lost london

---

---

You Are Here
You Are Here all photos by josh pollen (except flyer)

I think it may have been a dungeon at one point, maybe a really really big wine cellar after that. Now it's a club. With overpriced drinks and weird weird weird things happening that maybe should not be put on the same bill. Last night I went to what I think is the strangest venue/event combo I've ever been to. It didn't quite work, but I think the point was that it was supposed to be so cool (in that obscure, this art is way above even the heads of the artists creating it, we all are intellectual and artistic and party in fabulously obscure dark and different hideaways kind of cool way) that just entering the place raised your social status. Or one would hope. Sounds like my kind of place right?

It was really funny actually. And I did enjoy the bit where to go to the bathroom you had to swim your way through coked up and drunk fabulously dressed fashion students, half of which sounded like home (east coaster, new york accent, miami native, etc), the other half (obviously not the American men, since american men don't dance quite so much as eurpoean men) of which were dancing like happy lovely idiots. The fashion fags were there for some sort of fashion line launch or promotion thing, and I think somewhere in there there was ceramics and your random painting and drawings on the walls. We were there because Dan was doing a set of sound art, on a bill with other sound artists. He had this really cool mixed media thing that combined a projection of dots moving in swarm like patterns with ambient noise. It told a story that I got lost in creating. My explanation doesn't do it justice, this was in fact the most interesting bit of the night, but put on in the totally wrong room at the wrong time. Unfortunately, it went on after a particularly bad sound-art band that we had to endure to wait for Dan, followed by a fabulous spectacle of three queens bumping and grinding in heels, tutus, and more general drag.

All this was happening in a cavernous basement with red walls, which had a few main rooms with side rooms going off them, which looked a lot like ancient cells to place prisoners. Now they held tables and beds and candles and people gathered round drinking and talking, and trying not to bonk their heads on the ceiling.

Needless to say. It was pretty funny. We went back to Herne Hill and had our own party until well after the sun came up. I left the gathering early (in comparison to the others, that is). I walked back along the park which borders the main road in Herne Hill, watching everyone pass me on their way to work, judging my out of context party clothes and open-faced silly grin. I gawked at the weak sunlight forcing itself through the characteristically London cloud cover, and alighting on the tree tops and buildings. In Herne Hill and Brixton and most of South London, you can actually pinpoint where all the bombs were dropped in the second world war. As you walk along the rows of ancient houses and buildings, you happen across randomly placed more modern looking buildings. They stoutly announce themselves with a pragmatism that is lost on the beauty of their neighbors. I went to sleep.

Tonight I go to dinner in North London with the folks from Strident Tent State. Will be good to reconnect and talk politics and revolution again.

---

Comments

[JWoo]

Sounds groovy
I think I'm still totally outside the nightlife world, but it sounds like a fabulous time. I bet you fit in marvelously.