Somewhere in West Oakland, in a decaying loft where we got no heat, we used to sweat.
It was 2007, and every month, hundreds of people from throughout the Bay streamed into 33 Degrees of Love and Sound, a pop-up soundsystem adorned with art exhibits, singers and libations that only tasted so good because they didn’t wait for a liquor license. Upstairs, overlooking the dancefloor, was a DJ platform that certainly had no railing –where Mai-Lei and a rotating roster of selectors shared space with milkcrates and potted plants, keeping alive the only party in Oakland that stayed open until 5am. Next door, at Khalil’s place, Los Rakas might appear and throw an impromptu concert on the stairway. It was somewhere between a Maxwell video and that Zion scene in Matrix Reloaded. Vividly in my mind is Chinaka scooting her feet and swaying her hips while Phatrick up top played Dwele’s “A Pimp’s Dream” while the sun rose. Everyone had their hands up. There were no cameraphones yet. It was amazinggggggggggg.
Also, all of this took place at home. Like, actually at my crib.
So let me back up to that part where I said we had no heat. Only three blocks away from Pixar Studios, in the city that has now been ranked as the 4th most expensive place to rent in, Mai-Lei, M’kai and I spent our winters in an 1,800 square-foot loft, stuffing the walls with fiberglass, mashing insulator plastic against the windows, and despite all that, still using an open oven as a spaceheater. When it was still so cold that we could see our breath and couldn’t feel our fingers, we whipped out a robotic jet engine-looking heater connected to a giant propane tank, which would spit an inferno in a cage for ten minutes, just so that we could enjoy a half hour of coziness before having to slip back into our sweats and covers. These flames and open ovens were just inches from the sea of fabric and Zap Mama posters that draped and hung at every turn of the head.
The entire place was a fire hazard. A gorgeous, sexy fire hazard.
I moved into this wonderland on 33rd and Hollis right after college. The way Mai-Lei decorated it, you wouldn’t have guessed that it was across the street from a literal crack house. I don’t often use clichés like “diamond in the rough,” but there you have it. Soon, the landlord’s contract with the building owner ended, and they didn’t send us an eviction notice on time to legally ask us to leave. That’s my Google-lawyer translation for, “we found a loophole and didn’t have to pay rent for 2 years under the condition that we didn’t complain that we were living in a building that was falling apart.” When our oven/heater broke down, we stopped baking. When we discovered that a wall of mold had grown along our bathtub, we learned to carve and mount stone tiles. We were makers, and we were simply making due.
I loved that home maybe more than any other I’ve lived in since – the maroon walls, the golden curtains, the concrete floor that fried the palms of my feet in the summer, and turned them numb in the winter. Drinking 2 Buck Chuck from champagne glasses with Tupac Resurrection projected on our massive living room wall. Lightsaber fencing with M’kai, then barely tall enough to reach my hip, who had his room under the stairs like a brown Harry Potter. But none of my memories paint my time in Oakland as vividly as those 33 Degrees parties.
33 Degrees is where I witnessed the melding of art and revolution, bliss through bodily movement, the unsurmountable joy of creating space and hosting. 33 Degrees is where I learned to be lullabied to sleep with house music.
If you’ve ever been to any of my exhibitions or culture labs at the Smithsonian, you’re getting a glimpse of my very longwinded way of continuing the vibration that was conjured by our tiny crew, on an even tinier budget. It was here that I first learned how to curate, from those who never thought to identify as curators. We just wanted to be around amazing art, soundtracked by amazing music, with amazing people.
I have so few photos of those days, thanks to a decade of broken hard drives and the demise of Myspace. But it’s always been the familiar places I’ve encountered that take me back. From the time that Ruby led me to Le Comptoir Général in Paris, to Seiji and Steve’s ex-Ukrainian dance hall where I spend my evenings in Brooklyn, to my frequent visits to Desirée’s Nomad Yard in D.C.
And indeed in the images of Ghost Ship that Oakland so tragically lost this week.
I had never been to Ghost Ship. It was a neighbor, a kindred spirit, even. I read the reports that describe the setting as “a labyrinth of fire hazards,” and read comments by people who are perplexed as to why on earth someone would attend a crumbling warehouse stuffed with sweaty people dancing and painting and DJing and doing nails and giving massages and serving drinks and letting go of everything except for that very moment because everything else is going absolutely insane. But those of us who belong to these spaces flock to them because the safety in here protects us from the danger out there. We risk everything to be together, because our space might be hazardous, but so is the rest of the world.
