lindy sleaze at dim mak tuesdays
A few weeks ago, Charli XCX hosted a birthday party at a bar in Los Angeles. Unless you were literally Billie Eilish or Sabrina Carpenter, you likely witnessed this party via photos taken by Mark "The Cobrasnake" Hunter: flash photos of party people, standing on a booth or a couch or something, screaming, drinking, making faces at the camera.
A Twitter user named "drew" hailed these photos as the return of "indie sleaze":
Brat Summer 2k24 is almost over, and it will likely transition to a subtly genocidal election autumn in the "zone of Pinterest", and at this point in time, we are all aware (I think) that "indie sleaze" wasn't "indie sleaze" at the time, but is rather a postmortem genre tag on an metropolitan music/social scene from two decades ago that was then called "electroclash," or perhaps "bloghouse" or, most accurately, just "hipsters."
But Twitter user drew isn't wrong. These photos evoke the photos taken at a weekly party in Los Angeles, often by that same Cobrasnake...a party called Dim Mak Tuesdays, which was hosted by Steve Aoki's record label, featured performances from Lady Gaga and Justice, was attended by Cory Kennedy and Kanye West, and had its signifiers disseminated worldwide via those white-hot flash-accented 'Snake pix, plus other Flickr-hosted snaps of similar quality.
I never went to this party. I was tooooo young! Ohhh just a little baby. That party was in its prime when I was in high school in the mid-'00s, so all I got to do was read about it in NYLON and scroll through photos on various blogs. It looked so fun! Sweaty party people, all smushed together, listening to what was assuredly awesome music, smoking Parliaments, taking pictures on point-and-shoot digicams or now-prehistoric cell phones. But I was sure that when I graduated from college, I could move to a city where a scene exactly like this would be waiting for me.
Alas, I emerged in New York in 2012 with a mountain of student loan debt and a 9-to-5 job that felt too important to fuck up by partying on weekdays. I wasn't the world's most boring New York 20something, but I look back on my nightlife performance at this time and sigh deeply. If there were cool parties, I could not find them, and it was way more economically sound to really dig in at my favorite dive bar, where shots and beers were $5 but also free if you were nice to the barkeep, and where I had the nickname of "Taco Molly" (I once promised to buy the whole bar tacos, and never did.)
ANYWAY this is all to say that, when I saw on Instagram that Dim Mak Tuesdays were coming back—Aoki resurrected it in 2016, and there was another one-off party at a warehouse-y venue in late 2022 co-hosted by the Indie Sleaze IG account runner, but now it would return as a monthly party at the very Cinespace location of its origins—I was stoked to try my luck at the indie sleaze redux. I'm more of a club kid at 34 than I was at 24, which is a special lunacy we can get into in a different blog post. And even if this party failed to be as fun as the photos looked to me back when Bush II was in office, it'd still be a neat experiment to undergo for this blog you are reading right now ("Everything is copy" - Nora Ephron).
The first thing I realized after securing tickets to this event is that Cinespace, the dank-looking brickwalled club of yore, wasn't technically Cinespace anymore, even though it was advertised as such. It's the same building, but the bar is now The Bourbon Room, a chic low-lit lounge with a performance space. I'd been there the previous year to see a Girl God show, and it's nice in there...too nice for the PBR-swilling masses?
I convinced my husband Chris, who is an angel, to join me in this escapade. This is where I say that I actually had to stay sober for this night, because I had an early and important doctor appointment in the morning. Is that indie sleaze? I am sorry if it is not. I love a good party favor when the time is right, but like Myrtle Wilson's sister Catherine in The Great Gatsby, I feel just as good on nothing at all—once I went to see James Murphy and 2manydjs play records in Despacio, their hifi surround sound rig, and I had so much fun that I actually got called out by a stranger for drinking from the same single can of beer for three hours straight.
The Dim Mak Tuesdays flier said the party went from 10pm - 2am, so we showed up right as doors were supposed to open. A Dim Mak-branded inflatable graced the door of the bar, and a medium-sized line snaked around the building. We waited for 20 minutes, long enough for me to get pouty. I hate waiting in lines and would probably make a deal with God to die 5-10 years sooner if it meant I never had to wait in a line again. No one was moving at all, and I think they just wanted to reach critical mass to look extra in-demand for social media (tellingly, 2 minutes before we were let in, a lady walked down the length of the line with her phone aloft, taking the classic look at this long line shot. I've been a videographer, I know this game!!). Pissed, I took a photo with a garbage truck:
Finally we were let in. The bar filled up quickly. No PBR cans to be seen, everything was decanted into elegant plastic cups. The crowd skewed a bit male, a lot of guys in graphic t-shirts and hoodies, shiny gold lettering, skeleton wearing kimono, that type of thing. I clocked a small group of dudes who were wearing fashions I'd associate more closely with "downtown New York"—one of them in a rumpled jacket and skinny tie, like if Mark Ruffalo decided to become The Dare, another in a black blazer, crisp white shirt, Off-White brand yellow belt, and a red ski cap. This was either inspired cosplay or accidental recurrence; an element of indie sleaze dressing that nouveau trendsters seem to forget is how often hipsters wore winter headgear at inopportune moments. Throw a rock at a party in summer 2008 and you would have hit a hipster in a knit beanie, who would have then probably said, "ow."
