Before hearing of Andy Goldsworthy’s Hanging Stones, I had no idea where the North York Moors were, or what a “moor” even was. It’s hard to imagine ever visiting this remote dale in northern England if not for Goldsworthy’s installation. And yet, as the afternoon sun shone over the miles of trails and verdant pastures connecting this series of restored stone barns, I found it difficult to focus on the aesthetic merits of the handiwork, juxtaposed with the overwhelming natural beauty of its frame. Perhaps this is just as the artist intended.

“I have tried to see something that is in some ways already there,” reads Goldsworthy’s artist’s statement. “It is the valley itself, not me, that has set the terms of engagement and created my rationale for Hanging Stones… It will be so rooted in what is already there that it would be difficult to say where the work begins or ends.”

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The photo essay below contains only images of scenery and the buildings’ exteriors. If you’re not afraid of spoilers, I’ve included a gallery with some interior pictures at the very bottom of this post. Right above that is some guidance on planning your own visit. The FT and NYT articles about the work also have some nice imagery from different seasons alongside quotes from Goldsworthy and the project’s patron.

If you’re even considering a visit, make your reservation now for £10 per adult (up to six per party) and figure the rest out later. Although open rain or shine year-round, there are only a handful of slots available each day, and they are already booked through next June as of this writing. (Plan to fly into Manchester, rent a car, and stay in a nearby town such as Helmsley.)

At the time of your reservation, you will drive to a nearby bed and breakfast, where you will get the keys to the barns, along with a laminated map, written instructions, and a brief overview from the attendant of how to proceed. You then continue down the hill into the village of Rosedale Abbey, which is where your walk starts and ends. There’s a small shop in the town center with a lovely tea service and excellent baked goods, sandwiches, and other takeout lunch items. (I would still recommend packing enough snacks and water to get you through the day in case it is closed when you arrive.) Just to the north is a well-maintained public bathroom.

The hike is about six miles total with just over 1,100 feet of elevation change. We finished in about 4.5 hours. It’s not difficult for an able-bodied adult of average fitness, but expect to encounter livestock gates every few hundred yards that need to be closed behind you. The trail is too steep in parts to be handicap accessible, and even older children may struggle to complete the loop without assistance.

Set aside some time to visit the nearby ruins of the Bank Top Kilns at the apex of Rosedale Chimney Bank, which is the steepest public road in England.

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It’s been a long and cold winter in the northeast, wherein the energy of the parties I’ve attended has felt numbed by factors beyond the weather. In the face of upheaval and uncertainty, we continue living our lives distracted and forgetful, fulfilling plans made in the past, unaware of why we made them.

I arrive at Nowadays alone from a gray and windswept afternoon, eyes watering from the cacophony of airborne pollens in search of pistils. Relief awaits indoors, where the towering figure of Dutch acid specialist Identified Patient is slashing his way through the last half hour of his set from behind the decks. The crowd is with him with each lunge and parry. He receives a heartfelt round of applause as Aurora Halal takes over.

Halal is a polymath of the New York scene, as respected for her talents as a promoter as she is for her DJing. Her name on a bill all but guarantees the dancefloor will be full, even if the quality of the crowd varies. On Sundays such as this one, however, familiar faces tend to outnumber ill-mannered gawkers, and we are looking out for one another. The sharp-elbowed men in collared shirts, with two left feet, are readily admonished for their misbehavior and encouraged to shape up or depart. Meanwhile, Halal is glowing.

Many of the DJs I admire have such a strong sense of style that a single measure played a certain way is enough to conjure their names in the middle of another performer’s set. “This one’s giving Traxx,” or “that was so Lena.” Halal is not like them, but this is no slight. I don’t look to her for a specific set of sounds at any given party. My only expectation is that it will be good, because it always is, as it was today.

She starts with a continuation of what Identified Patient was putting down, staying in the realm of acid house, but reaching back towards the ecstatic, bombastic bangers of the 90s and aughts. The crowd is loving it, perhaps a bit too much. The floor quickly packs beyond capacity before the end of the first hour, so I flee outside for air.

I step back inside with about 40 minutes to go and am immediately hit in the face by a groovy breakbeat sampled from jazz pianist Randy Weston’s “In Memory Of,” otherwise known as the main riff from The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” — a measure I’d heard teased in so many sets throughout the winter, but never played in full, until now. This is the type of dancefloor moment that brings old friends together and forges new ones out of shared circumstance, setting an unabashedly nostalgic and freewheeling tone for the remainder of the set.

By the time the chorus of Alcazar’s “Crying at the Discotheque” rang out in the last minutes of the final hour, I felt my own eyes were as moist as those described in the song. I glance around the room, making misty eye contact with familiar faces belonging to people I’ve never met. These are the moments that remind me why I’m here. The joy cannot last, making its presence all the sweeter when I’m aware enough to taste it.

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I recently returned from a trip with my family to Guangzhou at the end of January. It’d been many years since I last traveled with this group to an unfamiliar location, and the week we spent together held many reminders of why that was so. Nonetheless, this was my first opportunity to return to China in over a decade, and I was eager to see how things had changed.1 Furthermore, I was excited to experience the ebullient atmosphere surrounding the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday.

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On the 16-hour plane ride, I envisioned standing in a night market lit by strings of red paper lanterns, sipping a cheap beer out of a returnable glass bottle, mingling shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow revelers as strands of firecrackers hanging from fire escapes and building entrances erupted in every direction. There would be vendors of fried foods and ice cream yelling incomprehensibly over the din, competing for our patronage. Lion dancing troupes would slither through the cacophony, smashing cymbals and banging drums to clear a path through the crowd of onlookers, eager to slip cash-filled red envelopes into the technicolor costume’s gaping maw. I would buy and eat exactly one caramel-covered hawthorn berry kebab, savoring each crunch of the cloying, bruleed shell as it gave way to the tart and mealy fruit beneath.

This imagined scene would have been commonplace not that long ago, but it was nowhere to be found upon my arrival in 2025. Over the past decade, strictly enforced fireworks bans have become the norm in most major cities. While some streets remain closed to cars and lined with seasonal vendors of treats and tchokes, any sense of holiday spirit was outshined by the staggering quantity of colored LEDs adorning every facade, rendering the whole scene in the ersatz saturation of a generative AI graphic. The attendees themselves seemed distracted and disinterested in what was in front of them, rushing away from one thing and onto the next, oblivious to other people and their surroundings, unless it was being fed through their camera’s lens.

When I was last in China in 2013, smartphones were a luxury good, most purchases were facilitated by wads of cash2, and Google Maps still worked on my iPhone 5. Shortly thereafter, phone prices fell precipitously as a reinforced and heightened Great Firewall pushed most Western tech companies out of the country as a uniquely Chinese internet took root.

Nowadays, in a society that never learned to trust credit cards, nearly all commerce is now facilitated by some combination of QR codes, app-based payments, and biometrics. (I had to scan my face just to gain admission to a zoo.) It’s possible to access any digital service one might need or want from within the singular WeChat app. The result is a level of digital consolidation unparalleled anywhere else in the world — a source of inspiration and envy for those in the West who aspire to emulate it.

However, the speed with which China was able to implement and enforce some of the world’s harshest and longest-lasting lockdown restrictions demonstrated how easily a willful government can convert the tools of routine convenience into a means of coercive control with the aid of an acquiescent private sector.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took in Guangzhou. (View them full-sized in browser.)

Update 3/13/25: The NY Times just published this piece about the lingering effects of the COVID lockdowns in Shanghai. It lines up with my personal experience of “the vibe” in Guangzhou and is well worth the read if you’re curious how things have changed.

It’s the last weekend of December. The sun sets mercifully later with each passing day, but the last light is long gone as I get into my car around 6:30 after a hasty dinner of leftovers. Pressing the ignition button produces an anemic cough from the engine, where a full-body sneeze is expected, and I wonder for a second if this is the sound of the diesel Jetta breathing its last. But it turns over readily with a second extended push, settling into a steady, raspier version of its familiar low burble. With that, I crack my first-ever can of Celsius and, against all common sense and prior experience, commence the four-hour drive to the city to go to an exclusive underground rave featuring a secret headliner.

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The air is thick with mist over these winding country roads, but no rain falls until I arrive at the interstate. The undulating upstate landscape fades into suburban New Jersey as trees give way to strip malls and traffic begins to congeal on all sides. It’s virtually stop-and-go when I arrive at the foot of the George Washington Bridge.

In an effort to distract from the boredom, my mind swirls around a simple question as I inch through towards the automated toll booths: What makes a rave a rave? It had originally been posed to me earlier that week during Christmas supper by a former neighbor and longtime friend of my wife’s grandparents. At the time, I tried to explain that it wasn’t necessarily the music or the legal status of the event, the intoxicants being consumed, or even the composition of the attendees. It is a function of all these components but is only a rave if the whole experience transcends the sum of its parts. Or something like that.

The party I was heading towards had all the right ingredients, which I confirmed upon my arrival around 1 AM. A short walk along a treeless commercial street through near-freezing rain led to an unmarked door: the entrance to a steamy cocoon of brick walls protecting a warren of plywood room dividers filled with worn-out seating, lit almost exclusively with dimmed red bulbs. Some corners were curtained off, but views between gaps in the cloth suggested that this might be a person’s home during the times when it wasn’t hosting events. I’d been here many times before, though never for this particular party series. 

The informational email sent out to ticket holders the prior evening indicated that the party was at capacity with no tickets available at the door without exception. So, I was surprised to see how sparse the dancefloor was. But any perceived lack in the crowd’s size was more than made up for by its energy. Every person in there took full advantage of the negative space to spread out, shake around, grooving with a vulnerability I’ve never encountered in a sanctioned club environment. Those coming out for air looked more like they were leaving a sauna than a dance floor. 

The dancers’ energy was matched beat for beat from behind the decks by Lychee and Sobolik, the back-to-back openers and co-hosts of the night. Their psychedelic selections ranged from vintage dubstep to chaotic electro and breakneck jungle, pushing the vintage four-point Klipschorn sound system to its literal limits, as evidenced by the occasional scent of melting plastic wafting from the corners.

I was intentionally among the first of our friends to arrive because most others were prioritizing sleep in anticipation of the headliner’s 4 AM call time. However, despite the massive energy of the crowd, the excellence of the music, and the comfort of the familiar environment, I was unable to settle into the party. Trying some of the communal tea only amplified my alienation by rendering me less able to speak. I felt like a set of noise-canceling headphones, emitting opposing vibrations to the surrounding environment, creating a quiet void to be filled with intrusive thoughts. Why is everyone else here so earnest? Why does that make me cringe? Why did I drive all this way to feel tired and lonely on a couch?

Things improved when more friends started arriving. With each additional familiar face, I felt more relaxed as my energy slowly but steadily began to sync with the surroundings. Then, around 3:30 AM, I went downstairs to put some things away in my coat and came face to face with Objekt hanging up their own jacket. 

Many of the people who’d been dancing their hardest earlier had gone home by the time Objekt took to the decks, opening with what sounded like a rampage through an 8-bit video game, splintering digital doors and smashing virtual windows into jagged shards at breakneck speed. But it wasn’t long before they settled into a left-field, downtempo, back-of-the-record-box vibe. By the time the first morning light began to peek through the window behind the DJ booth at 6 AM, both Kitchens of Distinction and Sly and the Family Stone had both made extended appearances. Dad’s in the garage with his CD collection. Don’t disturb him. 

As the conclusion of the set approached, the dark room brightened gradually as the couple dozen exhausted dancers who remained glided all across the floor, twirling around each other like wisps of smoke emerging from a cluster of birthday candles that had just fulfilled their purpose. The yearning two-note guitar lick from Slowdive’s “kisses (electronic version 3)” faded softly into nothingness as we began a gentle round of applause. The now-risen sun rendered house lights unnecessary.

If someone asked me what I’d been up to that night, I would’ve told them I was at a rave because it was an event that looked and sounded the part. But in my lived experience, we didn’t quite get there. Against my best intentions, I had to admit that something within myself remained closed off to the experience. But it would be several weeks before I’d understand why. 

“What’s my attitude?” is a question that some Theravada practitioners are encouraged to ask themselves during meditation. But I’d never fully understood what it meant until it was covered during a recent digital retreat hosted by Alexis Santos and Susa Talan. Santos explained attitude as the relationship between one’s awareness and the experience it is currently aware of. Am I demanding things to be a certain way, or am I allowing them to just be? 

That final hour of delirious swaying to distorted guitar licks before sunrise was nowhere close to what I was expecting when I began my 200-mile drive the previous evening. Yet this was what made the trip worthwhile. I can only wonder what other moments I may have enjoyed had I let go of those expectations sooner.

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I was unsurprised when the muscular man wearing Versace sunglasses tried to start a fight minutes after barging his way into the middle of my friend group near the front of the crowd. It was the inevitable outgrowth from a putrid party atmosphere, like how fungal fruiting bodies emerge from diseased trees after summer storms. If this were any other DJ, I would have left long before things escalated, but that night, we were at the Knockdown Center to see Jeff Mills and nothing short of a fire alarm would have pulled me away.

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Mills has been playing techno music professionally since the birth of the genre. He started DJing at a Detroit radio station as “The Wizard” when he was only 18, breaking seminal tracks by local pioneers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May alongside records he sourced on long drives to obscure shops all over the Midwest. Upon leaving the motor city in the ‘90s, he began playing his own music while amassing club residencies in cities like New York, Berlin, and Chicago. During this period, he recorded some of the most iconic songs of the genre, including “The Bells”—which is the song that plays in most people’s heads when they think of “techno music,” whether they’re aware of it or not. In recent years, he’s transcended form and genre, collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists, playing to philharmonic auditoriums, even leading a jazz ensemble. Through it all, he’s continued DJing to sold out crowds all over the world.

Mills’s hands are in constant motion during his sets. He makes full use of three turntables (or CDJs) to layer multiple tracks over each other while occasionally adding live improvisation from a separate drum machine.1 Each song blends into the next, with no single track receiving more than a few measures to shine alone. He does not call upon beat drops or bombastic chord progressions to whip up a crowd’s energy, opting instead for a more organic undulation from start to finish. The overarching effect is more fluvial than tidal, a continuous flow of sonic energy that bypasses the mind to directly manipulate the musculoskeletal structure.

This time, there was no festival to contend with. Every person in the building was here for Mills, and he had a new L-Acoustics sound system, multi-tiered stage, and revamped lighting rig to work with. One would think that this would make for a more attentive and supportive crowd, but that was not the scene I stepped into upon arriving at 2:30 AM, shortly after Mills took over from the opener. 

The air, already thick with wildfire smoke wafting eastward from New Jersey, was further fouled by a miasma of body odor, spilled drinks, and flatulence suspended in the cloying artificial fog that was doing its best to fill the cavernous former factory. The revamped stage layout put three tiers of dancers behind the DJ booth, adding a performative aspect to the whole party. Whether on stage or on the main floor, most of the nearly sold-out crowd was dancing. However, everyone felt out of sync with one another, more colliding than raving. Navigating the floor felt like trying to walk through a drive-in carwash: A brush of sweat-dampened cloth here, a spilled drink there, moist bodies colliding from every angle.

Cell reception was sparse, and it took a while to find my friend group by the foot of the stage. We greeted each other with hugs and exchanged trepidatious glances and whispers over the quality of the crowd—very bad, which contrasted starkly with the quality of the music being played—very good. The vibe of the overall room did not improve over the next half hour; however, more friends found their way into our little pocket of camaraderie at the foot of the stage. Things appeared hectic everywhere I turned, but by the time a dozen of us had congregated in our corner, I felt like I was able to breathe a little easier and give myself over to the music for longer stretches of time between being bumped by randos. But it’s hard to begrudge anyone for enjoying themselves to the extent that they lose spatial awareness. We should all be so lucky.

