5/13: The skatepark with Izzy Capulong

Wishlist Interviews: Part 6

It was last summer. We were celebrating the one year anniversary of Byline with cocktails and readings. The crowd of literary fiends flooded into the street, spilling over to the concrete slab once used as a parking lot instead of a stage for prose about partying. Time Again, was just beginning to pop off. This was before waves of nauseating coverage about a bar on the fringes of Dimes Square taking over the streets, defying city ordinances, and serving “hot dogs that hot girls love.” No shade to the hot dogs, simply shade to publications’ need to dissect every cool thing in the city.

I knew two people there (shout out to Annie and Claire) but felt so out of my element. Everywhere I looked, there were writers, and cool girls, and cool girl writers. I felt intimidated by the crowd and vowed to keep close to the friends I came with, giving up any hope of meeting someone new. While in line to grab a negroni, I chose to dissolve into the cacophony of the packed bar. As my mind tossed between the waves of conversation, the cold cuts slicer behind the counter was my anchoring point. I didn’t realize they served sandwiches. Someone bumped into a girl waiting in front of me. They mumbled an apology before their eyes widened with recognition, “Hey, I like your Substack!” They said this with a mix of sincerity and force - before abruptly running out of the bar. The girl and I stared after them before slowing turning to look at each other, mouths agape. “I have literally no idea who that was” she said, before introducing herself as Izzy.

Izzy Capulong is someone who’s done the work of clearly defining her aesthetic, from her long wolf cut, smudged eyeliner, red lipstick, down to her duct taped black boots. There’s an edge to her look, “Some people say I’m a real bitch before they even know me. My RBF doesn’t help... when people meet me out, I’m all goth and spikey.” Later, I would come to find out the Scorpio rising in her chart likely didn’t help with the approachability factor. At that party, I didn’t have time to be intimidated by her. She immediately brought me into her world, introducing me to her friends who were photographers and poets. She told me the name of her Substack, everyone’s sober girlfriend, and I promised to read it when I got home.

On the train, sweat drying on my back from the muggy evening, I pulled up her newsletter. Quickly, I understood why strangers came up to her at parties. She’s a phenomenal writer. She’s chaotic, vulnerable, and communicates what it means to be a 20-something in New York with the precision of a documentarian. From a hook up declaring he is going “monk mode” to a painful examination of being forced to leave the city she loves, Izzy recounts her thoughts with an unvarnished honesty that is endearing. She’s the Dunham of character examinations and the Bourdain of the downtown scene.

Unfortunately, Izzy doesn’t currently live in the city, but we recently met up when she was in town for her birthday. I rolled out of bed on a Saturday morning at 7 am and began to groggily brush my teeth, preparing to grab an early coffee with a friend in FiDi. I got a message from Izzy:

“so sorry major heads up i’m just heading home now ill try to make it to ours but if u don’t hear from me just assume i’m dead in my bed so sorry”

Hell yeah, brother 🔥

I responded with “no worries” and we planned on meeting up later in the afternoon.

I won’t leave you in suspense, she was, in fact, alive, and we found each other at 3:30 pm, wearing red outfits that rhymed. I grabbed a tea from La Cabra, and she sipped on a pouch of tamarind tea from 787 (pouches are a crazy beverage vessel in the year of our Lord 2025). Together we shuffled over to Tompkins, landing on a bench in the skatepark.

While Izzy was in undergrad, she used to hang out at this park and watch the skaters, occasionally skating herself. “I feel like a sleeper agent hanging out here.”

I discovered halfway through the interview that this was her first time being on the other side of the (iPhone) mic. As someone featured in Cobrasnake’s photography and with an impressive number of pieces for Office, I’m surprised to be the first to venture inside Izzy’s brain to see what’s going on in there.

She did say she was stopped for a street style interview once but they never used the footage because she got on an anti-capitalistic soapbox and went off on how we shouldn’t need to put a label on ourselves for the sake of fashion. Guess that didn’t really resonate with the editors of Glamour.

At one point, we fell into a classic social media interview trope not dissimilar to asking what someone pays for rent or what song they’re listening to - Izzy gave me a bag tour. She fit an impressive amount of items in her purple purse: “Blazer, camera, book, my pen, wallet, my spikes, my cigarettes, and a charger.” I’m not here to psychoanalyze but I like that she only placed possessives in front of “pen,” “spikes,” and “cigarettes.”