The first DJ on the bill was Dan Oh. The volume of the music was tentative at first, but it eventually began to rise to a level where you could feel the music enough to dance. Dan Oh introduced himself on the mic at one point and said he'd played this party 15 years ago, and it was past his bedtime. He started with some lightly zesty house stuff and then made it a little weirder, harder, and more '80s-as-'00s, in the bloghouse style to which I am accustomed.
When a blend got a little too choppy, he hopped back on the mic and said "I'm sorry...trainwreck city...." I actually love when a DJ set is not perfect, because it shows that a real person is up there at the decks. My friend Jackie, who among other things is a DJ, once shared a meme that I can't remember the exact content of, but it was something along the lines of "you can't get the blends you desire without the clanging you fear"...? A great DJ does not fear the clang. Ask not for whom the blend clangs, it clangs for thee.
But here is the molten core of my blog post, my personal raison d'bloguer. As Dan Oh played, and then Fashen took over, the music was loud and the beats were banging. The crescent-shaped space in front of the DJ booth was packed with people. And barely anyone was dancing. It looked like an indie rock show. It was a parking lot in there. I was mortified.
Now the headliner for this party was The Bloody Beetroots doing a DJ set. He was on last, and I am sure a lot of people were there specifically for The Bloody Beetroots, and wanted a good spot on the dance floor, and camped out accordingly. I'm not the Dance Police and can't arrest anyone for not grooving. But boy, does it feel fucking disrespectful to just stand on the dance floor and not react in any way to the folks who are cueing up music for you that you can dance to!
I was texting about this later with my friend Matthew and he wrote, "Something people leave out when they romanticize the 'indie sleaze' and blog house era - there’s a reason the Rapture wrote a song that goes “People don't dance no more / They just stand there like this / They cross their arms and stare you down / And drink and moan and diss." God, it was so dire, they had to invent the Rapture in order to get people to dance again ("I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell" - Christopher Walken).
It got so stifling and weird in the throng of not-dancers that Chris and I ended up squeezing on out of there. Lucky for us, there was another adjacent room where the music was playing just as loud as it was in front of the booth. The lighting was blue instead of red, and the AC felt cooler too. There were Persian-esque rugs on the floor, like it was an MTV Unplugged stage. Room to dance!!
We started getting down for real along with a couple of other good-vibed dudes. Now we were cooking. In truth, I have always appreciated a spacious dance zone over a crammed club, so I was probably kidding myself that I would have even enjoyed the original Dim Mak Tuesdays. There's a James Murphy quote in Meet Me In The Bathroom about how he wished he'd been around at Andy Warhol's Factory, but would have hated it at the time: "Oh, this is so boring and these people are so rude and what is that band the Under-somethings? They're so screechy."
Our corner of the bar started to gain some juice. Some fetching ladies came over to dance as well, probably also sick of the sardine situation in the main room; a photographer zipped over to take a bunch of photos of them having fun. (Haven't seen 'em posted anywhere yet. It's almost like it'd be cool if there were more blogs where people posted party photos.) There was a bucket of free waters near us, that was nice. I felt my mood lift as it always does when I dance ("I don't know, when you move your body, it's kind of like your spirit gets liberated"—Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood). I don't know where I got this dispensation for dancing, really. When I was a kid, I mostly sat and read books. I guess I just stored up a lot of energy from all the sitting and reading.
This was the scene when we eventually left:
STAGNATION STATION. Shout out to the two people with their hands up, truly the whole world is in those hands.
Looking at post-party footage on IG Stories the next morning, things did perk up when The Bloody Beetroots took over the decks. There was even a mosh pit! I guess everyone was really waiting for the headliner. And idk man. Everyone can do whatever they want to do. I can't stop you from having the night you want to have. I guess I just wish people would, as the rave scholar McKenzie Wark says, let themselves get fucked by the music a little more. Otherwise why are you here, in the club, with the music loud enough to prevent all other attempts at conversation? Do we just need to bring back lounges? Where are those 200 couches Interpol was singing about? We can put them in the lounge.
It's not constricted to one generation, I promise I'm not finger-pointing at young or old in particular, but overall, after the onslaught of social media and the smartphones upon which to view it, I have noticed a trend toward people having a one-sided consumer's attitude toward entertainment, and nightlife in particular. Choose a club, choose a bar, choose a party, attend it, and prepare to be wowed. Give it to me, baby.
But that's not how it works! A party is people. You are the party. It's your job to bring your own vibes. A club without people in it is just a room. And a club with people in it not dancing is no better than the DMV. If you want to sit and wait to be entertained? I would recommend buying a ticket to see Cirque du Soleil. Cirque du Soleil is awesome.
I promise I did have fun at this party because 1) I always enjoy dancing with my husband, duh 2) I really liked dancing with the other few people in that secondary zone. They totally made my night, they re-affirmed my belief in humanity, which is really all I ever want to do when I bounce into the club like a lil pinball anyhow. And there will be more parties to attend, more people to meet, and I am lucky I am able to do this at all. I know it's a bit cranky for me to try to shake the shoulders of a party and say: Do Better! It's just something I believe: fun is not a thing to buy, or a thing to wait around for and hope visits you like the tooth fairy—it's a thing that exists inside everyone, and all you have to do is find the right frequency to vibrate at in order to let it out. Onto the next soirée...
Thanks for listening to me whine. If you like I Enjoy Music, tell a friend!
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