Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Once Upon a Time in New York
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Discotheque enters the English language: 1960-66
After writing this I have come across a recent Oxford University Press article covering similar territory - and coming to similar conclusions. They also note the first printed references in 1964 to the abbreviated version 'disco' to refer to both the dress and the nightclub.
See also: http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/discotheque-dress-for-party-dancing-1964.html
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Dancing questionnaire 3 - Commie Curmudgeon
Spinning around on the hallway floor to Meet the Beatles when I was about four or five years old.
What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Stopping traffic in the streets of Manhattan as part of a group that advocated for revolution (even if most of the gawking onlookers didn’t quite get it). All the while dancing. I did that a few times with the New York City branch of the global anti-capitalist-festival group known as Reclaim the Streets [RTS New York traffic sign pictured]. The best event was actually for a relatively small cause, to defend the community gardens, in the spring of 1999. We took over a street in the East Village for a while with little interference for a period that felt like hours. (Probably not as long – I forget how long it was.)
Whats the best place you’ve ever danced in?
Again, with RTS, in the middle of 43rd Street near Broadway, on November 26, 1999. (This was for 'Buy Nothing Day', but also as a prelude to the protests in Seattle that were scheduled for November 30. Somebody asked me if I wanted to join a bus out to Seattle, and I declined, because I didn’t think I should take off from work. Hmm, how many times did I kick myself for that decision later on?) Anyway, it was pretty impressive that we stopped traffic right near Times Square. Though it didn’t last very long – 15 minutes? And many of the people got arrested. I didn’t get arrested – I had a knack for being invisible to the police back then. (It might have helped that I was slightly older than the others and wore slightly less conspicuous clothes. But I happened upon a video later and, as several other people commented, I actually was the wildest in terms of dancing. Not meaning to boast or anything…)
You. Dancing. The best of times….
RTS was good, but golden moments of post-punk youth were better. So… Dancing to a live show by The Monochrome Set in the early ‘80s in a club called the Starlight Ballroom, which was a big, no-frills place in a rundown section of Philly (I think it was Kensington), with about 50 people in the crowd. It was my 18th or 19th birthday, I was blasted in a nice way, and I loved to dance to The Monochrome Set, even though they weren’t known exactly as a dance band [sleeve of 'Alphaville' single, right]. I had good friends there to dance with too. I think that was when I was dancing with all the members of an all-girl art school, toy-instrument kind of noise band called Head Cheese. I went dancing a lot with Head Cheese, and that was fun, if a bit weird. (By the way, brush with fame(?)… The singer of that band, with whom I was fairly good friends for a while (by which I mean just friends, though I wasn’t lacking in other ideas now and then)…went on to form a New York City synth-pop band that had a Top 40 hit in the ’80s. The band was Book of Love, the song was “Boy” (popular especially with the gay set). But I was no longer friends with Susan. We’d had some kind of falling out over…what?…I don’t know…looking back on it, seems like nothing, from what I can tell…) .
You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Some benefit for the Direct Action Network Labor Solidarity Group, in 2001. The benefit was a flop, and I was going through not-so-good times with different members of the group, for different reasons (no, not going to go into it here). The band was some Irish band; I forget who, but they weren’t bad. I sort of danced alongside a few people, activists, who were the only other people on the dance floor. I got drunk, but not for good reasons. Everybody was drunk, but it was a crappy time.
Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Hot Club, Philadelphia, late ‘70s – a seedy little place, very punk, very intimate, and wild. That was great… Emerald City, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, late 1970s. Big, garish new wave club, very tacky, but with some incredible lineups and very underpopulated. Saw a double bill there of The Buzzcocks and The Fall in about 1979… Summer porch party in a five-person communal house in West Philly, 1981. One member of the house was in a band called the The Stick Men, who were like a rap-influenced version of the no-wave-funk band The Contortions. We were dancing to her record of The Sugar Hill Gang… Hurrahs, NYC, early ‘80s. Most outstanding experience was a Bauhaus show… Tier 3 and Mudd Club, NYC, early ‘80s. Both were clubs around Soho (if I’m remembering right). Tier 3 was much better, I thought, because it was more intimate and less trendy…. Little club in Tribeca (I forget the name), mid-late ‘80s; they were playing this stuff called “acid house” (loved it)… Limelight, a converted church in NYC, in the mid ‘90s. Not so great, and too trendy. Went to an Orbital show there, and did not have a good time – Orbital was OK, place was far too crowded, just not into pressing bodies with strangers (I can do that on the subway during rush hour)… Irving Plaza, NYC all the way from the mid ‘80s into the late ‘90s. Not a bad place. Had a lot of fun at a Chumbawamba show in about 1998(?) (though I’ve since then gotten very, very tired of Chumbawamba)… And, of course, dancing in the streets, and going to some small warehouse-type raves, with Reclaim the Streets…
When and where did you last dance?
