CLUBBING 2020
alexsa durrans
an exploration into the 'un-archivable' spaces in los angeles
a conversation with the folx who were there
The Los Angeles clubbing scene, like many other aspects of this city, is hard to track, multifaceted, disparate and often slips under the radar. From the big clubs in Hollywood, to the dive bars of East LA, to the warehouse afterhours of Downtown, to house parties in the Hollywood Hills, these spaces are critical cultural stirring points. Folx gather in community, in ways that the sprawl of the city and the barrier of the vehicle heavy lifestyle do not allow in the day to day. It is the club spaces that are the meeting points where at the end of the workday, after the drive home, we become in physical contact with our communities, and that is where we share our ideas, our dreams, and our work.
In this research I am examining the LA warehouse and afterhours spaces through interviews with participants in the scene. With anecdotal evidence and contextual connections, I hope to paint a picture of what a window into this world might look like. In deepening the understanding of how these spaces and communities function and the circumstances that lead to them existing this way, I hope to highlight and draw importance to the cultural creation that comes out of them. I am compelled by Julie Tolentino’s notion of “the body as a leaky archive” and Eleanor Bauer’s ideas of translation in her essay Effing the Ineffable. In connecting these ideas to the club and the bodies that fill it, I hope to find a way to delicately present these leaky ideas that perhaps don’t need to be sealed.
In these interviews I want to acknowledge that the folx I talked to fluctuate in and out of similar social spheres connected through nightlife, work, and art. I say this to highlight the shared lexicon that comes through and to understand that there is a shared (somewhat similar) image of what LA warehouse clubbing looks like for our communities. This is by no means full and final. I would also like to note that a lot of these folx are participants, organizers, and performers in these spheres, giving each interview a specific entry point to this work. The information in this paper is a supplement to the work that occurs in the club, in the leaky spaces, that we participate.
I will bring in sections of interviews with folx and peers in the scene and then expand on them with my own experiences and analysis. I do this to attempt to draw a through line and provide context to bolster the conversations and to bring us back to the notion of how these ephemeral spaces and movement of community are truly generative in cultural production. I understand this painting of the scene to be three-fold, looking at this from the lens of space, from the lens of body and from the lens of legality.
S P A C E
An Angelino’s relationship to space is different than most. The city’s structure is expansive and open, implying the feeling that the body too, can be expansive and open. In this expansiveness there are pockets of breath and air, sometimes alluding to a nothingness. If we look at a map of Los Angeles we can identify pockets and centers of business, community and attraction. This means that ‘in-betweens’ exist too, perhaps in neglect, but these spaces of transfer from one ‘center’ to another are the leaky spaces of translation and often the locations of the warehouse spaces the underground scene gathers at.
Spatial relations in Los Angeles have been theorized and critiqued for many years. In Black Los Angeles: American dreams and racial realities Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón gather essays from Los Angeles Scholars and date back to the inception of this city in 1781 when it was still under the Spanish colonial empire. What immediately struck me in reading the first chapter of this book is that the majority of the original settlers of Los Angeles had African ancestry. A tiny population at the time, these people were farmers, retired soldiers or miners (Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón). I think this is interesting to note, that the original structures (both literal and metaphorical) of this city were built by non-white settlers.
What was originally disorienting for me is now what I find most incredible about Los Angeles. The spatiality of the city does not prescribe to certain colonial and Western notions of what a metropolitan center should look like, and I would argue that this permeated into the cultural structures of the dance communities as well. This isn’t to say there are not any deeply rooted problems in how this city functions, there very much are. I am more so highlighting this in order to say that to understand Los Angeles, you cannot try to understand it as you would another metropolitan center in the United States. I think this understanding is an important lens to grasp how the warehouse and underground spaces function.
Turning to the more micro perception of space, I am interested in this inventory of spaces that the warehouse parties happen in. In comparing addresses to the larger map of Los Angeles, the trend does show that the spaces hosting the after parties in the underground scene are frequently in less affluent neighborhoods, or in ‘in-between’ spaces.
I as ked each of the 5 folx I interviewed to name spaces that felt familiar, that stood out or that were memorable.
“Vertexx/Reccen [Rec-center], Bubbles, directory ..”
