Partying Toward A Better World With Emily Witt

Maybe your soulmate really does live off Myrtle-Broadway...

A few Fridays ago, I went to a reading at Paragon to celebrate the release of Emily Witt’s new memoir Health and Safety: A Breakdown, out now from Pantheon. It’s a place I'd been many times, usually to dance under lights and fog on its checkered floors. 

But on this particular Friday night, the room was hushed. Bartenders threaded through the crowd with buckets of limes to slice for the long night ahead. Witt stood on the regal staircase and read a section from her book about accidentally k-holing at Sustain-Release, the techno festival that half the room had come back from just days before, with tales of fog bubbles and the resurrection of a floor once broken by too much dancing. 

Health and Safety is about a lot of things: Brooklyn’s dance music scene, the forces constantly threatening the scene, the war on drugs, the Black origins of American techno music, Berlin’s embrace of said music, being a New Yorker reporter in a post-2016 political landscape covering gun violence and right-wing militias, the onset of the pandemic and our now-embarrassing melodrama around it, the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, a rise and fall of a relationship, the release of one world and the embrace of another. 

Mostly, it’s about finding a home, one that may be obfuscated by neon lights, acid vision, and artificial fog. “Some of us were in our thirties and having friendships in a way we were told that you were not supposed to have as an adult,” Witt writes. “Subcultures were for the very young, and scenes and drugs and staying out all night were something you grew out of. And yet there we all were.”

It’s slippery in genre, like the way good music is, told with Witt’s exacting, clinical, yet no less mesmerizing, voice. Witt traded the world of Park Slope book parties and physician-prescribed Wellbutrin for psychedelics, ketamine, and a studio apartment soundtracked by the vibration of the J train, in the now meme-ified intersection of Myrtle Broadway. Witt’s Bushwick era is pre-Mood Ring, pre-Paragon — one where Bossa reigns supreme, where Ridgewood is still cheap. Witt doesn’t promise to have written any definitive history — her personal one is breathtaking enough.

Language Arts caught up with Witt to talk about the elusiveness of certain demarcations of adulthood, what she thinks of Brooklyn’s current techno scene, and straddling the worlds of capital-m Media and nightlife.

How did it feel to read at the club?

That one was easier in some ways than reading at McNally Jackson because at the bookstore reading, it was my family, my New Yorker editors, my friends. By the time I got to Paragon, it felt really easygoing and it was nice to read as part of a group of people and not have all the attention focused on my book. I liked that they turned the lights blue and they put it on Sade.

Did you always know that your journey into raving would be a book?

I definitely didn't think it would become a book for a long time. I was interested in writing a book about drugs around 2016 and 2017, but then there was this explosion of books, like Michael Pollan and Tao Lin's books, and a lot of magazine and newspaper articles and radio pieces about all of that. It seemed like it had all been written about. In the meantime, I was going out a lot, but I really didn't write anything about going out until 2021. I think that piece about when the nightclubs reopened after Covid in New York was the first time I really published anything, and I was very nervous about it. The book really found its reason for being after the pandemic, which caused this break in time, which allowed me to put that era in a little bit of a container and give it a beginning, middle, and end.

What were you nervous about when you first wrote about raving? 

There were a lot of the people running these parties I found extremely cool. I didn't want to blow up a scene that needed to be a little bit secret to exist, and that also benefited from being somewhat hidden from boring, extractive forces. It was a little bit not feeling like the right person to tell that story since it was largely a queer scene. It was kind of like, I'm not a musician. I'm not a queer person. I'm older than most people. I am not from Bushwick, so who am I to tell this story? I think I let go of that a little bit just because: Why not? And if I'm not the right voice for some readers, there will be other voices and there have been.

I think that being an outsider in those ways can give you more credence to write about it. It's the insider/outsider status that can allow it to be more objective and less naval-gazey.

And framing it as part of a broader personal story, trying to make it as subjective as possible. This was just my very personal experience of a thing, and I'm not claiming to write a definitive history or be an authority on anything. I think I felt comfortable doing that.

This cool, detached voice gives more credibility to how you chronicle the scene — but you are also reverent about it. How do you strike that balance, especially when you are talking to something that is so personal?

The coldness and the detachment definitely wasn't something I've consciously tried to cultivate. I think it's just kind of how I write. My editor for this book and I both decided that it was all right to be really sincere. I'm somebody that takes things a little too seriously and probably can't take a joke sometimes. That makes its way into the writing, but trying to be as honest and as plain spoken about how things make me feel and not try to pretend to be cooler than I am, or more knowing than I am hopefully helps give it more credibility or makes it more approachable.

The Cut called this book “the first great memoir of the Trump years.” I think that time is really interesting to revisit. It's also not the most interesting thing in the book to me. How do you see the book and how do you feel about that characterization?

I definitely wanted to write about the politics of that time because we're still in that ongoing moment. It's not like it's ended. We're once again in a presidential election with Trump running, and even though he's effectively lost a couple of times now, especially when I was finishing the book before Kamala Harris made her late entrance to the race, it really felt like a second Trump presidency was going to be in inevitability, and that with that would come a whole totalitarian system. I wrote it from a real, or definitely finished it from a place of wanting to be able to recount this moment in as much detail as possible so that whatever happens in the future, it might serve as some kind of testament to how people were thinking and feeling at the time. 