The other night in my bedroom, with a wonderful long-haired cat (by which I mean, really, a cat – I’m not using slang). He clung to my shoulders while I danced around the room to “Sunshowers” by M.I.A [pictured left].
You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make you leap up for one final dance?
Right now… Probably the song that I just mentioned.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Malcolm X and Lindy Hop
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by him with Alex Haley, was published shortly after his assassination in 1965. Much of the book concerns his involvement with, and later break from the Nation of Islam. But the earlier part of the book contains some fascinating memories of nightlife in Boston and New York in the early 1940s.
In Boston, Malcolm worked as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom and was clearly a big fan of the music played there. He talks approvingly of seeing Peggy Lee, Benny Gordman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and many others, and recalled the fierce dancing competitions:
'"Showtime" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low-white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad'.
Before long, he was a zoot suit wearing dancer himself (and indeed had progressed from shining the musicians' shoes to dealing them 'reefers'), and describes with evident relish lindy-hopping to Duke Ellington: 'Laura's feet were flying: I had her in the air, down, sideways, around: backwards, up again, down, whirling... Laura inspired me to drive to new heights. Her hair was all over her face, it was running sweat, and I couldn't believe her strength. The crowd was shouting and stomping'.
Still for all its liberation, nightlife was completely racialized. At the Roseland, some white dancers attended the black dances, but no black people were allowed to dance at the white dances, even if the music was provided by black musicians. Moving to New York, black Harlem had been catering since the 1920s for wealthier whites looking for thrills but not genuine social equality. I was surprised to read the word 'hippies'' dates back to that period: 'A few of the white men around Harlem, younger ones whom we called 'hippies', acted more Negro than Negroes. This particular one talked more 'hip' than we did'.
During the war, resentment against racist treatment grew. 'During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said no one dragged the white women in there'. In his recent biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), Manning Marable provides some background:
'Since its grand opening in 1926, the Savoy, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets, had quickly become the most significant cultural institution of Harlem. The great ballroom contained two large bandstands, richly carpeted lounges, and mirrored walls. During its heyday, about seven hundred thousand customers visited each year... In a period when downtown hotels and dancehalls still remained racially segregated, the Savoy was the centre for interracial dancing and entertainment. On April 22nd 1943, the Savoy was padlocked by the NYPD, on the grounds that servicemen had been solicited by prostitutes there. New York City's Bureau of Social Hygiene cited evidence that, over a nine-month period, 164 individuals has "met the source of their [venereal] diseases at the Savoy Ballroom". These alleged cases all came from armed services or coast guard personnel. Bureau officials offered absolutely no explanation as to how they had determined that the servicemen contracted diseases specifically from Savoy hookers... The Savoy remained closed throughout the summer of 1943' (it reopened in October).
During the period of the closure there there was a major riot in Harlem on 1 August 1943 after a black soldier was shot by a white policeman. 6 people died and 600 were arrested.
Marable reveals an interesting detail that Malcolm does not mention in the Autobiography - that under the stage name Jack Carlton, he performed as a bar entertainer at the Lobster Pond nightclub on 42nd street in 1944, dancing and sometimes playing the drums on stage.
Sadly it was another ballroom, the Audobon in Harlem, where Malcolm was murdered in February 1965 as he rose to speak at a public meeting there.
There's a great recreation of the Lindy Hop scene at the Roseland Ballroom in Spike Lee's film Malcolm X (1992).