In picking out a few names I can organize these spaces into three categories; established club, warehouse venue, and moving parties.
Established Club:
Warehouse Venue:Vertexx (DTLA) Rec Center (DTLA)
Moving Parties:
I am interested in the last two categories (which at times overlap with the first). Even in this interview process I notice an inclination to name the clubs, as there is more language and tangible information surrounding them. I find the notion of space in relation to these parties extremely interesting to note, they are transient because of bureaucracy and legalities. For example: Mustache Monday’s was run by Nacho and it moved around between established bars from La Cita to the Lash etc. In this way, this party was able to have a security of location and visibility in the ‘legal world’ and the restrictions that come with it (the 2am club closing, the sound requirements the space requitements etc.).
If we look at another moving party Rail Up, which was started in 2016 by Samantha Blake Goodman, Adam Cooper and Kelman Duran, we can see how it operated outside of these legal venue spcaes. This party jumped around between warehouse spaces, permitted and not permitted. I recall locations in South LA, in backyards and in artist run dance studios. I think it is interesting to note that as we track the leaky archive, it corelates with the mobility and ephemerality of the way these parties functioned. In space, but consistently moving out of necessity.
DJ, producer and even organizer Carrie Sun (KAILI is her stage name) discussed this with me in her interview.
‘From a promotion perspective… One of the major barriers of entries to event promotion in Los Angeles I think is the difficulty in securing spaces and the overhead that running events require. There’s a network of (gray area or completely illegal) venues that you sort of need to .. know someone to use. From the actual physical space to the sound equipment to security and bar, there are so many components that promoters need to consider even aside from curating lineups and booking talent. It’s so much easier to use tried-and-true venues, even if the actual design or vibe might be sub-optimal. This is such an LA-specific problem too, since there are so few good clubs and the 2AM shutdown is absolutely dire for a good event. In NY, London, or Berlin for example, the story is very different.’
These ‘illegal’ venues are dangerous too. The Ghost Ship fire in 2016 rocked the underground community around the country. A warehouse party in Oakland caught fire killing 36 of the 100 people there. This tragedy draws the questions, why do folx need to flock to the underground, to the warehouse, to the non-permitted. The simple answer is, because space for them in the ‘legal’ realms of society does not exist. Like Moten and Harney’s argument in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study these spaces are sacred, generative and there is a deep need to keep them, to not give them up to the mainstream (Harney and Moten). To note in Carrie’s experience this is “such an LA-specific problem” is what I am attempting to highlight in this research – the specificities of this city that yield these very “Los Angeles” results.
LA born and raised DJ Bapari also spoke with me about the qualms of producing in warehouse spaces:
Wilson is an interesting space to consider. Having been there many times myself I have a grasp of the layout, surroundings and the crowds it gathered. What is striking about Wilson is that when you look at the address during the day, it looks like it belongs to a towing company. So we have this space that is transformed at night, becomes this portal per say (Moore), and then is completely wiped away from history once the sunrises. All the people that were there know, but otherwise the elusive “Wilson” only exists when that address takes on a certain form.
This understanding of warehouse operation and ephemerality provides a logic to me that brings us back to Tolentino’s “leaky archive”. Of course, these moments and places are placed in the underground, the unseen, the unknown – but the bodies and the sharedness in these spaces carry the drips and drops from those nights with them when they leave the portal. It’s like each of the participants in the warehouse club is acting as the archive, and because the archive is the person (body and mind) it will be nonlinear, nonsensical and quite often intangible. Yet the necessity and importance of these spaces remain.
BODY
“I think its better to remember than to archive and hold onto the object which is only a shadow of what took place, sometimes…”
In validating and privileging the knowledge we can archive over the ephemeral, our Western culture, particularly white masculine affluent culture in the United States does not leave much room for the leaky archive of the body and the club. It is this colonial way of dichotomizing knowledge that leads the underground deeper underground; it is a means for safety and validation. When we think about the warehouse clubs of Los Angeles, we cannot skip through the bodies that occupy these spaces. In Diana Taylors essay ‘Acts of Transfer’ from her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas she suggests that because of the privileging of writing and verbal language, “live, embodied practices not based in linguistic or literary codes, we must assume, have no claims on meaning”. She further purposes that what is necessary to do is to “take seriously the repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor 25-26). It is this argument that I base my connection to the bodies that occupy the spaces of the Los Angeles underground warehouse scene.
