I miss last night already
Sunday at NY's newest party
New York has been pronounced dead more times than your average soap opera heroine. There are no more cool parties, allegedly; it died with Studio 54, with Area, Limelight, Tunnel, Paradise Garage, The Saint, Tuesday nights at BBar, Vandam at Greenhouse, Sunday nights at Hiro, Holy Mountain, and so on. Each new generation of partiers proclaimed that nightlife had died just as they arrived on the scene. You'd never experience Grace Jones being followed by someone carrying her coat for her (she hated coat check, and who doesn't, we stash our coats in crevices of a club in the dead of winter rather than waiting in neverending lines) or JFK Jr. waiting to get inside a club amongst a throng of patrons with coveted guest list spots or preening, chic wannabes or rich people willing to throw around money for access to cool artists and young hotbodies snorting the latest party drugs. The music pulsed more, the night had more energy when there wasn't a sea of losers holding their iPhone cameras at the DJ booth, recording moments to throw on social media for cool points, to prove to those who didn't get in that they mattered, to nobodies in the hometowns they abandoned that they were living lives better than you are in a flyover state with another kid on the way and divorce looming. The greatest time to be in New York is always the time when you're young and getting high off the city's possibilities.
There are, of course, phoneless clubs like Basement or Nowadays that lure the city's legendary DJs and hottest international imports, but on Sunday at Signal, the new East Williamsburg club that resembles an art installation from the outside, created something missing from even the hottest of underground party scenes — history. For the third installment of the somewhat monthly party Spaghetti Strap, brainchild of resident DJ SPRKLBB and producer Ben Richardson, partygoers gathered to watch New York icons Nita Aviance (one half of nightlife staple The Carry Nation and Beyoncé-approved with an official "Break My Soul" remix) and Juliana Huxtable (multi-hypenate visual and performance artist, currently top billed at every cool international festival or club while also commanding massive crowds at her New york parties) team up for the first B2B set. In a way, Aviance helped birth Huxtable in the early 2010s when she heard Huxtable DJing via her computer at The Cock and told her she needed to switch to CDJs and learn "how to really DJ." They've shared the same bill many times, but Sunday was their first official B2B, and the brand-new daytime party was to be their history-making moment.
Spaghetti Strap, which commences at 1 pm and goes till around midnight or longer if the carry is intense enough, began with Josh Steers on decks and a crowd of chic queers (exceptionally diverse in a spectrum of gender, sexuality and race, but to keep it 100, it's not giving Papi Juice, chile) assembled and grew the crowd to capacity by the time SPRKLBB and Detroit's own BEIGE linked up for a B2B. The set time for Aviance and Huxtable had been promoted as 8 pm, but the crowd had no idea the set had actually been moved to past 9 pm (Huxtable was rushing the airport) as they gathered around the DJ booth, pressed body to body in the packed club, dripping with sweat, and feeling a thick sense of anticipation usually felt with when for a global pop star begin their concert in a stadium. Per Signal's no phones policy, no one was at the ready with their camera phones waiting to document the moment (not even the extremely online Jordan Firstman, who'd been among the crowd since 5 pm), they were merely waiting for the music to shift, for the main event to start, for Aviance and Huxtable to appear behind the booth.
The party was so over capacity that I later discovered close friends had been dancing near me the entire day, that I even unexpectedly ran into the upcoming debut novelist I've had a crush on since seeing him at multiple parties with fierce door policies like Function and Zero Chill over the past few months and excitedly told him I'd just received a galley of his book. Despite Jay McInerney eulogizing the nightlife scene for New York in 2015, writers are still seen at the chicest spots in New York, and there's still a proximity to celebrities, real artists, and a dancefloor with electric, sexual tension. Learning that we'd still have time to kill, we slipped outside and finished my box of Parliaments (or I did, he rolled his own tobacco) and made our way back into the front left speaker of course, just in time for the mothers to arrive for their first-time-ever mother off. And as Aviance and Huxtable hopped on the decks with one another, sharing their own personal history with everyone whose own nightlife histories are permanently intertwined with over a decade of dance floors and makeouts and drug highs across New York and the globe, we all got to witness and dance to a magical moment that exists only within our minds, and not through grainy, poorly films vertical videos to scroll through on our phones in the Ubers and subway rides back to our respective homes. By the time Aviance played her remix of "We Belong Together," I thought I might be levitating off the dance floor. The party, originally scheduled to end at midnight, went well past 2 am. If you were there, you witnessed something iconic. If you weren't, don't worry, you'll be hearing about it in the same breath as someone declaring Sunday was the last time nightlife in New York was alive. They'll be wrong, of course, nighttime in New York will never die as long as the city is standing. See you at the next Spaghetti Strap.
LOVE. More of this writing, Ira.