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
'And I Dance with Somebody' - Diamonds are Forever & the Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994
Yokohama 1994 - image from Mori Art Museum |
'And I Dance with Somebody' - postcard from AIDS Poster Project, Japan |
The Plaza venue for the Love Ball (though this photo is of another event at the conference) |
ACT UP New York Press Release for Yokohama (full publication here) |
Newsletter published by 'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities'/OCCUR for Yokohama conference (full text of document here) |
Commemorative stamp from Yokohama conference 1994 |
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Hot Stuff - Alice Echols on Stonewall
'In some ways, it's not surprising that the Stonewall Inn became the birthplace of what many people consider the modern gay liberation movement: It was a dancing bar. The Stonewall had two dance floors, and it was unusual because most bars in New York City did not allow gay men to dance. The one in the back was often filled with black men and Latinos, and the jukebox was soul. There was a lot of getting down on that dance floor, and that led to a kind of sexual expressiveness.
There's this great quote I have in the book, that at other bars you could only get into the longing for a particular person -- and think, "Oh, he's cute" -- but you couldn't do anything about it. At the Stonewall, the dancing forced a kind of physical intimacy and, I think, gave the men there a sense of wanting more and yearning for more, which then got expressed in the Stonewall Riots.
It's very telling that when the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance started up in New York, one of their key activities was to organize dances where many of the movers and shakers of the disco world were first exposed to disco. I think it's very hard to disaggregate dancing from protest. Dancing is a protest especially from men who were surveilled and harassed. That's one of the reason why disco featured music that didn't stop. You didn't want it to stop, because that in itself was a kind of rebellion...
Once gay bars became decriminalized, the mafia pulled back somewhat and you saw these different venues cropping up, like private clubs. Dancing became a part of what Richard Goldstein calls the "psychic intifada." The music was so damn loud that the reticence and inhibition that characterized the gay piano bar could no longer be had. You had to dispense with the chitchat, which led to greater sexual explicitness'.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
History of Gay Bars in New York City
In view of my earlier post on Holland Park in the 1930s, I was struck by a New York Times report of a February 1923 raid in Greenwich Village:
Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men: Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, but Misjudged One Person by Clothing
The police continue to pay special attention to Greenwich Village. Every tearoom and cabaret in the village was visited yesterday morning by Deputy Inspector Joseph A. Howard and Captain Edward J. Dempsey of the Charles Street Station, and a party of ten detectives. Detectives Joseph Massie and Dewey Hughes of the Special Service Squad were at the Black Parrot Tea Shoppe Hobo-Hemia, 46 Charles Street, to witness what they had been informed would be a “circus.” They arrested what they thought were five women and eight men. It developed later, however, that one of the “women” was a man, Harry Bernhammer, 21 years old, living at 36 Hackensack Avenue, West Hoboken, N.J. He is familiaryly known in the Village as “Ruby,” according to the police. The charge against him is disorderly conduct for giving what the police termed an indecent dance (NY Times 5 February 1923)
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Nights full of sex and dancing: the New York hot summer of 1967
'There was a hit song in the 1960s by the Lovin’ Spoonful called Summer in the City all about how the days were hot and gritty, everyone looking half-dead, but the nights passionate and fun, full of sex and dancing. That was certainly my experience of the summer of 1967, an especially hot one when New York became a tropical city full of cruising and drinking, of people sleeping without air conditioners on the cindered roofs of their buildings, sharing wine coolers out of Mason jars, and attending late-night horror movies...
When a gay bar would open, everyone would rush there until the police closed it; it wasn’t until 1969, two years later, and the beginning of gay liberation following the Stonewall uprising that gays could freely congregate. At bars like the Blue Bunny, when a plainclothes cop would enter, the overhead Christmas lights would start to twinkle and all the dancing couples would break apart'
Summer in the city: Edmund White on sex and dancing in 60s New York (Guardian 14 August 2021)
Monday, March 26, 2007
Death of Roller Disco
In 'Night Dancin'' (1980), a guide to the New York disco scene, Via Miezitis described the Empire in its heyday: 'Rainbows, clouds and blue skies cover the walls. Neon criss-crosses and circles mirror balls hung from high gymnasium-like ceilings and transform them into phosphorescent planets in outer space. More rainbow-colored neon outlines a large, square railed-off skating area contained within the main rink; the neon is reflected on the ceiling and looks like a meteor or laser beams.
