New York City partied hard over the weekend and today is a bit of an intermission before we celebrate all over again tomorrow. My annual marathon of Halloween party portraits took me all over town and culminated backstage with Fatboy Slim after a raucous two-hour set that shook the block-long entirety of Bang On’s Warehouse of Horrors.
In Williamsburg, local band Tight Fright also packed the house for an all ages show at Knitting Factory that was taped for TruTV and included a post-show afterparty bus by Greenpoint’s Tender Trap.
In Manhattan, I spent time with two different generations after going to Morrison Hotel Gallery for the launch of Grateful Dead photography book Eyes of the World and then to Secret Loft for a party featuring live aerialists.
I even visited Queens twice: first for filmmaker Andrew Shirley’s encore NYC screening of Wastedland 2 at Superchief Gallery, in Ridgewood.
And then to an all-ages show for hometown promoters Taking Back Queens, in Bayside.
Saturday afternoon saw the gathering of two different two-wheeled groups that resulted in two different outcomes. At one end of Bushwick, the motorcyclists of Motorwolf completed a charity ride for Puerto Rican Hurricane relief that ended at The Cobra Club with a concert by Cruel Miracle.
It was a nice warm-up for the Club’s Sixth annual Zombie prom. Simultaneously, out on the neighborhood’s far end, next to Most Holy Trinity Cemetery, the Black Label Bicycle Club’s 14th annual Bike Kill gathering was halted by the police though the club was permitted to be on the same private property they had rented two years earlier.
Not to be deterred, Black Label simply saddled up and took the party to its original home in Bed-Stuy, where chaos reigned as their tall-bikes jousted and each other.
The end of my weekend took place Sunday morning along the Newtown Creek aboard the boat Schamonchi in Bushwick where JunXion’s Myk Tummolo performed a set for his private afterparty.
The friends he gathered arrived from a variety of places all over the city and everyone had an exciting story to tell. The tale I told his guests was about how over the past 37 hours I’d taken 24 group portraits in 16 different places of New Yorkers enjoying Halloween in their own way. With the recent debate over Columbus Day still our minds and the madness of the December holidays ahead I was happy to report that folks of all stripes were both celebrating Halloween and actually enjoying it.