Considerations | At the hellmouth coatcheck

Something about unaccountable experiences in and by which one communes via sweat and step with others outside of city limits.

A few years ago in the winter we took a cab from a bar like a block of smoked amber onto Kottbusser Damm, which turns into Hermannstraße, further south, then took a right below the rim of realty-crater Flughafen Tempelhof, continuing until we hit the jade office complex whose top floor housed the club Greenhouse.

A touring DJ will produce 3-4.75 metric tons of carbon dioxide in a month of flying for gigs, which is 550-900% more than the average UK citizen would generate in the equivalent time.¹

The Fool as depicted in the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck: calf-length yellow boots, one of which presses off the ground to take the tread further off a jagged precipice; however, the Fool with a jaunty little knapsack slung over shoulder gazes up to the sky; almost absentmindedly brandishes a white rose in the other hand.

Kodwo Eshun’s crackling prose—zagged voltage—in the intro to More Brilliant Than the Sun: “The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves, the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum.”²

A large portion of major cities in Europe are encircled by a ring road that either surrounds the inner core of a metropolitan area, or a margin in which the density begins to fray into suburb: A10 motorway (Amsterdam), R1 (Antwerp), Bundesautobahn 100 (Berlin), Centura Bucuresti (Bucharest), Périphérique (Caen), A4 motorway (Milan), GRAP (Padua), Zagreb bypass (Zagreb), and so on.

What must one wager to sustain a love and its according ethic in the end times—“now” being out of step with its terminus at “soon”?

Eshun continues: “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”³

Last weekend we biked out to an artist’s studio in Lichtenberg—an ex-GDR district looking and feeling as such, as of yet uncombed by cafes serving cortados—and although I find art parties to foster some of the most inhibited environments a body can encounter, people were wavy and sweating at this one: they had made the commute; the common space was a satellite.

Escalating seismics aside, the Hellmouth obviously wouldn’t open under Los Angeles, but rather off-center, somewhere out- of-pocket like Sunnydale.

Chicago acts like a trellis or lays out like a sheet of graph paper, one edge wet and thus easily torn away by Lake Michigan.

How, or assuming what posture, do we guide ourselves through the present via the future, if short-term futurity looks rich with suffering, and in the long-term, it’s merely void?

At the last Radiant Love rave out in Rummelsburg, a bus ride and an S-Bahn train and a tram and a brisk walk to a little warehouse next to a Kia car dealership, the vibe is very Hellmouth, warm, stilted and sometimes jagged, and somehow still lithe like the contours of humor in Araki’s Nowhere: pulsate love that’s teenage and naive and all the same encircles a gaping darkness.

Rounding to the Fool’s horizon looms a granite-blue range of mountain with snowcaps, which some read as a symbol for challenges yet-to-come; to me it looks like a cresting wall of wave.

We’re in a car like a roulette marble rolling into Chicago’s July heat, skirts around the edge of the lake down to the South Side’s Jackson Park, rolling to the Chosen Few cookout and festival—Masters at Work on the bill, Evelyn Champagne King.

Remember the limits of a city step are multiple, wavy, and relative.

One narrative of ancestry the house and 2step and ballroom and DnB tracks we dance to at Radiant Love and Chosen Few and Greenhouse and the studio in Lichtenberg et al. arises from what Paul Gilroy termed “the Black Atlantic”: a webbed network of cultural synthesis and redub operating on levels both local and global, set into motion by the inhuman logistics known as the Atlantic Slave Trade and the cyclic tides on which it travelled.⁴

In Nowhere, it is only before Montgomery’s human frame explodes, revealing itself to be a vessel for some insectoid alien, that he is finally able to say to Dark, the character he presumably might grow to love radiantly, “Like when I was trapped in the pod-thing the aliens had me captive in, all I could think about was what if they kill me, and I never get to see you again?”⁵

Overlay Dante’s concentric-ring model of Hell with the spiraling groove cut into a record: what would Satan’s seat be—reality pegged by a central and undoubtedly demonic axis, or further information simply unreadable in the eye of the stylus tip?

Fred Moten’s pyro-lyric prose (but truly stealth poetry, all blue fire) in the essay “Blackness and Governance”: “So we’ve been trying to find out how the commons cuts common sense—the necessarily failed administrative accounting of the incalculable—that is the object/ive of enlightenment self- control; and trying to get with that undercommon sensuality, that radical occupied-elsewhere, that utopic commonunderground of this dystopia, the funked-up here and now of this anacentric particularity that we occupy and with which we are preoccupied.”⁶

The entire park was dancing—utopian only because makeshift, more like a mutually willed ground on which I never doubted my status as a visitor or outsider to the South Side, and even then, I was somehow participant.

Note that city limits are often transversive; radial lanes rather than walls at the perimeter.