Over 1000 skaters cover thousands of square feet of roller rink. Human satellites, they orbit defying gravity, dancing and speeding effortlessly through space. Some resemble glider planes that float in the air; still others appear as precision performance jets as they whirl, dip, roll, fall and suddenly cut across the paths of other "planes." The Empire Roller Disco attracts the best roller disco skaters in the world, who perform their practiced and improvised disco routines regularly to disco beats spun by a regular disc jockey. The dee jay helps lead the skaters through the various peaks and dips of the speeding and furious energy high that is roller disco at its best'.
Quotes and images from 'Night Dancin'', text by Vita Miezitis, photographs by Bill Bernstein (New York: 1980). There is a petition against the closure of The Empire here.
Monday, January 15, 2007
'Dancing is not a crime!' - New York City
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Raymond Castro: death of a Stonewall veteran
'Raymond Castro, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, died in his hometown of Madeira Beach, Florida on Saturday, October 9th. He was 68 years old and is survived by his husband of 31 years, Frank Sturniolo, 50. On June 27, 1969 Castro was inside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, on the first night of the uprising and is documented as the only person arrested that evening who was known to be gay, according to historian David Carter.
Although police raids of gay-friendly bars were sadly common at the time, on that night people fought back. As two officers were escorting Castro out of the bar, the crowd shouted, "Let him go, let him go," and he pushed against the waiting patrol wagon with both feet, knocking the two cops to the ground. He was put in the back of the vehicle and detained, but was later released without charge. He hired a lawyer to resist the charge against him in court and also his lawyer represent an arrested lesbian who was in the patrol wagon with him. Typical of his generosity, he did not let the lesbian assist in paying the attorney who represented them. That night's events, including Castro's struggle against police, gave birth to the modern gay civil rights movement...
David Carter said that all the evidence he collected about the event made him sure that Castro's resistance to his arrest, taking place in public soon after the occurrence of the evening's tipping point--the unknown lesbian who fought the police outside the Stonewall Inn and twice escaped a patrol car she was placed into--helped guarantee that the resistance to the police raid became both massive and violent, and thus had the power to become a transforming symbol of LGBT consciousness: the Stonewall Riots.
Ray visited New York City in June to celebrate the 41st Anniversary of Stonewall and attend the 40th annual gay pride parade. The New York Daily News featured his story at that time, quoting Castro as saying: "A lot of people, especially the young ones, have no inkling what Stonewall is. They think Gay Pride is just a big party. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for 1969. I had no idea that I was going to be involved in history-making... I would do it all over again."
More on Stonewall here... history was certainly made that night.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Derek Jarman: gay clubbing in the 70s and 80s
Drugs are never far from the scene. After the hearts came Acid and quaaludes; then amyl, and something called Ecstasy. Someone always managed to roll a joint in a dark corner, and dance away into the small hours. It's certain that nobody who had taken the steps towards liberation hadn't used one if not all of them. The equation was inevitable, and part of initiation.
Now, from out of the blue comes the Antidote that has thrown all of this into confusion. AIDS. Everyone has an opinion. It casts a shadow, if even for a moment, across any encounter. Some have retired; others, with uncertain bravado, refuse to change. Some say it's from Haiti, or the darkest Amazon, and some say the disease has been endemic in North America for centuries, that the Puritans called it the Wrath of God. Others advance conspiracy theories, of mad Anita Bryant, secret viral laboratories and the CIA. All this is fuelled by the Media, who sell copy and make MONEY out of disaster. But whatever the cause and whatever the ultimate outcome the immediate effect has been to clear the bath-houses and visibly thin the boys of the night. In New York, particularly, they are starting to make polite conversation again - a change is as good as a rest. I decide I'm in the firing-line and make an adjustment - prepare myself for the worst - decide on decent caution rather than celibacy, and worry a little about my friends. Times change. I refuse to moralize, as some do, about the past. That plays too easily into the hands of those who wish to eradicate freedom, the jealous and the repressed who are always with us...
Thursday, April 15, 2021
Love is the Message Podcast
I was pretty excited to hear that Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert have started a new podcast, Love is the Message. Tim is the great cultural historian of disco with his books on The Loft, Arthur Russell and early 1980s New York, while Jeremy co-hosts one of my favourite podcasts, ACFM on Novara Media which looks at the weird/pyschedelic left.
