Event Review: Paradise All-Night Disco Party at Mezzanine

After a quick couple drinks at The Cinch to celebrate Juanita Fajita's birthday, the boyfriend and I headed out to the Paradise All-Night Disco Party at Mezzanine to meet up with our friends Jovino and Mermaid, two dedicated disco junkie DJs. The party didn't convert me to actually liking disco, which I still consider to be, at best, nostalgia music, but it was a fun, light-hearted time that did showcase some of our local DJs like Robot Hustle and Bus Station John in their element and putting some forth of their best efforts that I have heard so far.

Judging from the line when we arrived, and the fact that the coat check "sold out," Paradise was obviously the party of choice for most of San Francisco's clubbers. It was definitely crowded at 12.30 when Escort came on to perform, but there was still plenty of room to dance, and the crowd was among the most easy-going I've run into in a while. They were also among the best-dressed; though there were some interpretations of classic disco with fros, shades, and leisure jackets that bordered on the tragic, there were plenty of other party-goers who decided that disco fashion could have its own contemporary interpretation, as long as it was bright and sparkely. I saw and talked to a fair number of gay scenesters, including Leo Herrera, Dee Jay Pee Play (who told me he had just been reading about the original New York disco scene that morning and was feeling completely high from this re-creation of it), and Marke B. of the Bay Guardian, but overall the crowd was pretty mixed; I would have liked to have seen a few more gay boys, but I enjoyed the diversity of the scene, consisting as it did of people who seemed much more focused on having a good time than about how they were going to pick up.

The music was better than I expected, but there were also moments when the campy kitsch aspect of tracks like "Funkytown" (as the boyfriend said later, "there's no excuse for Funkytown") had the effect of bringing me out of whatever un-selfconscious enjoyment I was having and making me think that I had wandered into Polly Esther's Culture Club. The DJs in the main room did a technically OK job of mixing it together; there were some glitches, but some consideration also needs to be made for the fact that these tracks weren't constructed for mixing, and there's often so much treble and just plain noise in their mastering that you practically need an audio engineering degree to figure out how to put them together. I realized that this is one of the things about classic disco that bothers me, and why I sometimes rather like the newer interpretations of it from artists like Lindstrom or Prinz Thomas - the old stuff just sounds sonically bad. I think this is also why I don't really like dancing to it; though you could argue that its "the original dance music," I have a lot harder time finding the beat that I like, since the bass component is often muddied up and buried under the high-end of horns and strings.

Escort, the 18-piece disco orchestra from Brooklyn, put on a great but seemingly short show - they started a half hour late, and I don't think they were on the stage for more than half an hour. All I can say is, any band that has both a string and horn section is worth checking out to see how they bring it all together, and Escort was super tight.

My big surprise for the evening was Bus Station John's set in the upper room. First, BSJ has really tightened up on his mixing since I heard him last; this time he was even wearing headphones. Rather than trying to deal with the multitude of issues around mixing disco, he took the simple approach of just making sure everything started and stopped on a beat at the beginning and end of it a measure, and it all went together very well with a sustained energy. His programming was also much better than in the main room; there's no question that the man really knows his stuff when it comes to the rare groove disco, and his selections on this night, in that space with that crowd, made it all sound very fresh. I realized that, taken out of the context of a gay club, where disco feels like regressive nostalgia for the pre-AIDS era, it was much easier for me to get into it, tired though I was, because I could just take it as fun dance music, rather than being thrown into critical reflections on what it means for that music to be played in that kind of scene. It's still not my first choice for dance music, and it will always rile up the punk in me, and the contarian Futurist who believes that the present should be about the future, not the past (wow, that's deep), but BSJ's set made me realize that there are ways in which I can enjoy this music as long as it's not coming with too much baggage or reactionary statements about contemporary dance culture attached to it. So, good job Bus Station John, you got this cranky critic to change his mind just a little bit on something.

We left around 2.30, having stayed rather longer than I thought we would. Though there were moments in which Paradise felt just a bit too campy for me to take it as anything more than a rather safe excuse for otherwise conservative San Franciscans to dress up and "party," there were also moments where I wished that the vibe engendered over the course of the night, one that was sexy, fun, and smiling, could be brought as easily to other parties that feature contemporary dance music.

Mix Download: Honey Sound System DJs

All the boys in the Honey Sound System - Pee Play, Jason Kendig, Ken Vulsion, Robot Hustle, and Derek B (with one on the way from Safety Scissors) - have put out a new set of mixes for your "Summer of Acid" listening pleasure. Check the Sounds link, and watch the site for news of upcoming HSS events.

