days that last forever inside weeks that disappear
launch party, end of/start of year reading list, gratitude, the dis/embodiment of writing + 2 mixes
happy gregorian nu year
no nightlife essay today, just some gratitude, an end of year (start of? time is circular) book list, an upcoming launch party and not one but two big old mixes. First an invitation to you:
<3 SAVE THE DATE <3
Planet Wax, February 12th, 6pm-midnight - Please come celebrate the launch of my first book Club Commons with a couple of gorgeous DJs, pals and folk who feature in the book xxx
and next - 2 options to listen while you read:
Kiosk Radio –
I had the absolute pleasure of being invited out by Montage in Brussels to give a lecture, followed by a DJ Set for their night. The trip included a visit to Kiosk Radio, with none other than club wife ex.sses
After going on our own journey with sound it feels really special to circle back, merge hard and cascade softly, in a set where we peeled into one another. Floating through soundscapes with another person is a blessing! It felt special to travel for music together (thank you Montage crew!!) with ex.sses, queen of texture, queer of the night, a true experimentalist bending sounds to tickle your inner ears. The mix explores swampy sensuality, broken whispers and cinematic sonics. Please enjoy!
ex.sses and I are also cooking up some delicious plans for our heady, silly party ~\ LILITH //~ this year so keep your eyes peeled and your hearts open. You can join our mailing list for party love letters & announcements.
Collective Hysteria -
A downtempo journey through sultry vocal-led goodies, atmospheric ambient explorations, a touch of trance and trip-hoppy songs to slink through winter into spring too. It’s for heat rising in expectation, the excitement of the wait, the sultriness of a slow burn, the sensation of gearing up in sweaty, tingly anticipation. Please sink into this one//send it to your lover.
Other bits:
I spoke with brilliant No Tags about a club commons at the ICA! They published the conversation here
I spoke to Ed Gillet for this wonderful article challenging the prevailing narrative that nightlife in the UK is dying. Ed looks at the impact this story can have, and the possibilities of other forms of advocacy. Worth a read!
I also want to plug nu substack - Charlie Winn aka Unknown Niece - gorgeous musings on music and more. If you are seeking tunes to add to your playlist, and some stunning prose to accompany them, this is the place for that xx
Hello friends,
Time is doing strange things again. Stretching. Compressing. Days that last forever couched inside weeks that disappear. Discipline was never really my strong point, so naturally the universe decided this was the year to remind me about it in a new way, always a new way. Now winter is here and for the first time in months I can feel a slowdown coming. Not quite yet, but it’s on its way. My body is still catching up, still learning to invite that slowness again. Learning again to be disciplined in rest, not only in work.
This past year, I have been GLUED to my desk. Unintentional sobriety. Focus. Fear. Anticipation, Inspiration. Time went funny. Non-linear, stretching and shortening, days rolled into one long blurry stretch, as I stared and played with and went a little crazy with words, the same words over and over again, and my own thoughts (yikes…)
I wrote a book!
The book is called Club Commons: Moving Bodies to Grow Movements in Queer Nightlife and Beyond and it’s now out for pre-sale with my publisher Velocity Press.
The book is about queer nightlife and its journey from community subculture into a global commercial industry. I spoke to people who ran lesbian soundsystem parties in the 1980s. Abolitionist queer security and welfare workers keeping people safe today. Worker-led venues advocating for more agency in nightlife work. I explore some of the tensions of trying to cultivate the commons - anticapitalist principles of communal sharing - in what is today a commercial industry. The worker exploitation, and what it means when our supposed community spaces are market spaces. The book also holds intergenerational conversations because I don’t feel like we have enough of those in our queer communities, or in nightlife. We can barely remember a night out last week, let alone one from forty years ago. But also I think elder queers really knew how to party hard and we should celebrate some of the lineages we stand on.
I also want to talk about the cover of the book, because it holds so much. I was lucky enough to have 2 inspiring artists work on the cover - typographic historian Amrit Randhawa (Taxi Cab Industries) and artist and imagineer Opashona Ghosh.