They describe the new podcast as follows:
'Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a new show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and dance party organisers. Tune in, Turn on and Get Down to in-depth discussion of the sonic, social and political legacies of radical movements from the 1960s to today. Starting with David Mancuso's NYC Loft parties, we’ll explore the countercultural sounds, scenes and ideas of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. ”There’s one big party going on all the time. Sometimes we get to tune into it.” The rest of the time there’s Love Is The Message'
In the introductory episode they talk a lot about David Mancuso and his famous Loft parties which they see as a bridge between the counter-culture of the late 60s/early 70s and the emergence of disco not just as a music but as a new way of being on the dancefloor. As Lawrence describes it in the show, when Mancuso moved to New York he was 'heavily committed to the ideas that were fermenting around civil rights, around gay liberation, around the feminist movement of course the anti war movement and he also got interested in experimenting with LSD... it was very much the idea that the party could become a manifestation of these energies. It had become dangerous to go out on the street, anti-war protestors were getting killed by the state for protesting against the Vietnam war. There was this idea that the dancefloor space, that intimate private space could also function as a safe space, as a refuge where these energies could be cultivated, could be nurtured, could be given freedom to explore themselves'.
Of course there had been 'discotheques' through the 1960s but these were primarily heterosexual courting spaces with short songs and regular breaks for slow dances and trips to the bar. The focus was not on losing yourself in the music and the crowd. Lawrence describes The Loft as a an experiment where Mancuso used longer, percussive tracks as part of 'setting up the parameters, exploring the outer limits of what happens when you take the dancefloor, you turn it into a space of openness, of possibility, of exploration, of transformation, where there are no clear cut limits being set... using the neutral space of the floor as a space where the rules were taken away and people were allowed to enter it and redefine the set of the rules. The grand experiment was what happens when you start to bring a different form of music into this setting and you let the music take you somewhere, you let it drive the space'.
Lawrence and Gilbert are not just theoreticians of this sort of stuff but actually put on parties with Mancuso before his death in 2016, so expect to hear a lot more about this in future episodes.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo
By contrast, Garcia found that 'Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers... emphasize the individuated, extemporaneous and communal aspects that defined and inspired their dancing in the 1940s and 1950s'. In contrast to rigid steps, the first generation of Mambo dancers stressed 'feeling the music', inner emotions, spontaneity and dancing as 'an embodied experience, in which sound and movement were merged through the body'.
Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org:
Sunday, November 04, 2007
The great disco debate
'I was just a young teenager when disco had its heyday in NYC with Studio 54, not even of drinking age during most of that time, but I have a pretty clear memory of some things as an outside observer, such as the overblown elitism involved in that venture and much of the disco scene. Studio 54 was famous for having a door policy, something that didn't really exist in the punk scene until the Mudd Club and Danceteria (which policy I always disliked), and Studio 54 widely advertised the idea that you could get on their long line to participate in this big competition to prove you were glamorous or chic enough to get in. It was probably their biggest selling point.
Disco may have promoted a sort of liberation for oppressed identity groups, and it may have inverted the usual standing of some of these groups in society, but the disco scene, especially as manifested at '54, enforced a class elitism and system of hierarchical selection all its own. The argument that this movement was so utopian because it was run by women and gays could be countered with the argument that a woman also got elected to run the British government in the late '70s, and look how egalitarian she turned out to be.
If disco had these great liberating qualities for identity groups, it featured and promoted some pretty regressive attitudes as well. One might add that disco was characterized by a complete retreat from the overtly radical or even liberal politics of so much popular music (especially black dance music, if I recall correctly) in the '60s and early '70s. Disco had good qualities too, which were carried over into techno and a lot of related dance music in later years (which would take another, very long comment to spell out), but if my memory serves me correctly, calling it an egalitarian utopia is a bit of a stretch'.
Today I went to an exhibition in London of photographs of 'New York's Nightlife in the 1970s' by Allan Tannenbaum (example left). The exhibition at The Draywalk Gallery, off Brick Lane, was promoted by Deep Disco Culture and if indeed it was truly a representation of 70s disco culture I would have to agree that Richard was right. Many of the photos were of Studio 54, and while some of the scenes looked liked fun, there was clearly an emphasis on wealth and celebrity and more than a whiff of 'fuck the proles' upper class decadence.