But the peace was not to last. One moment, we were dancing amongst each other. The next, a mountain of a man burst into our midst like the protagonist of a Kool-Aid commercial. Much of his face was blocked by a pair of garishly gleaming Versace aviators, but he bore a striking resemblance to Jason Mamoa, right down to the steroid-enhanced muscles bursting out of a white Versace muscle tee. Everyone instinctually backed away to give him space as he began flailing his limbs about, but the more space we ceded, the more he took up.

As soon as someone had the audacity to push back, he started a scene that took the air out of the surrounding area. I turned toward the commotion to his face and torso pressed against a much smaller man’s as he yelled about having had his personal space invaded. Without thinking, I stepped in between the two, imploring them to calm down: “No one wants to see a fight tonight.” The big guy then accused me of taking sides, and I had to clarify that I had no idea who this other man was. I felt my body tense as I wondered if he was preparing to hit me, taking in the fullness of his frame as the moist breath escaping his flared nostrils invaded my own. Thankfully, he decided to back off after a few tense breaths, and I thought that was the end of it. Surely, he would leave the scene out of shame. Except he didn’t.

Instead, he resumed his chaotic moshing from only a few feet away and it wasn’t long before he was yelling at another man for getting in his space. Recognizing that this wouldn’t be the last time, I went to the bar hoping to flag down venue security. The bartender told me to wait there, and after a few minutes, a short man in a black down jacket and beanie arrived on my side of the bar. Upon hearing my account, he mumbled something into his radio before telling me to wait. “We need backup,” he explained. 

Backup arrived a minute later in the form of a man who looked to have recently been an American football offensive lineman. He was easily taller than me (at 6’2”) and must have weighed close to 300 pounds. In a baritone deadpan that sounded more like a command than a question, he said: “You can point him out?” I nodded. “I’ll follow you.”

The formerly recalcitrant crowd parted readily for the security staff, and I felt like a suckerfish swimming alongside whale sharks as I led them to the man’s location. When we arrived, it was obvious who the problem was, just by the look on everyone’s faces. Before I could even gesture in his direction, the larger guard grunted from behind: “White shirt, sunglasses.” I confirmed it, and they sprung into action.

The shorter guard went first, approaching Versace man from the front. “Is there a problem?” he asked. At this slightest of provocations, Versace man aggressively got in the guard’s face, yelling about how everyone around him was disrespecting his space, oblivious that the larger guard had flanked him from behind. Having seen enough, the larger guard wrapped his body around the Versace man’s torso and grabbed his arms with his hands, like an amoeba absorbing its prey. As he stated, “It’s time for you to leave,” three additional security staff emerged from the crowd, forming a phalanx around the belligerent as proximate onlookers began applauding for his impending ejection. Then, as if on cue, the eponymous bells from Mills’s “The Bells” rang out from the speakers as the whole crowd of 2,000 people erupted in cheers while the Versace man was escorted off the dance floor for good.

Initial relief gave way to unspecified anxiety as the residual cortisol and adrenaline from the encounter grated against my psyche like the unexpected effects of a spiked drink. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, nor could I relax into the music. So when my friend D mentioned they wanted to try their luck at the top of the stage, I figured there was nothing to lose by following along. The people on the stage were much more respectful of shared space, and we made our way up the stairs with ease, settling into an unobstructed view of the decks from directly behind the booth monitors.

The magic of DJing is not an illusion that suffers from a peek behind the curtain. If anything, watching the spells get cast only strengthens the enchantment. We danced as we gawked, mesmerized by Mills’s arachnidic hands floating over the controls, pinching a knob here, striking a button there as his hips sashayed in response to the manipulated sounds, accented by a fluttering streak of silver fringe running down the left side of his chest. The expression on his youthful visage was not that of a 61-year-old man at work but rather of a child at play, exploring the boundaries of possibility to satisfy his innate curiosity. He would just as happily be doing this alone in his studio if he weren’t here in front of a crowd. 

This feeling of playfulness was at the fore when recorded tracks gave way to his live improvisations on a Roland TR-909 drum machine. His fingers would flutter all over the knobs and switches with the expression of a jazz pianist and the precision of a watchmaker, his face alternating between placid moments of deep concentration and an ear-to-ear grin when he hits the sequence just as god intended (he is god). [An extended video of one of these solos awaits paid subscribers at the end of this review]

D and I made dazed eye contact at the end of Mills’s first solo, unable to comprehend how we’d been treated to such a profound view through so little effort. The others would have to join us. We agreed that they would stay put while I went to retrieve the rest of our crew. But first, I sent a text accompanied by a photo:

“leave the bad rave and ascend to valhala.[sic]”

It was now past 4 AM, and the crowd was beginning to thin, making it much easier to move around. Returning to our perch behind the booth with friends in tow, I felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning the communal experience below, but giving up on the bad rave was what finally allowed me to sink into the transcendence of Mills’s performance. From up here, all the people I’d found irritating while I was among them were nothing but a canvas for an extravagant light show they couldn’t even see. 

We stayed until the end of Mills’s last solo, a bit after 5 AM, gathering our coats as the encore continued apace for a few more minutes. We filed out into the pre-dawn darkness as the last measure faded into silence and parted ways towards our disparate homes, arriving as the sun made its first fuschia advances towards a sparsely clouded horizon.

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Paid subscribers will find an extended video of one of Mills’s last TR 909 solos of the night below:

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In order to be marketed effectively, non-fiction books need to be about something, and typically, pithier topics are easier to sell. Lost in the assertion that Emily Witt’s Health and Safety: A Breakdown is about the Brooklyn rave scene, or the first Trump presidency, or drug experimentation, or dealing with a romantic partner’s mental break is the fact that it is a memoir that manages to credibly cover all of the above in just 272 pages. It is insightful and enviably well-written, dense with evocative paragraphs, and devoid of cliches in a way that feels as effortless to read as it is difficult to achieve.

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Witt’s vivid descriptions of deeply personal experiences that resist verbalization feel profound on the page. On the appeal of techno, she writes: “The music did not say what to feel or when to feel it. Instead it followed a process of defamiliarization and destabilization. To make a literary comparison, it had the discontinuity of poetry instead of the continuity of a story or a novel; it pursued a different order of sense-making… What techno offered was not meaning but space, and the possibility of evoking the complexity of the world through discontinuities and breaks, interruption and hybridization.” 

One might similarly delight in Witt’s descriptions of the more disappointing states you might encounter while partying: “I was having a spell of inertia. It pooled inside me like an oil spill, suffocating the dolphins and waterfowl. I pictured an antique Miele vacuum sucking it out with the sound of the suction device at the dentist’s office. But no, it was too deep, it was a bog, it was the stored carbon of millions of years. As in—the pill we took didn’t seem to be working.”

And if you’ve worked in media before, as Witt has at the highest levels for many years, her unflinchingly realistic—some might say pessimistic—views on journalism’s power to affect societal change may resonate deeply in you as they did in me. Following her coverage of the Parkland massacre and the subsequent lack of gun policy changes—amidst all the other early Trump administration injustices—Witt observes: “I wrote as part of an anxiety-producing machine. No rhetorical register seemed to have the power to break through.”

The most poignant stories are those that address the tension between Witt’s identity as an upwardly mobile, white, heterosexual cis-woman who works in prestige media and the scenes that she navigates as a member and a reporter. What will other ravers make of the fact that she will be among the first people to professionally document a community whose culture is driven primarily by queer and brown artists? How does one balance the ethics of participating in protests while covering them for work? Is it possible for a modern woman to square her desire to maintain a radical self-image with the urge to lose herself in monogamous love and parenthood? She illuminates these struggles with a perspicacious style that can only come from someone speaking their truth, but arrives at no clear answers. 

The final part of Health and Safety centers on the subtitular breakdown of Witt’s long-term partner’s mental health and their shared life. Under threat, we react to survive, justifying our choices after the fact when making meaning of it all. Here, however, Witt recounts traumatic sequences that happened years ago in precise prose, free of adornment or analysis: “I could see by the expression on his face that this was outside the realm of any normal conflict. For once, I knew to keep my mouth shut, but it didn’t help. Andrew grabbed a handful of the rice on my plate and dropped it into my glass of wine. I began to tear up… I don’t remember everything he said. He wasn’t coherent, he was yelling.” It reads less like the memoirs of a notable writer and more like a journalistic account of a tumultuous period of a woman’s life—except the reporter and her subject are the same person. Fans of literary non-fiction will miss the vivid interiority from prior parts of the book, but good journalism is about accurately portraying what happened, not telling us how to feel about it.

For people unfamiliar with Brooklyn’s rave scene from 2016-2021, Health and Safety paints an intriguing portrait of a culture that we may not see again for another generation. Many of us who were a part of it in some capacity will feel fortunate that she documented her own perspective in such a stylish, researched, and readable manner. And I hope that those who take issue with her depictions of certain events or people are inspired to share their own accounts. Writing about these subjects is difficult to do well, but that’s also why it’s worth pursuing.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

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If a storm were forecasted to hit your community, it would be wise to stock up on extra supplies, fill your bathtub, reinforce doors and windows as needed, and check on your neighbors to help them do the same.

What would be the wise response to an organization from far away, promising to prevent the storm from ever arriving, if only you give them your money and time? Believe them if you’d like, but prepare locally nonetheless. We should not let our desire for alternative outcomes blind us to reality as it is.

The funny thing about being a person of color living in a place like rural Vermont is that the white people who surround you have few if any, preconceived notions of who you are based on your ethnicity. I suspect this is partly attributable to a lack of interpersonal exposure due to living in a rural place, perhaps partly due to a different media diet that may not contain as many racial stereotypes, and partly due to the greater emphasis on kindness and neighborliness in daily life around these parts. In most cases when I meet someone new, I feel seen as just “a person” as opposed to “an Asian person.” As someone who was never good at math and didn’t hang out exclusively with other Asians growing up, it’s liberating not to have to overcome those hurdles. Other things I’ve managed to avoid while living up here include being called “Bruce Lee” and “Jackie Chan” by strap-hangers on the subway or being told to “go back to China” by some random Long Islander while walking down the street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

The most othering experience I consistently encounter is that most people I introduce myself to will remember my name the first time we meet, even if it takes several times to remember Alex’s. There’s also the occasional “Oh, that’s such an interesting/beautiful/unique surname!” from a well-intentioned old lady working at the polling station or municipal office, but I know it comes from an earnest place, even if it feels cringe to receive. Even people wearing MAGA paraphernalia smile and wave hi when we pass each other on Main Street. I may not be of them in the way that a white person wearing my same clothes might be assumed to be, but I also don’t feel the default otherness that I’ve experienced in predominantly white spaces I encountered while living in more diverse parts of the country.

Anyway, this is all to say that it hasn’t been a problem… yet. However, the fact that the closest Asian grocery store is a 90-minute drive away did start to grate on me pretty deeply after a while. This is why I was so happy to be introduced to the Asian grocery delivery service Say Weee by our friend Bryan. It’s been an absolute godsend and it was a privilege to write about it once again for the One Thing newsletter. You can read the full essay here or at the link below. (And if you sign up for Say Wee using this link, we will both get $20 off our next order.)

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🟧 An Asian grocery store for anywhere

Michael Zhao: My wife and I bought our first home in the fall of 2021 in a small, rural town in southwestern Vermont that we’d been visiting for several years, drawn by its exceptional cycling and relatively affordable real estate. We now live a shorter walk to the supermarket than we ever did in Brooklyn, but the inventory at our local Shaw’s leaves mu…

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On a recent Sunday in the middle of October, when I’d planned to be recovering from a late night spent with Tim Reaper and Dwarde at a DIY venue’s jungle night, I was instead seated on my meditation cushion in the upstairs sunroom in our home in Vermont for the first time in several weeks due to a cold that had swept through my body on Friday morning. I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to getting back in the mix after having slept normally for over a week. Still, the continued rest would do me no harm. 

Despite its immense popularity, the S.N. Goenka lineage of Vipassana that I’d been practicing since June is known among meditators as one of the more intense traditions, and I now knew, based on my own experience, that it was too intense for me. This would be my first attempt at meditating since the Cheetah House crisis counselor I’d met with had warned me against resuming formal practice of any kind, lest it result in irreversible and permanent psychosis. I felt that this advice was well-intentioned but too absolutist to be useful because there were many gentler options I had yet to learn of, let alone try. 

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At the top of my list was the Theravada Buddhist lineage based on the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. Tejaniya is a Burmese monk who spent his early life as a rowdy and rebellious teen and chronically depressed, drug-seeking textile merchant before ordaining as a monk at the age of 36 in 1996. He has an easy sense of humor and emphasizes that cultivating awareness and wholesome states of mind can occur on or off the cushion. I was on my cushion that day because I was about to attend a digital half-day retreat led by two of the lineage’s most prominent US-based teachers: Alexis Santos and Susa Talan.

After a short introduction, I participated in the first group sitting without incident. Santos led a simple guided meditation focusing on coming into gentle awareness of the present. Rather than feeling like I was inside of a snow globe that was being shaken with increasing intensity—as I had during my last few Vipassana sittings—I felt like this meditation was stopping the shaking so I could just observe the white microplastics fall into place at the bottom of the base. Towards the end, he mentioned that meditating in this way is more about allowing awareness to come as opposed to actively pushing for it. He added that when you arrive in a moment of stillness in this way, it can feel like coming home, which it did for me.

In the weeks since I’d stopped meditating, I felt more irritable than I had in months, could feel my lower back beginning to ache in familiar ways, and the tension in my jaw and fatigue in my teeth were also returning as a result of increased night-grinding. That such a short amount of time away could produce such perceptible effects on my body and mood was remarkable, given how new I was to the practice. But this break also helped me recognize the many ways in which other practices have helped me hone my awareness and presence prior to becoming a meditator. 

Back in middle school, I had a sleepover routine with a friend of mine from elementary school: after dinner, we’d walk to Starbucks a few blocks away to order caramel macchiatos, then stop in at the movie rental place across the street, and finally swing by 7-eleven to pick up energy drinks to consume as we watched the film. After the movie was over, we would watch Saturday Night Live and play video games until sleep came, if it did at all. The point of this wasn’t for the love of movies, TV, or even video games—which I was never any good at. It was the gooey sensation of being fully awake yet unable to think a coherent thought. By the 20th hour of not sleeping, the only light left in the house was in the lizard brain’s room. All the negative self-talk and insecurity I was accustomed to suffering throughout the rest of the day would finally quiet down. In this state of semi-consciousness, I could only discern and attend to exactly what my body needed or wanted from moment to moment.

My first experience of intentional and consistent practice in pursuit of presence began when I started snowboarding more seriously in high school. This was when I first wandered off of groomed surfaces in search of tree runs, cliff jumps, and other double-black diamond features. I found that putting my entire existence in a position of physical peril gave the mind no choice but to surrender control to the body if it wanted to continue living. This kind of forced presence is often referred to as a “flow state,” where you can’t help but focus on the here and now and must trust your subconscious intuition and conditioning to carry you through what is an objectively dangerous situation—or else risk falling off the literal edge of a cliff or mountain face. The only problem was that the mountain was 3.5 hours away, and I had neither a car nor a license to drive myself to the ski bus, let alone Lake Tahoe. As such, these experiences were few and far between. 

It wasn’t until I started running regularly after joining the track team during the second semester of my junior year of high school that I discovered a regularly accessible way to cultivate this condition. Unlike my teammates—who’d had a three-year head start on training, an elevated baseline of fitness from playing competitive club soccer in middle school, or both—I had never run consistently in the past and had no ambitions of becoming fast. I was there to practice, not to compete. 

Although I never recorded anything approaching a competitive mile or half-mile time during competition, I was able to quickly build my stamina to the point of enjoying the daily, three-mile training runs at the same steady pace as the rest of the team. Not long after that, I began attending the group’s weekend trail runs where we’d meet up at a local nature preserve on Saturday mornings to go on runs exceeding 6 miles in length, ideally closer to 10. At some point past the fourth mile, I would notice the wandering and pleading would quiet down as the mind began accepting the body’s primacy, and we would settle into a light-footed tempo that we could sustain indefinitely. Or at least until the last car back to town was ready to leave the parking lot. 

Once in college, I had more free time than ever to run, but it was difficult to stay in the habit when there were so many alternative activities to pursue. In order to make room for exploring a new city, meeting new friends, joining various clubs, recreational drinking, and pool tournaments, my daily runs became weekly, eventually giving way to nothing at all. That this marked the beginning of a period of utter misery strikes me as no coincidence. However, it was also the period when I began putting the pieces together for the practice that would come to define my later 20s and 30s. Among them, experimenting with psychedelics, abusing study drugs to pull all-nighters (for both business and pleasure), and discovering that dancing could actually be fun when the dances were thrown by other students and featured music that we actually enjoyed. 

This all came together for the first time during the first weekend of May at the college’s notorious end-of-year festival. It was 60 hours of continuous revelry beginning with a Friday afternoon bonfire in front of the library where graduating seniors—marked by the gilded-plastic laurel wreaths atop their heads—burned their paper thesis drafts, dowsing each other in showers of cheap sparkling wine, as everyone sought sloppy, consensual make-outs with all the crushes and nemeses acquired through the course of an academic year. For most students, the rest of the weekend would be filled with drug experimentation, bottomless craft beer, art installations, live music, and DJ sets into the wee hours. But the highlight of the weekend, for most people, was the Sunday morning sunrise screening of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie masterpiece, “Stop Making Sense,” featuring The Talking Heads at the height of their powers. The vast majority of bleary-eyed attendees filling the historic Student Union building at 5 AM were still on the tail end of whatever drug journey they had begun earlier that night (or even the day prior), in varying states of unraveling. 

When David Byrne walks onto the screen and announces that he has a little tape to play for us, we’re already clapping and stomping to the beat of “Psycho Killer.” At some point, the sun rises as we sing along to “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” Tops come off, tits come out, and the scent of sweat and musk fills the steamy room, rendered visible by the window coverings having been thrown open all at once at the first signs of daybreak. As the last “Still waiting” of “Crosseyed and Painless” rings out over the PA, everyone in the room is totally present and wrapped up in the moment. Then the credits roll as the audio source switches to the CDJs, and the first bass note of “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem bursts out of the woofers. Whatever fumes are left in the tank get burned on the spot, and then it’s time to hug it out, kiss whomever you need to, enjoy some morning sun if the Oregonian spring allows for it, and then off to bed until the same time next year. But what if I didn’t have to wait all year?

I’d already started seeking out more electronic music towards the end of my time in Portland, where some friends of friends had become somewhat prominent DJs in the scene. But it wasn’t until I moved to New York and traveled to Primavera Sound in 2016 that I realized raving was the practice I’d been working towards all along. And now that I lived in a city with an ascendant scene, it was something that I could access anytime I needed to, which turned out to be not that often in those halcyon days. 

At the time, I was still happily employed at the only salaried job I’d ever held, which was at the same start-up that I’d dropped out of college to help run as its first employee in 2013. I felt a deep sense of purpose in the work that I was waking up each morning to do and growing satisfaction with my social life, which was expanding with each passing month as more of my college friends made the move eastward to the city, often crashing for a few weeks at a time in our guest room while they looked for their own place. Building this plucky publication by day and sustaining my community by night assured me that my life had a purpose.

That sense of purpose was long gone by the time I’d become employed and subsequently burnt out by two separate multi-thousand-employee corporations—separated by a satisfying, albeit exhausting, and insufficiently remunerative stint in the service and retail industry during a global pandemic. By 2023, I was going to parties on at least a monthly basis and had come to realize through a combination of talk therapy, raving, and ketamine-assisted therapy that the corporate job and its concomitant trappings were the true delusion and that losing myself on the dancefloor was the only consistent opportunity I had to become present to reality as it actually was. However, accepting this knowledge still wasn’t enough to get me to do anything about it. It took getting laid off, a fruitless job search spanning several months, and watching a loved one die before I made any significant changes to my conception of how I ought to be living my life. 

I landed in my first Vipassana retreat with no expectations for what awaited me, open to whatever might happen. It was nonetheless shocking when I ended up going as deep as I did in such a short period of time. Speaking to longtime practicioners confirmed that it wasn’t all just an illusion. Even so, I remained skeptical. How could someone who had never meditated prior to their first retreat deserve to achieve such depths of insight with so little prior experience?

By the time I’d left the retreat, established a daily formal practice, and began reaping the benefits of doing so, I’d all but forgotten my initial doubts. Then, after my latest experience with hypomania and subsequent break from meditating, I found the answer to my original question in the response to another. Prior to the retreat, I’d filled out the teachers’ Google form asking them how I ought to proceed with meditation, if at all, given the crisis counselor’s stern warning against doing so. Santos’s response came after the first group sitting, and the truth of it reverberated through my bones like I was an antique gong being rung for the first time in centuries: 

What do we mean by practice? What the dhamma, and the broader range of these teachings, is really pointing us to is: “What is the most skillful and meaningful way to be in the present moment?” And anything that we decide to do, that generates the skillfulness, the wholesome, the wise, we can say that is dhamma. That is what is worthy of doing.

Up to now, I’d thought of myself as a novice practitioner because I’d been meditating for such a short amount of time. But this expansive definition of practice helped me understand that I’d been walking the path long before I knew of its existence. By the time I took my self-imposed break from meditating, I’d begun to think of formal meditation as the only practice that I would need going forward in order to continue down this path, but that’s just not the case for me—or anyone for that matter. Although becoming a meditator had made me more aware of the benefits I was gaining from all the other practices I’d maintained throughout my life, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t benefiting from them before I started meditating. The overall goal of walking the dhamma, continued Santos, is to bring the mind and body into balance through skillful action, which can mean choosing not to meditate. After all, the eight-fold path is so-named because there are eight elements to it, of which meditation is just one.

After the event, I booked an individual follow-up in order to get more clarity on how to approach my meditation practice as my neurochemistry continues to normalize. I was advised that I could meditate if I am comfortable doing so, but ideally while lying down or walking rather than sitting formally. So, I’ve been doing that from time to time, using the recordings from the retreat to guide me. But mostly, I am trying to become more comfortable with just relaxing and taking care of myself: taking baths, cooking meals, and reintroducing exercise back into my life—which I’d all but given up during my summer of twice-daily meditation.

As I write this, four and a half months after my first successful attempt at meditation, my formal practice looks a lot like it did back in May: almost non-existent. I am at peace with that because I now know that I am a lot further along than I ever realized—not that there’s a destination to aim for. Only through stopping my formal practice was I able to realize that walking the path is not about progressing toward any particular conclusion. It’s about the awareness that the journey itself is worth taking, regardless of the outcome.

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Good writing is like an expensive haircut. The end result is as much about what’s been taken out and how it was removed, even though we only see what remains. It should read effortlessly and elegantly—the most natural-seeming version of itself that it could possibly be. But unless there’s literally nothing left, there’s always more material that could be cut. With the advent of digital media, these edits can even be made post-publish. So how does one tell if a piece is done?

This has been at the top of my mind as my present neurochemistry leads me to produce at prodigious rates with a level of ease and certainty I wouldn’t have previously believed possible. However, I am fortunate to be surrounded by those who are willing to share their truest reactions to my work. Yesterday evening, after speaking with Alex about a draft of an essay I’d been excited to publish, I realized she was right: This wasn’t my best work. The concept and themes at the center of the piece felt clichéd, to begin with, and were further strained by having been written and rewritten over the course of several weeks. So while the parts I like might make their way into future pieces, it’s going back on the shelf for now. 

It was also at the fore when The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka offered to syndicate my essay on my raving origins on his One Thing Substack—but only if I could come up with a version that was 700 words long, down from the original 1850. This felt like an impossible task, which it ultimately was. I did, however, get it down to 800 words by cutting every b-plot, striking entire sentences of descriptive flourish, and removing all appearances of aphorism and cliché. I thought the piece would suffer from these losses, but after rereading both, I might actually prefer the truncated version. You can click the preview below to reach your own conclusions.

One Thing

🟧 Reclaiming raves

An extended version of this piece first ran on Michael Zhao’s Substack, Craving/Aversion…

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2 years ago · 1 like · One Thing

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Since the end of May, I have published 18 pieces at a clip of almost one a week, mostly essays and reviews, some of them over 3000 words long, all of which I am proud of. Many have resonated with a lot of people I know and even beyond—my essay on raving was even featured as a Substack Staff Pick this past week. That there are hundreds of people who do not know me and are reading my work is a tremendous privilege that I do not take lightly. Some of you have texted and emailed me kindest and most encouraging of words, telling me that this is my calling, that I have inspired you to start your own projects. I want to continue prioritizing this work and expanding its scope, but as motivating as your verbal encouragement is, I still need to make a living. Which, for now, means writing product reviews and doing digital strategy for other people and institutions. But hopefully that can change.

As of this writing, Craving Aversion earns me $403 annually and that is before Substack gets its 10%, Stripe takes their 3.5% and the government gets its 45% (including self-employment taxes). This means I am netting about $17 a month, which is about half the price of cover one (1) early-bird rave cover, including RA’s fees. In other words, this is more or less 100% a labor of love, which is fine and I still enjoy doing it, but if you’ve been enjoying this work and have $5 a month, or $25 a year to spare (I am still offering half off annual subscriptions in perpetuity), please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today to make this project more sustainable.

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I did a little Instagram Story poll to see what readers want to see more of and it was overwhelmingly more rave reviews (which will come as soon as I recover) and interviews with DJs and notable figures in the mindfulness space. Both of these things cost money and a lot of time to put together and I need your support to make it happen. So here’s the deal:

If 7 people upgrade to a paid subscription by the end of next weekend (at either $5/month or $25/year), I will immediately begin working on the interview series. Free trials don’t count.

If you have no budget to spare, I have also activated Substack’s referral program. Using the button below or the “Share” button on any post will give you credit for any new subscribers, which can earn you free time for a paid subscription.

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Additionally, I had originally written an essay for this blog about how I’ve been navigating the past few weeks of hypomania, but upon re-reading it, I felt that it was worthy of a broader audience. After an editor friend of mine (and my first non-parental paid subscriber) offered to help me edit it down to be more coherent, I decided that it was worth pitching to some magazines to see if anyone might be interested in paying me to publish it. Even if they all say no, I am still immensely proud of myself for getting to this point from a confidence and self-esteem perspective.

I believe that good writing is meant to be read so I will never paywall the pieces that I publish here, which is only enabled by your support. But, for paid subscribers only, I have included an excerpt of my forthcoming bipolar II essay at the bottom of this dispatch.

With all that out of the way, I have honestly been doing quite well overall, all things considered. There were moments that felt a little touch and go, but thanks to Alex’s support and some well-timed interventions from professional care-providers as well as some key referrals from the broader meditation community, I have been able to channel this energy in a productive way that has felt overwhelmingly safe and supported through this strange time.

After 3 nights in a row of little to no sleep, I started on a mood stabilizer last Wednesday and my symptoms have been subsiding continuously since then. That this culminated in a cold yesterday morning, which prevented me from going to the city was probably another sign from the universe that I just wasn’t ready to get back in the mix.

In other news, I got a bunch of pottery out of the kiln recently and they turned out so much better than I ever could have hoped. The ones above are from the gas kiln. See my instagram for videos of my pieces from the more recent wood firing.

We also had a surprisingly abundant harvest of dwarf pears this year. The clutch from above was picked a little early but Monty Don suggests on Gardener’s World that you should always aim to harvest while they’re still rock hard and not yet ripe, then finish ripening them indoors before eating. Even if they don’t smell ripe, they’re ready to pick when they separate from the branch with a slight tug, which makes sense if you think about it. We’ve been eating them in the weeks since and each one has been delicious. Branch-ripening yields a better flavor, but you’re likelier to lose more to pests and ground-falls if you go that route.

Speaking of plants, this summer has been a gardening season of benign neglect. Not a whole lot of tending or watering of any regularity, but almost everything survived. And we were rewarded with a stunning autumnal floral display for our admittedly minimal efforts—which you can see more of on Alex’s instagram.

We also opened a coworking space downtown in a 1400 sq ft loft in a former print factory, where members of the community can pay a low monthly fee to have a spot to access reliable Wi-Fi and good espresso anytime they want. We had our launch party on September 10th during which over 25 people came to check out the space and enjoy some food and drinks. You can learn more about it at PoultneyCoworking.com or by following us on Instagram.

Friends have been asking me lately, how the hell did you manage to go to three raves in one weekend and write 3000 word reviews of each one during the morning after? Well, it’s simple: I was literally going insane. Between September 21 and October 1, there were more nights where I woke up between 3-4 AM than after 6 AM. And every time it became clear that sleep wouldn’t be returning, I would get up and start writing.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve experienced hypomania in my adult life, but it has been the most productive instance by far. In addition to the roughly 18,000 words contained in the essays and reviews I’ve published here (including this one and another forthcoming), I’ve written 43,000 words of a book manuscript, a 6,000 word essay about this whole experience (edited down to 3,000), a 2,000 word humidifier review for the Strategist (which I wrote and edited in less than 2 hours), an abridged version of my raving essay for Kyle Chayka’s One Thing Substack (to be published next week), and I’m still going—even though, thanks to Alex’s encouragement, I sought and received psychiatric help last Wednesday, after which I’ve been getting plenty of sleep each night and am now feeling mostly back to normal.

However, this experience and the professionals I’ve spoken to about it (via the Cheetah House meditator crisis support line) have also led me to the sad conclusion that I need to take a break from Vipassana meditation as taught in the S.N. Goenka tradition. It turns out, the fact that I took to it so readily was actually a sign that I ought to meditate a lot less than the 2+ hours a day that Goenkaji’s teachings prescribe—if at all. Although, in my opinion, this podcast from The Financial Times presents a somewhat sensationalized account of the risks involved and uses its script and sound design to push listeners towards sinister conclusions where they might not be warranted, it is still important and worth a listen because it presents a deeply-reported and fact-based view of how meditation is not just some unalloyed good that anyone can and should pick up in order to improve their life. I plan to resume meditating when I feel fit to do so, but under the tutelage of a dedicated teacher, for both my physical and spiritual safety.

That brings us to today. A day where I’d planned on riding a train into the city in order to see my friends, attend a jungle night at a DIY space near my apartment with a bunch of friends, and to catch up with a DJ friend who was scheduled to play upstairs at Public Records the following afternoon. As much as I would’ve enjoyed all that, I will also enjoy these last hours of foliage before the windstorm forecasted for this afternoon takes it all down for the year. How fortunate am I to have this be my plan B?

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming essay about living and meditating through a recent bout of hypomania—until the meditation stopped working and began worsening the situation. It is only available to paid subscribers. Join today for 50% off in perpetuity.

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How many parties would be too many to attend in a single weekend? While I never originally intended to find out, I discovered this past weekend that the answer for me in my current incarnation is somewhere just shy of three.

Based on what I’ve published so far, it may seem like I only ever go to raves as part of some quest for greater purpose and meaning in life. The truth is, that’s neither my preference nor my intention for most nights out. This type of set just happens to be in vogue in today’s rave scene. Like the Instagram-driven, Michelin Star-chasing, tasting menu-ification of fine dining, selectors want to challenge your notions of taste, make you think big thoughts and feel big feelings, and take you on a journey you won’t soon forget. But what if all I want to feel is “really good,” and all I want to think is, “Wow, this is so much fun!”? 

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Alice “Moxie” Moxom is one of NTS Radio’s longest-tenured residents, with good reason. Since NTS went live in 2011, her two-hour Wednesday broadcast brings listeners the best of what’s on offer in the world of UK garage (pronounced GARE-uhj), house (along with all its subgenres), and dub music.1 Much of it’s new, and some of it’s from her imprint—On Loop Records—but the old school hits (from the likes of Todd Terry, Ron Trent, Carl Craig, etc) and lesser-known vintage tracks she resurfaces during digging expeditions also make frequent appearances. The show is tied together by Moxie’s sonorous and soothing presence on the mic—she even has a side gig as a voiceover narrator. I don’t listen every week, but when I do, it always puts a spring in my step and a smile on my face. 

The first and only time I saw Moxie perform in New York was in 2019 at one of Elsewhere’s “Elseworld”-branded club nights, which were multi-room, DJ-led parties seeking to establish this rock venue’s reputation as “the Berghain of New York”—a laughable notion since it’s impossible to imagine even the worst European club charging anything near $20 for a tall can of Pacifico. That night, as with most events in New York, no set times were posted, so we arrived at the reasonable and early hour of 12:30 AM, just in time to catch her last song as she left the stage. It was a huge disappointment seeing as she plays so rarely in the States. Indeed, this past Sunday’s party at Public Records would be her first in New York since 2019. 

Most Public Records parties take place in the Sound Room–– a fancy-looking, birch-clad, windowless club space with four-point sound, and a hardwood dance floor plagued by many quiet zones created by inter-speaker interference that encourages people to talk instead of dance. Despite this fact, it’s widely “known for having the best sound in the city”, largely due to the reputation of the system’s designer, Devon Turnbull of Ojas Audio—a talented protege of the late Virgil Abloh. 

It’s rare for a venue to gain a following based on its sound designer, but that is very much the case at Public Records, as evidenced by the demographics of its clientele. A typical crowd on any given weekend leans straight and male. Any given attendee might be wearing a vintage graphic tee purchased on eBay for over $60, a pair of limited-run Nikes that you have to buy using an app, a Rolex watch, or, as is often the case, all of the above. Consequently, opportunities to lock in are few and far between, and I know many scene ravers who refuse to go there on principle. You either have to come to a co-promoted event on an off night—such as Dweller’s excellent Thursday night party featuring Tim Reaper this past February—or, as was the case this past Sunday, buy a ticket for one of their Sunday afternoon outdoor Nursery parties and hope it gets rained out and moved into the Atrium. 

The Atrium is situated inside an old, brutalist industrial building with soaring concrete ceilings featuring huge skylights and a minimal, albeit effective, dose of color-adjustable mood lighting. Typically, it’s filled with tables and seats for its day job as a vegan restaurant. But from time to time, all of that comes out, and the monolithic, green-painted, Turnbull-designed speakers from the Nursery get wheeled in. The Atrium is an objectively large space for Brooklyn—probably twice the size of Nowadays’ indoor area, but it’s still not big enough to fully contain the power of these green monsters. They are so loud that there can be no talking overheard within a 20-foot radius of either stack.  It can even be difficult to place an order over their booming bass and sparkling treble whilst standing back at the bar. Perhaps most interestingly, if we consider the speakers to be at the front of the room, the DJ booth is situated orthogonal to them at stage right. This makes for an interesting dance floor dynamic because the DJ is working within the same sonic environment as the audience—even though they also have separate monitors.

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We step into the venue, already tired from a long weekend of other great parties. But we’re here for a good friend’s 31st birthday and would not have missed Moxie’s stateside return unless we were physically incapacitated and prevented from doing so. I didn’t even think twice about buying tickets as soon as they were announced, despite the venue. While waiting for the birthday girl and the rest of the crew to arrive, I ordered and inhaled an $18 vegan burger served with furikake potatoes and harissa ketchup. You won’t find that at a DIY venue.

Despite the distinctly Public Records demographics of the rather small crowd, it was a cute scene. Most of the roughly 50 attendees were dancing beneath the skylight and in front of the speakers, and those that weren’t were hanging respectfully back by the bar or outside, where conversations belonged. Surveying the crowd, I spotted one person I’d maybe seen once at Nowadays or some DIY show. They wore Salomon sneakers, black cargo pants, vintage wire frame Oakleys, and a black bandana as a head scarf. Or it could have just been their raver costume for the day.

At one point, I clock a ginger man stealing glances in our direction from the other side of the bar who is the spitting image of a Kiwi friend and coworker of one of our best friends who lives in Berlin. But this particular ginger is in New York and wearing a black-on-white G-Star logo baby tee with extremely low-rise, wide-legged, bootcut cargo jeans framing the entirety of his bare midriff. Surely, this was his gay döppelganger. I thought about sneaking a pic to send to our friend but ultimately decided against it. Only later in the evening did he approach me to confess that he was in fact who I’d thought he was and that he was in the midst of a little solo vacation across the pond. We sent a selfie to Berlin and I got the explanation back that this guy had decided to entirely change up his look in the past year after being denied entry to Berghain one too many times. He is still as straight as ever but hasn’t been denied entry since the wardrobe refresh. 

The party had officially started at 2 PM and was originally scheduled to end at 8, so by the time 5:30 rolled around and there was still no sign of Moxie, we began to wonder what was going on. It was no skin off our backs because the Montreal-based Regularfantasy was doing a great job on warm-up duty and kicked it up a notch in the last hour. Her house-forward set was easy to eat, striking a nice balance between getting people excited to dance more while keeping things vibey and chill. She kept the melodies flowing but held back on the bass and percussion, leaving a little something in the tank for after sunset. Her biggest moments came in the form of a couple of trancey house edits of older pop hits: a totally untraceable “Barbie Girl” remix that we recognized from her set at Horst 2023 and a similarly vibey edit of Crazy Town’s “Butterfly”, which was identified on the CDJ display as “A1 Crazy Vilage [sic] VINYL ONLY.” Good luck finding either.

By the time Moxie arrived a bit after 6 PM with her husband Leon Vynehall in tow, the sun had begun to set, causing the mood lighting around the rim of the skylight to take on new prominence in the space. What had felt like an indoor version of an outdoor party for the past couple of hours began to cohere into a clubbier environment that was heavy on vibes and blessedly lacking in artificial fog. It was, however, heating up. As Regularfantasy handed over the controls to her successor, she got a round of applause led by Moxie herself. It was a cute reprieve before Moxie decided that between the changing light and her late arrival, she was going to make up for lost time.

A funny thing often happens when a headliner takes over from the opener. The sound just becomes bigger, not necessarily louder, but everything hits harder and clearer. Kick drums and basslines feel deeper, and more embodied. Snares simultaneously get crisper and less grating. And vocals feel warmer, ringing out more sonorously. I am not sure how or why this happens. Part of it must be psychosomatic on the part of the listener anticipating the changeover, but at least some of it ought to do with all the knob fiddling that happens on the mixer’s EQ. Like any other instrument, each sound system has its quirks and strengths that must be learned, accounted for, or highlighted. The more experienced deck players are just better at feeling this out.

After Moxie takes the lead, the music gets much more intense. We are still squarely in the realm of happy house music, bopping along around 125 BPM and there would be no pitch-fader trickery tonight. But the tracks being played have an edge to them that felt new and invigorating. No pop edits will appear from here on out, which was a bit disappointing to me on account of my desire to hear the “Nasty Girl” - Tinashe remix she’d opened her September 18th radio show with. Although she did at one point early on drop a yet-to-be-released deep house production by Wallace feat. Love Letters, containing a menacingly seductive vocal hook about “Craving,” which unbeknownst to her, felt a bit on the nose. I loved it.

At this point, there were about 60 people split between dancing indoors and chatting outdoors. Within the next half hour, about 20% decide that they’re too tired to keep going and go home. The rest end up inside, shaking their bodies as close to the speakers as possible, despite the now overwhelming heat of the dancefloor. The demographics hadn’t changed, but all inhibitions had been shaken away by the bass, proving that even people who exclusively shop the Ssense sale section can lock in under the right conditions. 

While taking a breather outside, I spot Leon Vynehall having a smoke with a friend and decide to say hi. “You must be Mr. Moxie,” I opened. This gets the desired effect of a quick chuckle and immediate disarmament. We talk about the state of the local scene, his last few shows, and what he’s doing for the rest of Moxie’s tour (head groupie, Instagram husband). Before heading back inside, I ask his real name and he gives it to me. A classic British name with a very British spelling. What a gent.

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 Around 7:15, we got a message from J asking if it was still worth coming given there was only an hour and a half left in the set, to which I responded affirmatively, explaining, “I don’t think security is even checking tickets.” I’d spotted the only doorman on a smoke break about an hour ago and hadn’t seen him since. My wife then offered to pay for J’s cover if they ended up needing to pay. Sure enough, when they arrived some 20 minutes later, they were told to buy a ticket at the Sound Room’s coat check, but simply turned the corner and joined the party instead.

We embrace in front of the speaker, letting out a little yelp of joy but it’s of no distraction to anyone because the sound is just so massive. Moxie is reaching to the bottom of her deep house bag in search of the low-end limit of these massive subwoofers. But there is no end to the amount of bass they can produce. The highs were similarly impressive, with the sax riff accompanying the vocal hook from Jon Cutler’s “It’s Yours” ringing through the horn array on top as if the instrument was being played live in the room with us.

By the time 8 PM rolled around, only a few dozen dancers remained, but Moxie had every last one of us in the palm of her hand. Even Leon was on his feet, dancing by the booth, stopping only every so often to take little videos of the scene. Perfect Instagram husband. 

Meanwhile on the dance floor, despite my best intentions of taking it easy, I have been fully sent for the third time in as many days. Not too long after J’s arrival, their high school friend A appears during a water break. We greet as old friends and he comes bearing good news: He has a fresh vape. However, the mouthpiece had broken off, leaving a gaping hole, surrounded by sharp plastic shards. This widened hole also has the effect of increasing the vape’s throughput so that it hits much stronger and quicker, akin to a bong. 

Back on the dancefloor, with my back to a concrete support pillar by the left speaker, I carefully gum the broken vape and take a deep pull, feeling the vapor enter my chest, and expand outward from there, leaving a sparkling, shimmering sensation in its wake. I close my eyes and relax into the concrete, reveling in the deep satisfaction of getting exactly what I wanted at just the right moment. Craving. I drop it back in A’s open pants pocket while he’s still dancing, eliciting a chuckle. Get this thing away from me.

The night wouldn’t be complete without a piano house moment, and it arrives right on time, shortly before the finale. The crowd goes wild. Everywhere I look, there’s a smile on every face and a groove undulating through each body. Not a single person stands still in the back, to the side, by the bar. Everyone is moving, and I can tell what they’re thinking because I’m thinking it too: Wow, this is so much fun!

Toward the end, she treats us to the dulcet tones of George Michael in one of the rare vocal tracks of the evening. (“Flawless, absolutely flawless.”) Her last song finishes at 9:00 PM on the dot and is met with raucous applause. “One more song!” I shouted, out of habit more than anything else. She obliges immediately and drops one last house track structured around an ethereally reverbed analog synth arpeggio. The perfect soft landing. Another round of applause, this time louder than the first. She lets out a laugh and claps her hands over her head, both with us and for us. 

When the dust settles, my friends and I take turns paying our respects at the booth, fangirling about the set she’d just played and recounting the time we ran into each other at Eris Drew’s last club night in the Sound Room in April 2022—during which we all contracted COVID for the first time. And then there was the last time we saw her headline the first night of Horst Music and Arts Festival in the spring of 2023 alongside her besties as part of the B2B2B2B NTS host super group SASS2. We tell her how fantastic the sound was in the Atrium compared to previous parties we’ve been to in the Sound Room, and she expresses relief since it turned out her left monitor had been malfunctioning all along. It’s a good thing the booth was in front of the speakers, after all! Then security is on us. We don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.

Throughout the evening, friends, new and old, had been asking if we were planning to go to Mansions afterwards, where PLO Man, whose outdoors closing set I had thoroughly enjoyed at this year’s In the Open, would be spinning until 3 AM. To be clear, I love Mansions—with its impeccable wine program, carpeted dance floor, and its “someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying” level custom sound system relative to the rest of their build-out. But there was a 0% chance that I was going to continue past my apartment, all the way to Ridgewood, to ruin whatever chance I might have had at finally sleeping well tonight. And as much as I love looking around a dance floor and seeing familiar scene faces from all around me, tonight was a good reminder that sometimes, a bit of anonymity can be fun too. Perhaps the true saving grace of these Public Records parties is that I probably won’t ever see any of these people ever again. We’re all just there to have a good time for one night only.

I suggest out of habit that we might walk home to wind down a bit, but am filled with immediate regret when my wife instantly agrees. J comes to my rescue, offering a ride home, which I ravenously accept like a trained monkey snatching the lit cigarette out of a tourist’s fingers. It’s been a long enough weekend filled with a heretofore unimaginable amount of fun. Healthy habits and routines can resume tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll take all the help I can get. 

If there were any deep revelations to be had about the evening, it’s that there might just be such a thing as too much fun for one short weekend. Yet I would do it all again in a heartbeat. Just give me a few weeks to recover.

Correction 10/7/24: Amelia Holt reached out after publication of this review to tell me that she stopped doing bookings at public records during the summer of 2023. She now books and promotes her own Honey Trap party series, which has appeared in venues all over NYC and also abroad in Berlin. You can learn more about that on Instagram.

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How did the word “channel” come to be overloaded with so many meanings? Just off the top of my head, as a noun, it can refer to a length of water, a unit of broadcast television, or any number of forms of connecting two things. Here however, I am primarily interested in its usage as a verb, which per Oxford, may refer to the action of directing something towards a particular goal or object, but in the context of a person, means to “serve as a medium for (a spirit).”

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I chose my outfit for the afternoon while on the tail end of a luxurious wine hangover courtesy of the wine lunch we’d had with our friend M, who works as a sommelier. Because I was operating on barely any sleep after staying late at Nowadays, the hangover began from the moment we left our seats. But the flip side is that due in part to the quality of the wines consumed, it passed almost as quickly as it came. We had parted ways with M after our meal to get ready for the party and planned to reunite at our place in about 2 hours. My wife and I spent most of that time napping on the living room sofa while softly rinsing Oasis’ Definitely Maybe on the kitchen Sonos.

Upon waking up, I feel restored and ready to meet the rest of the day. I made some tea, brushed my teeth, and checked Instagram to see if Knockdown Center had decided to move this thing inside on account of the persistent rain and whipping winds, which only seemed to worsen as the day wore on. Eventually, our other friend B arrives at our door. He is a lurker in some NYC raver Discord server, which has boots on the ground investigating the matter. The report is that the DJ remains outside, but the music is being simulcast into the Studio—which is the smaller house music stage within the larger Basement club space situated in the literal basement of the Knockdown Center. Whatever the solution ended up being, we weren’t eager to stand around in the rain waiting to find out. We can see the locally-based opening act some other time.

Oh, Knockdown Center, how I loathe your strict door searches, surly security, and overall corporate-feeling style of operation. And yet, you have been host to some of my best rave experiences in New York—including the yearly T4T Luv NRG gatherings. I attribute this to a combination of factors of which the sound is a big part. Upstairs and outside is a massive, site-specific L-Acoustics array, whose logo I recognize from some of the best festivals I’ve attended in Europe and seen videos of on Instagram. Downstairs, it’s all Funktion One (same as Berghain and Sustain Release), which is not my favorite sound profile, but gets the job done consistently well. That said, I am never really sure who to blame when the levels aren’t quite right, which is often. It seems like the more experienced DJs have ways of EQing things into the zone on their own, but more often than not, the decibel meter app on my phone reads at about 95-97 decibels (dB), which is fine for a bar, but not loud enough to discourage talking on the dance floor. More importantly, that is the volume where wearing earplugs feels too quiet, yet leaving them out risks hearing damage. That’s why most dance music clubs try to keep things at around 102 dB, which is too loud to talk over, but loud enough to overcome hearing protection by just the right amount.1

The other thing that makes this space special, and also often unbearable, is that it serves as an estuarine, where the freshwater rivulets comprising the city’s various rave scenes mix with the vast ocean of those who cosplay as ravers to be seen alongside the normies attracted by big names like Four Tet, Honey Dijon, Jeff Mills, Floating Points, etc. By now, Objekt is now probably too big of a name for a smaller club like Nowadays—or Basement—but not yet big enough to sell the 3000 tickets needed to fill the entire Knockdown Center. So he gets booked outdoors in the Ruins, which has about half the capacity.

With the exception of the aforementioned annual T4T Luv NRG pride party, which sells out early to the heads who know, it’s hard to say what the mix of the crowd will be for any given event until you arrive. I keep this in mind as I get dressed and opt for raver drag: a black Homme Plissé tank, black washed straight leg jeans, and a pair of vintage gray, black, and blue New Balance sneakers from the 90s. Looking the part, but not enough to stand out.

M arrives at our place right as Oasis ends and we share our tea and continue lounging for a bit, enjoying the album and each other’s company. The rain continues to fall outside so we are in no rush. Eventually, it’s confirmed that the event is staying outdoors regardless of the forecast, which precipitates some outfit adjustments.

I add my black nylon Prada bucket hat—the one with the extended brim, chin strap, and zippered triangular pouch on the back from the SS22 runway show—to keep my head dry in case the rain worsens and tuck a pair of wraparound cycling glasses with blue-mirror lenses on top. Incognito no more.

Now fully dressed and antsy to leave, I don a navy, waxed cotton duster to protect against the weather and summon a Wait-and-Save Lyft, but even with the discount, surge pricing is sitting at about 50% higher than normal. But when Navpriet rolls up in the white Chevy Equinox, we are pleased to learn that she is worth every penny. Hot 97 on the radio, guru talisman on the dash, it’s the perfect place to come up as we make our way through traffic, bopping along to “Nice for What” (volume up) which transitions seamlessly into “Nasty Girl” by Tinashe, a hot remix of which opened Moxie’s return to her NTS slot a couple of weeks ago.

As we step out of the car around 6:30 PM, the rain has all but stopped, never to return for the rest of the evening but for the occasional sprinkle. Despite my extensive preparations, security consists only of a quick wave of the metal detector wand accompanied by an off-color joke asking after the number of grenades I’m carrying. It was then that I knew this would be a good party, a hunch confirmed as B and I turned the corner and came face to face with a rave in full swing.

Despite the weather, it felt like the whole crowd was locked in as Skee Mask was thrashing behind the decks, whipping himself and the whole damp audience—especially the 20 or so dancers in the very front—into collective delirium with track after track of hard, groovy techno and electro bangers. He was channeling his inner demons to make it so that the partygoers could no longer tell the difference between wetness caused by the rain and their sweat and he appeared to be succeeding. It was a beautiful sight to behold and I was eager to get into the mix.

I grab an ice-cold Japanese beer at the bar to help kick what remained of my lunch hangover as the rest of our crew convenes around me. Everyone who gets a sip ends up going to buy their own as I’m left to admire the weatherproofing treatment, which consists of black PVC tarps, loosely wrapped and gaffed over all sides of the DJ booth to protect the electronics, billowing slightly with the breeze. You would never guess that this was the best way to protect thousands of dollars of sensitive electronics but it turned out to be just enough for the circumstances.

The sound is ok from where we are, albeit too quiet, and I am standing in a puddle on the gravel. I survey the group about going further into the crowd and they’re all game. I tie my jacket on the damp security fence, as many others have done, and begin bouncing my way towards the middle. Based on how things were shaping up, I was pretty sure that would be the last time I saw it until the end of the last song.

Standing on dry concrete, almost directly in front of the right speaker with my earplugs in, I am still finding it hard to lock in. I opened my decibel meter app and it reads about 95 dBA. The worst volume level. I take my earplugs back out and am greeted by the sound of chatter all around me. I turn around and, to my surprise, greet H, who looks fresh as a daisy after chopping off his once-unruly mane of chest-length, wiry brown hair. Slightly ahead of us is the group of die-hards leaving it all on the floor. I aspire to their energy but it’s just not here for me yet. Nor can it be until this sound situation improves. Fortunately, the sun sets around 6:50 PM these days and as soon as dusk takes hold and the lights get brighter, the music gets louder in equal proportion. This is more felt than heard as the bass begins to shake my organs in the familiar and comforting way that only good speakers are capable of doing. Earplugs back in.

Now I’m ready, but the others are happy with their current lot, so I set off alone across the crowd to my rave home, at the front left in front of the speakers. Like at most parties, among the 20 or so dancers currently doing the most, there’s a clear divide between the majority in the middle—beautiful people, moving unencumbered by karmic baggage, exorcising what demons remain through dance—and those at the front left—the demons themselves who are expressing their truest selves and dancing as if they are the music because they are. This is their home and they are happy to share with anyone who enters, but only those who match their freak can stay. Not because they’ll kick you out, but at some point, unless you’re one of them, you probably get turned off by watching a stranger with neon green pigtails wagging their pierced tongue in your general direction as they slither their body, casting spells with their hands in your general direction as their eyes stare not at you, but through you to whatever is on the other side of this world. I say “them” as if I am not one of them, but I think in my heart of hearts, these are my people. So I will use the first-person plural to refer to us from here on out. Those in the front right are just there to see what happens.

At the front left, we feast on each other’s freak and share party favors freely. I feel my energy building as doppelgängers start appearing all over the place. Some of them are real though. Like the speaker demon from last Sunday morning during Identified Patient and Djrum’s sets at Nowadays. She’s totally in the zone, eyes closed, directly in front of the speaker, physically here, but mentally surfing the astral plane. When I tap her to say hi later on, her face alights and we embrace as old friends, even though neither of us learned each other’s name and didn’t bother to ask this time either.

I’m fully here now, but I had drifted away from the left and more towards the middle, grooving among the trad hotties who were doing their own thing. At one point, a tall and muscular man appears along the fence at the front and pulls the attention of one of the dancers. They get to talking and they keep on talking. I shoot occasional glances in their direction over the next ten minutes or so and each successive glance reveals a more subdued scene than the one preceding it. The dancers around them were becoming visibly agitated, dancing with less intensity and throwing glares in their direction. Finally, I spot another woman just fuming at this guy from just a few feet away but he and his non-dancing partner remain blissfully unaware, so, upon remembering that I am actually 6’2”—albeit only 150 lbs—I decide to say something.

Dancing my way into the middle, I tap his shoulder and say, “Hey man, take a look around,” gesturing at the dancers behind him and to either side, “and match this vibe, or else please take this convo elsewhere.” He looked a bit shocked but seemed to take this advice at face value. However, his partner in chat took much offense, yelling “Hey fuck you motherfucker!” as I danced back over to the left. Looking back, I saw that he had decided to start dancing his face off rather than leave. I came back for a second just to affirm his decision, which he took with a smile and a hand to the heart. I return the gesture as I back away.

For the next hour or so, breaks notwithstanding, I dance at the border of front left and the middle among the myriad other ravers in various states of losing and finding themselves in the frenetic energy of the pit. Skee Mask is once again doing Skee Mask things. He pulls every trick he’s rehearsed (and maybe a few he hasn’t) out of the bag. Around 7:30, which is when Objekt is supposed to appear, he cuts the music for just one beat like he’s Eminem in “Lose It” to see if anyone notices, and, of course, everyone does. It was as if everyone in the crowd took a collective gasp but before we could exhale, it was over even quicker than it began.

Soon after, Objekt appears out of the fog wearing some kind of blocky-striped, black-and-white, oversized cotton sweater with baggy sleeves like a wizard’s robes, his unruly mullet looking like it’s about to leave his head and take on a life of its own like a Tribble from Star Trek. The last time I saw him was when he was just another guest on the main floor at Berghain during a Friday night Reef party in the spring of 2023. At the time, his mullet was a long way away from his bald-head days, but still a far cry from the mane he now possessed.2 I couldn’t wait to hear what tricks he had hiding up those sleeves because, to be honest, it was hard to imagine following up on what Skee Mask had been throwing down for the last two hours.

As a headliner, what do you do if your opener is shining so brightly that he might be on the verge of conjuring a second sun in the sky? The only possible answer was to go B2B, which was not part of the bill as originally marketed but had been announced ahead of time on Objekt’s Instagram stories. This was unusual. Now having witnessed what Skee Mask was up to, I imagine they had a conversation about it ahead of time that went something like this:

Skee Mask: Hey man, I am going to absolutely murder this crowd and there will be nothing left for you by the time I am done with them and there’s nothing you can stop me.

Objekt: Sounds tight. Let’s do it together.

End of discussion.

And thus was conceived a plan for mutually assured destruction in a world currently swirling with all too many literal interpretations of this doctrine. But for this party, in this setting, it was the only conceivable path forward. Never mind that it was meant to go from 3 PM to 10:30 PM and that many of the attendees probably had plans and tickets to attend other parties afterward. This was not their problem.

Objekt spent maybe the first 15 minutes or so of the B2B theatrically futzing around with cables and plugging in gear from behind the black tarp, out of view of the audience, which confused me because usually this stuff is done by techs, well in advance of the performance. Unless he was preparing a live set of some sort? But he wasn’t. I guess we will never know. In any case, his mere presence was motivation enough for Skee Mask to kick it up a notch, which would have been difficult to imagine minutes ago. This crowd was as ready for Objekt as it could possibly be, but he paid us no attention, continuing to futz with his cables. Then he left for a bit.

When Objekt finally returned with headphones in hand, we were in a full-on frenzy brought on by Skee Mask’s relentless concatenation of breakbeats and searing acid house bangers, crashing violently into each other, channeling the very best of what I imagine the 90s rave scene had to offer. These are the vinyl-only treasures that exist only on Discogs for $100+ per single and in the form of YouTube rips, where the comments are full of nostalgic Gen Xers recounting the magic they experienced once upon a time in a warehouse on the outskirts of town, but never since. At moments, it felt like we had fully gone back in time and were dancing in a different era.

This tracks completely with my understanding of Objekt as a DJ and musician, which is that he is both a brilliant student of 90s rave music and a masterful troll. Although I’d heard his 2016 breakout single “Theme from Q” many times before, he didn’t come to my attention until 2019, when at Primavera Sound, I saw him play a tight DJ set in a converted parking garage cum club, followed by a live set on one of the performance stages. During both sets, he dropped a track that lives rent-free in my head to this day.

It started with a generic-sounding breakbeat, followed by a swelling siren sound, which is joined by an even higher-pitched siren. As both sirens crescendo at about a minute in, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt with a vinyl spinback as a vocal sample interjects: “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute, drop an old school beat!” A video game sound effect cues up a comically aggressive jock jam-inspired two-chord alternating synth progression. The siren restarts and some more scratching happens in the backdrop for a few seconds when another vocal sample commands calmly without a trace of emotion: “Free your body and your mind.” Then the swirling bass synth hits and the siren returns louder than ever before cutting out yet again to make room for one final, heavily reverberated vocal sample. “Are you ready?!” echoes through the brief silence as it all comes crashing into the mix together with the breakbeat breaking harder than ever before, commanding your full attention to stop what you’re doing and start shaking your body. If the song I just described sounds like it is compiled from a veritable greatest hits of 90s rave music cliches and must be some kind of joke, that’s because it is.

It would be several months before it was finally released, and during this interim period, the track followed me throughout clubs from Berlin to Belgrade and back west to America. When it finally did become available, it was released on Bandcamp under the alias “DJ Bogdan” as “Love Inna Basement (Midnite XTC). The liner notes describe Bogdan as a club owner and DJ at the heart of the 90s Berlin rave scene whose smash hit, once lost to time, was rediscovered on a reel-to-reel tape and restored to its original glory for digital and vinyl release. In admirable commitment to the bit, Objekt still insists to this day that DJ Bogdan is real and that this was his song.

When Objekt started playing his first track in the B2B at around 7:40, I went to check in on my friends, having no idea where they might be. So I went up to the balcony and took in the sight of the entire crowd and snapped a quick picture. When I finally found them in the middle left, about 20 feet back from where I had been dancing this whole time, I was surprised and delighted to see that our numbers had swelled. Wifey, M, B, and H were now joined by J, D, and also K, all from our Sustain camp crew. “This is unbelievably good,” a phrase I both uttered and heard many times throughout the evening. I asked if anyone else wanted to join me up front and J and D decided to join. But when I get to the front and turn around, they’re not there. Oh well.

Keying back in on the music, there’s a distinct tension between the two DJs as Skee Mask continues to reach deep into his chest of ripped-vinyl treasures while Objekt counters with more contemporarily produced and mastered tracks that sound much cleaner while paying homage to that same era.

At one point, a young man with long, bleached-blonde hair and visible roots appears in front of me wearing knee-length cargo shorts and a light blue tank—the spitting image of Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi from Point Break. He begins doing what I can only describe as “rave dancing” by gyrating and flailing in opposite directions as if he’s trying to stomp a vat of grapes while picking new bunches off of the surrounding vines and also hula hooping, all at the same time. It is a whole vibe that I love and I try to match his energy for a bit, meeting his eyes and mirroring his moves for a while before resorting to verbally expressing my appreciation for his style. He asks how I know this other guy who he’s friends with whom I’d greeted earlier with a hug. I informed him that I just had a chance encounter with him last weekend at Nowadays and barely remembered his name. We talk briefly about our plans for the coming month and express mutual exhaustion at the incredible bounty of upcoming parties during this time when all we truly need is to rest at the end of a long festival season. In any case, we got back to dancing on our own and he eventually drifted his way over to the middle.

Speaking of Point Break, navigating a dance floor in America often feels a lot like managing a surf lineup, insofar as there’s a mutually enforced, unwritten, and constantly updating hierarchy of who gets to go where and with how much ease. If people recognize you as having been locked in at the front, you can glide by them with no resistance beyond a polite touch to the shoulder. By this point in the evening, people part for me before I even get to them. I conclude that the Prada hat has something to do with it. It may feel like a costume to me, but it is a distinctive part of the reality I am creating for those who perceive me wearing it. The clothes make the man and tonight, that man is a rave god who wears designer clothes and gets to come and go as he pleases to the front of the floor.

At around 9 PM, after multiple attempts, Objekt finally managed to banish Skee Mask from his perch at the B2B for the last and final time—about half an hour past his originally scheduled exit. The last 90 minutes of the evening started in ecstasy and ended in a blur as the music shifted away from the melodic electro, acid house, and breakbeat territory we’d been exploring in the B2B and into the deep-cut rhythmic DnB and dubstep zone where Shazam is of no use. That, and my lack of sleep from the night before, was finally catching up with me, blurring the lines between intoxication and exhaustion. At one point, he cuts the beat as menacing laser sounds and electric crash cymbals fill the floor, accompanied by violent attacking strobes as if we all of a sudden found ourselves amid a sci-fi war movie set. Every time I looked at the booth, however, Objekt was completely calm and collected, eyes locked on the mixer while dancing only subtly from side to side.

At some point near the end, when the crowd was beginning to thin out, B and M came up to join me and were floored by what a difference 15 feet could make in the level of energy one experiences. M asked why he hadn’t come up earlier, to which I could only remind him that he was invited on several occasions. There’s always next time.

By the end of the set, we had reached 170BPM and I had left it all on the floor. I vaguely remember participating in a round of applause, which was received by only the slightest smile of acknowledgment on the part of Objekt. Then he disappeared, leaving us to grapple with what remained of our minds and bodies as we gathered our coats and bags off of the security fencing. We, the locked-in said our thanks to each other, made the requisite exchanges of follows, and hugged it out amongst ourselves.

