| Event | Gorges |
| Date | February 11, 2024 |
| Location | World's End, New Orleans, LA |
| Attended | 7AM-10AM |
| Performers | Sass Collective |
Sunrise at the End of the World
The sun had risen about half an hour before we finally made it to the naval base. It was a massive, three-building complex, abandoned save for a lone cop car camped out by an open driveway. We’d arrived in New Orleans just six hours ago and immediately met P, St.’s friend, who told us about Gorges, a sunrise rave happening at World’s End, a levee-turned-park along the Mississippi in the Bywater neighborhood of the city. P, our de facto guide, was sure that we had to cross through the naval base to get there. I was in a zombified state, animated by coffee, the delirium of sleeplessness, and the waning inertia of a road trip, but I was still cognizant enough to feel uneasy. P assured us that the cops parked out front didn’t care. People trespassed here all the time. We’d be fine so long as we weren’t stupidly obvious. We wandered a bit, looking as casual as possible at seven in the morning, as we searched for the best place to climb. A plainly dressed, straight couple biked by us a few minutes later. I didn’t think they were headed our way judging from their looks, but they stopped and said something cryptic (but would turn out to be literal) about the path being under the trains. They kept going, and we, confused, hopped the gate.
The atmosphere inside immediately shifted. We’d crossed a threshold. The energy was menacing, yet there was this well-traveled quality that disarmed me, even in my state of hyperalertness. Distant, muffled beats perforated the stillness. We passed through the first floor of the first building, taking some photos of the blight, and mostly stayed on the outskirts of the other buildings. At the fence on the other side of the base, I realized I had almost torn my little Telfar jersey climbing the gate for nothing…we crawled under our last hurdle and joined the sparse procession on the public footpath leading to World’s End.
The sun hadn’t broken the overcast all morning. A biblically dense fog shrouded the ships in the Mississippi and curled around the vegetation along the water. The music was pumping now, like a beacon urging us forward. At the head of the clearing stood the portal, a circular moongate structure adorned with garish technicolor fabrics. A meandering laissez-faire energy permeated the space. There was a small crowd dancing languidly in front of the DJ booth at the center with others drifting from the dance floor to picnic blankets strewn about or the sofas sloping along the river’s edge. Someone had pulled a truck, with makeshift seating in the back, into the clearing a few paces from the dance area. On the far end, there was an old tower full of people with a swing that went harrowingly over the water. It looked as though one gust of wind would send it all into the Mississippi.
The four of us wandered toward the far edge of the clearing behind the DJ booth to gather our bearings. P braided S’s hair, and I quietly stared into the fog as my brain adjusted to the raucousness. Something was churning inside me. St. had spent last summer in New Orleans and warned that I’d be drawn to the thrill of its lawlessness and vivacity, and admittedly, I was taken. It almost felt staged, as if New Orleans knew I was coming and decided to give me a show. All these charmingly unusual characters. The otherworldly fog swallowing everything. The desolate monster of a building looming in the distance. A levee in New Orleans being called the “End of the World” and this Odyssean journey leading to the banks of the Mississippi. It was uncharted territory, coming at a time when life in New York felt equally as unknown with new questions of how to inhabit myself post-breakup and how to discern which feelings were my own or the new medication and if this distinction even existed, let alone mattered. I walked along the concrete drop-off inching down the slope to get closer to the water. I wanted to see my reflection, but I began to slip and had to scurry back to the top before falling in completely. P finished with S’s hair. I asked if they wanted to dance. It didn’t matter who was playing. I needed to sweat out the last few hours, to exorcize the buzzing in my head.
Thirty or so minutes passed, and I started feeling a little sluggish and disconnected. We’d only slept an hour last night, so I figured I needed more time to get accustomed to the spotlight of a bright morning and shake out the exhaustion. Another thirty or so minutes passed, and my block continued, as if the river’s fog was clouding my mind, keeping me from focusing on the music. The disconnect on the dance floor started to bleed through. Little phantom fingers poked me, distracting me from dancing and alerting me to little incongruencies that I hadn’t noticed earlier until I tried to, yet couldn’t, do exactly what I craved to do most. Fresh blueberries at the DJ booth and cigarette butts floating in the river. The hypervisibility of the dancefloor and the veil of mist occluding what surrounded us. The sounds of tomorrow slicing through the vestiges of a city’s past. The blasé energy around me vis-à-vis the dystopian theatrics of the levee. Glazed eyes of the ravers as their spellbound bodies moved. How many squatters had passed through here? Who were the shrines dedicated to? What would become of the naval base? Where were the Black ravers in a city like New Orleans? Had this levee been submerged during Hurricane Katrina? The breeze, now sharper and more chilling, gave me gooseflesh. I was unraveling at the overstimulation and the questioning. The glamor was dissipating, leaving behind the ghostly afterimage of reality–endless miles of highway, asphalt writhing, coalescing into one giant wall erected right in front of me. The clarity of the comedown at once jarring and dulling. Bones as still as the water. My vibe was dead, and I was left frustrated and stuck.
In “Suffocation of the Void: Hauntology, New Orleans, and Art Neville,” Ryan Clarke writes of his city, “There is a specter haunting New Orleans. It glides right above every street corner, in every bar, at every venue, and any instrument that finds itself within the city’s limits. It’s unavoidable and it takes up so much room. . .That what is no longer continues to take up space in its non-existence is the most prevalent idea to New Orleans today.” Clarke goes further to say the cultural production of New Orleans is haunted by this non-existence, rendering little room for cultural forms of today, or even the near past, to truly breathe. At the rave, I felt this haunting of the non-existent etched in the physicality of the space, both literally and figuratively (and really the latter due to the former). All the echoes at the end of the world left by those before had morphed the area into some kind of geo-spatial palimpsest. Altars for the dead. Remnants of past squats. Graffitied messages on rusted defense structures. City park benches. Trinket-covered shrines. The naval base itself was an especially enormous monument to the presence of that which was and is no longer. The levee held so many layers of spatial reckonings in which this rave (and those before and to come) was enmeshed. Man-made barrier against the might of a river, a site of both abandon and remembrance, a dance floor, an appendage to urban blight, a park, a canvas, a graveyard… I just wasn’t sure how to make sense of my presence, if there was even room for this reconciliation. What was palpable at the rave was this sense of limbo between contradictory forces…trespass and welcome, hallowed and profane, boundlessness and confinement…all swirling within the multivalence of the World’s End and its many lives, some dead but none truly gone.