Writing During Wartime
A contemplation on praxis, and a palate cleanser from another place and time
It’s been well over a month since I sat down to write something substantial. One major reason for this is I have been on the road for familial and business obligations; another is that I have have been working through writer’s block.
It’s not that I lack topics, as I have three outlined essays sitting in my Drafts. It’s that I don’t know if actually care enough to dedicate my mental activity to further consideration of just how much things suck and our impending political doom. After all, there are plenty of people here, on Bluesky, and in various editorial pages who are saying pretty much the same things I would say, probably to a considerably larger audience to greater effect. What difference will it make for me to join in the chorus of woe, except to remind myself to be miserable on a constant basis?
Several things came up this week to help me work through this block. The first was reading M. Gessen’s NYTimes piece on the normalization of the Trump regime’s authoritarianism, which enabled me to see my block as an expression of shell shock. As other writers have noted, when so much shit is flooding the zone every damn day, it’s hard to keep up, and easy to become overwhelmed to the point of feeling it’s pointless to do so.
The second thing was discovering a big batch of posts from my SFScene and Lost Horizons blogs on my laptop hard drive. I wrote these posts from 2004 to 2008 as a chronicle of what I thought was interesting in the SF electronic music scene, with lots of influence from the likes of Michael Musto, Chuck Klosterman, and Lester Bangs. As I read over these posts I first thought “hey, these are actually pretty good,” and then I thought about the praxis behind them. From my earliest involvement in the rave scene in the late 90s, I had the sense of being in a cultural moment that was worth telling others about, and wanting to tease out why.
Finally, on Friday night my partner and I swung by a Burner event at a local bar with the theme of “Luigi Rave,” a celebration of the wonderful world of Mario Bros. I was disappointed that there wasn’t a ritual execution of a CEO at midnight, but was delighted with the spirit of the event that reminded me of so many from the past. Then, last night, I stumbled upon a “Synthpop and Darkwave Festival” at a neighborhood venue, and while standing outside the venue and sharing a joint with other attendees, I realized that Seattle is having a cultural moment of its own. This moment, like the one that informed my previous blogs, is rooted in an external world filled with darkness and the horror of authoritarianism, but still finds a path to a practice of community, creativity, and joy in spite it (quite literally). The darkness is always lurking just out of sight, but, like a tropical storm gathering off the coast, is something to be aware of and prepared for, rather than letting it consume all attention and thought (credit for this analogy to my partner).
On this Sunday morning, it feels like I have found a way back to writing with a focus that seems worthwhile. While I think there is still a place for Important and Trenchant Political Analysis from my unique perspective, I think it’s far more important to be a chronicler of the things that are happening in the world of a community that is working to live and survive and find love and happiness and creative expression, than it is to provide constant updates on barometer readings (“uh oh, looks like we just dropped a couple points!”).
This is not about becoming numb to the constant presence of darkening clouds and increasing winds; it is about living our lives the best we can under these conditions, and in spite of them. When I was a deeply troubled queer teen I came across the aphorism “Living well is the best revenge,” which has become the motto of my life. It’s probably unlucky to say so, but I have some confidence that, within the next several years, Trump will be dead and rotting in his grave, and the best way to metaphorically piss on it will be to continue to live, and thrive, and enjoy everything I can about this world I live in, for as long as I can.
So, for a little palate cleanser, here is a post written almost exactly twenty years ago, which, in its concluding paragraphs, puts forth a philosophic position that still holds up for me today, and provides a guide for the path into the future.
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YAWN
Originally published in SFScene.blogspot.com on June 10, 2005
YAWN, a very sleepy Friday morning. We’ve had three days of gray, damp to wet weather here in SF, which always makes my metabolism slow down.
In this overdue update, ruminations on the joys of house parties, a small DJ breakthrough at the Tastee Flame party for yours truly, more on how SF needs more funky warehouse parties.
These past few weeks have confirmed for me that we are so much closer to our animal relatives than we like to let on. When the days grow shorter and colder, we tend to crawl into our dens for hibernation just like that do, only to emerge months later, blinking in the sunlight. Over the past two months it seems that the social world of San Francisco has begun to kick into gear again, or at least mine has; while, through the Winter, it seemed like everything had gone to ground and there wasn’t much to do except rent movies and get stoned, now every weekend has a house party or an evening out attached to it along with, of course, getting stoned.
This past weekend on Friday Jeremy and I took in a house party at the home of legendary Blue Room/Tantra psytrance DJ KJ, who lives only two blocks from Jeremy on Mission Street. KJ shares space with a couple housemates in an old commercial space that has a very funky loft-like feel to it; there’s one large main room with a ladder attached to each wall that leads up to overhead loft spaces. It always makes me think of a module in the international space station. It’s the sort of space you come to expect in SF, but see very little of any more. It’s also a great space for entertaining, with a large main room, a big kitchen, and an outdoor patio.
