Moon Shoes Review
Rave Review
By Michael LipkowitzP.L.U.R., spelled Nic, pointing to the letters painted vertically on the wall. It means Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Its iconic for ravers everywhere: Its what we live; its what we breathe.
Originally published at www.stockyardmagazine.com
The floor was reluctant to release the soles of my shoes, as though I were attempting to cross a large glue mousetrap instead of a warehouse expanse. Random art clung haphazardly to the walls, with no discernible flare or direction. (I use the term "art" loosely here, as the decor was essentially post-modern bullshit: multicolored, ejaculatory stains oozing down the canvas and off onto the floor.) Thrown everywhere that was most inconvenient in the room, rotting couches bled cotton fluff out of the exposed orifices of their overturned cushions. The space teemed with people, their eyes brimming with energy-I could tell when they looked at me, their eyes darting across the room altogether, like a clan of primeval beings. My eyes latched onto theirs, and I could feel my heartbeat accelerate, as if something were about to happen that would transcend any possibility of communication (verbal or otherwise). I was on the verge of something visceral, something you can't quite grasp-something that flicks between your fingers like dying sparks sputtering between neurons. Possibility loomed.
At least it loomed more than it had at the beginning of the evening, when mostly boredom filled the cocktails that Laura and I guzzled on the thirty-seventh floor of her building on Michigan Avenue. Our eyes traced the landscape of the city from the balcony, and we were laughing as gusts of wind pulled her hair along their current beneath the autumn stars. Then Nic joined us, sporting a form-fitting V-neck sweater. He draped his arms over our shoulders.
"I just heard about this rave over on Kedzie; they just sent out the address. You guys in? We'd have to leave now, though. It's way out there." I looked at Laura hesitantly. She beamed back, confident in her enthusiasm (or in the fact that she now had something to be enthusiastic about). I set aside my reservations and followed them both west on the Blue Line.
Blinking blue police beacons heralded our destination. They adorned every corner, burning silently in the darkness. Cars sped down the road at velocities upwards of seventy miles per hour, as hecklers leaned out of the vehicles' windows, cursing loudly over the din of their stereos. Shattered glass littered the sidewalks like cheap confetti from a party favor. The street signs along the way were sometimes crooked, sometimes upside-down, and sometimes beaten to the ground at a ninety-degree angle. ("I found myself within a forest dark, " the line goes, "for the straightforward path had been lost.")
"They put the party out here, " Nic explained, chuckling, "because nobody's gonna give a shit how loud you play the music, not gonna care if you're dealing or rolling or whatever-because the police don't come out here anyways: They wouldn't risk their own lives for a bunch of kids."
We could hear the beat pulsing through the night air from two blocks away, the musical current surging through our toes as we approached our mark. A neon aura of glowsticks and colored strobe lights flashed above, winding in a cloud of artificial fog through the warehouse's shattered windows. We crossed the threshold of the building, and I felt the beat stir like a demon within me.
All around us swerved strangers drenched with sweat, make-up smeared and dribbling down their faces. Our shifting gaze alighted on an uncanny mix of clothing styles and accessories: vests and V-necks, fuzzy slippers, fairy wings, devil horns, animal tails, guitar cases, bikinis for both genders-nothing appeared to be off-limits. In fact, some weren't wearing any clothes at all. Bracelets strangled some arms as though painted directly on the skin, while others donned so many colored strings and fluorescent beads that no skin at all was visible in between. Hair was shaved, spiked, dyed, or layered. Most tried to dress fantastically, their aim being to blur their gender identity (if they had any). There was no order-it was mayhem.
The main vestibule, apart from the artwork on the walls, had a makeshift "bathroom" off to one side. Sectioned off by wood panels reaching to the ceiling, it contained a giant porcelain tub, lined with hair and waste, whose rusted piping had disconnected from the wall years ago. The line for the bathroom was stationary in the flux of the crowd, as if the people in it were flaunting their post-alternative aesthetic on a stage. The more of them I saw, however, the fewer of them I noticed; the strength of the rave's stimuli blights the senses almost immediately.
Laura made a genuine effort to make conversation with the other participants and learn more about them. She spent most of her time in the back room, astride one of the many porch chairs lining the smoky, makeshift bar (This was a plastic, folding table with a piece of paper that read, "SHOTS - 1$"). People passed around paraphernalia of all shapes and colors; cigarettes and drinks were shared by dozens. A tall man with cornrows distributed tablets in the dark. There was a strong sense of camaraderie-the substances used were communal rather than individual, as suggested by the accelerating contact high that Laura and I began to experience.
"P.L.U.R., " spelled Nic, pointing to the letters painted vertically on the wall. "It means Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.' It's iconic for ravers everywhere: It's what we live; it's what we breathe."