The font used on the front cover is a piece of queer-feminist socialist history. It comes from MOONSTORM, a newsletter from the 1970s, specifically from an advertisement by the Women’s Car Repair Collective, an initiative organised by the Lesbian Alliance of St Louis, Missouri. They offered car repairs by/ for queer women, books and tools, as well as a coffee house and counselling services. The font’s maker, Nat Pyper, aims to make “the act of typing an act of remembering” where fonts are “time machines” that allow us to “engage the past as a verb.” Opashona Ghosh’s cover illustration brings this same temporality, in the form of vibration and circularity where queer stories move like threads criss-crossing and folding back into each other to draw new shapes.
This is how commons work. Not through linear progress, but through circulation and reactivations, where resources, knowledge, and visions belong to the people who sustain them. Memory and storytelling maintain the commons when physical spaces are threatened. They tide us through the losses, keeping possibility alive even when community spaces are gone. But remembering isn’t just about looking back. It’s about expanding what feels possible now.
Orbiting, then landing. Things speeding up, then slowing down. The past folding into the present. That’s the shape of this year. That’s the shape of the book.
The embodied experience of writing is strange. It involved sitting at a desk on a laptop staring at words for hours on end while the world shook and groaned and moved and you stayed frozen in place, sentence fragments floating through half sleep in the mornings, invading semi-lucid dreamscapes. It involved being so obsessed with an idea or a thought you wring it through words, like trying to shove a pipecleaner all the way through a straw that’s too small. Kind of painful and uncomfortable? Maybe a little bit gross? Possibly completely unnecessary. You squeeze words in your hands until they squirt out your knuckles and lick the remains off your fingers and swallow, so they travel around your body until you regurgitate it out onto the page, never quite sure if it’s going to land the same way that it moved through your gut, but when it’s time (when the publisher calls!) you just gotta spit it out anyways. Spit it out and hope for the best.
Thank you for the support on Club Commons so far. I never really thought these little words might travel and they’ve already gone further than I ever imagined thanks to you, whoever is reading this, yes you, I’m talking about you. I love you. Thank you for using your precious attention here, right now. Here. Right Now. Thank You.
Since the book was announced, I joined the brilliant No Tags for a talk at the ICA, went to Belgium with Montage, and also joined a cohort of nightlife workers in New York exploring cooperative models for nightlife, invited by DJ Voices from across the pond in New York, a DJ and organiser who I am very inspired by.
Because I am indebted to writers, thinkers, organisers, lovers, artists who do what they do best, I thought I would share a couple of books I read this year that really sung to me. They turned pages in my heart and soul and made my brain feel bendier, more supple, more equipped for the road ahead:
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 – a speculative oral history of a post-capitalist world, with interviewees who were part of the revolution, and the new social orders that came after it. Some beautiful fragments, blueprints, for seismic shifts to dream up, to come. There is one particular chapter on assemblies and party people that sung to me as I spent the last year and half working on a regional citizens assembly in the UK by day, and writing about nightlife by night! Gifted to me on my birthday by a total and utter hottie.
Assata: An Autobiography - writings from political revolutionary Assata Shakur, who was imprisoned in the 1970s for her involvement in the Black Liberation Army (who then broke her out of prison). She fled to Cuba where she lived out the remainder of her life. Her writing is potent. The poems peppered throughout the journey of the book sink into you. Assata is a beautiful thinker, dreamer, revolutionary who was living out the new world while the old one tried to shackle her. Incisive, emotional and embodied social commentary via a stunning and incredible memoir. RIP Assata.
Foucault in Warsaw – translated from Polish, this is an archival dive into a moment in famed Foucault’s life seldom spoken about. Prior to publishing his well-known theories, Foucault was a young academic in 1950s Poland when he entered into a relationship with another man, who turned out to be a police informant, spying on gay communities in communist Poland. Foucault’s theory of the panopticon may have emerged from this far more intimate moment of surveillance. This book takes you on a trip into archives, through their gaps and missing pieces to forge a tapestry of gay life in Poland at the time, the closeness, the risk, the threat of gayness to the state in all its intimate shapes.
Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures – Starting with the fascinating history of poppers, the book then spirals out to offer bolder, broader ideas about sex, bodies, queerness, pleasure and capitalism. From Victorian healthcare, to police raids on queer clubs, to online sex cultures and their relationship to queer communities, the book turns into a deeply confessional tone towards the end that really drew me in. It’s about the many ways pleasure is suppressed, but always leaks through the cages seeking to contain it. Always.
I have plans cooking for a Club Commons Library ~ to come ~ so book recommendations or donations are very welcome.
More merry reading to you! Endless dreaming, more solidarity, more liberation, more organising, more repair, more love, more sensuality, more silliness, more art in service of movement-building, of movement-making, movement-shaking, more archiving, memory work, queer intergenerational sharing, more interpersonal moments that reflect the systemic shake ups and changes to come. Thank you to those who fight for liberation, to those who spit in the eye of violence, to those whose ideas travel and liberate, one word at a time. I would have nothing to write about if not for your work.
______
Signing out with a short extract from the introduction to Club Commons.
with love, warmth and a steaming hot cup of chai <3
_____
What I witnessed at those parties night after night wasn’t just escapism. It was something more fundamental. On sticky floors, surrounded by sweat-drenched bodies, I saw practices of care and collective resourcefulness. I later found language for this in Silvia Federici’s Marxist feminist writing on the commons: not a romantic return to pre-capitalist utopia, but contemporary practices of resistance. Let me be clear about what I mean by ‘commons’. At its simplest, the commons refers to resources and spaces that are collectively owned and managed by communities that use them rather than controlled by the state or private capital. Think of it like this: a commercial club is owned by investors or property developers, run for profit, with every decision filtered through market logic. The result is that decisions are made on how to extract maximum value from each body on the dancefloor. Regulations determine who can enter, what can happen, when music stops. But a commons is different. It’s a sound system collectively owned by the crew who maintains it, a venue where decisions are made by those who dance there. It’s workers controlling their own labour, and communities shaping their own spaces. According to Federici, the commons are both material resources, and the social relations that form around sharing those resources.
The language of the commons emerges from England’s history of land dispossession. Beginning in the thirteenth century, land that communities had long used collectively – for pasturing animals, foraging, and subsistence – was seized by wealthy landowners and fenced off as private property. People who had previously accessed these lands without payment now found themselves tenants, forced to rent back what they’d once shared freely. As Silvia Federici argues, this wasn’t simply a historical turning point but “a regular reoccurrence on the path of capitalist accumulation and a structural component of class struggle.”
Today, queer nightlife faces its own enclosures. Spaces once held by communities are absorbed into urban development schemes, or transformed into profitable assets for those who never built them. Venues that emerged from community need are sold to developers, and local festivals are bought by global multinational corporations. Even Pride – once a protest – is enclosed by corporate sponsors who profit from the very visibility queer people fought for. Cultivating the commons in what is today a commercial industry brings a certain amount of tension. As Federici notes, “we have commons in fact that are co-opted by the state, others that are closed and ‘gated’ commons, and still others that are commodity-producing and ultimately controlled by the market.” Not every space claiming to be ‘queer’ or ‘community-run’ is actually held in common. Understanding nightlife through the framework of commons and enclosure reveals how struggles over space, pleasure, and collective life repeat across centuries – and why defending queer spaces is inseparable from broader fights against dispossession.
Silvia Federici suggests that “commons should be autonomous spaces and should aim to overcome the divisions existing among us and build the skills necessary for self-government.” Federici frames the commons as “a political frame for thinking of alternatives to capitalism”. Throughout this book, I trace both physical commons in space and resources, and practices of commoning that emerge in social interactions in and around queer parties. What these examples show is that the commons is not about removing money or refusing organisation. It refers to ways of pooling resources, building infrastructures outside market logic, and creating spaces of solidarity through sharing the things that make life liveable – which include gathering around dance and music. When cleaners, DJs, bartenders, and dancers collectively determine how a space runs, that’s commoning. When profit circulates back through the community rather than extracting upward to shareholders, that’s commoning. When club workers define how safe nightlife is created themselves, that’s commoning. On the dancefloors I found myself on, I saw people caring for each other while working to change the world.
<3
Can’t wait to read the book!