But from all I have read and heard, I do not believe that disco can be reduced to Studio 54 and similar scenes. Tim Lawrence is one of many who have persuasively argued that the origins of disco were quite distinct from its later manifestation. In an article entitled In Defence of Disco (again) (New Formations, Summer 2006) he puts forward the following account:
'The disco that riled the gathering forces of the New Right was born in cauldron conditions. Lacking alternative social outlets, gay men and women of colour, along with new social movement sympathisers, gathered in abandoned loft spaces (the Loft, the Tenth Floor, Gallery) and off-the-beaten-track discotheques (the Sanctuary, the Continental Baths, Limelight) in zones such as NoHo and Hell's Kitchen, New York, to develop a uniquely affective community that combined sensation and sociality. Developing a model of diversity and inclusivity, participants established the practice of dancing throughout the night to the disorienting strains of heavily percussive music in the amorphous spaces of the darkened dance floor'.
The subsequent opening of Studio 54 in April 1977 as 'the glitziest and most exclusionary venue of the disco era.... steamrollered the ethical model of the downtown party network into smithereens... Whereas the dance floor was previously experienced as a space of sonic dominance, in which the sound system underpinned a dynamic of integration, experimentation and release, at Studio this became secondary to the theatre of a hierarchical door policy that was organised around exclusion and humiliation, as well as a brightly-lit dance floor that prioritised looking above listening, and separation above submersion... Whereas the dance floor had previously functioned as an aural space of communal participation and abandon, it was now reconceived as a visually-driven space of straight seduction and couples dancing, in which participants were focused on the their own space and , potentially, the celebrity who might be dancing within their vicinity'.
In disco the lyrical content was rarely political in the way some rock and soul was, as Richard identifies, but this can only be seen as a retreat if we judge music solely by what it says. A negative critique that explicitly refuses to affirm the way things are is one part of any radical social movement, and this is something that we find for instance, in some punk - essentially the sound of saying NO. But movements also need to be constitutive, that is to develop new more liberatory relationships between people involved. The latter was the contribution of the best disco dance floors, 'generating and spawning a model of potentially radical sociality' (Lawrence) quite different from the audience at traditional gigs, a contribution that has been played out in different dance music scenes ever since.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Dancing Questionnaire 23: Luc Sante
1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
In 1963, when I was around 9 years old and in St. Teresa's School, Summit, New Jersey, our teacher would take us once a week to the adjacent Holy Name Hall to teach us square dancing. The tune was invariably "The Old Brass Wagon," and Mrs. Gibbs may have sung it herself--I don't remember a record. One week, though, she plugged in the jukebox and played "My Boyfriend's Back," by the Angels, and encouraged us to frug. I'm not sure the experience was ever repeated, but it left a permanent mark on me.
2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Oh gosh, that's a tough one... Possibly it was meeting Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club, probably late 1978. I swear I knew at first glance that there was something exceptional about him. He moved in with one of my friends, and then another, and he and I were good friends until he became famous, circa 1983.
Basquiat at the Mudd Club in 1979 |
From 1977 to 1982, roughly. Isaiah's, a reggae club in an upstairs loft on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond approx. '77-'79; the Mudd Club from its opening on Halloween 1978 until it started getting press three or four months later (and then there would be huge crowds inside and out); Tier 3 on White Street and West Broadway (tiny, but excellent sounds), 1980-81; Squat Theater on 23rd Street around '79-'81, irregular as a dance venue but *the* place for the all-too-brief punk-jazz efflorescence; the Roxy around 1982--a roller disco that once a week would become a sort of hiphop-punk disco, often with Afrika Bambaataa on the decks. And sometime around '77 or '78 a gay friend once took me to the Loft, which I'm sure you've read about; it fully lived up to the hype.
4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
White people attempting to dance to white rock, pretty much always the case until 1973 or so, when a great many people of my acquaintance suddenly "discovered" James Brown. And then the last three decades, when dancing opportunities have been few and far between.
5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
My first real dance experiences were all in gay discos, early '70s (I'm straight, but had a gay best friend): the (old) Limelight on Sheridan Square, Peter Rabbit's on West Street, and the amazing Nickel Bar on 72nd Street - where Robert Mapplethorpe, among others, would go to pick up young black men, and where the level of the dancing was so amazing I didn't dare attempt to compete.
Summer of 1974 in Paris: Le Cameleon on rue St.-Andre-des-Arts, a tiny African disco in a barely ventilated cellar - but it was the summer of "Soul Makossa." Nine years later I was back in Paris and Le Cameleon had moved to a much larger aboveground space--an exhilarating experience.