This case of reportorial knowledge, as Taylor defines as anything non-archival, is not isolated to Los Angeles, it is of course global. So is the privileging of the written word as a ‘truth’. It is the reason why dancing in the club, moving through space in a warehouse or DJ’ing all night until sunrise are thought of as ‘vapid’ and ‘superficial’ ways to be. Just as Moore discusses in Fabulous what is seen as excessive to the mainstream is a means of survival and self-expression to those that do not accept White heteronormative culture. I would argue that if you were to look at both Moore and Taylor’s arguments you would see they are essentially saying the same things: what we do with our bodies, what we share in subversive ways with our communities, and the places we occupy in the underground realm are extremely valuable knowledge systems, even though a society based on archival truths continually disagrees.
It is this argument that articulates why the generative culture and community that happens in the afterhours warehouse spaces of Los Angeles are continually pushed into the underground. We see moments in which entities with money come in to elevate the scene for a night or two, for example Redbull Music throwing a Valentines Day party in 2020, but ultimately leaving just as quickly as they came.
In going back to what Emily Lucid, artist and clubgoer, said to me about it being better to remember ephemerality rather than attempt to lock it into the archive rings true. The systems of knowledge that these bodies take on and shape are more than adequate ways of knowing. Further more, Emily seems to hint at the idea that attempting to fit the repertoire into the archive is not an adequate portrayal of the knowledge shared in those spaces. I think it is important to inspect the patterns of what is considered valuable knowledge in our culture and what ways of knowing are swept to the side.
In my conversation with artist and dancer Lyric Shen she suggests a way this reportorial knowledge tangibly exists alongside the archive in the warehouse.
In studying and understanding how these people and their bodies interact in the warehouse space, we have a better understanding of how knowledge is shared. To have the lived experience is to know, to embody and to share that knowledge whether we are aware of it or not. That is why even in my role as researcher and author, my lived experience in this scene holds a knowledge of its own, just as all my interviewees. Lyric correctly asserts that our culture is not ready to see knowledge production at the club as ‘work’, and I am certain this is why clubbing in general is belittled or thought of as a frivolous activity.
The bodies that take up the spaces in Los Angeles clubs are defiant. They book warehouses and front money for the deposit. They share the addresses with friends only and create sliding scale payment systems as a forms of ‘rave reparations’. They go above and beyond to reject the carved-out spaces of 1OAK and Bootsy Bellows and the Hollywood Groups monopoly on the clubs, in which white bodies, cis bodies and mostly stagnant bodies are privileged. This defiance is work and it is deeply commendable. Specifically, in the Los Angeles scene where the liquor laws, club rules and spatial permits rule all, these leaky archiving bodies are easily lost in the already difficult to grasp city scape.
LEGALITY
Bureaucracy in Los Angeles is messy and from my experience confusing. This is a city with a postmodern lay out governed by a very antiquated system. Bapari highlights this in their comparing DJ’ing in Los Angeles and New York City.
A critical part of validating a culture is legality. There is an important link Bapari makes is that when the city has built and designed a system to allow clubs and nightlife to exist, its more acknowledged and respected – its more archived! The evidence is presented as such, in Los Angeles the warehouse scene has to exist against so many rules like the 2am liquor law, the lack of public transit and of course the scarcity of space. In New York, there is a branch of the city government, quite literally the Office of Nightlife that tends to this sector of the city. This gives the message: we see this as a valuable and necessary part of the operations of the peoples of this place, we will put money and labor towards it. In Los Angeles, it is up to the folx that go to the parties to organize, without the City’s support. Groups such as ‘LA Nightlife Alliance’ have been organizing and representing party goers, but the work is much more difficult without the City on their side.
