“The best parties have an element of mysticism,” says her majesty the Queen, she of hearts.
“What I’m talking about is that revelry is treated with reverence, it’s a little bit more rare to find parties like that up here.”
Which is an understatement. Up here, Kingston (everyone knows what Down There is), for all of its cosmopolitan nightlife pretensions, barely rates. Drive down Wall Street on a Saturday night starting from the Old Dutch Church to the end of the street and observe the empty sidewalks.
A block over on Fair Street, everyone could be dining at Cleo’s or Le Canard Enchaine, imbibing at the Stockade Tavern. A block over the other way through the parking lot of the courthouse, they might be lapping it up at the Saltbox. At the end of Front Street you can booze in Snapper McGee’s in that hazy space somewhere between a fistfight and a dart game. There is the cozy and expensive restaurant bar down the steps under the Hotel Kinsley or you could march down to the Kingston Plaza and try the rowdy crowd at Chic’s.
And that’s it. That’s the Saturday night action in Kingston so wild it needs the protection of three different police forces, State, County and City, to patrol the citadel with overzealous overlapping jurisdictional vigilance.
But it all boils down to this: While Kingston’s annual music-washing festival, the O+, passes like a meteor shower but once a year to renew the city’s artsy pretensions, there is no Saturday Night live music scene in Uptown Kingston. Which says everything you need to know about uptown Kingston — edging, but backing safely away from the edge.
With BSP dead, consider the Art Buoy. Consider the Strand.
Party on the strand
Located at the beginning of the Kingston rail trail, Art Buoy is a spiritual extension of the Artport Gallery curated by co-founders Stefan Saffer and Laurie de Chiara out of the Cornell Steamboat Building.
“The dance parties at Art Buoy, it all started with DJ Dirty Martini,” says Staffer. “We wanted this event space to be for very different events. And my dream was always to have a nice, small dance place without hard drugs, with good air and a nice sound system and some dance.”
Officiant of the harvest ahead of the long, cold months coming, the full moon on Saturday 28 provided an opportunity for party architect DJ Dirty Martini to manifest the night’s crossroads at the brick warehouse.
On the night of the party, the weather had not yet shifted with the rain and the night was warm enough to walk the streets, a moveable feast of costumed revelers had chosen their hour to head down the hill.
Her face pale, her hair red, her lips bloody, a vampire bride with fangs wearing a white dress and veil. A lounge lizard version of Satan in a crushed velvet red blazer, horns, ball gag, whip, everything red but the ball gag. A seedy airplane pilot wearing a Jet Blue blazer with three stripes at the wrists, floral print underneath, and a pair of Aeroflot wings fastened to a Greek fisherman’s cap calling himself Nick Diabetes. There was a leggy flight attendant in a sky blue-polyester go-go dress with shoulder pads. She had scrawled TWA with a marker onto her yellow, transparent visor. There was the matadora wearing the montera bent on harassing bulls and there was a powdered-faced Queen, waifish in a flowing black-and-white-striped dress, she who wielded a scepter and wore a twiggy crown of playing cards in the suit of hearts to adorn her brunette curls. And there was the man costumed as a walking pile of pine cones. Lastdressed in tall socks with the shorts well above the knees and suspenders, there was the man who with his Lederhosen would later elicit simulated Germanic rage, out of Director of Interactions Stefan Saffer at the head of the ticket line before entering the party.
“I grew up on a farm, right,” says Staffer, a German. “And what I wore as a child was a pair of leather Lederhosen. They put that on you and you would live with it for a couple of years, because they bought them bigger so you could grow into it. And so that is what I grew up with. And I was making fun of him. I wasn’t outraged at all, I found it really amazing and funny.”
Vampire bride, Lounge lizard Satan, Matadora, Lederhosen, The Queen, Seedy Pilot, Leggy Air Stewardess, Pine Cone Man. I was there as the invisible man.
The small party moved over the land in an erratic pattern by design, down through parks, off of the main streets, straying through equal portions of darkness and moonlight, to remain inconspicuous as a guerilla platoon.
The seedy pilot was expanding upon his point about not antagonizing the cop mentality.
“Everyone is guilty of something,” he says, “but don’t make your behavior their problem and everything is just ruby.”
This summation was arrived at because of the group’s discussion attempting to parse fact from gossip and figure out just what was going on down in New York City with regards to mushrooms, those naturally growing conduits to the spiritual potentialities within each human being. Rumor had it that mushroom chocolates are now sold everywhere under the counter at bodegas, that Colorado had finally arrived in New York.
“Even if true, it’s still a Schedule 1 substance,” grumbled the Seedy Pilot. “So it doesn’t matter. Regardless, the human race is doomed.”
He went on to refer to a recent study in Japan which found microplastics floating in the clouds above Mount Fuji. “It’s even in the rain,” he said. “Now, that should be illegal.”