By our current pace of industry and cataclysm, we have only twelve years to limit a global temperature-increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius—any hotter, the floods, droughts, fires, and famines come ravishing us just a bit sooner into the century and at greater rates.⁷

It’s not even about leaving city limits, but the experience of being routed, reaching a different ground or grasping for it.

The sense of regulated urban grid—symptomatic noise complaint—reaches a breach at the edges of not only lakes or rivers but train yards or elevated tracks with loading docks and highway pylons dissuading realtors, and what may arise are landlocked beaches, raves under bridges.

Apocalypse is a gradient, and the inferno, like the dancefloor, isn’t devoid of politics: while I write this ledger, the number of residents of what could be called hell on earth (shoreline eroding, uninsured pharmaceutical deadlocks, Western wars fought elsewhere, etc.) only grows.

Berghain, a successful business model that also happens to be a club, fills out budgets to be giving Hellmouth, to be feeling underground, all the while stepping further away from the chasm and into the greater horror of money in the daylight, common sense.

Recently I speak about gun control legislation with my aunt who is visiting Berlin from Brooklyn—there’s been two separate massacres the day before in the US—and when she asks if my American friends and I speak about politics very much, I say with only a few; I say we talk about apocalypse a lot, though.

Marshall Jefferson says of Ron Hardy’s demonic rodeo, The Music Box: “You went in there: pitch-black, one cheesy color light bulb—couldn’t see nothing in there; there were no seats, no chairs, just a big dance floor—the music was so loud that you were forced to dance to it.”⁸

Ostgut, Berghain’s first iteration housed in a train repair warehouse on Stralauer Allee, strafing the banks of the River Spree, sounds like it was actually apocalypse rehearsal drawn into 4-beat measures, bouncing off 4 concrete walls.

The festum fatuorum, or “Feast of Fools,” was a relatively short-lived feast day celebrated by early-Medieval European clergy, during which priests and deacons would wear masks, dance in the choir wearing dresses, play dice, and generally wild out in a fashion of inverted normalcy as a means of approaching orthodox biblical ideas of humility, which is just another way of saying animist therapy.

Without coin or sanity, utterances credited but unaccounted for, what can the wandering Fool wager—that white rose, that annoying white dog teething at the ankles?

Prophetic Fool and lyric prophet Tricky always knew hell is round the corner: “Distant cradle in the crevice / and watches from the precipice / imperial passage.”⁹

In defining a diasporic, trans-Atlantic Black identity and culture, Paul Gilroy emphasizes the influence of “routes” just as much as “roots.”

In which case it’s worth asking—how did a skeletal white femme get here, writing about raves and time’s end and these musics not definitively but foundationally, itinerantly Black?

The inner-city club can feel like a ring of hell in its sense of being a spiritual dojo, but not a provisional utopia.

José Esteban Muñoz slitting horizontally apart what fronts sealed, what looks like locked horizon: “It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be.” ¹⁰

I would say I started listening to jungle the summer when I was 18. I had no idea what I heard, but was tugged by it; I’m not sure I would have been able to further defer a seemingly pendular choice to not live had I not started to step into the body house holds for me on a dancefloor, which I started doing in the following years.

When asked about the differences between Chicago house dons Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, their respective styles and followers, the radio programmer and ex-Music Box employee Stacey Collins answers: “Ron was more gutter.”

A bell-hooksian love ethic is one by which love is recognized as a form of action, one undertaken to stimulate the personal and spiritual growth of oneself and others.¹¹

Maybe all we have to offer in the gamble on our future (ever-foreshortened) is a belief in a love or ethic or a love ethic that can in fact animate the present, can radiate.

Also, Aria is always teaching me a lot.¹²

By our current trajectory, those existing outside hubs of capital—beyond the spatial and/or ideological limits of capital and major cities, the subaltern and incalculable—will be swallowed by ocean or fire first. One doesn’t need a prophet’s eyes to see this.

Hell is either already here or just around the corner; a dancefloor to which one travels, a dancefloor that admits spiritual visitation or fosters union outside account, a dancefloor at cross-hatched odds with the orderly loop of the city filled with law, may simply allow us to step into the shrinking space between those two places, and be here willfully—I’m still here, the next beat’s coming, my friend’s hand on my neck, sweat in my eye, step.

1. Stuart Swift, “Flying High, But at What Cost? The Environmental Footprint of Touring DJs and Club Culture” (2018), stampthewax.com

2. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun (1998)

3. ibid.

4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)

5. Gregg Araki, Nowhere (1997)

6. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Blackness and Governance” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)

7. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018)

8. Jake Summer, I was There When House Took Over the World (2018)

9. Tricky, “Hell is Round the Corner” (1995)

10. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

11. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

12. Aria Dean, Notes on Blacceleration (2017), e-flux.com