I think Andy Warhol said it best ...

OK it's Monday morning and someone (Zamfir?) is playing a pan flute in Lafayette Park. I love that it can't be something normal like a guitar or trumpet around here, you know? It has to be a pan flute or a bagpipe.

In mythology, the music of Pan was said to be capable of arousing inspiration or sexuality, which is the perfect segue to a brief recap of "Fierce Hot Mess" on Friday night at Oslo.

I gotta say, I think this event is tremendous, and I am proud to say I managed to achieve two of the three objectives in the name. The energy was great, everyone was having fun and when things shut down at 2am it seemed like we'd just gotten going.

It was crowded but not packed (the crowd was bigger than the inaugural FHM on July 4, though), and it was full of familiar faces, younger and older, freaky and subdued. One of my friends mentioned that one nice thing about the way the gay scene works in Detroit right now is that there isn't a place everyone goes all the time, but then periodically and sometimes unexpectedly there is a night when just everyone you love to see is there. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how the straight scene works too, albeit with a touch more regularity.

So the crowd is great, and the music is greater. It was a fantastic mix of disco and new wave dance that you love from the olden days mixed with some house and ital-disco and new stuff you might not know. It's definitely a dance club vibe, but in an old school way. I got my Sylvester, "Do You Wanna Funk," which thrilled me to no end. And I got the song, "You Belong," by Hercules and Love Affair, which is currently in heavy rotation at Chez Supergay. It's got a little Kevin Saunderson/Inner City homage thing going on and is amazing. (And the video is genius, it kind of captures the sound and spirit of the Palmer Park after-hours club Midnight Sun back in '95-'96, before it became Numbers and got that tacky circuit party crowd.)

Interestingly, on Saturday I was up to August 2, 1978 in The Andy Warhol Diaries, and his entry for events exactly 30 years prior was:

"Life really does repeat itself. The old songs come back in a new way and the kids think they're new and the old people remember and it's a way of keeping people together, I guess, a way of living."

That pretty much sums it up. See you at the next one, first Friday in September.

The whistle kills me. It's perfect.

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