PS: You can get copies of the mixes on CD, plus a copy of the new "Honey Porn" zine ($10) at their House of House party at The Transfer this Friday. See the Friday Night Guide for July 27 for more info.

Event Review: Tea with Honey at The Transfer

Sometimes it takes a whole weekend to get it right, to catch the right vibe, to find yourself in a state where you're not thinking, or analyzing, or planning, but are finally caught up in the energy of the moment, lost in dancing, staying much later than you had planned on because it's all come together in such a way that you don't want to leave. Tea with Honey at The Transfer, the first attempt at a t-dance by the Honey Sound System crew of Pee Play, Ken Vulsion, and Robot Hustle, with special guest appearances by Safety Scissors and Gavin Hardkiss, was the perfect capper to a long weekend and probably the very best expression of the Sunday evening party that I have experienced in a long time.

I love the concept of the Sunday t-dance, something that starts late in the afternoon and ends around midnight. It's one last chance to go out, be social, dance, and drink before the work week begins, and since it's Sunday chances are there's not much that requires your attention beyond what you'll slot up in the DVD player. It starts early enough that you can go and leave and still get a good night's sleep, or if you're lucky to have Monday off, you can stay out a little late and feel naughty. And then there's the special element of Sunday evening music; chances are everybody has had enough of the high-energy approach by that point, what you want is something fun and easy-going, something that will move you onto the dancefloor but recognizes that, after a hard weekend of partying, you're probably not going to be looking for a serious aerobic workout. I think that Sunday evenings are when deep house truly reigns supreme, because it lets you groove and be mellow at the same time.

The boyfriend and I showed up at The Transfer a little after six, when the crowd was mainly barflies and a few folks who had come along to support the Honey Sound System. We got to chat a bit with Pee Play and got a copy of the Honey Sound System 'zine; if their musical talent wasn't enough reason to hate them, now they've got the visual thing going as well. Robot Hustle was playing ItaloDisco, a genre I generally don't care for but, here on this Sunday afternoon, seemed especially fitting for the mood. A few folks straggled in, but it wasn't until around 7, when Ken Vulsion took to the decks, that the energy really began to build - I guess everyone got home from the Eagle, powdered their noses, and made their way to the party.

Then, at 8, Gavin Hardkiss took to the decks and things really took off. Up until this point I've not really understood The Transfer as a dance space, but there I was, getting down and loving it. For the first time all weekend I was actually having fun, and Gavin did a bangin' job of keeping the mood upbeat and energetic with just a dash of the techy thrown in to keep it all interesting. The boyfriend got drunk and behaved in the most light-hearted way I've seen in weeks (and took some ah, revealing, photos in the photobooth ), one of our friends came to join us and danced like a madman, there were faerie boys and Burners and even a pirate in attendance. I spotted a few young starlets like Leo Herrera in the crowd, and the word "fabulous" tripped easily from the lips. The only downer was when someone stole a CD I had left up on one of the drink shelves, but I already had it burned to iTunes, so who cares?

We left around 10.30, before I had a chance to hear Safety Scisssors and Pee Play, but with the way these kids are taking off I'm sure I'll have multiple more opportunities. I know that they're planning a "House of House" party at The Transfer on the 27th, which I will be sure to attend, and you should mark your calendar as well. As our friend, Jimmy, said, these are certain to be the "It boys" of the gay party scene for a while, so come out and hear them now so you can say "I remember when they used to have those crazy parties at The Transfer."

Gavin Hardkiss demonstrates his fretting technique.









Ken Vulsion, Pee Play, and Leo Herrera get the boogie fever.







Ken Vulsion practices warding off the paparazzi.








Did I mention that there were pirates?

Upcoming Event: Tea with Honey T-Dance, Sunday July 15

Honey with Tea: A Tea Dance with Honey Sound System and Special Guest Gavin Hardkiss!

Fresh off his appearance at Supperclub on Saturday night, Gavin Hardkiss will join Honey Sound System DJs Ken Vulsion and Pee Play, as well as Robot Hustle and Safety Scissors, for a tea dance at The Transfer.

6PM - 12AM
No Cover Listed
The Transfer, Church and Market Streets

Event Review: Sex and Icons Show at Magnet, Reception at The Transfer

Friday night's opening for Leo Herrera's "Sex and Icons" show at Magnet, followed by the reception party at The Transfer, was certainly the weekend's see and be seen event for the alternaqueer crowd, where there were more well put-together boys with complicated coifs than I have seen out in Clubland for a very long time. And though the show did not quite match my expectations , and the scenester aspect of the party tended to overpower my perceptions of its other elements, both confirmed for me that there is a younger gay underground art and music scene that is well on its way to re-defining the San Francisco club experience, with artists like Herrera providing the iconography, and DJs like Pee Play, Jason Kendig, Kenvusion, and Robot Hustle, along with their many associates, providing its essential heartbeat.

