This week’s guest is the intriguing, talented, and amazingly well-organized Malena Grosz, who is currently traveling across the United States to interview party culture professionals for her multimedia thesis on community-led party culture to gain and share their perspectives on best practices and shared challenges in cultivating better life through celebratory gatherings – and to tackle the corporate commodification of “nightlife” and its dangerous side effects.
Her website-as-thesis-project will eventually be live (circa May 2019) at:
We Discuss:
Gentrification and corporatization of nightlife versus community-led celebration,
What urban nightlife can learn from Burning Man and festival culture,
The disavowal of mundane time in spaces of celebration and how party culture does and does not need to accept the realities of our organic rhythms,
Mentorship, moderation, self-control, personal agency,
Reconciling the nomadic and sedentary strains of humanity,
Taking responsibility for your own education (and life in general),
Getting kicked out of the School of Art for consent-based body painting,
Harm reduction versus the nanny state,
Learning to speak party to Academia,
The extraordinary importance of cognitive liberty and the freedom to imbibe,
The economics of big festivals and their scaling problem, and how it turns people into cattle,
Alternatives to alcohol (like tonics) and how parties can stay solvent without depending on encouraging dangerous levels of intoxication,
Learning how to empower people by delegating decision-making authority as an event producer,
Everything in moderation, even moderation,
The importance of safe spaces within every party (like Camp Soft Landing at Burning Man),
Rest stops at festivals and rests in music, quiet places where people can connect to contrast against losing yourself on the dance floor,
What party culture can learn from the intensely structured environment of academia,
“Festival referees” - good idea or disaster waiting to happen?,
Deputizing “Knights of the Dance Floor” and empowering people to be guardians of collective space,
Festival sheriffs and Night Mayors and the successful interfacing of mainstream culture and the needs of revelry populations,
The New York Nightlife Advisory Board and other official groups representing the needs of party culture in city and state governments,
Other promising international developments in the progress of human understanding of what safely integrated party culture looks like,
Figuring out how to measure the contributions of everyone involved in an event, not just the headlining acts.
And more!
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96 - Malena Grosz on Community-Led Party Culture vs. Corporate "Nightlife"