There has been so much talk of changing the last call in LA from 2am to 4am. Dubbed the “Last Call Bill” or SB 58, the bill would allow cities across California to serve alcohol until 4am (currently alcohol sales are prohibited between the hours of 2am and 6am). This would of course mean that clubs would be able to stay open much later, facilitating more legal and safe parties. In August of 2019 the bill was opposed by the LA City Council in a 10-2 vote. The logic to say no to this bill is there on a surface level. Safety was the most prominent counter point to this bill. If bars stay open until 4am that means two more hours of folx drinking, and a high percentage of them driving home in inebriated states as LA is such a car reliant city (KABC). LA Nightlife Alliance were a major supporter of this Bill passing, stating that it would in fact lead to a safe nightlife community in Los Angeles. What is clear is that this topic is contentious and divided quite explicitly between folx that think nightlife is a generative and important part of city life and those who think nightlife is a creator of mayhem.
In detailing the above debate regarding liquor laws in Los Angeles and the bureaucratic divide on the City level, I am aiming to bring to light another circumstance in which underground warehouse parties are pushed into the un-archivable spaces. Where the laws are stricter, the underground scene grows more expansive but also less ‘acceptable’, making the generative culture of the afterhours nightlife scene in Los Angeles more difficult to name. There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution either. Allowing clubs to stay open later means that folx are not forced to have parties in rundown warehouse spaces but it also means more instances of suppression of non-white heteronormative party goers in more established spaces. Again we come back to the idea that it is not as simple as attempting to fit the repertoire into the archive.
S P A CC E EE BODY LE G ALITY
The translation of knowledge that happens at the club is spectacular, dynamic and important. In Eleanor Bauer’s essay Effing the Ineffable she says “let us not assume that words can only denote and movement can only connote, nor settle for a simple inversion or exchange between the connotative tendencies of dance and the denotative tendencies in language”(Bauer 162). The movement of bodies in the club (both the literal dancing and the macro movement of bodies between nightlife spaces over the course of the LA underground evening) is a production of meaning that is subversive and powerful. This is to be said of all dancing ‘fabulous’ bodies in the global nightlife scene (Moore). In pointing specifically to Los Angeles, after parsing through these interviews, experiencing the nightlife myself and reflecting on the broader knowledge of the city, the knowledge that is generated in this city is less archived and less respected as truth due to the spatial constraints and the bureaucratic impositions of the City and State governments.
My hope is that this research is a slight opening of a window into lifting up these folx, spaces and ideas that are innovative and important. These modes of knowledge exchange are boundary pushing, subversive and critical for the next wave of progress we want to see in this city. I am grateful to be able to do this research. Creating an archive of the ‘un-archivable’ is creating a stamp of memory that can reflect a culture that is often forgotten. I would like to thank Lyric Shen, Arielle Baptist (Bapari), Emily Lucid, Carrie Sun (Kaili) and Sandy Heyaimn for being so generous with their time and sharing their connections to these places. I mostly would like to thank all the folx who throw the parties, who DJ them, who work the bar, who work the door, and who dance; all have welcomed me at my best and worst in Los Angeles and most importantly have taught me much of how I understand my place in this world.
Works Cited
In this research I am examining the LA warehouse and afterhours spaces through interviews with participants in the scene. With anecdotal evidence and contextual connections, I hope to paint a picture of what a window into this world might look like. In deepening the understanding of how these spaces and communities function and the circumstances that lead to them existing this way, I hope to highlight and draw importance to the cultural creation that comes out of them. I am compelled by Julie Tolentino’s notion of “the body as a leaky archive” and Eleanor Bauer’s ideas of translation in her essay Effing the Ineffable. In connecting these ideas to the club and the bodies that fill it, I hope to find a way to delicately present these leaky ideas that perhaps don’t need to be sealed.
In these interviews I want to acknowledge that the folx I talked to fluctuate in and out of similar social spheres connected through nightlife, work, and art. I say this to highlight the shared lexicon that comes through and to understand that there is a shared (somewhat similar) image of what LA warehouse clubbing looks like for our communities. This is by no means full and final. I would also like to note that a lot of these folx are participants, organizers, and performers in these spheres, giving each interview a specific entry point to this work. The information in this paper is a supplement to the work that occurs in the club, in the leaky spaces, that we participate.
I will bring in sections of interviews with folx and peers in the scene and then expand on them with my own experiences and analysis. I do this to attempt to draw a through line and provide context to bolster the conversations and to bring us back to the notion of how these ephemeral spaces and movement of community are truly generative in cultural production. I understand this painting of the scene to be three-fold, looking at this from the lens of space, from the lens of body and from the lens of legality.
