RA have published a lovely piece about Lucky Cloud Sound System. You can read it online here.
Love Injection 33 added to L&D Extracts
Love Injection have published an extract from L&D about club 57. The whole issue can be accessed here (pdf).
Life and Death interview on the IASPM-US
I was very happy to have been interviewed about Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor by Jarek Ervin of IASMPUS, now published here. It's all gone quite well with L&D, I guess I should write another book...
Happy Birthday David Mancuso
Photo by Tomas Borbás, work paid for, please contact for permission if using commercially, http://insicht.de/contact/
It'd be lovely to be able to wish David Mancuso "happy birthday" over the phone or even in person, but as this is the first year when that's not possible, at least 20 October can be a day of remembering. It's a little surreal to think that if David were still around he'd be 73; it seems like only the other day that we were spending time together in London in the run-up to a Lucky Cloud Sound System party and David reflected on the milestone of having recently turned 64, that being a big birthday for any Beatles fan.
It's David's birthday so I had to pick out a picture with balloons, so here's a picture of David at the Light in London in 2007, almost certainly during preparations for our Lucky Cloud Sound System summer party. Below I'll paste a little book extract that opens with a reflection on "Loft time" before describing the importance of balloon's to David's party environment--an environment that, beginning in Japan and continuing on Second Avenue before it also took root in London, could travel (with care).
Love saves the day...
The absence of clocks contributed to the dance dynamic. In the everyday world the clock signifies the unstoppable forward movement of teleological time, but party time unfolds in a different dimension—thus Mancuso’s decision to print Salvador Dali’s melting watches on the Love Saves the Day invitation. When clocks are nowhere to be seen, time starts to dissolve, and this provided the dancers at the Loft with an opportunity to forget their socialized selves—the person who has to get up at a certain time, go to work at a certain time, take lunch at a certain time, leave work at a certain time, etc.—and experiment with a different cycle. "Once you walked into the Loft you were cut off from the outside world," says Mancuso. "You got into a timeless, mindless state. There was actually a clock in the back room but it only had one hand. It was made out of wood and after a short while it stopped working."
Time, though, didn’t simply stand still, but went into symbolic reverse thanks to Mancuso’s practice of decorating the Loft with hundreds and hundreds of balloons. "Everybody loves balloons and they don’t cost a million dollars," he says. "There were always lots and lots of balloons." The decor created a reassuringly familiar setting, drawing guests into the therapeutic and nostalgic domain of their childhood and the set-piece birthday party. "It was a childlike experience, not childish. You could let yourself go." Inflated with just the right amount of air and/or helium, the multicolored balloons either drifted just below the ceiling or bobbled along at chest height, encouraging dancers to participate in the creation of a bewildering display of Brownian motion. "It was a very safe environment. People could regain what might have been lost."
From Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music, 1970-79, 24-25.
Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican
Basquiat was a major figure in Life and Death on the NY Dance Floor, so I was delighted to be asked to feed into the Barbican's forthcoming Basquiat: Boom for Real season in several ways plus write this piece, just published, which contextualises it all, http://bit.ly/2iMdx0K
In addition to offering bits and pieces of help with the show itself I've been co-curating a music night, featuring Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Arto Linsday, Justin Strauss! That'll take place on 7 October. There's more info at http://bit.ly/2eLkElG
Earlier that day I'll be heading to a free screening of Downtown 81, the downtown film starring Basquiat, after which I'll be chairing a discussion with downtown designer/producer/scenester Maripol and (last I heard..) August Darnell of Kid Creole and Arto Lindsay. All were heavily involved with Downtown 81, Basquiat and the wider downtown scene.
In-between I'll be working with five young directors who'll be creating short films as part of the Barbican's Too Young For What? Creative Learning programme-which is what it's all about, in a way, http://bit.ly/2vxwHNQ
The basic argument of the article: we might like to think of Basquiat as a genius, but he only became Basquiat because of his immersion in the wider downtown scene, so creativity is in many respects collective, and we might do well to think more (in Eno's term) of scenius than genius...