You talked in an interview about how a lot of us felt embarrassed about how we all behaved early on in the pandemic. This is the first time that I have enjoyed having that reality reflected back to me. It's part of the book because it's just what happened, but I think there is something you can gain from reading about Covid at this level of not-so-future distance.

I try to be aware whether I'm writing about internet dating or Covid or whatever, about the banality of my own experience, because I think especially during Covid in the beginning, there are all these personal essays about baking bread that had this melodrama and that weren't sufficiently self-conscious of their own fundamental, universal banality. It might not have been possible to escape that, but I tried to write in a way where I wasn't trying to mystify an experience or pretend my experience of the thing was more interesting than anybody else's, but as I was writing it, it was interesting. I did wish that I had taken more notes in real time. When I went back to write about that time, I was like, “Wow, I already kind of forgot so much of it that I can't recapture.”

What does going out look like for you now?

It's funny. I just had this huge week of going out, even after Sustain. There's also this festival called Making Time in Philadelphia, so there's tons of musicians in town, and they're playing every bar. I still love to hear new music, but I can't stay up all night. This weekend I went to Nowadays at noon on Sunday, and I saw Djrum. I just drank a Variety cold brew.

Then last night I went to Bossa. At the end of the night, I had a glass of wine and saw this Russian DJ named Buttechno. I think I went to Mansions on Wednesday. In part, I had to go out with this New York Times reporter, but I probably would've gone anyway because these Australian DJs I liked were playing, and those three parties were perfect. They were intimate. The music was really good. I didn't have to stay up all night. I didn't have to spend $70 just to go to a warehouse. That's where I'm at right now, as an adult. It’s really cool that there are all of these high-quality small clubs in New York right now and bars where you can go have an adult drink like a really nice glass of wine or a nice cocktail, and hear really good music. I am sure that sounds really boring to some people, but that's kind of where I am.

I'm happy to hear you say that. I didn't start going out until 2021 and I was reading your book, and I was “Oh no, did I just miss when things were good?” I probably did, but it's nice to know that it's also changed into maybe a stranger thing that is still cool.

The 10th year of Sustain Release was last weekend, and it was the 8th year in a row that I've gone. I was kind of like, I think it's time for me to retire. The last time I went, it felt like I didn't know a lot of people anymore, and this time I had almost the opposite experience where by the end of the party, it was the same people that had always been there for so many years. It was a very strange phenomenon, but I had a really, really good time. It's hard because I do have this kind of guilt or the sense that I need to grow up. That's not the right way of putting it, but that I should be doing something better with my time. But then, I don't know, it is lucky to have friends and have music and have a cool place to hang out with them.

I mean, what else is there?

That's what I keep coming back to. I went to LA for four years almost as a way to just test and see. I think especially during the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers had this fantasy of another life somewhere. You go and you're there and you're driving around and you can do your grocery shopping. It's really easy and you go hiking on the weekends and stuff. But then it turns out something was missing for me.

Your book resonated for me because I, too, exist between these two worlds of media and raving and nightlife. I used to work at the New York Times, and then I started bartending in Bushwick, and it kind of changed everything. There's so much that's different about these two scenes and ways of being, and I'm wondering what you feel is similar?

I was very professionally focused in my twenties. It's really hard to make it in journalism and harder now, even than when I was doing it. There was a sense that you have to devote everything to this if you want to be a writer. I felt the social scene in those circles was much more professionally oriented. That’s not a bad thing, but it was nice for me to start entering a different scene that was much more not professionally focused. 

You didn't have to talk to anybody at that Paragon reading. I really liked when Nick quoted that theorist on the concept of liquidarity. In that case, he's talking about an ambient party where you're in a space with somebody. You're collectively present, but you're kind of on your own at the same time. If you want to, you can go talk outside or make some jokes or shoot the shit a little bit. It's not quite this heavy emphasis on conversation as the primary social currency. I’m kind of a shy person and that just felt really comfortable to me. I am curious what you would say.

I like nightlife because it's the opposite in so many ways. I like that you don't talk about where you went to college or what project you're working on. I like that working in nightlife, people's ambitions all feel like they're on equal footing, and it feels like everyone is working physically hard to make what they want to do happen. Chasing journalism never felt like enough for me. It didn't feel like home in the same way. Maybe they're not similar. And that is the beauty of it.

I’ve always had a little bit of a complicated relationship with conventional adulthood and both envying it and wanting it, and in finding it elusive, and wanting to try all this other stuff out to see if it makes me feel more connected. I've always managed to feel this sense of belonging in these other scenes. The other thing I guess I like about being around nightlife is what you're describing in the bartender. I admire this kind of professionalism because it is really physical. It's really about being able to maintain and stay calm in a chaotic situation. There’s so much that I admire about the people that put these parties on and run the bar and run the door.

I think that is a similar thing to journalism: working in a chaotic environment. It's letting your powers of observation and people skills guide the way, but it's in a totally different container.

One thing that's always really moved me is a lot of these artists in particular, these DJs, they have an underground audience. They're not Skrillex, they're not in Las Vegas. There's not champagne bottles popping around. And yet they bring so much effort and thought and care into the stuff they do. I guess that's also kind of carried over to my writing. You might not be a mega bestseller, but I want the particular group that I think of as wanting to read this book to feel like I really delivered for them on their standards.