Updated 2 years ago
Michael Alig just died of a heroin overdose.
I have zero room to talk. In 1993 I led a film crew from the syndicated TV tabloid, American Journal, into Club USA in Times Square after they gave me heroin in the penthouse of the Marriot Marquis, and they did a big expose on heroin and clubbing. I thought it would be fun to be gobsmacked wearing Gaultier sunglasses and parting the crowd like the Red Sea. But I only did it for the kicks and I thought it was cool, and stopped shortly thereafter because it was boring and stupid.
I was going to write an obit for Alig, but quickly realized all he ever did that was good was throw a lot of parties, thrown mostly at Gatien clubs. But this was not some unique contribution. The 90s were chock full of great parties. In the early 90s, the best were from people like Suzanne Bartsch and people within the Patricia Field milieu, Richie Rich and the like, and on the other end of the spectrum, the burgeoning rave scene with the Frankie Bones’ Storm Raves and Scotto’s NASA. And later on, Twilo and my favorite, psytrance.
After much thought, the true enemy was and is macroeconomic: the slow squeezing of the real estate bubble and gentrification on urban creative impulse. Everything else is window dressing. We in the 90s were in a sweet spot between old cheap scary and new expensive spotless. Alig’s era was more in the early scarier part of the sweet spot, when some schlub like me could afford to live 2 blocks from Limelight and squeak in.
In that environment, world-class nightlife would naturally grow like mushrooms. Add in the advent of the Internet, and all the money that brings in to creative types, and you have a predestined golden age that continued on into the 2000s with Burning Man and WIlliamsburg/Bushwick, until it all got slowly strangled by 2020.
It’s just fucking sad (and funny) that Rudy Giuliani turned out to be so much more campy kitschy cross-dressing pants-down wig melting dildo store trashy entertaining than Alig ever was. And he outlived him.
This ain’t John McCain’s funeral. I’m gonna put in as much effort in writing about his death as Alig did in trying to get his life back together after prison, so I’ll just end it with this:
You’re only as good as your last party.
Here is a fairly sized scrapbook from that era, with a timeline, music, videos, flyers, photos, newspaper articles, and stories:
