Who's flying this plane? Djrum and Identified Patient play Nowadays
A Sunday morning at Nowadays Nonstop, featuring Djrum
You arrive at each new party with the context of every one that came before it. This time, when your new friend hands back the tiny little yellow bottle of amyl-nitrates just a little too forcefully and the fluid splashes onto your bare hand, you know you must immediately run to the bathroom to wash it off with plenty of warm soapy water. Or else the room will start spinning, your heart will begin racing at 200 bpm, and you will agonize over whether you should try and sleep it off or go to the hospital until the sun rises. Knowledge acquired the hard way, through lived experience, is embodied in a way that cannot be learned through reading or listening. In moments like this, it feels like coming full circle, returning to assure the prior version of yourself that didn’t know any better that things will be okay because this was the moment when you learned an important lesson. The result is a silent, internal chuckle shared between your inter-temporal selves as they finally understand the meaning behind this joke of cosmic proportion.
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.
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.
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.
Many states even have “stand your ground laws” which state that you are legally allowed to kill someone with a gun if they try and take your ground from you. Truly, the European mind cannot comprehend this insanity.