My wife, friends, and I found each other and made our way towards the exits with heavy limbs, tired necks, and the swift encouragement of venue security. As we walked, I reflected on what we’d just witnessed. The music was truly excellent, but that alone does not a rave make. Everywhere I looked in the pit, I saw bleached blond hair, vintage Oakleys, cargo pants, motocross jerseys, stomping boots, industrial jewelry, skintight mesh tops of every shade and color… While I didn’t clock any pukka shell necklaces, I bet there were some to be found had I looked more closely. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who put on a little raver costume for this party.

You’ve seen the camcorder footage on YouTube and read the comments. You’ve heard the music, perhaps even in a club. Perhaps like me, you have felt nostalgic for this once-thriving 90s rave scene you never had the chance to participate in. Maybe it makes you sad to think about this bygone era because you think its time has passed and that it’s gone from this Earth. Fear not, dear reader. Every day we wake up and consciously or not, step into a reality we create for ourselves and each other. That reality can be anything we want it to be and it often starts with finding the right fit and striking a pose until it feels natural. That raves can exist at all is proof that when enough of us have the same idea and congregate in the same place at the same time under the right circumstances, we can collectively channel any vibe we want into existence. It’s a tremendous power and privilege we all share as humans. Let’s not let it go to waste.

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Yesterday evening, after attending a birthday at a bar in Bed Stuy, we made the long trek to Ridgewood for my first Friday club night in a long time. This was the first of too many parties on the docket for the weekend, but I was determined to make it to Nowadays come hell or high water because I simply could not miss yet another opportunity to see CCL, who was playing back-to-back with Physical Therapy for the final night of his six-year residency.

I’d previously had the pleasure of locking in with Physical Therapy—most notably at his Saturday closing set during the inaugural In The Open. But despite having tried on five separate occasions in four different cities across three countries, I had never made it to the dance floor for one of CCL’s legendarily playful yet heady sets.

When we arrived around midnight, the club was far from full, but the fog hung heavy, and melodic disco deep cuts were chugging along at a steady pace. The couple dozen people already on the floor seemed to be having a good and chill time nodding and grooving along, though not quite dancing yet. The DJs matched their vibe behind the decks, taking turns doing the dirty work of keeping this party going until the rest of the crowd showed up with the energy. It was alleged to be a sold-out show, which was hard to imagine given how sparsely attended these Friday night parties are reputed to be. When I told my friend earlier in the day that I was going, he went as far as to imply that I might be making a mistake. “It’s always a bunch of twenty-year-olds who found out about it on TikTok.” Noted.

I greeted a couple of my friends who had arrived before me and noted that CCL was hanging back as Physical Therapy leaned in towards the CDJs. Excusing myself briefly, I took advantage of the moment to approach the booth. “Can I tell you a story?” I asked. To which they responded affirmatively.

“Do you remember at Primavera Sound in 2022, when the Boiler Room stage collapsed the night before you and Physical Therapy were supposed to play?” I asked again.

Their eyes lit up with recognition as they responded “Of course!”

“Well, that was the first time I tried to see you play. Since then, I’ve bought and had to give away tickets to your last several appearances in New York. I went to your Sunday R4R club night at Tresor the last time I was in Berlin but had to leave because my friend and I were simply too tired from being at Berghain two nights prior, and, just two weekends ago, missed almost your entire set at Sustain because we were chilling too hard in the hammocks at camp. But now I’ve finally made it, so thank you for listening.” At that, they cupped their hands to their face to cover a chuckle as their bleached blonde hair and gray eyes shimmered with laughter inaudible over the sound of music.

“Well I’m glad you finally made it!” they said as I performed a little prayer hands bow before waving and backing away towards my friends.

I looked around for the people who I came with and upon seeing none of them, I made moves towards the smoking patio. They were there, waiting for me as I stepped into the balmy, Indian summer night. “Where’s M?” I asked as I joined them on the bench. M was a close high school friend of Physical Therapy’s, now well into one of those successful careers requiring a postgraduate degree from a fancy school. We’d told him to ask for a spot on the list, but, having not come to a show in so long, he was too bashful to do so. But this was the last hurrah at Nowies and he’d come prepared, wearing his faded Allergy Season hoodie (Physical Therapy’s record label)—the surest sign of a longtime fan. Even though he’d been told the event was sold out, they eventually let him pay money to enter the still mostly empty club. Go figure.

Not a minute later, he appeared outside as well, with Physical Therapy in tow. As they shared smokes while catching up on the opposite side of the patio, their body language indicated that whatever reservations M had had about the state of their relationship were completely unfounded. Old friends are real friends—a fact that straight men in particular tend to forget between hangs.

Cigarettes done, Physical Therapy returned to his post and M rejoined the rest of the group as S appeared through the door, followed by another friend I had forgotten was coming, as yet another friend pulled up beneath us on his bicycle. An unexpected reunion! As we gathered our group and established the context of where we’d all been and were planning on going for the rest of the evening, the music started heating up a bit. “It was empty when I was dancing in there,” informed S, “but just as I was leaving, there was a rush of 20-somethings coming onto the dance floor so it’s probably pretty good by now…” That was all we needed to hear.

Back inside, the vibe had shifted for the better. The floor was not quite packed, but there were dancers from wall to wall in both directions and the music had progressed to some kind of funky, groovy, melodic tech house-type thing. (Honestly, that might not be an accurate descriptor as I am terrible with genres, but the important part is that the party was now bumping.) We shuffled our way through many gaggles of 20-year-olds to our perch at the front left and settled into my preferred spot, between the speaker and the lighting control panel.

As we started dancing, my wife turned to me and asked if M was wearing earplugs. I turned to see him dancing directly in front of the speaker, with no earplugs in sight. I asked if he had any and he said no, so I told him where to find them in the cubby at the far right end of the bar. He returned a minute later and flashed a thumbs up, ears aglow in safety orange. Now we could get to work.

I hand M a bottle of poppers, partly just to see how he would react. I was chuffed that he knew exactly what to do and made no attempts at drinking them. It was then that I knew that he could hang. The music continued to crest as the selections became closer and closer to what we now refer to as a “return to the Grove,” in reference to the ascendant outdoor stage at Sustain Release. Think acid house and techno with a hard groove, unexpected melodies, and a small, but mighty dose of pop edits. After a while, B turns to me and says, “They’re flying the spaceship, but doing so carefully” and I agree with him. We were clearly taking off, but it wasn’t clear if they were really planning to take us all the way out of the atmosphere. Until they did.

There’s a secret third state between clearing out the sludge and riding high on euphoria that is only accessible during certain types of sets. Most house and techno music is produced at about 127 BPM give or take 3 beats. Whereas Djrum finds interest in speeding things up into DnB territory (about 170 BPM), I find that many of my favorite DJs go the opposite direction, slowing it down just a little bit to about 115-120 BPM. This gives the music an ineffably psychedelic edge that feels especially trippy when you’re hearing songs you know and love. CCL and Physical Therapy are too versatile to be typecast, but tonight, this was their bag.

In this zone, when you close your eyes and let the sound overtake you, you can enter what I sometimes refer to as the mind palace. A series of ever-expanding hallways and rooms covered in vaguely Aztec/Incan patterns that multiply with each step you take. It's kind of like playing Temple Run, but not a total waste of time. When running through the mind palace, one is neither elated—as you might be while peaking during a house music set, nor grinding through it—as with a techno set. Instead, you’re exploring the astral plane with no agenda and no care in the world. It’s a pretty great place to be on any given night and it was the perfect place for this particular night.

My wife and I had made a pact with B and A that we would try to be in bed by 4 AM, which at this point, felt like an impossibility given how much fun we were having. But every thought about that eventual future was taking me out of the present and causing me to miss what was happening in front of me, which was the whole reason for being here. Looking down at my watch, it was 2:18 AM. Still plenty of time to shut the fuck up and just enjoy the moment. And so I did.

The person running the lights was the same person doing them for Identified Patient and Djrum. They sensed that this party needed very little in terms of visual effects to keep it going. Just a few solid blue or purple color fills here and there, keep the fog at a reasonable level, and lay off the strobes. Utmost restraint. It was truly perfect and I told them as much—a compliment accepted with grace.

As a result of the lighting choices, the most consistent source of illumination throughout the night was the halogen lamp shining on the mixer for the DJs while casting an angelic glow upon their faces—like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. As I turned to face the room, I saw a sea of dark faces bobbing expressively, eating up what was being served as if we were a horde of raccoons visiting the porch of that one guy in the neighborhood whom everyone knows is always good for a scoop of kibbles around this time of night.

For the next hour, we were fully locked in. Leaving only for bathroom breaks and the occasional drink of water. Not everyone gets to be on the spaceship so you have to make the most of these moments when they happen. As 2 AM became 3 AM, the music swelled with confidence as they dropped hit after hit of songs I’d heard many times before but never bothered looking up the names of. By the time we peaked at around 3:20, I was ready to go until the end, but the opportune transition to a perfect dub edit of Sister Nancy’s downtempo reggae classic “Bam Bam” allowed us to assess the state of our bodies and accept that we would be better off going to bed. After all, there was a long weekend ahead of us.

After saying our goodbyes to all, we hopped in a car with B and A and headed back north towards Bed Stuy. By the time we got into bed and checked my watch, it was 4:10 AM. Close enough.

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The name refers to the Buddha’s diagnosis of the source of human suffering: Craving things we don’t have and being averse to the things we think we can’t tolerate distracts us from living in the moment and experiencing the world as it is in all its beauty, complexity, and horror. That together, both words contain “raving” and an anagram of “rave” in them feels like a fitting bit of serendipity. (I also like that it can be misread as “craving a version”, which I am sure has some deeper double entendre that will reveal itself in time.)

As a journalist, longtime raver, and a newly-practicing insight meditator, my work cuts to the essence of living with intent and purpose. Cultivating awareness and mindfulness is not limited to the meditation cushion and neither is this blog.

Not all (or perhaps even most) of the topics I cover will be about raving or buddhism—although those wells run particularly deep. At its core, much like meditation, raving is about pushing the physical and mental limits of the body in order to become open to the present as it is. To that end, activities like long distance running, creating art, and even gardening have more to do with the practice of raving than putting on a little outfit and going for a night of dancing. It’s all about intention.

Maybe this feels like a stretch right now, but hopefully, it will make more sense the deeper we go. I look forward to sharing this journey with you all.

You can also follow along on Instagram, where I’ll be posting occasional memes in addition to promoting this project.

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I believe that good writing is meant to be read as widely as possible and as such, will never paywall my words—although some paid-member benefits are in the works for the near future. The topics I cover are not ones that most publications will pay for, but the experiences and research that go into producing these essays do not come cheaply. Your financial support makes it all possible. Upgrade in the next two weeks for the cost of a Sweetgreen salad and a kombucha to lock in this discounted rate in perpetuity. Thank you for reading!

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Sometimes you walk in the door and it’s like you’ve been here before. Because you have. Maybe not in this life or this consciousness, but there are just too many coincidences to ignore. You find yourself a party to a conversation you’ve had before, nodding along, chiming in as appropriate. You hit all the notes exactly as you remembered because the conclusions have already been drawn. There’s no use in determining when you first found yourself here because there is no answer besides the truth, which is not knowable in a manner you can comprehend. All the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips, but your phone has no reception. You accept it and move on.

When the music is hitting, there can be no questioning the primacy of the moment. Any attempt to understand it serves only to break its spell. The magic dissipates and you find yourself in a dark and stuffy room surrounded by sweaty strangers losing their minds. Best not to think. Just keep dancing. Close your eyes. You stop, you die.

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DJs are to be taken seriously, despite choosing to be known by names such as x3butterfly, Identified Patient, and Fart in the Club. There is no DJ named Unexpected Cheddar yet, but from the moment the phrase hits your ears, you are certain that there will be one someday, perhaps sooner than later. In the meantime, we make do with Physical Therapy b2b CCL at Nowadays.

You step out for air and remember you have a body as the sun hits your bare arms for the first time in hours. A gentle breeze dries the clamminess coating your limbs as a heady mix of tobacco and weed smoke, candy-flavored nicotine vapor, and designer perfume fills your nostrils. It doesn’t feel like 12:30 pm. It doesn’t feel like any time at all, really, but that’s what your watch is telling you.

Eating can be hard. Sometimes it’s easier to just sit with the hunger. But eventually, the calorie reserves run out and you are faced with the choice to either eat or leave. But leaving isn’t an option when the vibes are this good. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a Sunday morning such as this in a place where we used to have them so often. But there’s no need to dwell on the past for more than a moment because it always comes back around before you know it. Just enjoy being here now.

You go out back and look at the food truck menu. There are many options but only one you can imagine putting in your mouth. Fries are ordered. You feel an overwhelming fondness for the man behind the counter whose kind face you’ve seen dozens of times before and pay with a credit card, but decide to tip in cash. You only have $5 and the fries were $7. He expresses his utmost appreciation in the form of a big smile to go along with the beeper he hands you that will go off when the food is ready. You would have given more if you had it on you.

Your phone decides it’s time to work again for a few minutes as notifications for dozens of missed messages come pouring through the screen with timestamps from back hours ago—missives from an alternate reality left behind. So and so woke up tired and was wondering if it was still worth coming (it is). Such and such wants to know if anyone has a ticket to spare (they do). By the time you make it back inside, you hug the latter who found a ticket, but not the former, who was still too tired from the events of last weekend to go out again. A new message arrives from your wife. She thinks she just saw someone we think is annoying—but don’t actually know, recognize a pillar of the scene that we do know—who doesn’t know us—and that the interaction was “lol”. Your text about eating was finally sent, several minutes late. She responds that she is going to join you for fries as you continue standing and waiting for the buzzer to buzz.

Someone you briefly chatted with in line at the bar this morning ended up coming by the food cart as well. You earnestly compliment her boldness in wearing a Rolex in a place like this (36mm stainless steel Oyster Pertual with the date complication). She points out your Prada bucket hat in response. You’re not sure if this should be interpreted as a tit-for-tat exchange of snark or a moment of mutual recognition of each other’s game. You decide it doesn’t matter as she walks away and you spot your old friend from college, looking a bit lost on the other side of the vast yard. You call his name and he spots you, walking over, right as the buzzer goes off. Ding fries are done.

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You find a picnic table in the shade on which to sit and eat and admire the way the crisp, herbed shell gleams against the high noon sun, feeling the heat of the oil on your fingers. Hot enough to burn your tongue. You dunk it in the small paper cup overfilled with ketchup and eat it anyway. Upon meeting teeth, the crispy shell shatters, allowing steamy clouds of potato mash to escape their confines, coating your mouth in salty, fatty ambrosia. And yet, your stomach still does not want to eat them, no matter how loudly your muscles are begging to be fed.

Your wife arrives shortly thereafter and the three of you get to talking. As she begins debriefing your friend on the latest small-town gossip back home, the deja vu hits you like a grand piano falling out of the sky and onto your head. As the dust settles, tweety birds circle your head as you begin fishing the ivories out of your mouth, where you were sure there were teeth just moments ago. How else could you have eaten that fry? As reality begins to rezip around you, you realize it’s been entirely too long since you said anything so you begin chiming in at opportune moments, but it’s as if you’re reading off a script you’ve already rehearsed many times before. It doesn’t look like either of them has keyed in on this, but maybe that’s because they’ve also rehearsed it and are just committing to the bit. Crazier things have turned out to be true.

You look at your watch and realize it has been far too long since you were last on the dance floor. Only one hour remains in the set. Better get back inside.