Pine Cone offered no opinion. He was talking with Lederhosen about an enormous Carp reeled in by a friend from the Rondout Creek.
“And he ate it!” asked the Austrian incredulously.
“He did,” said Pine Cone. “I wouldn’t eat anything I catch there. Because of the PFAS.”
But Pine Cone knew a guy you take the fish to, to have it prepared, if you absolutely couldn’t be talked out of it. And then if you did eat it, it was delicious.
Down past the church spires on Wurts Street, down the old Company path past the open, dry-socket in the landscape that is the Irish Cultural Hole, along the aforementioned polluted Rondout creek, next to T.R. Gallo Park, hundreds of fall leaves float there on the still surface of the water under a blazing bright nighttime full moon. The road to the Art Buoy runs along the creek and was lit by a moon so bright you could dance with your own shadow.
Across the street walked another doomed bride with her escort. The Vampire Bride was displeased until it was pointed out her doppelganger was The Corpse Bride. So many injured brides.
The Queen of hearts was forced to stop again and again to tie and re-tie one of her royal shoes, first by the fountain outside Mariner’s Harbor, next underneath the 9W overpass, her crown of cards fixed firmly to her hair. Everyone turned to wait. She dismissed them with a queenly wave.
“When people started referring to me as the Queen, I started to feel how form follows function,” said the Queen. “There’s that sort of Cinderella moment where it’s like, this is not actually a pumpkin. Or these are not actually rags. This is like a resplendent costume. And that’s a fucking carriage. At some point I did start feeling like a really fucked up weird queen.”
Party time
Past the Cornell Steamboat Building, past the water treatment plant with the eternal burning flame and crossing the trolley tracks, when the queen’s party had made it through the ticket line, past the minor international incident that the Lederhosen had sparked, the soirée as laid out was divided into two worlds, one which was inside the long brick warehouse, with the repetitive electronic formulas of techno music throbbing and stabbing through the machine-produced fog.
The other world was outside around the back set in a field of grass with a fire pit and a tall wooden post, out in the open air under the stars, bounded by the Rondout Creek with a smattering of moored boats, less than a mile from the creek mouth into the Hudson. Out here another DJ offered a counterpoint to the music inside which was reliant upon harmony, melody and drums with a groove.
“For Halloween,” said Saffer, “that was the epic thing… and finally we also got the flier in [popular local zine] Chosen Family. So we produced this together. And we were like, Okay, this is going to be the night where we kind of have a good enough crowd for having fun and stuff like that. What the DJ’s didn’t tell me though was that they would set up a second PA system in the back outside. Yeah. And that’s what brought police in.”
Out in the backyard, the first thing The Pilot said was that it looked like a fairy had exploded. He was referring to a dense mound of glitter all in a shiny pile at his feet.
The Vampire Bride soon after was drawn irresistibly to the techno inside and was there haunted by lasers and the silhouettes of a stiffer kind of dancing. More combative. Air punches and firm stomping. Multiple laser blossoms between regular solid starbursts of shifting colors. Time sped off.
After an hour of dancing, the Stewardess began to tax the pilot’s stock of tobacco, giving cigarettes out to the passengers in the field, werewolves and the undead.
“In my defense of giving out cigarettes, around this time in aviation stewardesses would hand out cigarettes freely on flights,” says the stewardess, “and everybody smoked them.”
The stewardess and the seedy pilot found their own mirror companions, another stewardess and another pilot, who in contrast was not seedy at all. That pilot with a neat haircut wearing a stiff white short-sleeved top, sans-blazer, could have worked for one of the corporate operations like American Airlines or United. By contrast Diabetes looked like a fly-by-night pilot busted down in the aviation ranks.
“Where are you from?” That was the question of the night. Really it was the caterpillar’s question: “Who are you?” Strangers meeting in the open field, strangers in the bathroom line, loudly shouted into the ear dancing under the lasers. “Where are you from?” followed by “Do you live here?” then the existential question: “How’d you end up here?” Everyone had a story.
The other stewardess traced her history starting from the Bronx, up to Peekskill, then to Newburgh and now to Kingston. Diabetes said his unlikely journey was from Topeka to Sacramento to Hudson. The Queen of course had been raised and coronated in Kingston.
A bright, fattened skull of a moon blocked out most of the stars with its cold light and washed the Rondout Creek too, but still you could have forgotten the moon was there. Until you looked up to breathe and there it was. and then people really were dancing with their shadows.
“It reminded me of the vibe when I was young,” said the stewardess, “when you went to nightclubs and everyone took ecstasy, you’d have the same kind of really warm conversations with strangers about nothing. Of course you’d make friends with girls on the dance floor. I feel like you don’t really do that with booze. But it was nice outside under the moon.”
