| Event | Scrap Time |
| Date | June 21, 2026 |
| Location | Secret Location, Brooklyn, NY |
| Attended | 5:15 am – 12:30 pm |
| Performers | Ashcan Orchestra, Gbar, Nail Salon, Axine M * Solid Choir, Bella Hayes, Cube, CZ Wang b2b Will DiMaggio, Natalia, DJ Manny |
Doomsday Preppers
When we arrived at Scrap Time just before sunrise, at a beach not chosen for its beauty but for its likeliness to fly under the pig radar, there were girls giving out extravagant bouquets of avant-garde flowers—pitcher plant, purple smoke, peonies, garlic scapes, foxtail lilies—from a wagon. Considering that a single squiggly chive blossom had recently been quoted at $20 per stem at my local flower shop, I guessed that these were leftovers from some other event, or that they’d been homegrown. Or maybe some rich person had chosen to redistribute their resources in this fleeting and baroque way. People gamely donned the flowers as sculptural accessories and staked them in the sand.
The Poncili Creación crew were set up next to my friends and some of them started burying one of the brothers in sand, adorning his grave with flowers. A woman wearing flesh-toned booty shorts printed with pubic hair implored someone to hand her a straw so that the brother could continue to breathe while he was fully buried. No one responded, so she scrounged one from a discarded iced coffee cup and broadcasted a sexy glare. Michael found a waterlogged loaf of bread in the murky water and brought it over, shouting “Breadwoman!,” a call that resonated widely given the demographic overlap with Dripping the previous weekend. To everyone’s horror and delight, a Poncili brother took a bite out of the wet loaf.
In the distance, a person danced in the water alongside a skeptical egret, preening and mincing and mimicking its moves. It was solo time in the water doubling as an impromptu performance for anyone who was paying attention. Part of the pleasure was being watched. Apparently giant horseshoe crabs had been getting their freak on during an earlier stage of the party, but we had arrived too late to see the action.
I have been thinking about how we—the people around me—create what I consider real value, as opposed to financial capital, even as we live in a city that extracts and devalues our skills, hazes and degrades us, and is constantly trying to eject us and replace us with half-empty high-rise luxury condos and other worthless shit that we can’t afford and probably wouldn’t want even if we could. The shoreline should be public and free, but too often it is privatized and policed. Beach renegades like Scrap Time reclaim it, even just for a moment, though depending on the location they can come with the risk of federal charges and confiscated equipment, which had happened to friends who threw another renegade last summer.
As some friends set up beach shelters and others handed around chilled fruit and orange juice and we debated the swimmability of the waterway, I thought about how good we are at taking care of each other as chosen family, or even just rave-family-of-the-moment. Moon and I ventured into the water, which didn’t seem to get deeper no matter how far out we went. We talked about a book we had both read, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The family therapist that I had briefly convinced my dad to see with me had privately recommended it after witnessing our dynamic, and it basically read as a memoir I could have written. The author proposes that people who grew up with emotionally immature parents (there are four flavors: emotional, driven, passive, and rejecting) are very perceptive of and responsive to others’ needs, and also overly independent and self-reliant. The flipside is that we feel like we always need to be taking care of others instead of ourselves and that in order to be loved, we can’t have any needs or negative emotions of our own. An improbable number of my close friends have either read the book and hard-related, or written down the title and planned to read it because they already knew they would.
One of these friends, Merray, told Shawn that she is tired of being Mommy and she wants to be Baby now, and I told her that we could be her parents and that there was a jug of cold water in the cooler and that she didn’t have to bang her bottle against the wall in order to get it. I am starting to think that so many of us out here are good at packing the right things to enjoy the cold night and the beating sun and share food and drugs because we developed these skills as survival strategies and coping mechanisms in childhood. There is something healing about the fact that we can now use this capacity to take care of and create abundance for each other.
As I contemplated the wreckage that our Boomer parents have left us—societally, environmentally, and emotionally—I saw a giant handmade squid puppet dancing nearby, accompanied by someone wearing a practical sun hat with a mesh flap that had been transformed into a puppet face. Suddenly, some people broke out a giant Montessori-style parachute that sheltered the dancefloor under protective shade while creating a festive atmosphere as DJ Manny played a song that told everyone to get low. Crouched under the parachute, I said hi to a person I’d met at a cursed city- or possibly developer-funded drag performance in Domino Park earlier that week and they introduced me to their friend whose green hair I had admired during Bendik Giske’s dusk set at Dripping. They had been sitting in a row with three friends: one with deep orange curls, one with a marigold buzzcut, they with green, and another with purple, which was exactly what I wanted to see as I was coming up on acid. They told me that they had deliberately sat in rainbow “Powerpuff formation,” which had definitely felt powerful.