Nic was studying interior design at Columbia College. In fact, everyone here was studying interior design-at Columbia, at the Art Institute, at Loyola. Interior design, architecture, or the visual arts at these or similar institutions of higher learning. The exceptions were the individuals who choose not to attend college at all and, instead, drifted from rave to rave every weekend. They made friends with strangers who would drag them to all four corners of the city until, finally, somebody would decide that the night had to end (no matter where the sun stood in relation to the moon). For a group of people who were trying so hard to burst through the seams of conformity, they did a excellent job of portraying a single, homogeneous mass.
"We're creating a community, man, " Nic explained (as he is wont to do). "Here, right now, with these words, these actions. With each and every night of raving, we step closer to creating something bigger than ourselves."
Something didn't sit well with me (Perhaps it was just the music, which I thought was causing irreparable hearing loss, or maybe it was the heat and humidity, which I thought was causing cardiac arrest). Laura also looked puzzled; she crossed her arms, and I peered around the miasma of smoke that hovered over the crowd. There was a pointed lack of judgment and cynicism that I wasn't quite used to. In its place existed an unqualified sincerity and a genuine, unfiltered generosity. What, I had to ask, was the purpose?
All the rave's disparate elements merged on the dance floor. Afforded the largest room in the warehouse, it sprawled the equivalent of three tennis courts and endured the abuse of hundreds of dancers under a noble, twenty-foot ceiling. The lights were streaming, bursting between my fingers, and yet I was also awash in darkness. Sweat gushed from every pore, and the cold, bottled water that the D.J. continually shook into the crowd seemed to be baptismal, as if it were about to seep through my skin and purge me of the crowd's infernal heat. We danced as if separate from time, our limbs seeming to fuse together in the ellipse of the strobe light, which freezed drops of sweat and water mid-air. The ravers transcended their bodies; names and identities peeled away like old stickers, and the music and pharmaceuticals fashioned them a single body.
"You become a stranger to yourself, " Nic declared enigmatically, in the haze of smoke and shadow. He seemed to be perpetually speaking in aphorisms and absurdities, in false memories and random facts. Nic was not a person but a caricature; they all were-none of them seemed real.
Laura stumbled up to me, already gone, shouting, "Do you see that girl over there?"
"What?" I asked, brining my ear to her mouth.
"That girl, over there." She thrust her finger into the crowd, pointing at a black woman with long, tentacle-like dreadlocks that bounced in the air with her trance-like movements. "I made out with her!" The woman turned her face to me in the repeated pass of an overhead light, and I saw her features were masculine.
"Laura, that's a man." She creased her forehead, looking more closely. Nic came over after noting her distress, and Laura explained her confusion. He examined the person in question.
"No, Laura; he's right. That's a man." The person continued to dance, like some androgynous deity, as the crowd ebbed and flowed around it in a tide of mechanical precision.
"No, guys; I'm positive that's a woman. Look at those tits-what do you call those?" As the deity hovered closer, I saw that its loose blue shirt flapped around simply because it was poorly tailored. The figure then drifted back into the crowd and was lost for good. Laura paused for a moment, stared at the lights leaping across the ceiling, and then began to dance again, allowing the confusion to seep out of her body. Once more we felt a sensation of detachment, as if something was pulling us up and away, out of our skin.
Eventually, the flickering lights began to fade. Nic waded through the crowd and pulled us aside.
"We should go; it's getting late." Laura and I looked at each other, confused. How long had it been? An hour? An excess of two seemed impossible.
We emerged from the warehouse, and the night - and everything about it - was in a quixotic blur. It was five in the morning, meanwhile, and the Blue Line had stopped running. We decided to flag a taxi; but, as Nic said, shrugging, "They don't drive on this side of town." Laura grew worried. Cars were speeding past, the passengers inside waving their fists and spitting incomprehensible words into the void.
The ravers stumbled out into the night-most of them drunk, none of them sober. Removed from the magic of the rave, they were ordinary individuals once more. The ripped V-necks and the stained Converse, the exotic wings and the fuzzy slippers-all of it seemed droll and childish, while in the darkness of the warehouse their trappings made them as gods and goddesses. Now, as the sweat pouring down their tired faces glimmered under the streetlights, all of their pretense and insecurity was readily apparent. Their allure dissipated as quickly as the heat from our skin.
And so they took themselves out of their hovel and returned to the posh apartments they inhabited across the city. Laura, Nic and I eventually slid onto the cushioned seats of a cab we had summoned by phone. It shuttled us promptly home, away from the buzz, the glitter, the heat, and the haze and back to our comfortably quiet lives.
"I don't know what that was, " Laura said, gazing out of the window as we drove through the heart of the city. "Was that real? Was what we just experienced truly real?"
The taxi driver laughed as we drove along the lake shore. "Oh, I've heard that one before."
The vibrations in my toes seemed to have traveled with me, but then I realized it just the motor of the car; perhaps I was suffering a kind of shell shock. On the horizon, meanwhile, the sun was already rearing its judgmental head.
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