It was already a pretty full floor when you left it an hour ago, but now it is as full as you have ever seen it. 2 pm on a Sunday. What a time to be alive! The plane had just left the runway when you last left the building, but now it was fully at cruising altitude. Djrum is at the controls, three turntables spinning at once, needles down on all of them as he fiddles with the mixer’s knobs and levers as if touching the body of a lover whose every secret he has come to know through decades of intimate shared experience.

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Most pilots try to fly with a steady hand and will go out of their way to avoid rough air and sharp turns. This is to help maintain their passengers’ collective illusion of safety and stability as they hurtle towards their destination in a glorified tin can moving at just under the speed of sound. But here is a man who flies for the sake of flying. He is a test pilot hellbent on pushing the plane to its physical limits just to see what might happen and he has no intention of catering to anyone’s comfort level—least of all his own. The plane banks and rolls, twisting and smashing through thunderheads, storm fronts, and updrafts as it ascends higher and faster until the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling and the atmosphere becomes too thin to sustain winged flight and plummets back towards Earth at frightening speed. We are just along for the ride.

We are approaching our final destination, but there’s limited visibility. Although we spent all morning at the front left of the dancefloor sandwiched between the speaker stacks and the DJ booth, the sheer number of new bodies coming into the space had pushed our crew to the middle, too far from the action. “Do you want to watch him land this plane?” I asked through cupped hands placed over my wife’s left ear. She told me to go ahead if I wanted, but that it didn’t feel worth the hassle to her. She had a point. I can’t remember the last time I saw the indoor space this crowded. It was now 20 minutes from the end of the set and barely anyone was hanging at the bar or waiting for the bathroom. I get back to dancing.

2:50 pm, read my watch. 10 minutes left. I turn to speak into another friend’s ear and this time it’s not a question: “I am going to watch him land this plane!” He responded that he would come with. So I set off, bouncing my way through the crowd, with him in tow, and also the rest of our crew.

You can tell a good dance floor from a bad one based on how freely one can move around. In all my years of raving, I have found that in almost every European or Asian club or festival I have been to, it doesn’t matter how crowded it is or how intoxicated the people are: one can effortlessly get from anywhere on the dance floor to anywhere else, just by dancing along to the beat as you move. Nobody owns any particular spot and no malice is assumed when drinks get spilled along the way as they often do. This is because we are truly sharing the space and as long as you behave predictably and respectfully, people will freely share whatever you need. Not mine, not I, not myself, as the Buddha said. This is rarely the case in America, even at parties with the most-selective door policies. I attribute this to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to share space.

Americans are taught from a young age that getting to a spot first means that it is your spot and you have every right to be there until you choose to leave it of your own accord.  We ingrain this into small children with games like “seat-check” and “backsies” (wherein kids lay claim to the right to return to their chair by yelling the word) and wildly offensive teasing phrased like “Indian giver” (which refers to the Native Americans who — having “given” their land rights to settlers who had asked for it in exchange for almost literally nothing because they had no conception of what that meant — had the gall to ask for some of it back, simply so that they may continue to exist).  And it is reflected in our policies, like the Homestead Acts, which encouraged Americans who were displeased with their current lot in life to move out west to literally stake a claim to the vast “unused” lands at no cost to them—other than what you paid to get there. “Sharing,” in this context, means that I have mine and you have yours, but we don’t step into each other’s unless invited to do so, irrespective of what you or anyone else may need or want. And if you challenge me, I will defend my space with elbows, feet, weaponized beverages, etc.1 That this mindset persists so strongly to this day in a society built on stolen land should come as no surprise. But that doesn’t make it any more tolerable—especially when you’re around people who purport to know better.

This afternoon was one of the rare exceptions where our entire group of about twelve people was able to slink our way from the middle to the front in just a few measures of music. From there, we watched as Djrum lit another joint, cued up the last of his tracks, and deployed the landing gear by slowly pulling the pitch faders down from where they’d been sitting at the top of their limits, back down to 0, before continuing their journey into negative territory. The frantic frothiness of the set began dissipating as a track that started squarely in drum and bass territory (170 beats per minute) morphed into a groovy techno beat (130bpm), before revealing itself as having been a dub song all along (90 bpm). The pitch fader on a Technics 1200 turntable only goes down to -8% so he eventually went fully manual, dragging his left fingertips across the grooves to slow the rotation further and further until finally, he reached over with his right hand and delicately pressed the giant Start/Stop button, causing the whole system to shudder to a stop with a final, emphatic wub.

Pandemonium, as the crowd erupts in cheers and applause—as grateful for witnessing the performance as we were for having survived it. There was no bow, nor was one expected. “One more song!” Someone yelled from behind. But there would be no encore. Once a plane lands, it needs a lot of time to be refueled, resupplied, and cleaned before it can safely take off again.

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As we walked away from where we’d tied up our jackets near the bar at the back of the converted basketball gym, my legs were still rubbery from the last bump. About seven of us stood at the back of the crowd, staring blankly at the pulsing light array hanging from the ceiling, waiting for one another to make the first move for what felt like entirely too long, until E’s booming voice cut the awkwardness with a question: “Did we forget how to rave?”

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I started going to raves in 2016 after some friends and I decided on a lark to see the LCD Soundsystem reunion tour at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. Although the big stages were the main attraction, we found ourselves repeatedly drawn toward the Bowers and Wilkins DJ tent on the opposite side of the festival. This was no small thing, given it was separated from the rest of the festival by a 20-minute walk along a narrow footbridge stretching over a yacht marina. It was there, on the last night of the festival, that we first experienced Lena Willikens in all her glasses-wearing, chain-smoking resplendence.1

Although I had been to a few club nights thrown by friends of friends in the Portland electronic music scene and had seen Pitchfork-famous electronic music artists like Four Tet and Todd Terje perform in local venues and festivals, I’d never intentionally sought out a DJ-driven techno experience up to this point. I must confess, I found the whole concept a bit cringe at the time. Why would I pay money to see someone play someone else’s songs when I could see real live musicians perform their own art for the same price of admission? I wasn’t searching for an answer to this question when it came to me.

Willikens played for two hours, of which I only caught the latter half when our friends J and S texted the WhatsApp group saying that we could not afford to miss what was happening. Techno is easy to mock because it kind of all sounds the same—to the point where even a seasoned fan of the genre would have a hard time explaining in words what makes a “good” song better than a boring one. Although much of what Willikens played was technically techno, none of it could be mistaken for anything other than what it was. Synthesized melodies and distorted vocal samples layered over analog percussion, mixing into hip-hop-inspired breakbeats backed by wet and juicy acid riffs. If that sentence meant something to you, then you know why it hit. For everyone else, allow me to quote another friend who I recently discovered also had their first techno experience at Willikens’s hands: “I was like ‘Cool, my life is different now.’”

I cannot claim to be an expert on this topic, but for me, the line that divides partying from raving is painted by vulnerability. In the hands of an experienced DJ, the songs being played are unlikely to be familiar and you may never reencounter them thereafter. But none of that matters because it is really just about the vibe. The sensations that arise as sound meets body feel eternally familiar. All expectations and desires for what could be melt away as one becomes absorbed in the present moment, opening fully to the DJ. In this state, a dancer’s movements become an instinctual, involuntary reaction to the music. You could call it a trance, but this implies a directionality in the relationship between DJ and dancer that doesn’t quite capture the full truth. Although the selector controls the music, the dancer’s sustained attention is just as important a part of the equation. When all of this comes together among a critical mass of people on the same dancefloor, we are raving.

Raving is neither achievable, nor necessarily desired by any given combination of DJ, dancer, and party. Raving is not about trying to have a good time. It is not about blowing off some steam. It is not an excuse to get blasted on drugs. (Although it can consist of and often includes all of the above.) It is about being completely present in the moment as it is unfolding among others going through the same experience.

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Fast forward to September 2023. I am at a summer camp in the Western Catskills with some 1500 other people attending an independent electronic music festival that I describe as homecoming for the New York rave scene. After what has already been an indescribably transcendent weekend, Lena Willikens and longtime collaborator Vladimir Ivkovic are preparing to take over the decks at 2AM—the second-to-last and prime timeslot of the entire festival. They were playing at the outdoor stage, situated in a clearing amongst the pine trees bordering the camp’s boating lake and tenting area. It was a clear night, which meant the air was cold, causing steam to rise from the lake. I was with a few members of our crew on the other side of the lake, waiting for someone to return from the bathroom when their set began. Even from across the water, we could sense that the vibe had shifted.

We carefully crossed the floating bridge to meet up with our friends, each wobbly step bringing us closer to our destiny. As we approached the opposite bank, I turned around from my position at the front of the group to snap a blurry picture of the world as I knew it, before what was about to transpire.

I could describe what happened next in words, but it wouldn’t do you any good. You had to have been there. Especially since the stage’s recording equipment had somehow failed to capture a single minute of the three-hour set. I later spoke with the tech in charge of running it and he lamented that power stoppages throughout the evening had led all the other set recordings to cut in and out, but this was the only one that completely disappeared into the ether. A couple of months later, I ran into Ivkovic at a different party and told him the news. “Good,” he responded. “I am glad the recording doesn’t exist.” He continued, saying something along these lines: People think they can stay home and listen to the stream and get the experience, but this is not true. You must make the effort, the same as all others involved. It is better when you contribute.

This year’s iteration of the homecoming festival felt different. In particular, my Friday night suffered from a failure to launch that no amount of changes to scenery or consumption habits could overcome. Finally, around 3AM, after a while spent wandering aimlessly alone, I found a group of my friends congregating by the fire pit outside the main stage—a children’s basketball gym that’s been lined with anti-fatigue mats across the court; LED beams, lasers, and industrial fans across the ceiling; and a Funktion One speaker stack looming in each corner. After a few minutes spent catching up, we decide it’s time to check out what’s happening inside.

Holding our jackets in our arms, we insert our earplugs and follow each other into the back of the crowd, taking in the pulsing lights, music, and bodies. Skee Mask is doing his thing, which means different things on different nights, but tonight, for now, it means relentlessly pounding techno—the kind that normies make fun of for all sounding the same. I can tell it’s the good kind, but can’t tell you why. However, it’s too quiet in the back. I make gestures towards the bar, where we’ll be able to leave our jackets, freeing us to move into the mix.

We now find ourselves returning to the beginning of this story and it’s time to face the question: “Did we forget how to rave?”

Chortling at the thought, I snapped out of whatever funk had overtaken me and led our little crew towards the front right of the room, where I knew the lights to be dim and the sound overpowering. As we drew closer, the bassline became louder, became felt, became embodied. We reached a pocket of space just a few feet from the speakers and, in a literal sense, got to work.

Closing my eyes, I see a gooey globe of light, pulsating and shedding trails of color in time to the music as my head begins nodding along. My legs hone in on the same frequency, bouncing from foot to foot in time with the bassline, hips swinging in tow. A synthetic snare crashes into the mix and my fists are pumping to their rhythm as if punching a speedbag. The goey globe collapses in on itself, leaving a gaping hole in its wake and I jump in after it, digging deeper and deeper with no bottom in sight. Each beat dredges out more sludge, more dirt, clearing the path for more digging, like snaking the drain of my soul. More bouncing, more bobbing, more punching. The song changes seamlessly every 2-4 minutes and my movements adjust accordingly. My closed eyes can’t see if others are doing the same, but they don’t need to because I can feel the vibe is all around me. We are raving.

My friend J has described raving as being coextensive with meditating, but I never fully grasped the truth in that statement until this weekend. Above all, they share the characteristic of having a goal that is achievable only through letting go of your desire to achieve it. Our only role is to be present and aware so that we can recognize it when it comes. This is easier to do when we put ourselves in a semi-monastic environment designed to facilitate the experience. Moreover, there are many different expressions of this goal that can only be achieved through different kinds of practice. The aforementioned description of raving is just one among many that I’ve personally experienced. It just happens to be the kind that I feel most prepared to articulate. It is based on my personal experiences and not meant to be prescriptive of how others might feel. That said, allow me to talk some shit.

Raving is as much about hedonism and feeling good as meditation is about becoming a more productive member of a capitalist society. Which is to say, not at all. This is the source of the tension that exists between the identity of “raver” by those who practice raving and the popular connotation of the label in the broader culture. This is not to imply that a “real” raver holds any moral superiority over someone who macrodoses molly at Electric Zoo, but only one of these types of people could do what they do while also being the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Now to finally answer E’s question: Yes. I forgot how to rave.

Part of this had to do with the fact that I’m now a meditator. While I am more cognizant of my awareness when I am aware, this has ironically made it more difficult to actually be aware because there’s this extra layer of being aware that I am not currently aware that needs to be disentangled before I can become aware. Part of this had to do with the fact that last year’s festival was so indescribably brilliant that it was difficult not to cast aspersions towards every little difference I encountered. Things like expanding the capacity of the outdoor stage and changing the orientation of the lights in the indoor stage felt like an affront to my memory of the perfect weekend I was not having this year—even though it obviously had nothing to do with me. But in the end, if the company and music are good, and your mind is set just right, none of that matters. You start again as if you’d never left.

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The first and only time I ran a half marathon was in my senior year of high school. It was during the last cross country meet of the season against our crosstown rivals, which I was attending, but barred from participating in. I didn’t intentionally set out to do it, but looking back, I don’t know that I could have if I had.

Two weeks prior, I was doing a training run with the team along our regular route. It was a hot and sunny fall day, so we left our shirts trackside before departing. Beginning at the high school’s football field, we crossed campus and scurried over El Camino Real — the busy four-lane thoroughfare marking the boundary between the town of Palo Alto and Stanford’s Campus. We then wound our way past the sun-drenched athletic practice fields, grand administrative buildings with terra cotta tiled roofs and sandstone facades, through the middle of the vast and brutalist student quad, and up a steep, tree-lined hill before arriving at the recursively named Lake Lagunita — which was really more of a dried-out hay field that only occasionally had some water in it. Depending on the mileage target for the day, we would do anywhere between one and four laps around the half-mile dirt trail tracing its circumference. This day, we were planning on just one easy lap before heading back the way we came, but it was not to be.

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We crested the hill leading up to the lake, taking in a vast and familiar view of golden grass waving in the wind, surrounded by dark oak trees along the edge, set against a blue sky streaked with a smattering of white clouds, framed by the green hills beyond. Typical California stuff. In the midst of all this however, an unexpected figure punctuated the middle of the scene. In what would have been the deepest part of the lake sat an abandoned golf cart. There was no thought or discussion to be had. We ditched the route and stomped through the knee-high grass to investigate this new development.

We arrived at the cart and I immediately clocked that the keys were in the ignition. Imagine yourself as a 16- or 17-year-old. Have you seen enough, or are you getting behind the wheel? I learned then that I was in the latter category. Which led to the discovery that the vehicle was very much operational, with plenty of gas in the tank. A friend joined me riding shotgun and we sped off through the lake bed towards the lowest point of the trail where we could potentially rejoin the paved road. A handful of our other, better-adjusted or less-adventurous (depending on how you look at it) teammates watched us for a minute before jogging back to the trail to resume their run.

After a bumpy traverse through the gopher-mound-ridden lake bed, we made it to the relatively smooth dirt track and somehow managed to scale the steep hill leading up to the wider, double-track portion of the trail. Most of our fellow runners were going counterclockwise around the lake as I drove clockwise, leaving plenty of space to pass. By this time, the girls’ training run had also arrived and, in my recollection, were extremely impressed by our antics. Or aghast. (Not sure if I could tell the difference between those reactions at that age.) In any case, a couple of our friends running towards us stopped mid run and burst out laughing upon recognizing the situation. I braked hard, skidding to a stop and my copilot invited them into the rear-facing seats on the back as we resumed our joyride towards the road giggling all the way.

