Page 4 - NYWaste-Spring2014

4 New York waste we’re Back Issue 2014
GOD SAVE NYC Bright Lights, Big Shitty
By Pam Glam
Well I’ve been thinking a lot about nightlife and all the big changes in the NYC scene.
I was lucky enough to grow up here, and nightlife was amazing. Even from a young age, I always loved to party. I remember my best friend’s older sister sneaking us into the limelight when we were 12 (we didn’t look it). My family’s house became known as Pam’s Party Palace and I would have parties every single weekend starting in junior high and we would sneak kegs into the bushes in my backyard and get as wrecked as possible. You could say I was the black sheep. I had a house party for my 15th birthday, sent my family to a double fea- ture and hired a reputable DJ who set up a booth in my living room, unfortunately I invited too many different groups from all over NYC and a gang fight broke out in my living room, blood and broken furniture splattering all over the walls while the dude played “punks jump up to get beatdown.” By my 16th birthday we had started going to raves so we all went to NASA to celebrate and did everything we could get our hands on. My boyfriend at the time was in ABK crew, all the skaters who did the movie “Kids” and I started meeting amazing club kids and people like Astro Earle. We would go anywhere we could find a rave, even to one at Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos, those were some awesome times. In college we got more into the rock, goth, & club scene, going to the Bank and Life on Bleecker St where I got a job doing guestlist when I was 18 which was amazing, they paid me $40 an hr and all my (underage) friends got to come for free, VIP, free drinks, every- thing. We started going to Soundfactory and Twilo and the Tunnel and did that whole thing when it was still mostly gay, before the bridge and tunnel crowds took over but even when they did it was still good for a long time. I remember one Sunday walking out of Soundfactory at 2pm wearing almost nothing and walking around the corner to a totally desolate 10th Ave and seeing to my horror a biker gang of about 40 badass looking dudes in a parking lot revving their engines thinking oh shit, this is NOT good. Then as I got closer I realized it was the day of the pride parade and they were all gay, wahooooo. We also got into going to balls and the whole gay scene which was beyond fabulous at that time, really legit, raw and DIY not to mention amazing music and energy on those dancefloors. You would find out about parties from flyers, flyers were Everything and maga- zines and newspapers and bulletin boards, not to mention actual phone calls. All through college in Manhattan I worked full time, was going on scholarship and had to keep my grades up plus commuting from queens, but I always prioritized parties and nightlife, this shit is like religion to me, fuel that feeds my soul. There is some- thing very primal and human about coming together for the sacred cause of raw celebration, just to appreciate being alive, really, there is so much that happens energetically at a party, you can feel it brew like a stew from the beginning of a night to the end, you can feel what was made together in the air, breathe it in and dance to it... Yeah.
Anyway during college my closest friends started living in a communal loft in Bushwick back in 1999 before that was a thing, and it was all about having warehouse parties and having bands and crazy nights in this extraterrestrial and completely removed world we were creating, jumping across the rooftops at dawn so high on life and you don’t even want to know what else. At this time there was literally NOTHING in Bushwick and I mean nothing, we were by the Morgan L and you had to go to Bedford just to find food for Godsake, even get- ting beer was like an army mission. These were the best and most wild times of my life with all my dearest friends carving out an impossible slice of just what we considered heaven; simple, dirty glories, living life to the very edge and in some cases crossing over... It shaped me forever and was my golden age of freedom and puri- ty.
During this time I rented out a space for my 21st birthday party and the manager dude gave me the keys and was like alright just lock up when you leave, holy shit did we destroy that place, they claimed $2000 worth of damage, I remember giving the keys to my DJ at the end of the night and just leaving with my friends, the party kept going but we all went back the loft and partied straight through to the next night. There’s a video of me being serenaded “happy birthday” by my friends playing electric guitar while I was sitting in the bathroom sink having the time of my life at 11am... Lots of near electrocutions in that bathroom, lol. Anyway this is when bands and the whole hipster thing started happening, Bedford Ave was basically just a bulletin board where artists and musicians and people in the scene could connect and grow this beautiful world and the new culture started really exploding like a renaissance.
And then Sept 11 happened and everything changed, Giuliani and Bloomberg came and did everything they could to stamp out these beautiful gardens like weeds, it was horrible and traumatic and awful, the city became like a murder scene, a graveyard of innocent parties and venues killed one after the other in that evil rampage against fun. There were the ridiculous days where undercover cops would give you tickets in clubs FOR DANCING because of the stupid cabaret rules from 1890 and bouncers would come up to you DURING BANDS and tell you to stop dancing or they would throw you out, every club was just relentlessly busted with- out reason or legal justification and it was all just about disempowerment. There had been a lot of strength, uni- son and momentum in the scene at the time, there was a real people’s movement taking place after 9/11 and it
was all very independent and beautiful and inspir- ing, but the rich developers with special interests and all their corrupt politician friends set out on a campaign to basically break people’s spirits, break apart coalitions, social infrastructure, public ser- vices, and systematically eliminate little by little what one perceived as basic civil liberties, re-estab- lishing them as luxuries to be bought only by those who could afford it, changing the rent laws, zoning laws, slashing social programs, basically castrating actual New Yorkers and getting us all down and docile so that there would be nothing standing in the way of the Golden Age of Tourism, and this started in the clubs and in nightlife, the last bastion of free- dom. Now we are 9 million residents getting assaulted by over 50 million tourists every year plus all the rich transplants and transients who could give a flying fuck about our homeless, our senior citi- zens, our children, our infrastructure, and basically everything fundamental to the NYC we knew and loved, so you better believe the "planners" won that fight by a landslide and we are now in the unfortu- nate state that the needs of these outsiders take cate- gorical precedent over the lowly creatures who actu- ally LIVE or are from here.
THANK GOD DeBlasio won, and we will finally start to see a little bit of damage control restoring some semblance of justice to the long abused New Yorker. But I digress... As a result of this series of events, nightlife in NYC became a pathetic, comedic, empty, hollow, non-existent shell of its former self for basically a decade, and anything good just went so far underground (it had to, in order to survive) that many people just didn’t even bother going out any more. (One good thing is that the underground is now so strong and so good and still so removed that it’s like there is an alternate universe you can travel to for truly amazing parties how New York used to be and is supposed to be, it is there, it is living, breathing and dancing like a MOTHERFUCKER, you just have to dig like one to find it.... But again I digress.)
What I’ve really been thinking about and what I want to talk about is the above ground. I would call it at about 2 years ago, shit started rising from the dead a little. The idiots that were running the gov- ernment and plaguing us with all the catastrophic over-development finally realized that all these brainless monied nobodies they had attracted like flies to honey would also want to “party” (or believe they were engaging in some sad alternate version of it). So we started seeing something interesting, new bars and clubs opening up, something that hadn’t happened in a very long time. But these were not good venues. Most of these were actually very bad