S P A C E
An Angelino’s relationship to space is different than most. The city’s structure is expansive and open, implying the feeling that the body too, can be expansive and open. In this expansiveness there are pockets of breath and air, sometimes alluding to a nothingness. If we look at a map of Los Angeles we can identify pockets and centers of business, community and attraction. This means that ‘in-betweens’ exist too, perhaps in neglect, but these spaces of transfer from one ‘center’ to another are the leaky spaces of translation and often the locations of the warehouse spaces the underground scene gathers at.
Spatial relations in Los Angeles have been theorized and critiqued for many years. In Black Los Angeles: American dreams and racial realities Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón gather essays from Los Angeles Scholars and date back to the inception of this city in 1781 when it was still under the Spanish colonial empire. What immediately struck me in reading the first chapter of this book is that the majority of the original settlers of Los Angeles had African ancestry. A tiny population at the time, these people were farmers, retired soldiers or miners (Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón). I think this is interesting to note, that the original structures (both literal and metaphorical) of this city were built by non-white settlers.
What was originally disorienting for me is now what I find most incredible about Los Angeles. The spatiality of the city does not prescribe to certain colonial and Western notions of what a metropolitan center should look like, and I would argue that this permeated into the cultural structures of the dance communities as well. This isn’t to say there are not any deeply rooted problems in how this city functions, there very much are. I am more so highlighting this in order to say that to understand Los Angeles, you cannot try to understand it as you would another metropolitan center in the United States. I think this understanding is an important lens to grasp how the warehouse and underground spaces function.
Turning to the more micro perception of space, I am interested in this inventory of spaces that the warehouse parties happen in. In comparing addresses to the larger map of Los Angeles, the trend does show that the spaces hosting the after parties in the underground scene are frequently in less affluent neighborhoods, or in ‘in-between’ spaces.
I as ked each of the 5 folx I interviewed to name spaces that felt familiar, that stood out or that were memorable.
“Vertexx/Reccen [Rec-center], Bubbles, directory ..”
“With clubs it is a little difficult because there aren't necessarily that many but I would say General Lee's hosted a lot of events run by and played by a lot of local DJs. There is also the Lash, La Cita, The Ace Hotel and El Dorado all of which are in DTLA. Each of these places hosted a lot of local events and DJs. As for some larger events their locations varied but an event that really stood out to me was Bubbles - usually drawing large crowds in the several hundreds, having a good team of organizers, and always equipped with a powerhouse lineup.”
“Yes — Mustache LA was something I looked up towards for years (mostly because of Fade to Mind/Night Slugs and other DJs I was a huge fan of on the internet). Nacho took me under his wing after he saw me perform once and it meant the absolute world to me. Probably one of my “breakout” gigs was the Mustache with Mexican Jihad in March of 2018. Nacho and I began to collaborate often since after that gig.
Rail Up was also an event that I had noticed grow and sort of karmically became involved in. I also attribute a large part of my growth both as a partygoer and as a DJ through the bonds, events, and friendships I formed through it. I think Rail Up in Jan 2018 with DJ Lag was my actual breakout event
Those two were probably the most formative for my “DJ Career.” Pre-2018, I frequented the whole spectrum of events and probably attended every imaginable venue from legal to illegal. I spent a lot of time at Los Globos and Jewels Catch One and The Handbag Factory.”
“Mustache, bubbles, Rhonda, The Oxwood, payasa, mcpoems, heaven, electric pussycat, oil can, gurt, top40, swallow, Playstation...”
“I love how multi-cultural LA is. I can go to a sweaty warehouse for a dancehall night or a laser and fog rave scene. or a dumb Hollywood hills mansion party where no one is dancing and everyone is just trying to look cool.”
In picking out a few names I can organize these spaces into three categories; established club, warehouse venue, and moving parties.
Established Club:
General Lees (Chinatown), Lash, La Cita, Ace Hotel, El Dorado (All DTLA), Electric Pussycat (Glendale), Oil Can Harry’s (Studio City), Los Globos (Silverlake), Jewels Catch One (Mid City), Handbag Factory (DTLA).