Also, besides the venues noted in #3, the Rock Lounge (sleazy, but good music) succeeded in the same space on Canal Street by the Reggae Lounge, circa '82; the World on 2nd Street a few years later (too sceney for words, but you could shut your eyes); assorted after-hours spots such as Brownie's on Avenue A (not to be confused with the legit rock club of the same name that succeeded it), although drugs were more of a priority than dancing or music in those places. Post '83 I can only remember the short-lived but excellent Giant Steps--a jazz disco--and a series of retro-soul clubs (don't remember their names, alas).
6. When and where did you last dance?
The New Year's Eve before last, a private party in Tivoli, New York, a pretty good techno mix.
7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Tie: "One Nation Under a Groove," Funkadelic; "Got to Give It Up," Marvin Gaye.
All questionnaires welcome, just answer the same questions - or even make up a few of your own - and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires).
Thursday, July 02, 2009
We were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets
"it’s 4 in the morning July in ‘69, me and my sister we crept down like shadows, they’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence and a monochrome vision.. it’s history and we stayed awake all night and something is said and the whole room laughs aloud, me and my sister looking on like shadows, the end of an age as we watched them walk in a glow, lost in space, but I don’t know where it is, they’re dancing around, slow puppets silver ground".
There are other pieces of music associated with this episode. The BBC apparently played David Bowie's doomed astronaut anthem Space Oddity during their moon landing coverage (must admit I always assumed that Bowie recorded this after the moon landing, but it seems it prefigured it). Pink Floyd meanwhile jammed live on BBC during the moon landing, according to Dave Gilmour 'They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead - it's a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues'.
Post-acid house, samples from the Apollo 11 voyage have been widely used as a signifier of spaced out (inter)planetary humanism, for instance on The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991). Then, rather incredibly, there's Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's recent rap track Rocket Experience ('I've been there, now it's your turn'):
Of course, Gil Scott Heron offered a contemporary critique of the prioritisation of Cold War space spectaculars at the expense of wider human needs with his Whitey on the Moon: 'A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon, Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon, I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon, Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon'. While he was right on one level, I still hold on to the optimism of believing that the human adventure hasn't come to an end with MP3s and High-Definition TV.
I don't have much to add to a talk I gave on 23 April 2005 as part of the 'ART IS NOT TERRORISM' event at Confluences, Paris, a 'Benefit event for the defense of Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble at the occasion of 10 years of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts'. The event also included films, music and contributions from Jason Skeet, Kodwo Eshun , Riccardo Balli, James Becht, Ewen Chardronnet, Claire Pentecost, Brian Holmes, Nicola Triscott, Anjali Sagar, Michel Valensi and others.
Nostalgia for the Future: The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars
Once upon a time, people believed in the future. When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, one of the most popular programmes on TV was called 'Tomorrow's World'. Every week scientists would talk about how new and wonderful inventions would make our life better. Sociologists talked of an impending leisure society, where our biggest problem would be what to do with all the spare time created by increasing automation.
Space was central to this sense of future possibility. In eight short years the human species went from Yuri Gagarin's first tentative journey beyond earth's atmosphere to landing on the moon in 1969. However much this achievement might have been framed in the politics of the Cold War it truly was a giant step forward for humankind.
This faith in the future was not confined to apologists for the existing order of things. In 1969 the Situationist International looked forward to the day when 'Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature' (1). Sun Ra proclaimed that 'Space is the Place' for all those who found earth boring and George Clinton invited 'Citizens of the Universe' to join the 'Partying on the Mothership' (2).
I was of the generation of small children woken up in the early hours to watch the first pictures beamed back from the moon. The TV shows and films of the period led us to believe that soon we would all be doing it. By 2001, according to Kubrick's film, humans would be reaching out to the absolute on the far side of the galaxy.
We were lied to. What really happened in 2001? Grey September, planes crashing into buildings followed by weapons targeted from Space on some of the world's poorest people. We are now living in 'a general global state of war that erodes the distinction between war and peace' (3). A new kind of war without temporal or spatial limits - a war waged everywhere and nowhere, anytime, any place.
