remember "cotton eye joe"?

This is the best record review I've read in a while.

it was kinda minimal, and kinda the best night ever

So, I ended up dragging my tired bum to Mayer and Boratto at Cielo. I'm pretty sure that the last time I enjoyed myself this much at a club, Clinton was our president and the Twin Towers were still standing. I left about three hours later than I set out to (that was three hours of looking at my watch and going "OK, just one more song and I'll go").

Highlights of the night:
- The opening DJs dropping better music than I've heard most top tier NYC favorites spinning for the past seven years
- Boratto spinning the prime cuts from his Chromophobia album, each new blip and thud eliciting roars from the crowd
- Mayer bopping around in front of his laptop (remember records?)
- A rather euphoric clubgoer informing me that I was actually the person that killed Laura Palmer
- Learning the Cielo economy:

- Watered Down Stoli Orange + Tonic = $10 plus $1 tip
- 12oz Amstel Light = $7 plus $1 tip
- 22oz Sapporo = $10 plus $1 tip
- 22oz Sapporo = bargain
- 2 x 22oz Sapporo = bloated on the dancefloor

-Mayer dropping the Carl Craig remix to Junior Boys "Like a Child" at 3 a.m.


Uh-oh point of the night:
- Getting into the cab after everything and realizing I was pretty darn tired after all

Also:
-The back of my head and my arm ended up in a picture on Resident Advisor (I really wasn't trying to make shadow puppets, really I wasn't)
- The New York Times liked it too
!

Editors Note: The following post was started two weeks ago. Then work got in the way. Ergo, let's pretend it's two weeks ago and everyone's excited about the new Superman movie.

Yet again, 4th of July weekend is the best weekend ever. Yours truly was blessed with a five day weekend, and ho boy did it rock.

Saturday night we went out to Roxy, and had a surprisingly fun time. The crowd at the club has changed pretty drastically since the dark days of 2001 where everybody on the dancefloor was a shirtless steroids-addicted Chelsea clone, completely zombified by the apparently enjoyable mixture of crystal meth and ghb. The crowd is actually a bit more diverse and, for lack of a better word, normal now. Mike Cruz was spinning what felt like an endless onslaught of vocal tracks (remixed circa 1997) of three varieties (I got my man, I got yo' man, You can have my man - he a skeez!) but after 4 a.m. the music became a little more underground and started to resemble actual house music (side rant here - why are gay clubs with second tier DJs stuck in this horrible rut of playing this unmelodic Hi-NRG screaming diva stuff that was tired in 1999? Please try throwing in something a little more forward thinking or minimal, this is NYC not Syosset, Long Island).

Anyway, we ended up closing the place. The whole night the other half was in this sense of amazement, like when Principal Victoria on South Park got stoned before the annual Christmas play. And rightfully so - we didn't have to take care of complete strangers about to overdose! At 5 a.m. he was up on one of the speakers struttin' his stuff, a few classics from my old Tunnel and Vinyl days were dropped, and later we walked home in the morning sun, completely deaf (this is actually pretty cool when you haven't done it in a while).

Sunday night was the Madonna concert, and hence by far the highlight of the weekend. I've deliberately missed her past two tours because of the exhorbitant ticket prices and my usual inability to enjoy big stadium concerts. But with Esther falling off horses, I wasn't sure how much longer I would have the opportunity to see her be the Madonna we currently know and love, so I splurged. Thankfully so. She's brilliant.

The night of the fourth we walked over to Columbia Street to watch the fireworks. So, OK, Columbia street is only about five blocks from where I live, yet I hadn't been over there in years. Figure that one out. Needless to say, there's a lot of fun stuff going on over there. The fireworks were fantastic. No matter how old and jaded you get, watching colors explode in the sky never loses its thrill.

the new york times has a decent article on the soon to be changing clubbing landscape in chelsea. well, none of these places appeal to me in the slightest, and i don't see how five clubs targeting the "a-list crowd" are going to succeed in the middle of a recession, but what do i know. four years ago, if you told me that i'd miss twilo greatly and regret not going there often i'd probably have called you crazy.

in 2003, the most rebellious thing you can do, apparently, is bust out to vanity 6 and beyonce in a bar. i really hope these guys make some headway soon.

hmmm, maybe drinking tons of red bull while dancing isn't such a good idea.

with the rave act having passed the house and the senate just two months ago, it is already being used to squash political activity. please note that sasha and digweed were not going to play at this event.

this is both a good thing and a bad thing.

it's a good thing because both sound factory and exit were, pretty much, crack houses. these were afterhours clubs where an "early night" was generally considered to be when the last song was played well into sunday afternoon. to look onto a dancefloor of thousands of people cranked out beyond belief, trudging back and forth, speaking complete nonsense, and being bombarded with 140 bpm noise is really depressing. it's a bad thing because, just like when twilo was shut down a couple years ago, the better parties are now going to be bombarded with tweakers. vinyl is finally recovering from the last onslaught, i shudder to think about what it's going to be like for the next couple months.

once again the media completely misses the heart of the problem here, which is the crystal meth epidemic that's taken hold of the afterhours party. designer drugs are not what's fueling the 48 hour partier, or causing an alarming increase in the spread of hiv, or any other completely ludicrous behavior.

grrrrr!!!!

village voice has a great article about the rapid fall of house music this year. gotta love the line where that one dude credits part of the fall "to the djs themselves, who as often as not provide dancers with nothing more than a beat that's absolutely perfect for nodding off." so true, so true.

you also gotta love the fact that shelter, the party that arc kicked out for its quickly dying progressive-house night (all reports say that the place is practically vacant except for fridays when danny spins) is getting all the hype, the press, and the word of mouth.