What's the point of partying? (On Emily Witt's Health and Safety)

A few years ago, when I lived in New York, I read Emily Witt's Health and Safety with a book club. Witt tells the story of her life, beginning in her mid-30s, in the mid-2010s, when she, guided by her boyfriend, gets into the Bushwick underground club/electronic music scene. She describes herself as living a kind of double life, wherein in her work life, she is a New Yorker investigative reporter, while outside of it, she takes time off to spend whole long weekends partying.

Witt has a kind of reverence for partying. She distinguishes herself and her scene from the normies, the casuals who go out on weekends for a few drinks and leave at 1AM. Those truly dedicated to the scene are out until 5 on a Monday or Tuesday, or will stay at the club for 2-3 days at a time. The serious partiers don't drink, because drinking ends the night too early: they mostly do club drugs and psychedelics. Some of the venues she describes are illicit underground raves, others are above-board. They are in Brooklyn and, sometimes, Berlin.

Witt gestures towards the cultural inheritance of, e.g. the LGBTQ or black club scene of the 1970s, which this scene inherited from (and still has a few "old head" members), but despite familiar 2010s posters rejecting various "-isms" and "-phobia"s, the scene she describes ultimately lacks political content. If anything, the tendency for Witt's scene to proclaim explicit political messages (far less common now than during the events Witt describes) seem to me more like a compensation for the fact that what they were doing, ultimately, wasn't political at all. Ostensibly, in Witt's scene, partying was supposed to mean something, to be counter-cultural, DIY, revolutionary, or "transcendent" in some vaguely articulated sense. In reality, the real value that Witt and her scene shared was the importance of a good party.

I like a good party, and I enjoyed the book very much, but I came away from it with the opposite reaction to many other readers. Those in my reading group expressed interest in checking out some of the venues she mentioned, as did Michelle Lhooq's in her review. I on the other hand wanted not to live a life in any way resembling Witt's and found myself almost repulsed by its excess, drawn instead to a life of calm, quiet routine. I had, at the time, also been reading Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, and I saw in the lifestyle Witt describes everything Berry disliked about city life: excess, consumption, no stable values or community, people frenetically jumping around from one place to another, seeking out a new kind of high or new club that is more bold, exclusive, or cool than the last: towards what end? After reading hundreds of pages regaling crazy nights out, I wanted to buy land in rural Oregon and start a vegetable garden, or something. You could attribute my reaction to age, but I am still today younger than Witt was at the start of Health and Safety.

Witt has no illusions about the downsides of her lifestyle. Lauren Oyler points out in a review that some of the drug combinations Witt casually mentions are life-threateningly dangerous. The last third of the book takes place after the start of COVID, where everything comes crashing down: her boyfriend is arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest and starts having fits of mania, leading to a terrible breakdown of their five-year relationship. Witt found herself, then 39, realizing that she sort of expected that she would have kids with her partner, and now this definitely wasn't going to happen:

But it was also that I knew what I was giving up by leaving, which wasn't only about Andrew. It was about some fantasy of family that had become a delusion months ago, but which until I walked out I could still pretend might be possible. To cut him out of my life would be to accept that I would never have it, that thing that made women so silly and make such terrible decisions, the desire to surrender oneself to another, the longing for love and babies. A middle-aged solitude that had always scared me was looming, and I saw the loneliness of the years ahead, and it terrified me. I was wrong about a lot of things at that time, but I was right to be scared about that. I knew that there would not be another chance, that the door on the fantasy was closing forever. I had always been skeptical of it, yet as it slipped out of my grasp, it was suddenly the only thing that mattered in the world.

I found this to be tragic, and deeply sad. I could not read the partying scenes prior to this in the book as fun or compelling in any way. It wasn't just that Witt enjoyed partying, it was that partying had become her raison d'être: it, and the romantic relationship associated with it, was what she had devoted her life to, at the cost of all else.

In San Francisco, folks have lamented that people here are lousy at throwing parties. Self-consciously, many have tried to revive a good house party, or build or transform existing venues to be more "cool" or "exclusive." Mostly, this fails because SF is not Bushwick, nor is it Berlin. The people here don't really yet have the sauce to create what is happening in either of these cities. Many efforts to produce a culture of true excess like the one Witt describes come off as corny, inauthentic, lame.

Some attribute this to the fact that SF is full of rich tech workers: too reserved, career-obsessed, dweeby. But it's worth noting that Witt is an ivy-league educated New Yorker reporter and her boyfriend was a tech worker with a substantial trust fund. If there is a class issue here, it is not the haves vs. the have-nots, but old money vs. new money.

In any case, I find these kind of "material" explanations for SF's supposedly "lame" party culture to be insufficient. With enough time and motivation, one could reproduce some aspects of the scene Witt describes. The question is: what's the point?

In my younger years, I was a big part of the Midwest DIY scene, which I still have a great fondness for: house shows, house parties, bands playing outside and in venues of grey-area legality. In some sense, one could describe this as a more "authentic" version of Witt's New York club scene, populated not by trust fund techies but people who live on the material and not just psychological margins of American society. Still, I'm not sure any of this posturing really matters. It doesn't matter if a party is "cool" or "authentic" or "exclusive" or only full of the most-dedicated scenesters. The problem is a matter of values.

Many in SF want their parties to be hot, cool, full of well-dressed people, unlike the dweeby male-dominated stereotypical SF party. However, contempt is not the basis of a good party: you have to have a reason to party! For Witt, it was the fantasy of transcendence through excess. In SF, commonly, people fixate on the symbols of New York culture: over-dressing, trying to be "hot" and "stylish," without really understanding what those things actually mean. More importantly, they fail to see exactly what is troublesome about the life and culture they are symbolically trying to emulate: one dedicated to cultivated consumption and reckless excess.

Still, I really, really, like a good party. In this paragraph, you will find me saying things a little bit lame: the values I think are required to produce one. A good party is about producing good company. People should be made to feel comfortable, relaxed, included, and safe. People should be nice, friendly, open, and fun. Ideally, a good party mixes people who wouldn't otherwise. I have lived in many places and partaken in many different scenes, and it is these values, moreso than the right cultural signifiers or a sufficient commitment to debauchery, that distinguishes a good party. A good party doesn't need to "look" cool, it has to be cool—and that doesn't just happen in New York City, nor only in big cities, and it isn't something you can tell just by looking at pictures of it posted online.

Finally, a good party should follow the golden mean: it should go late, but it can't last forever, and it can't be the towards which life is directed.