What better weapon in this new kind of war than space-based systems with the whole world in their sights? In 'The coming of age of the flesh machine', the Critical Arts Ensemble describe the development of the sight machine as an element of the war machine. They write: 'Through the development of satellite-based imaging technologies, in combination with computer networks capable of sorting, storing, and retrieving vast amounts of visual information, a wholistic representation has been constructed of the social, political, economic, and geographical landscape(s) that allows for near-perfect surveillance of all areas, from the micro to the macro. Through such visualization techniques, any situation or population deemed unsuitable for perpetuating the war machine can be targeted for sacrifice or for containment' (4).
The United States Air Force has an Air Force Space Command with its own Strategic Master Plan setting out a 25 year plan to maintain US space superiority. It boasts that 'Recent conflicts in Afghanisatan and Iraq have clearly demonstrated the asymmetric advantage space brings to any fight, whether that fight is in the middle of the desert, isolated mountainous terrain, or a large metropolitan area' A frightening new military newspeak has developed - 'Space Force Application' (weapons in space deployed against terrestrial targets), 'Counterspace' (preventing enemies using space), 'Space Force Enhancement' (using space to support air, ground, and sea forces) and 'Full Spectrum Space Combat Command'.
The Plan proposes developing the 'capability to deliver attacks from space… Space force application systems would have the advantages of rapid global access and the ability to effectively bypass adversary systems' (5). The vision then is of an orbital killing platform, out of this world but able to strike at targets on its surface. Weapons that can be deployed at the push of a button without the pesky inteference of mutineers, strikers, war resisters and saboteurs.
The Plan also describes something called the 'Commanding the Future' initiative, established to implement all this. This is the official vision of the future in 2005. No more fairy stories of better days to come. Instead the future as an idea has been colonised by fear and pessimism. We are told that the future will be a more dangerous place, in which only the State can save us. Every repressive law is now justified in the name of protecting us from some terrible future eventuality. So we have the Patriot Act which has ensnared Steve Kurtz and many other innocents.
Opposition movements have also turned their face to the past. Previous radical movements populated the future with utopian visions of different possible worlds. Marx wrote of the 1848 events in France that 'The social revolution… cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future' (6). Since the heyday of the space race and the defeat of the radical movements of the 60s and 70s there has been a lowering of horizons away from changing the world towards just stopping things getting worse - the buzz words always seem to be 'stop' and 'resist'. Elsewhere, social conservatism is on the march from religious fundamentalisms to endless retro fashions in music and clothes.
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts was partly an attempt to make good some of the unkept promises of our childhoods. Like the band Pulp we asked 'we were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets. When you have seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?' (7). We wanted to rediscover space as the site of new ways of living and being, relishing the eruption of the marvellous rather than smothering it in the commercial, state and military baggage dragged into space by the mainstream space programmes. To do so we created a speculative playground in which all manner of new possibilities could be explored - dancing, music, sex - in the context of the entirely feasible proposition of community based spaced exploration.
The questions posed by the AAA remain unanswered: 'What would it be like to step into space? Beyond earth's gravity, its economy, its laws, what wonders would we discover? What unknown pleasures would we stumble across on our trip to the stars?' (8).
For most of us, the AAA is now in the past, but it is also in the future. One of the ideas we toyed with was that the AAA was a revolutionary movement of the future operating in the present, maybe, like in the film Terminator, sent back into the past by future autonomous communities in space, to guarantee their eventual success.
The task remains of reclaiming the future as a place of expanded human subjectivity and social wealth, rather than as a repository for present day anxieties. If sometimes it feels that we are in dark times, we must remember that the darker the night, the brighter the stars.
Neil Starman
The Once and Future Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Paris, April 2005
References:
1. Eduardo Rothe, The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power, Internationale Situationniste, no,12, (1969).
2. The reference here is to the Sun Ra tracks 'Space is the Place' and 'Outer Spaceways Incorporated' and to Parliament's 'Mothership Connection'.
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
4. Critical Arts Ensemble, Flesh Machine: cyborgs, designer babies and the new eugenic consciousness (New York: Autonomedia, 1998)
5. Air Force Space Command, Strategic Master Plan FY06 and beyond (2003)
6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napolean Bonaparte (1852)
7. Pulp, Glory Days, from the LP 'This is Hardcore', 1998.
8. Neil Disconaut, Mission Accomplished but the Beat Goes On: the Fantastic Voyage of the AAA, in See you in Space: the Fifth Annual Report of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (London, 2000)
See also: This is how we walk on the moon