Warehouse Venue:
Vertexx (DTLA) Rec Center (DTLA)
Moving Parties:
Mustache, Bubbles, Rhonda, Payasa, Swallow, Rail Up, Directory.
I am interested in the last two categories (which at times overlap with the first). Even in this interview process I notice an inclination to name the clubs, as there is more language and tangible information surrounding them. I find the notion of space in relation to these parties extremely interesting to note, they are transient because of bureaucracy and legalities. For example: Mustache Monday’s was run by Nacho and it moved around between established bars from La Cita to the Lash etc. In this way, this party was able to have a security of location and visibility in the ‘legal world’ and the restrictions that come with it (the 2am club closing, the sound requirements the space requitements etc.).
If we look at another moving party Rail Up, which was started in 2016 by Samantha Blake Goodman, Adam Cooper and Kelman Duran, we can see how it operated outside of these legal venue spcaes. This party jumped around between warehouse spaces, permitted and not permitted. I recall locations in South LA, in backyards and in artist run dance studios. I think it is interesting to note that as we track the leaky archive, it corelates with the mobility and ephemerality of the way these parties functioned. In space, but consistently moving out of necessity.
DJ, producer and even organizer Carrie Sun (KAILI is her stage name) discussed this with me in her interview.
‘From a promotion perspective… One of the major barriers of entries to event promotion in Los Angeles I think is the difficulty in securing spaces and the overhead that running events require. There’s a network of (gray area or completely illegal) venues that you sort of need to .. know someone to use. From the actual physical space to the sound equipment to security and bar, there are so many components that promoters need to consider even aside from curating lineups and booking talent. It’s so much easier to use tried-and-true venues, even if the actual design or vibe might be sub-optimal. This is such an LA-specific problem too, since there are so few good clubs and the 2AM shutdown is absolutely dire for a good event. In NY, London, or Berlin for example, the story is very different.’
These ‘illegal’ venues are dangerous too. The Ghost Ship fire in 2016 rocked the underground community around the country. A warehouse party in Oakland caught fire killing 36 of the 100 people there. This tragedy draws the questions, why do folx need to flock to the underground, to the warehouse, to the non-permitted. The simple answer is, because space for them in the ‘legal’ realms of society does not exist. Like Moten and Harney’s argument in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study these spaces are sacred, generative and there is a deep need to keep them, to not give them up to the mainstream (Harney and Moten). To note in Carrie’s experience this is “such an LA-specific problem” is what I am attempting to highlight in this research – the specificities of this city that yield these very “Los Angeles” results.
LA born and raised DJ Bapari also spoke with me about the qualms of producing in warehouse spaces:
‘One space that I went to often for various events was called 'Wilson' [dubbed this name as it was on Wilson St] - there were many underground shows that took place there. I even threw a handful of shows at this location. It was a good sized but not too large, in an accessible location east of DTLA and was never shut down at any of the events I attended. I think it became a fairly 'reliable' space for events and promoters.’
Wilson is an interesting space to consider. Having been there many times myself I have a grasp of the layout, surroundings and the crowds it gathered. What is striking about Wilson is that when you look at the address during the day, it looks like it belongs to a towing company. So we have this space that is transformed at night, becomes this portal per say (Moore), and then is completely wiped away from history once the sunrises. All the people that were there know, but otherwise the elusive “Wilson” only exists when that address takes on a certain form.
This understanding of warehouse operation and ephemerality provides a logic to me that brings us back to Tolentino’s “leaky archive”. Of course, these moments and places are placed in the underground, the unseen, the unknown – but the bodies and the sharedness in these spaces carry the drips and drops from those nights with them when they leave the portal. It’s like each of the participants in the warehouse club is acting as the archive, and because the archive is the person (body and mind) it will be nonlinear, nonsensical and quite often intangible. Yet the necessity and importance of these spaces remain.
