February 22, 2008
My article on prague.tv
December 7, 2007
The Promised
[this changes tenses a lot IM SORRY BUT THIS IS A POST-MODERN WORLD AND I WAS DANCING FOR 12 HOURS...HOW'S THAT FOR (IN)TENSE]
Because We Are Your Friends
For devotees of techno music, no pilgrimage is more sacred than their journey to the I Love Techno Festival in Ghent, Belgium. The event is held in the expansive Flanders Expo a few minutes outside of the town, but not far enough away to console the residents. At the festival, holy DJs sustain the beat for over 12 hours, while their fans stomp and flail to the music. You can feel the rumbling pulses of sound from the nearby train station. On the day of I Love Techno, Ghent is deserted.
The festival pilgrims are mostly University-age youth, equip with fluorescent clothing, lighters and glow sticks. They flock into Ghent in waves, and plant themselves in the local bars and restaurants to wait to take the train to the expo for the festival.
A young man sits outside a restaurant wearing a Leprechaun costume. He looks around, watching group of techno lovers with blue hair waiting in a nearby park. “Look at them all,” he says, fixing the green top hat on his head, “they’re all crazy.”
Girls in the bathroom of the restaurant apply heavy make up, their ritual masks for the night to come. Eight blackened eyes stare back at me from the bathroom mirror. After my own long pilgrimage, I want to wash my hands.
We took a 14 hour bus ride from Prague to Brussels, Belgium on Friday night, and spent Saturday in Ghent (a municipality in Flanders, Belgium) consuming carbohydrates to last the evening. Then, on light, happy feet we made our way to the Flanders Expo Center, which held the 35,000 festival guests.
On the train to the expo, a young girl clutches her pint of beer, still in the mug she stole from the restaurant. She takes a gulp, and without hesitation screams, “TECHNO? TECHYES!!”
We waited in line in the rain from 5:30-6:30 pm, knowing that we wouldn’t see the outside again until at least 5 am the next morning. Inside the expo center, neon light sculptures flash in the center of the lounge area. By the next morning, the carpets and couches in the lounge, which is labeled with a neon sign that says “Chill Out,” will be covered in watery grime from the techno fans’ shoes, and white sediment from their dry sweat.
It is crowded. There are four separate rooms where DJs spin, and there is a steady flow of people in and out of each room from the time the first note vibrates through the hall.
It is impossible to escape the crowd. The dance rooms are barred off by a maze-like series of gates; they are there to prevent guests from flooding the room. Each room can only hold 5,000 people, so pressure mounts as the night progresses; the best DJs take the stage around 3 am.
After six hours of dancing, the lines for water are overwhelming. The chill out lounge is full of exhausted, spread-eagled bodies. It looks like a refugee camp. Inside the dance rooms, lights flash and spin over the crowd. Whenever the bright lights go on, you can see the audience, a sea of bodies balancing between pleasure and torture. At every moment, someone is touching you, exchanging sweat, exchanging energy.
Finally, at 3:30 am in the dance room labeled “Orange,” the most famous DJ duo of the night takes the stage.
They call themselves Justice, and during their set, they raise their arms up in the shape of a cross, while the techno pilgrims scream their lyrics like a prayer for relief. Relief from the dance. Relief from the loud music. Relief from the drugs.
The sacred two DJ behind a glowing cross embedded in a celestial mess of blinking lights. Periodically you can see people raising their arms in the shape of a cross. We shout their lyrics:
“Because we are your friends, you’ll never be alone again.”
It is impossible to feel alone in the crowd of pilgrims, but each person has their own dance, their own prayer, their own reason for seeking the release of 12 hours of straight dancing and partying.
Later that morning, the techno fans drag their legs through the town of Ghent, some looking for a hotel, some looking for a place to sit and wait for their train back to Brussels.
All the hotels are closed. The residents of Ghent know that I Love Techno brings young partiers and drug users from across Europe. They are covered in sweat and leave trails of water bottles and vomit.
Still, ask any of them, and they will say that I Love Techno is not an out of control party, but a religious experience. It is for the music. It is for the love of the sound. It is to be with your friends—the fellow pilgrims.
November 13, 2007
My generation
This weekend I went to the I Love Techno music/sound festival in Belgium.
My version would be titled “I Sometimes Can Bring Myself to Enjoy Techno, Not at 4 am, Not with the Sweat of Thousands of Pilgrims on My Arms, Not in the Face of Adversity.”
We took a 14 hour bus ride from Prague to Brussels on Friday night, spent Saturday in Ghent (a municipality in Flanders, Belgium) consuming carbs to last the evening, then on light, happy feet we made our way to the expansive warehouse space that held the 35,000 festival guests. We waited in line from 5:30-6:30 pm, knowing that we wouldn’t see the outside again until at least 5 am the next morning.
This is my skeletal description. An analysis of the environment–completely sealed from the outside like a casino, writhing with bodies wandering between pleasure and torture–will stumble into the blog after my recovery. We got back to Prague at 6:30 am, after another 14 hour bus ride across Germany.
Here is a video of the French DJ duo Justice, who performed from 3:30-4:30 am.
