It's like...rave
Was my favorite demographer's 2AM "my English is faltering" take on the venue for last night's Luna Lounge gig. First, HUGE ups to my peeps who drove out in the drizzle despite my "I can't vouch for this place" disclaimers and the party flyers with the woman rocking an afro, pasties and not much else. ok - perhaps the image would not be a complete deterrent, but the typos should be.
Monkey and I arrived at the space and waited our turn after several unmarked trucks and vans unloading items I presume "fell off the truck" to unload my records and enter the loading bay, I mean club entrance. More accurately, the space is a jacked up warehouse. Decor consisted of blown up images of naked women with bubbly butts hanging out of cargo pants, close ups of platform heels crushing cigarettes and some installation art involving latex and chicken wire.
I had to ask, "who maintains this culture?"
I walked around and soon found the maintainer of the culture atop a ladder engaged in some electrical wiring. It was almost as alarming as when I caught Milyoung hanging upside down from the roof of 392 Grand engaged yet another home improvement project. That said, upon being told she was trying to rig additional "heaters", the word Fire Trap came to mind. Ever resourceful Monkey quickly confirmed there were fire sprinklers--for our peace of mind, we chose to believe they were not just for decoration.
I don't want to sound ungrateful for the opportunity to spin so I will note that as a bedroom DJ (more accurately living room nook DJ) who now lives in a townhouse so can no longer turn up the volume, I appreciate any opportunity to play music at floor shaking volumes especially if the set up involves ginormous monitor speakers. This means I've gotten myself in situtations where the sound system is about the only thing saving the day. I'm thinking of one gig at Parlay that required climbing a ladder to get into the DJ booth and passing crates hand over hand to Sqeuak as I wondered about the genius who wanted to house the DJ in the club equivalent of a tree house. Once up there, I understood the treehouse set up--we could see entire floor and even around the corners. A vantage point that would have been fascinating if anyone was actually dancing. Between Ang, Squeak and I we were trapped in that treehouse booth for 4 hours. Given the crowd (non-dancing NY East Asian 20 something yuppies) we decided it was in fact more fun being trapped in the treehouse. So after a good faith effort to get at least a head bop, we decided to amuse ourselves with the clubs excellent sound system. Thus, the criteria for musical selections moved from "what would move this crowd?" to "what have we always wanted to play at ear throbbing levels on a professional sound system?" I can't even remember what we played, but it was fun --at least for us and the yuppies didn't even look up. You know, I could have sworn I've blogged about this before but a quick search yields nothing. Yes, this blog has a search function!
But back to the warehouse - the place actually got full and people were dancing. Since it was a good system, I was on early and still residually cranky from work, I cleared my head by playing some bass heavy stuff in the first part that I'd put in the "not crate saver" category. Don't remember everything, but I do remember Get Yourself Up, by KRS-One. Moved into some stuff that I can never manage to mix smoothly, but no one seemed to care -- included Break You Off, by the Roots, and managed to close w/a set that began with Wear Clean Drawers, The Coup (a song that requires a separate entry later) somehow it was apt to play:
"Wash you hands after using the toilet
Brush after every meal
And also
Wear clean draws everyday
'cuz things may fall
The wrong way
You'll be lying there
Waiting' for the ambulance
And your underwear
Got holes and shit"
On to tonight's NCLR gig. Crates will be different here, but just as much fun. Peace!