After getting two more cigarettes for herself and the Queen, The Stewardess rhetorically challenged us to guess her favorite costume and then pointed out into the off-center of the grassy field, where a man in a white button down shirt, now open and unbuttoned, wearing white jockey shorts and nothing else was absolutely working a very tall rectangular wooden post planted into the dirt like it was a stripper pole in front of god and everyone.
“Things change,” says the Pilot. “Puritans would have tied him to that stake of wood and burnt him alive,”
“Now it’s a maypole,” says the Queen.
Not long after some neighbor up in the hills of Ponckhockie called in a noise complaint which summoned the police.
“Out front in the ticket line, I thought that neighbors were having a disco!” says Saffer. “I thought the neighbors were having a party, not knowing it was us! The DJ’s didn’t tell me and they faced the system towards Ponckhockie. And it’s kind of a valley, you know? The sound must have been very well-heard all over Ponckhockie, for sure.”
The outside PA system was shut down and everyone was brought into the warehouse to dance indoors.
“Next time we’ll start a little earlier because we have to stop a little earlier, and we’ll face the speakers towards Port Ewen because Port Ewen deserves some music.”
THE FOREST
Long after midnight the Pilot and the Stewardess left the party and made it maybe fifty feet before the Queen came calling after them, renouncing her decision of minutes previous to stay.
Trolley tracks run alongside the Art Buoy and the Queen walked down the center, over the ties.
“Choo-choo,” she said.
She had left the rest of the party behind on the dance floor which was now scattered with pine cones.
“I went back in,” said the Queen, “ and you know, Lederhosen was doing like high kicks and his
and I was just like, You know what, I love these people so much, but I am not at this level.”
The Queen demanded that the Seedy Pilot take her and The Stewardess home through a shortcut high above the water treatment plant, up through the darkened woods. Walking the few blocks of deserted streets towards the darkness forced a reassessment.
The Seedy Pilot offered a way out. “Are you sure you want to do this,” he asked.
“Why not,” asked the Queen.
“No witnesses. Dark forest. Could get jumped,” conjectured the Seedy Pilot.
“You’ll fight for us won’t you?” Asked the Stewardess
The Seedy Pilot said he would.
“I can just imagine the police officers,” said the Seedy Pilot. “ So, two girls went walking into the woods after midnight. And you went with them.”
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” worried the queen of hearts out loud, echoing the fairytale words passed down through the centuries. “ But she was caught by her own spell. She remembered another beautiful nighttime walk she had taken in the same forest, only it was in the snow.
“Before we went in, I was like, ‘Alright. Hold up.’ And I hiked up my dress so that I could run if I needed to,” said The Queen later. “I hiked it all the way up and shoved it into my coat. I put my bag into one of my pockets and I put my glasses on so that I could see more clearly. And I had my phone out ready to call 911.”
“You want to do it for the beauty and the atmosphere,” the Stewardess added, “and then of course the only argument against that is like “Oh, because you’re like this walking victim because you’re a girl.”
“I should have brought an axe,” said the Queen. “A bloody axe would have completed the look.
Through the woods
Just inside the beginning of the darkness, at the side of the dead end road, stood a building with no door, no windows and no roof. The empty building which the forest had overgrown was filled with moonlight.
“That freestanding building that looks like it’s probably about to collapse also sort of like made it even more dreamlike because, ‘what is this empty derelict structure right doing here’,” said the Queen, “and there’s earth and nature inside of the house too.”
Beyond the derelict building was the darkness, but the moonlight chopped through between the rows of tall naked trees and illuminated stripes up the tall hill. There was a thick carpet of leaves over the dirt path.
“We’re wandering through this dream, and what does the forest mean?” asks the Queen, “Except its real life and the moonlight is shining down. It felt like I was looking at a painting, or we were watching a movie.”
Left behind while the Pilot scouted somewhere far ahead in the darkness, their ears played tricks on them. Voices drifted up the hill and into the forest from the Savannah Olé restaurant-bar far down below. They talked about how their brains compensated to form signals out of noise. They heard the voice of Lederhosen and turned back to see where he was.
The conversation turned again now to form versus function, of function growing from form.
“The vampire bride, her dress was really tight at the bottom,” recalled the stewardess,“so she could only take these little mincing baby steps and then to compensate for the dress she would throw her veil around. She became even more of a Vampire Bride because of her movements. And then when he danced, the Pine Cone Guy just became like this insane wood spirit of whirling pine cones.”
The memory breaks the Stewardess down with laughter. The dance-floor when they left was scattered with pine cones
“You become kind of even more constricted,” says the Stewardess, “but it’s fun because now you’re the costume. It’s like the Hindu god who plays a game, who breaks himself into a million pieces and forgets.”
The Queen leaves the path, swishing through the dry leaves to the base of a tree. She stands beneath looking up and pushes on it to start the tree swaying so she could watch the boughs swing against the sky.
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