Every assumption you can draw from an audience so lively at 4:30 am is a true one.
The sacred two DJ behind a glowing cross embedded in a celestial mess of blinking lights. Periodically you can see people raising their arms in the shape of a cross. We shout:
“Because we are your friends, you’ll never be alone again.”
November 8, 2007
The arts
Here is an arts piece I wrote about David Cerny and the Meet Factory. Please forgive the redundancies with previous posts. I hope it satisfies any technical curiousities.
This fall as the New York art scene pulses with international buzz and global art fairs make record sales, artists and advocates struggle in countries that have a shorter reach.
David Cerny is a Czech sculptor whose provocative work draws attention from around the world. At home, it’s harder to stir interest.
In Prague, tourists look up from their guidebooks to see Cerny’s bronze “Hanging Man” dangling from a rod on the roof of a building. The hanging figure is Czech-born psychologist Sigmund Freud, but its owner is an American art collector.
Czech art historian Tomas Pospiszy says that Czechs lack interest in local, contemporary art because of social values, not because artists produce low-quality work.
“Czechs want nice things to decorate their living room,” Pospiszy said, “it has to do with education and new consumerism: the general values of society; it’s the environment, not the art.”
Because of frustration and new opportunities, Cerny has shifted some of his efforts to foreign soil.
In September, he unveiled a giant, mechanical sculpture of a human head in Charlotte, North Carolina. The piece, titled “Metalmorphosis,” took shape with funding from foreign investors.
But Cerny hasn’t given up on the Czech scene.
He is the co-founder of Prague’s new hub for contemporary art, the Meet Factory, a warehouse space that sits between train tracks and a highway in a “rough and ready” neighborhood in Prague.
Above the entrance to the building, Cerny installed two of his trademark car sculptures. The boxy vehicles look like they are driving up to the top floor, where 15 resident artists will create works for exhibition in the factory. Huge projectors make the other outside walls look like they are covered in giant, fluorescent balloons.
Cerny is a bold silhouette outside against the bright backdrop. He wears all black and whispers to another dark figure as guests trickle in on opening night.
Cerny worked with film director Alice Nellis, and musician David Koller to renovate the space, which now holds a performance stage, a bar, artist residences, several galleries, and a cinema.
The resident artists are mostly international, a step which may bring attention to the artistic potential in Prague.
“It is absolutely necessary to have something geared internationally,” said Helena Staub, a Czech gallery owner and curator who divides her time between Prague and Paris, “this is something official, not underground, which will give access to the Prague art scene.”
But in its opening week, the Meet Factory did not give a warm welcome.
Although everything else is finished, activity in the factory is limited because the building is not heated.
Local artists were invited to graffiti the walls of the main gallery on the ground floor, and the art’s neon glow makes the room feel warmer, drawing attention from the incomplete remodeling.
David is waiting for railroad bureaucrats to sign off on his heating plan, which will allow him to install piping under the train tracks. The process may take months, although it was Prague City Hall that suggested and provided the warehouse for the project.
The Meet Factory received a $1 million grant from City Hall to cover running expenses, but that doesn’t include reconstruction.
Cerny says the Meet Factory will have a regular schedule operating by spring, but for now they are working on becoming a team, and assigning managerial roles in each room.
He is in the process of choosing a director for the building.
Leadership is important in Czech art organizations. Grants from the government are given once a year, and there are no standards that ensure how much an organization will receive.
The grant system is up for review again in early November, and Ludvig Hlavacek, director of the Prague Contemporary Arts Center, is holding his breath.
When the center was founded in 1992, it was funded by the Soros Foundation, an American association that supported projects in several post-communist countries.
During the days of Soros funding, the Contemporary Arts Center was located in Castle Cimelice and had 40 resident artists.
Now, with funding from the Czech government, their headquarters is in a former factory, and they sponsor only 2-3 artists whom they send to the United States.
“They give support based on tickets sold, the quality of performance doesn’t matter to them,” Hlavacek said, “the situation at the Meet Factory is very typical—they want to see that if they give you 1 Kc, you will turn out 2 Kc.”
Aside from the Meet Factory, Cerny’s only other publicly funded project was a set of giant babies with TV heads. They were installed like sculptural leeches around the base of the TV tower in Prague, but one was kept for the patrons. It sits in the garden of the district’s City Hall.
According to Cerny, the Culture Department officer who commissioned the project left soon after its completion, citing corrupt practices as his reason for parting.
“The value of art was ruined by the Bolsheviks,” Cerny said, “it was 40 years of ruining intelligence.”
Cerny remembers a letter to the editor that was published in Hospidarsky Noviny, the most widely circulating newspaper in the country, about his work on “Metalmorphosis.”
“It accused me of brown-nosing rich Americans for their dirty money for my projects,” he said, “they’re just stupid.”
But some international artists see the lack of local interest in art as an opportunity.
Amande In is a French installation artist living in the Meet Factory.
“Prague is in the exact middle of Europe, but also the middle of no where,” In said, “we are not run by an art market because there is no art market, we are completely free.”
Still, Cerny is waiting for something to turn on the heat.