Leo Herrera's photos bring to mind Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle on first glance. Like the images of those photographers, Herrera's seem to come from a space inhabited by fables and mystical creatures, and he shares with them an anti-naturalistic aesthetic - unlike Pierre et Gilles, however, his images are not the supporting material for painterly re-workings, nor, like LaChappelle, does he work with the direct qualities of light. Instead, Herrera's muse is Photoshop, and you have the sense of hours spent trying to get just the right level of color saturation, or using filters to manipulate specific layers. Herrera has a terrific visual sense for both color and composition, and what was perhaps most notable about all his images was the consistency of the vision that ran through them, from work that was produced for commercial purposes, up through his faux porn posters, to his more abstract moments, such as the straight-on contemplation of a poppers bottle and a bumper, or, perhaps the most memorable image of the show, a large, metal bracelet-adorned dildo with very convincing pre-cum courtesy of a hot glue gun.

As the title of the show makes clear, Herrera is interested in the iconic aspect of his images, their ability to encapsulate a quality that transcends their specific nature and reveals their connection to a universal concept. In light of this, I thought it interesting that so many of the images had a commercial context, such as the image of Peaches Christ as a towering tranny monster that was used to promote her Midnight Mass shows, or the porn posters. In many ways, the work of a commercial photographer is to create iconic imagery by investing the ordinary with a supernatural or super-real quality. This was what I saw as the craft in Herrera's work, and the rationale for his image manipulations: the imposition, by the photographer, of meaning onto things that are ordinarily mundane, like a brown poppers bottle, or a dildo that you could pick up anywhere in the Castro. However, if Herrera's images were successful at imbuing meaning into objects that ordinarily had none, I thought it was less successful when contemplating objects that already had the capacity to speak for themselves. One of the images I was most curious to see, for example, was of Harvey Milk's suit that he wore the night he was assassinated. Herrera's treament was to crop the composition very tightly, so that the form of the shirt was reduced to just the front panels, and to put a light behind it that glowed through the material like an ethereal heart. But, did Harvey Milk's shirt need to be aestheticized to this degree to make it speak as an iconic object, did it really need Herrera's artistic intervention to have a voice? In looking at this photograph, and of Daddy Alan Selby's leather hat perched on top of someone else's head, I wished Herrera had taken an approach more out of straight photography, giving the objects the ability to simply be what they were, which, to me, would have placed them more in the realm of the iconic than an aesthetic interpretation that was, for me, too literal-minded. My final thought at the show was that Herrera has both an aesthetic vision and the skills to execute it, but perhaps needs to spend more time thinking about what he is revealing rather than what he is creating.

The reception at the Transfer was probably the most fabulous event I've attended in a while - disco balls threw diamond spots of light all through the bar, posters and proof sheets were suspended on lines along the walls, they even moved the damn pool table out of the way. Kids were crowding in on the heels of the Magnet show closing, and DJs Ken Vulsion and Robot Hustle were setting a fun, easy-going vibe. The tracks tended toward electro and a little bit retro, and though I was personally in the mood for something a bit harder and a little more techno, I had no real complaints. Well, aside from the fact that I still can't get the hang of the Transfer's space - even after clearing the pool table and moving the tables and chairs into its previous space the dance floor seemed more like a way station on the route to the bathrooms, with the bar serving as the soul for that space. The boyfriend and I eventually headed off to Lights Down Low at 222 Hyde, since we were in more of a mood to dance than to hang out and add our own iconography to the scene, but it seemed pretty clear to me that this was ground zero for the new clique of kids who will be defining the gay club scene for their generation, and I will be happy to check out their events and chart their progress.

Upcoming Event: Sex and Icons Show at Magnet, Reception at The Transfer

Local photographer Leo Herrera will be presenting a solo show of images "of rare gay artifacts pulled from the GLBT Historical Society's world-renowned archives (the suit worn by Harvey Milk the night of his assassination), as well as living gay figures (Amanda Lepore, gay rapper Cazwell), and historic monuments (Stonewall Tavern)" at Magnet on 18th Street (x Castro) this Saturday from 8.00 - 10.30 PM. Following the opening join Jason Kendig, DJ Pee Play, Kenvusion, and Robot Hustle at The Transfer for the get-down reception. The opening is free, and I believe the reception is as well. More info on the show at www.HomoSexualArt.com.