When we really got going, our conversation often revolved around the three things Izzy orbits around: culture, the internet, and writing.

We are all a part of an insatiable machine. It devours trends and music and style, an amorphous blob barreling down the individuals feeding it. It craves to be current, to be on the cusp of knowing, and in absorbing the zeitgeist, it promises to benevolently reward us with a glimmer of fame. A brief moment of virality, before being swallowed whole again to be used as caloric energy towards the “next big thing.”

I think moving away from the city gifted Izzy with perspective on the culture she’s so used to covering. She describes individuals elbowing for the spotlight instead of creating for a collective movement, writing to wear the label of writer and making art just to call themselves an artist.

“Everyone is scrambling to be the first person to do ‘the thing’ but when we look at artistic movements and we think about [various] scenes, we’re not thinking about one motherfucker. Like, sure there are standouts but it’s The Beats, not just Jack Kerouac. The punk scene was not just Patti Smith and Richard Hell.”

She adds, “We need to remember artistic movements are not started by a single person. Culture is not just one guy, one girl, one they. It’s you doing your own thing, seeing who you run into… and bringing everything from everywhere else to other people who are bringing their everything from everywhere else.”

Not only does this relationship with individuality come at a detriment to the culture we could be creating together, but it also turns us into easy marketing targets.

“That’s why I have so much beef with adding ‘core’ to everything. It’s such a marketing ploy and we’re just making our identities more palatable for what - a starter pack? I interviewed Sophie Browning who runs Joan of Arca. We talked about starter pack memes and how people are just using those as a paint by numbers for their identity.”

She remembers reading articles like, “‘Here’s how to have a Coconut Girl Summer’ and ‘7 products you need for Brat Summer’ but the [actual] products you need for Brat summer aren’t going to be advertised on Buzzfeed. The Brat products are a key, a bag, test strips, and Narcan.”

We talked more about the city, how she misses it.

She volunteers what she would say if she were ever on Subway Takes: “Interesting people don’t need to advertise how interesting they are.”

I ask her what she wants to be writing in ten years, “I have enough poems, I could release a book and maybe that would get me back to New York. I just wanted something physical.”

She brings up another idea from Sophie: there is so much entropy on the internet. “People say the internet’s forever but it’s really not - links go bad, websites get deleted. I just want something physical to prove I do stuff.”

It’s a coming of age revelation when we discover the things we were once told to keep us out of harm's way, weren’t always true. I’ve heard this sentiment of the temporal nature of the internet echoed by magazine editors and TikTokers alike. Gen Z is seeing the fortress we’ve grown up with, crumble. Sites and resources we took for granted are fading into oblivion, like the defunding of national suicide hotline or Google no longer working the way it should.

We have a desire to create some for ourselves, untethered to servers. It feels foreign, like we’re asking for the world. Izzy talks about the print projects she wants to work on with sobriety - a novel, a book of poems, both serving as an epitaph to prove she was real.

For my last question, I ask, “What do you think the universe is speaking to you?”

We agreed it’s definitely not speaking through TikTok Tarot readers. Right now, Izzy lives in Ohio, and is desperately trying to get back to the city. I know what that feels like. I moved to New York in 2017, only to drop out of school after one semester and move back to Texas. I remember driving on I-30, the highway that circles downtown Dallas the day I came home and saying to myself, “I’m not going to be here forever. I’m going to find a way back.”

We talked about the well intentioned people offering her advice to consider this time in the burbs as a “writers retreat,” but that doesn’t ring true and that’s not the answer she gives for what the universe is telling her.

Instead, she tells me the experience has raised the bar for how she expects people to treat her. “It made me a bitch, but in a necessary way. And it’s awesome.”

That’s why I like Izzy. Yes, she’s a talented writer. Yes, she has piping hot takes. But it’s her grit, her resilience, her carefully placed critiques, and self-deprecating humor that make her iconic.

She’s let the city, and its people, galvanize her into a steel blade - perfect for slicing off a piece of the scene and serving it on a plate for your enjoyment.

Which brings me to the main event ⬇️