The occasion for this party was the twentieth birthday of one of his housemates, and a send-off for his approaching departure to NY. His roomie is a fabulous faerie boy, who was dressed for the evening in a kind of leather tunic thing with leather gauntlets and a sort of Mongolian hat with long peacock feathers coming off it. He is slim and cute and androngynous and generally the type of boy you find in faerie circles. In their presence I get a real feeling for the meaning of the word “avuncular.” In this case, though, it felt pleasant enough; though I may now be twice this boy’s age, I’ve found that forty is not without its cynical satisfactions.
The party itself was a lot of fun, though, like most faerie parties, there were more drinkers than booze, and I would have brought some records had I known that there would be open turntables. I was not feeling the vibe particularly strongly when we first got there, and my ability to deal with faeries seems to be directly proportional to how intoxicated I’ve become. However, one old friend I hadn’t seen in a very long time showed up, and we had a good conversation about ourselves, the imminent demise of the oil economy, and the general nature of the world over a bowl. Meanwhile, Jeremy got hooked into various conversations around the patio table as well, and within an hour or so we had reached a sufficient state of sociability. More faeries of my acquaintance showed up, drinks were drunk, weed was smoked, and the jests and conversation went on until we were sufficiently sated with the fruits of faeriedom (so to speak).
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating; life needs more house parties. One side effect of the housing situation here is that almost everybody I know lives in some small, cramped studio, or with at least three to four other people. Neither situation is conducive to social spontaneity, much less partying. And so, we try to organize groups of friends to go out somewhere, a solution that really does not lend itself to social intimacy, and which excludes those who can’t afford it. If there’s one thing I could change in my life, it would be having a large enough living space that I could actually entertain on some scale larger than two other people on a regular basis. As soon as I become a mobile gaming Baron, I keep telling myself . . . .
Saturday night Jeremy, Aaron da Starfox and I spun at a benefit party for a Burning Man camp called Dance Dance Immolation. It was held in a warehouse down toward Bayshore that was apparently the site of many old Blue Room parties. As it happened, it was once again the occasion for running into people I hadn’t seen in a while, who had various affiliations with this space. I was a mite annoyed when we first arrived; we were scheduled to start playing at 10.30, and our set-up space was occupied by someone making a chocolate layer cake chandelier (that is, a chandelier that had several chocolate layer cakes as part of its structure), and a gaggle of geek boys trying to wire up a simulation of the DDI project to be played between sets. As the party opened and people arrived and began filtering through, I started to just play random tracks, and was grateful that I had brought an actual album with me (I have now learned you should always have something you can just put on and play that isn’t necessarily part of your set), and finally, around eleven, we were able to sorta turn down the lights while the boys continued to try and cobble their project together. They had it working to the point where DDR was being projected on a wall, which caused everyone in the dance room to stand and stare at the apparently hypnotic images of arrows and bright colors coming from the game. I was not pleased – note to party hosts, if you put any kind of “watchable” thing in the dance room, people will stand like drooling sheep and stare at it rather than dance. Finally, the hostess appeared, and I made an appeal to turn the damn thing off so people would actually dance, and my request was granted.
I played a set of dirty German techo, which can still be heard up at my waxdj.com site (http://www.waxdj.com/djs/494) and was generally pleased with the result – people danced. I spun some of the smoothest mixes I have ever done, and had a minor DJ breakthrough – I think I’ve learned to not spazz out and just go with the flow. I haven’t played out since FurCon in January, and have been feeling a bit miserable about the whole DJ thing ever since. But for this set, I felt that I had adequate time to practice, knew the set well, and thought all the tracks were good. But more importantly, if things didn’t got perfectly, I wasn’t going to sweat it, as long as people danced and had a good time. The thing is, conditions weren’t perfect – I couldn’t get the monitor levels to adjust, and it was hard to hear the tracks mixing together as well as I would have liked, but it really didn’t matter. Most of the time, when you’re playing live at a houseparty or elsewhere, you’re not going to get the perfect situation for flawless mixing, and I’ve really come to the conclusion that being too much of a perfectionist really gets in the way of going with the flow of what’s happening and being there in the moment. DJing should be more like Zen and less like a machine, and a little wabi-sabi (a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete) is part of that Zen aspect of it. So long as you have the flow, and can manage the vibe, then you’re a practicing technoshaman in my book.
The party itself was great, and took me back to the days of the warehouse parties I went to in 99-00. Again, it seems like that is an era that has really passed away because those spaces don’t really exist any more. And it’s a shame; we really need more opportunities to just have fun without thuggy security guards hanging over us, to sit in hot tubs with complete strangers, to don fireproof suits and be shot with flamethrowers, and to hang out with friends and interesting freaky strangers in a convivial atmosphere. And, these parties are were the real musical innovation takes place as well; nothing that any of us played was stuff that you would hear out at typical club nights in SF (maybe Aaron’s electro grooves, but even then more people seem to be looking backward than forward, as he does). If the SF dance music scene is going to have any vitality, it’s going to come from the roots of underground events like this one.
We got home finally around 4AM on Saturday, and felt extremely satisfied with the course of our weekend when we finally rolled out of bed all groggy and hungover on Sunday. But it was a good kind of hungover, the kind that lets you know you’ve moved some things through your body, that your mind has journeyed to other places, and that, even if you feel a little empty, it’s because you’ve rid yourself of some things that you probably don’t really need.