It is six AM. I am in an industrial warehouse in Bushwick. Instead of thin plastic cups of Old Crow and Rolling Rock, the cute, amicable bartenders are serving boutique coffee and nine dollar organic pressed juices. The clientele looks eminently employable. A man wearing face paint is hanging from a rope swing over a foam pit. I am attending my first-ever sober rave. There’s the muffled groove of house music bouncing off of empty brick buildings; there’s the bouncer at the door checking wrist stamps; there’s the high, industrial ceiling with its exposed beams. But instead of ambling past the K-holed zombie waste-oids and afterhours addicts double-fisting Red Bull cans, I’m being greeted by the event’s anointed “hugger” who drapes a plastic lei around my neck and wishes me a good morning.
The dance floor is spring-loaded and a group of scruffy, possible startup consultants sweating in their unbuttoned pinstripe shirts, are bouncing and giggling, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. A couple of wiry thirtysomethings wearing prayer beads and colorful athleticwear are upside down, challenging each other to duration handstands (they must be vegan; I don’t know how else you get that skinny). The dance movement therapists by the DJ booth see me looking out of place and invite me to express myself through free-form improvisational movement; I politely decline.
It turns out there’s an international network of Yoga Raves™ that spans Argentina, Lithuania, and South Africa, plus plenty of general purpose early morning sober parties in cities like London, New York, and Sydney. There are hour-long lunchtime dance parties in Midtown Manhattan, so you can goof off in between shifts. There is a whole world of un-inebriated clubbing to be done out there, a parallel dimension of party populated by the affluent professional class and New Age disciples.
As someone whose average Saturday morning begins with a few hours of chest-rattling techno followed by a daylight stroll home from some forgotten warehouse district, I naturally balked at the idea of white collar health nuts stepping onto my turf. At the parties I prefer to haunt, half the attendees can barely hold down their bike messenger jobs, let alone handle an administrative gig for some socially-minded non-profit. But, masochist that I am, I knew I had to see it for myself before all the burners left town.
“I have a really crazy mind,” said Scotty Lavella, a frequent morning raver, volunteer hugger, self-described health nut, and part-time anesthesia engineer who is currently producing a web-based comedy cooking show. I had gone out for a cigarette and found him leaning against the back of the warehouse, savoring a breather and watching the sun rise over barbed wire fences and cinder block buildings. “My mind can’t be silenced by sitting in a corner sniffing Yohimbe root and sage-ing myself; I have to dance; I have to run. I dance—and my mind slows down.” Like most of the party’s attendees, mindfulness and self care is central to his lifestyle. He doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t do hard drugs; he drinks only occasionally. “I’m totally being present,” he says. “It’s like meditation.” (...)
Hardcore party culture has always had an ambiguous relationship to labor. In the New York City discotheques of the 1970s, where club culture as we know it first flourished, hard work permeated every membrane of the city’s sprawling pleasure complex. “They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend,” DJ Ian Levine told author Peter Shapiro in Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. His description of the culture at the time captures its ambivalent relationship to the looming presence of labor and its successor, death. “Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat,” he says, describing the exhaustive effort that preceded, followed, and in many ways pervaded Saturday night out at the club. (...)
Even now, the pleasure-seeking class of full-time partiers in Berlin will tell you that all of this leisure time is actually a lot of work. Ask one of the gaunt, leather-harnessed demi-gods at Berghain for advice on how to keep partying for 14 hours and they’ll likely provide some variation on the following: bring a backpack with snacks and toiletries, dress sensibly, space your drug use out at a reasonable pace, and most importantly, when that moment comes where you hate yourself and you feel poisoned and scared and you just want to go home, power through it and you may come out the other side to reach unprecedented heights. And if you’re really fading, taking a nap for an hour or two in the corner of the club, then get up and keep going. It sounds like workplace advice for a new hire.
The dance floor is spring-loaded and a group of scruffy, possible startup consultants sweating in their unbuttoned pinstripe shirts, are bouncing and giggling, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. A couple of wiry thirtysomethings wearing prayer beads and colorful athleticwear are upside down, challenging each other to duration handstands (they must be vegan; I don’t know how else you get that skinny). The dance movement therapists by the DJ booth see me looking out of place and invite me to express myself through free-form improvisational movement; I politely decline.It turns out there’s an international network of Yoga Raves™ that spans Argentina, Lithuania, and South Africa, plus plenty of general purpose early morning sober parties in cities like London, New York, and Sydney. There are hour-long lunchtime dance parties in Midtown Manhattan, so you can goof off in between shifts. There is a whole world of un-inebriated clubbing to be done out there, a parallel dimension of party populated by the affluent professional class and New Age disciples.
As someone whose average Saturday morning begins with a few hours of chest-rattling techno followed by a daylight stroll home from some forgotten warehouse district, I naturally balked at the idea of white collar health nuts stepping onto my turf. At the parties I prefer to haunt, half the attendees can barely hold down their bike messenger jobs, let alone handle an administrative gig for some socially-minded non-profit. But, masochist that I am, I knew I had to see it for myself before all the burners left town.
“I have a really crazy mind,” said Scotty Lavella, a frequent morning raver, volunteer hugger, self-described health nut, and part-time anesthesia engineer who is currently producing a web-based comedy cooking show. I had gone out for a cigarette and found him leaning against the back of the warehouse, savoring a breather and watching the sun rise over barbed wire fences and cinder block buildings. “My mind can’t be silenced by sitting in a corner sniffing Yohimbe root and sage-ing myself; I have to dance; I have to run. I dance—and my mind slows down.” Like most of the party’s attendees, mindfulness and self care is central to his lifestyle. He doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t do hard drugs; he drinks only occasionally. “I’m totally being present,” he says. “It’s like meditation.” (...)
Hardcore party culture has always had an ambiguous relationship to labor. In the New York City discotheques of the 1970s, where club culture as we know it first flourished, hard work permeated every membrane of the city’s sprawling pleasure complex. “They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend,” DJ Ian Levine told author Peter Shapiro in Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. His description of the culture at the time captures its ambivalent relationship to the looming presence of labor and its successor, death. “Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat,” he says, describing the exhaustive effort that preceded, followed, and in many ways pervaded Saturday night out at the club. (...)
Even now, the pleasure-seeking class of full-time partiers in Berlin will tell you that all of this leisure time is actually a lot of work. Ask one of the gaunt, leather-harnessed demi-gods at Berghain for advice on how to keep partying for 14 hours and they’ll likely provide some variation on the following: bring a backpack with snacks and toiletries, dress sensibly, space your drug use out at a reasonable pace, and most importantly, when that moment comes where you hate yourself and you feel poisoned and scared and you just want to go home, power through it and you may come out the other side to reach unprecedented heights. And if you’re really fading, taking a nap for an hour or two in the corner of the club, then get up and keep going. It sounds like workplace advice for a new hire.
by Max Pearl, TNI | Read more:
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