BODY
“I think its better to remember than to archive and hold onto the object which is only a shadow of what took place, sometimes…”
– Interview with Emily Lucid, November 2020
In validating and privileging the knowledge we can archive over the ephemeral, our Western culture, particularly white masculine affluent culture in the United States does not leave much room for the leaky archive of the body and the club. It is this colonial way of dichotomizing knowledge that leads the underground deeper underground; it is a means for safety and validation. When we think about the warehouse clubs of Los Angeles, we cannot skip through the bodies that occupy these spaces. In Diana Taylors essay ‘Acts of Transfer’ from her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas she suggests that because of the privileging of writing and verbal language, “live, embodied practices not based in linguistic or literary codes, we must assume, have no claims on meaning”. She further purposes that what is necessary to do is to “take seriously the repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor 25-26). It is this argument that I base my connection to the bodies that occupy the spaces of the Los Angeles underground warehouse scene.
This case of reportorial knowledge, as Taylor defines as anything non-archival, is not isolated to Los Angeles, it is of course global. So is the privileging of the written word as a ‘truth’. It is the reason why dancing in the club, moving through space in a warehouse or DJ’ing all night until sunrise are thought of as ‘vapid’ and ‘superficial’ ways to be. Just as Moore discusses in Fabulous what is seen as excessive to the mainstream is a means of survival and self-expression to those that do not accept White heteronormative culture. I would argue that if you were to look at both Moore and Taylor’s arguments you would see they are essentially saying the same things: what we do with our bodies, what we share in subversive ways with our communities, and the places we occupy in the underground realm are extremely valuable knowledge systems, even though a society based on archival truths continually disagrees.
It is this argument that articulates why the generative culture and community that happens in the afterhours warehouse spaces of Los Angeles are continually pushed into the underground. We see moments in which entities with money come in to elevate the scene for a night or two, for example Redbull Music throwing a Valentines Day party in 2020, but ultimately leaving just as quickly as they came.
In going back to what Emily Lucid, artist and clubgoer, said to me about it being better to remember ephemerality rather than attempt to lock it into the archive rings true. The systems of knowledge that these bodies take on and shape are more than adequate ways of knowing. Further more, Emily seems to hint at the idea that attempting to fit the repertoire into the archive is not an adequate portrayal of the knowledge shared in those spaces. I think it is important to inspect the patterns of what is considered valuable knowledge in our culture and what ways of knowing are swept to the side.
In my conversation with artist and dancer Lyric Shen she suggests a way this reportorial knowledge tangibly exists alongside the archive in the warehouse.
“So in that sense there is a function to the chaos. It becomes the work of folks with social influence/people moving between spaces or frequently occupying spaces to document (ultimately archiving and organizing) and serve as the main connection points. So then there is another layer, socially, engaging different kinds of micro and macro celebrity. I think in some ways our culture has yet to legitimize this work, while those who do it intentionally or by proxy have often been in positions of negotiating larger amounts of power in their communities.”
In studying and understanding how these people and their bodies interact in the warehouse space, we have a better understanding of how knowledge is shared. To have the lived experience is to know, to embody and to share that knowledge whether we are aware of it or not. That is why even in my role as researcher and author, my lived experience in this scene holds a knowledge of its own, just as all my interviewees. Lyric correctly asserts that our culture is not ready to see knowledge production at the club as ‘work’, and I am certain this is why clubbing in general is belittled or thought of as a frivolous activity.
The bodies that take up the spaces in Los Angeles clubs are defiant. They book warehouses and front money for the deposit. They share the addresses with friends only and create sliding scale payment systems as a forms of ‘rave reparations’. They go above and beyond to reject the carved-out spaces of 1OAK and Bootsy Bellows and the Hollywood Groups monopoly on the clubs, in which white bodies, cis bodies and mostly stagnant bodies are privileged. This defiance is work and it is deeply commendable. Specifically, in the Los Angeles scene where the liquor laws, club rules and spatial permits rule all, these leaky archiving bodies are easily lost in the already difficult to grasp city scape.
LEGALITY
Bureaucracy in Los Angeles is messy and from my experience confusing. This is a city with a postmodern lay out governed by a very antiquated system. Bapari highlights this in their comparing DJ’ing in Los Angeles and New York City.
“I think one of the biggest reasons it is so critical is that Los Angeles unlike a lot of its metropolitan counterparts (New York, London, Berlin, Montreal etc.) has its bars close at 2am, liquor/alcohol cannot be sold or purchased after this time. It leaves nightlife in somewhat of a limbo. If you want to go to a standard bar or club last call can sometimes be as early as 1:30am. I remember living in New York and realizing how big of a difference it was. Not only were there more events in general, but because these bars and clubs could stay open later these events were busy and prolific. People could hop around from show to show without rushing or feeling discouraged. Nightlife in that sense feels like a more respected aspect of the culture of those places. Whereas in LA, there are not only fewer shows, there are fewer locations, and they have to shut down sooner.”