After a harrowing descent down the rather steep and bumpy trail out of the lake, we made it back onto pavement, in the loading area behind a nearby residential hall. Unfortunately, a few facilities workers happened to be on a smoke break and we were immediately confronted to explain ourselves. Apparently, it was obvious that two shirtless teenage boys weren’t meant to be operating a Stanford-owned golf cart. We opted instead to abandon ship, leaving the keys in the cart, running off into the crowded quad as he quixotically demanded we stop.

Having evaded capture, we figured that we had also evaded consequences. After all, we did the university a solid by recovering a missing vehicle and restoring it to the roadway. Having reunited with the rest of the team at the track, we were already reminiscing, recounting, and joking to that effect. The other shoe wouldn’t drop until tomorrow’s practice.

Apparently, someone on the team who had witnessed our joyride had decided that this behavior was untoward and that the perpetrators ought to be held to account. Which is how my friend and I found ourselves talking to the coach before practice.

Coach Joe — or simply “Joe,” as he was more commonly known — was new to coaching cross country and track, having graduated from college only a few years ago and moved back to Palo Alto even more recently. Not too long before that, he was a student and star athlete at our high school. All of which is to say, he shared a familiarity and camaraderie with his athletes that made him feel like “one of the guys” and also undermined his stature as an authority figure.

I don’t remember too much about the specifics of the conversation Joe pulled us into, but I do remember feeling like he was less upset about the transgression itself than with the fact that he now had to do something about it. We had left him with “no choice,” but to suspend us from the last meet of the year. As someone who had only started running with the team last spring as a forcing mechanism to spend less time with some deadbeats I’d fallen in with, this was of little consequence to my running ambitions. My co-conspirator was somewhat more competitive and may have done okay though, so I felt for him. (The girls were entirely spared.) Regardless, Joe clarified that we would still be allowed to attend the meet to support our teammates and warm up with the crew as usual.

On the day of the meet, I was in a bit of a funk. We got off the school bus and proceeded to the rubber track surrounding their football field to stretch and warm up. Jogging along with my teammates, I felt my mood begin to lift in equal proportion to the amount of sweat beading down my skin. By the time the warm up run had finished, I felt I was only getting started. So I left my shirt in the stretching area before setting back out onto the three and a half mile race course, running in the opposite direction of the racers, in the dead grass bordering the asphalt walking paths. The heats passed me by in successive packs. The fast girls, followed by the medium girls, followed by the slow girls. Then a lull. Then the fast guys… By the time the slowest guys were heading towards me, the sun was starting to set and I realized that I had run the course three times over, which was already longer than I had ever run before. At the end of this third lap, I wound my way back to the track, but I still wasn’t done.

After a lifetime plagued by shin splints, which returned with a vengeance when I started running track earlier that year, I found the solution while reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It makes the case that everything we know about running footwear is wrong-headed, marketing-driven BS designed to sell shoes that promote comfort (and injury) over fitness and health. And that minimalist shoes — or no shoes at all — was the way to go if you want to avoid injury. By the end of the track season, pretty much everyone on the team had read it and, based on the proliferation of Vibram FiveFinger toe shoes and similarly minimal footwear, around half of us bought the premise completely, including me. Regardless of whatever controversies surrounding the book’s claims may arisen following its bestseller status, I remain confident to this day that switching to minimalist shoes helped heal my shin splints. But as anyone who’s tried running long distances in toe shoes can tell you, they are as uncomfortable to run in as they are for a spectator to behold.

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With the first 10 miles down, my legs were still feeling fresh and the endorphins coursing through my body were pushing me further, if not faster. But my poor toes were screaming for relief from the pokey neoprene seams surrounding them on all sides. So off came the shoes and off I went, this time barefoot, going around the track. With all the heats finished and the cooldowns completed, I was the last man running. A few laps in, some of my friends took notice and, matching my slowed, but steady cadence, asked what I was doing. I told them I was going on mile 12 and thinking about doing a full 13 miles if time allowed and they seemed excited by the prospect.

Unlike with a race, there was no line to cross and no crowds to cheer. But a few friends joined me as I approached the end of my twelfth and final lap and a few others clapped for me and slapped my back as I rejoined the group in their stretching area. It wasn’t much, but it meant more to me than any of the roughly 10th-from-last place finishes I’d racked up during the rest of the season.

An immense runner’s high kept me from feeling the blisters in various states of development and rupture on my toes and soles as I lay on my back, staring into the pink streaks of cloud across the purple, early evening sky. I reflected on how prior to last March, I had never run more than a single continuous mile. Yet here I was, 8 months later, having completed a half-marathon on a lark. And really, I only stopped because the bus was leaving soon.

We are conditioned to believe that we are only capable of the things we’ve already accomplished or have painstakingly planned to accomplish. If you had asked me if I thought I was capable of running a half marathon earlier that week, or even an hour before I started, I would have confidently denied it and told you I had no intention of finding out. The goal was never there to begin with, yet the physical ability was within me all along. Perhaps it was the spontaneity of the feat that rendered it achievable.

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For most of my adult life, I’ve marked achievements by giving into my most status-conscious acquisitive urges. I rewarded my first real promotion with a “buy-it-for-life” leather jacket that I had coveted for months, but never fit right. Then there was the vintage Omega watch commemorating the sale of the startup I worked at—lost at a TSA checkpoint less than a year later. And then there’s the Leica film camera that I bought to celebrate another promotion, which I seldom use because I’m too self-conscious to carry it in public. Even if none of these items are of much use to me, I joke that I’ll know I’ve lived a good life when fistfights break out among the shoppers of my estate sale. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking more about what a life well-lived and devoid of ironic detachment might look like amidst living it. I’ve caught fleeting glimpses of insight, but it wasn’t until I visited Bread and Puppet Theater that I understood what it might feel like to experience it for oneself.

Bread and Puppet is a leftist puppetry company based in Glover, Vermont that hosts donation-based performances on their farm during summer months and tours the country at other times of the year in eclectically-painted school buses. True to their name, they serve fresh-baked whole-grain bread with every performance. Their unique, hand-hewn, folkloric aesthetic is propagated across Vermont and beyond by a prolific woodblock printing operation. Once you recognize their work, you begin to see it — and its imitations — everywhere.

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Eventually, you think you might want to get over there and see what all the fuss is about. Then The New York Times publishes a profile reminding you that the company’s founder and artistic director is turning 90, so you’d better go and see it sooner than later. Which is exactly how we found ourselves driving towards the Northeast Kingdom a few weekends ago.

The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus had already started by the time we pulled into the meadow that served as the fairgrounds parking lot. The brilliant summer sun shone unobstructed on the sizable crowd dotting the hillsides of the natural amphitheater. At the focal point of the parabolic mound was a painted school bus serving as the backdrop to the performance stage. We grabbed our picnic blankets out of the car and walked through the field, past the white big-top tent where harried performers searched for the next skit’s relevant accouterments through myriad stacks of puppets, props, and tapestries piled high like rugs in an antique store. Finally, we passed the orchestra’s canopy tent off to stage right, before setting our picnic blankets down just a few feet up the slope of the amphitheater.

For the next hour, performers dressed in muddied hiking shoes and once-white workwear, sun-faded and soiled to a nostalgic ecru wore, carried, or operated oversized papier mâché masks, props, and puppets representing laborers, fascists, children, mothers, soldiers, animals, skeletons, and myriad sprites and spirits — all painted in a manner evoking European folk art. They danced in haphazard unison, singing songs with echoes of socialist hymns and pantomiming circus-inspired acts—such as the flying trapeze. The whole production had the free-flowing, unpredictable feel of a campfire showcase and to be perfectly honest, it was a bit lost on me in the dizzying heat of the late-July sun. But what I will never forget is the image of 90-year-old artistic director Peter Schumann watching his creative vision unfold onstage.

Without realizing it, we had sat almost directly behind Schumann. He too was dressed in ecru, leaning back in a white plastic folding chair while puffing on the chewed-up remains of a large cigar resembling the tattered, wide-brimmed leather hat atop his shockingly full head of long, white hair. He sat there for the entire hour, save for one sketch about two-thirds of the way through when he stood up in his worn-down Birkenstock clogs to lead the entire troupe in a thespian seventh-inning stretch of sorts, barking calisthenic commands in an emphatically brusque German accent.

After the circus concluded, we picked up our blankets to take to the car, making a pit stop to browse the most functional-looking of the painted school bus, which had transformed into a pop-up retail operation for prints, tapestries, zines, and other purchasable ephemera. The prices were low, almost questionably so. $2 cards, $3 zines, $20 poster-sized prints, $90 fabric hangings the size of a window sash. I resisted the temptation.

After stashing our stuff, we turned around and followed a mowed path up the hill, just to the right of where we’d been sitting. Cresting the climb, we were greeted by a wooden shack as an overwhelming garlic scent with yeasty undertones permeated the air. This was the service area for the eponymous bread: As brown as the stained wood of the shack, densely crumbed, packed with seeds, served thinly sliced with a generous smear of garlic aioli that was more garlic than aioli. The very picture of health food. As we accepted our portions, Schumann flanked us from behind and entered the shed, drinking from a blue can of Harpoon IPA as he inspected the slices. Finding them to his liking, he joined our procession as we followed signs pointing towards the museum and “cathedral” on the other side of the road.

We all watched as an older woman stiffly carrying a beach chair wandered off to the right when she should have gone left. Schumann turned to us, muttering, “She has gone the wrong way, but soon she will realize.” Indeed, she reached the end of the mowed area and, rather than turn around, cut through the unmowed field of tall, yellowing grass punctuated by stalks of chalky-green milkweed that had just finished blooming. As we all prepared to cross the road together, troupe members hollered to each other from both sides of the road: “Schumann crossing!”

He peeled away on the other side of the road as we continued into the museum, which was housed across multiple floors of an old dairy barn. Inside, the ceilings are as low as the exhibits are dense. The exhibition hall consists of a series of cow pens that have been converted into oversized dioramas stuffed with puppets and props from past performances. Every surface housed a sculpture or painting — or was itself painted with some inscription, pattern, or scene. It was dizzying being surrounded from all sides by such pure and earnest creative expression. From this state of overstimulation emerged an understanding of what was going on here.

The overwhelming abundance of works packed so densely begs one to question their existing definitions of art. Is this “outsider art”? If so, what is it outside of? What is the purpose of art, if not to make an observer feel something? Around the time I started becoming aware of these thoughts, I wandered out of the exhibit, landing back in the attached gift shop, where I encountered the cheap art manifesto.

Taken as a whole, Bread and Puppet is a priceless expression of the importance of human life and the joy of living in a world where wonder is possible. Yet any individual piece of the project is priced at more or less its cost of production. If a clumsy museum visitor’s overstuffed backpack were to take out a part of a sculpture, any member of the company could have it fixed within hours using a few cents worth of glue, paper, and paint. There is no reason why it can’t go on forever, regardless of who is at the helm. And yet, as the Times profile from last summer explains, it is hard to imagine that being anyone but Schumann. Every aspect of the performance, the art, and the property itself reflects his unique personality and creativity. Conversely, his experience of it all is one of visible joy — despite the often tragic themes and stories he addresses in his art.

After we finished at the museum, the second performance began in front of the adjacent “Paper Maché Cathedral,” which from the outside, looks like any old barn, save for the solar panels and roughly hand-painted signage on its standing seam roof. The first two musical performances took place outside with the audience gathered around the performers singing in front of the building’s closed main entrance. The whole scene had the feeling of a spontaneous street busking. We were then led into the building, which was as shocking an experience as any part of the actual performance.

While the interior of the museum was still architecturally recognizable as a dairy barn, the Cathedral was not. True to its name, every visible aboveground surface was decorated as ornately as any baroque chapel. The dim lighting only added to the intrigue as sculptures and frescoes materialized out of the shadows in any direction you looked.

After we took our seats, Schumann stood up from his seat near the back of the bleachers and gave a brief introduction explaining the cantata’s origin. It was originally written in the 1970s in response to the war in Vietnam, but recently updated to reflect our current times. Mysterious figures moped in the shadows as dancers and puppeteers swayed to the sounds of nontraditional percussion and atonal wails emanating from stringed instruments and woodwinds, occasionally accompanied by operatic singing. Each act was introduced by the somber reading of a different Palestinian civilian’s firsthand account of the ongoing war in Gaza. Many of these civilians were killed before their words could ever be translated into English. It was, to put it lightly, a monumental bummer.

But there was an undercurrent of hopefulness running throughout the whole thing. Bombs and soldiers kill, but it is in our nature to survive. It’s hard to say for certain, but I think the message from the final scene depicted below is that people can overcome as surely as green plants grow. Or maybe something less saccharine. Despite the dour tone of the performance on the whole, upon its conclusion, the audience erupted in an emotive standing ovation lasting several minutes.

As we filed out of the Cathedral and back across the street towards the parking area, the late afternoon sun was dulled by previously invisible Californian wildfire haze hanging over the horizon. The previously verdant meadow was recast in nostalgic sepia tones as if anticipating a tropical sunset. The alarming circumstances leading to the haze’s arrival sat at the back of my mind, yet at this moment, I couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of the result.

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Up to this point, the majority of my culinary experiences happened at home or in Chinese restaurants—which, at the time, all shared a similar menu regardless of geographic location. On the rare times when we would branch out, we usually ended up at Miyake—the long-shuttered, cheap and popular Japanese place in downtown Palo Alto—or at a Fresh Choice—the defunct chain of Californian salad bar buffets. Even while traveling abroad, we usually slept on the sofas and floors of my parents’ far-flung college friends—who also cooked in their flats and ate at Chinese restaurants menus similar to those near our own home. But in a world without smartphones, we often ended up eating what was convenient to our immediate surroundings—even if my mom would’ve preferred otherwise. That’s how my sibling and I, cranky from a full day of being marched through halls hung with art we were too young to appreciate, ended up being seated in a museum restaurant for what was to be our most expensive western meal to date.

I can’t remember anything about the menu other than what I ordered: Salmon with zucchini pasta. It sounded like something I could get at the Olive Garden, which was the epitome of European cuisine to me at the time.1 When the plate arrived, I was pleasantly surprised by the crispness of the pan-seared skin—having only ever eaten steamed, whole fish with slimy skin up to this point. But I was absolutely bowled over by the “pasta.”

“Zucchini pasta” was not a wheat-based pasta dressed with zucchini sauce, nor was it a flour-based noodle enriched with zucchini puree. The zucchini itself was the noodle. This realization hit me like hearing the punchline to the world’s funniest knock-knock joke (remember, I was nine). The verdant strands were lightly sautéed in a bit of butter and garlic and finished with a squeeze of lemon to tame their astringency without sacrificing texture. It was the perfect foil for the pink and fatty cut of fish—or they would have if I hadn’t finished the entire portion immediately. This became my first conscious memory of the pleasure of recognition while eating.

I have since felt more moments of transcendence while dining than I have with any visual artistic medium. The evanescent nature of eating commands my awareness into the present moment in a way that viewing a static painting or sculpture cannot. The experience changes from moment to moment, not just of the food and drink, but of the company and the surroundings. It all congeals into a single memory to be filed away under whatever feelings arose throughout the meal. Most end up somewhere between comforting and satisfactory and are rarely—if ever—recalled for further reflection. But every so often, I experience a meal that changes me.

A memorable meal opens my eyes to new possibilities and can challenge me to think deep thoughts. But the most affecting ones are just plain fun—like being served zoodles for the first time as a kid, a decade before plastic spiralizers became a thing. It doesn’t take a fancy chef in an expensive restaurant to get me there—although this potent combination hits more often than not. I’ve reached it in food stalls. And in the dine-in kitchen at a friend’s apartment. It can even happen on a weeknight, no-cook potluck. The magic lies in the unpredictable ineffability. Nonetheless, I feel increasingly compelled to try and eff it up2.

I don’t have a concrete plan here, other than to try and write some words worth sharing about memorable meals that I’ve had over the years. So let’s call it the first in a series. I look forward to sharing more soon.

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