A critical part of validating a culture is legality. There is an important link Bapari makes is that when the city has built and designed a system to allow clubs and nightlife to exist, its more acknowledged and respected – its more archived! The evidence is presented as such, in Los Angeles the warehouse scene has to exist against so many rules like the 2am liquor law, the lack of public transit and of course the scarcity of space. In New York, there is a branch of the city government, quite literally the Office of Nightlife that tends to this sector of the city. This gives the message: we see this as a valuable and necessary part of the operations of the peoples of this place, we will put money and labor towards it. In Los Angeles, it is up to the folx that go to the parties to organize, without the City’s support. Groups such as ‘LA Nightlife Alliance’ have been organizing and representing party goers, but the work is much more difficult without the City on their side.
There has been so much talk of changing the last call in LA from 2am to 4am. Dubbed the “Last Call Bill” or SB 58, the bill would allow cities across California to serve alcohol until 4am (currently alcohol sales are prohibited between the hours of 2am and 6am). This would of course mean that clubs would be able to stay open much later, facilitating more legal and safe parties. In August of 2019 the bill was opposed by the LA City Council in a 10-2 vote. The logic to say no to this bill is there on a surface level. Safety was the most prominent counter point to this bill. If bars stay open until 4am that means two more hours of folx drinking, and a high percentage of them driving home in inebriated states as LA is such a car reliant city (KABC). LA Nightlife Alliance were a major supporter of this Bill passing, stating that it would in fact lead to a safe nightlife community in Los Angeles. What is clear is that this topic is contentious and divided quite explicitly between folx that think nightlife is a generative and important part of city life and those who think nightlife is a creator of mayhem.
In detailing the above debate regarding liquor laws in Los Angeles and the bureaucratic divide on the City level, I am aiming to bring to light another circumstance in which underground warehouse parties are pushed into the un-archivable spaces. Where the laws are stricter, the underground scene grows more expansive but also less ‘acceptable’, making the generative culture of the afterhours nightlife scene in Los Angeles more difficult to name. There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution either. Allowing clubs to stay open later means that folx are not forced to have parties in rundown warehouse spaces but it also means more instances of suppression of non-white heteronormative party goers in more established spaces. Again we come back to the idea that it is not as simple as attempting to fit the repertoire into the archive.
S P A CC E EE BODY LE G ALITY
The translation of knowledge that happens at the club is spectacular, dynamic and important. In Eleanor Bauer’s essay Effing the Ineffable she says “let us not assume that words can only denote and movement can only connote, nor settle for a simple inversion or exchange between the connotative tendencies of dance and the denotative tendencies in language”(Bauer 162). The movement of bodies in the club (both the literal dancing and the macro movement of bodies between nightlife spaces over the course of the LA underground evening) is a production of meaning that is subversive and powerful. This is to be said of all dancing ‘fabulous’ bodies in the global nightlife scene (Moore). In pointing specifically to Los Angeles, after parsing through these interviews, experiencing the nightlife myself and reflecting on the broader knowledge of the city, the knowledge that is generated in this city is less archived and less respected as truth due to the spatial constraints and the bureaucratic impositions of the City and State governments.
My hope is that this research is a slight opening of a window into lifting up these folx, spaces and ideas that are innovative and important. These modes of knowledge exchange are boundary pushing, subversive and critical for the next wave of progress we want to see in this city. I am grateful to be able to do this research. Creating an archive of the ‘un-archivable’ is creating a stamp of memory that can reflect a culture that is often forgotten. I would like to thank Lyric Shen, Arielle Baptist (Bapari), Emily Lucid, Carrie Sun (Kaili) and Sandy Heyaimn for being so generous with their time and sharing their connections to these places. I mostly would like to thank all the folx who throw the parties, who DJ them, who work the bar, who work the door, and who dance; all have welcomed me at my best and worst in Los Angeles and most importantly have taught me much of how I understand my place in this world.