I asked Shawn if there is a name for this subculture, which seems more specific than just raving and has a postapocalyptic flair. It feels spawned of bike coops and mutual aid and Crew Change, yet not totally divorced from fashion. There are pattern-makers in our midst. Headscarves over embroidered baseball caps, t-shirt surgery and frayed edges, lots of tattoos, hormones, thongs out, realtree camo, kind of crust punk and wook-adjacent, but not corny. They identified early 2000s Alexander McQueen and the local chapter of Food Not Bombs as touchstones. It’s important to look bedraggled and kind of like you washed up on the beach, but also hot. Geoff doesn’t pander to this aesthetic: he showed up at Dripping with no food or sleeping mat, just knee-high shiny black rubber boots with sculptural detailing and latex rope along the back, and here he is wearing black leather platforms, short shorts, a crisp blue Lacoste shirt, and a Fendi hat or something. I love how glamorous he is under all circumstances. Unlike the rest of us, his shoes never come off. Pony arrived wearing Telfar loafers, which I pointed out to Geoff, who was holding a Telfar water bottle that he had misplaced and then located in the lost and found in the dungeon at Dripping—a testament to the audience’s integrity, I thought. Pony unfurled a beautiful woven blanket from Myanmar and I appreciated our ability to populate our lives with beautiful, practical things as well as beautiful, impractical things in service of our needs, which include whimsy and hotness as well as cold water and structural change.
I spotted Robin from my writing class, whom I’d never met in person, and rushed over to introduce myself. She immediately felt like kin, given that we have spent hours together on zoom and both shared compromising personal essays with the class. Several other members of the class, as well as our professor, are also here. She hands me issue 28 of a photocopied newsletter that she and her friend Rae make. The words wiggled at me when I looked at them, but when I read it later, I discover that she is advocating for spending time sweating with and talking to strangers as an alternative to taking SSRIs. It turns out that Rae and I both went to college in Montreal and frequented the same bike coop, and we trade stories about being negged or hit on by bike coop men, but fuck them: we built our own bikes, and Robin has since founded and co-founded two bike shops and I coincidentally went to one of them last week for a workshop where I made a kite out of a contractor bag and a dowel. I brought it today, and I see some other workshop participants here too. I love continuing education. We somehow always find and re-find each other in these self-organized spaces that inevitably converge at the rave.
I recognized the wisdom of making a kite out of a trash bag instead of, say, the handmade Japanese paper I had envisioned, once I tried to fly it in barely any wind and it ended up in the sand and water with seaweed trailing from its string. Garbage bags are resilient and multipurpose and basically free, and so are we. Like a hack Christina Ramberg, I had used a silver marker to decorate the kite with a bow-tied tuxedo on one side and a suit and tie on the other—design choices initially informed by the shape of the kite that had now become comedic. There was something poetically perfect about trying and failing to fly a trash kite adorned with formalwear while tripping at the beach rave.
Some of the organizers had laid out handmade merch on the rock jetty—disheveled used t-shirts of various shapes and sizes that had been artfully airbrushed and bleach-sprayed. In my altered state I found it impossible to discern which, if any, of these items of clothing I would actually wear in the future, but I urged Shawn to buy one airbrushed with an open pizza box labeled HOT, FRESH containing mounds of sand that spelled out S-C-R-A-P. I told Robin that if I saw anyone wearing any of these shirts out in the world, they would immediately seem like someone I needed to befriend—I guess that’s how merch works, it dawned on me—but I also recognized that we are all here now, and it’s not like I’m going around introducing myself to everyone.
At some point, the music stopped, and I saw two cops walking down the beach. This was not great timing, as I had taken 2CB not long before, but they didn’t engage with anyone. They just walked along the shoreline—romantically, many of us thought, or wished. The only thing that would have rescued their reputation was holding hands. Make it gay! There wasn’t much else for them to do. At this point it was 8 or 9 a.m., barely anyone was drinking alcohol, and everyone had it more or less together even as the party was going strong. The cops actually seemed kind of awkward, like they knew that they had shown up where they were not wanted, worn the wrong outfits, and that everyone was watching them and wishing they weren’t there. For a moment, it felt like the power was ours. Near the tents over by the turntables, I heard choral music. Six women were kneeling in the sand, singing from sheet music that they held down from the wind. Was this staged subterfuge? Some said the generator had cut out, others said that it was a planned performance. Apparently the cops had said “Good work keeping down the decibels” before leaving. I was reminded of the Scrap Time show on the Staten Island ferry in December, where I had worried that the ferry staff would shut us down, but they loved it. They came over to watch and take videos and told us we didn’t even need to get off and re-board the ferry in Staten Island if we didn’t want to.
I found myself thinking, if we can do this, maybe we can do anything. Maybe we will be okay. Maybe we can figure out how to survive this wreckage and make something out of it. Lately my go-to example of this is the massive, architecturally precise gothic cathedral—complete with pointed arches and backlit stained-glass windows—that had been built out of cardboard and packing tape for Kay and Seva’s wedding at Zero Chill last fall. It was pure folly, made out of garbage like my kite, a massive amount of effort for a day or two of pleasure, a show of architectural and engineering prowess in the service of pure delight. Because we can, and also because we need this.
Scrap Time felt like that too: it must have taken a ton of planning and effort to book and coordinate the DJs, source the generator and speakers, haul everything in, spend 12+ hours at the party, and then clean up and pack up in the midday sun. Plus it was free, with just a La Croix box sharpied with “$$$” passed around the dancefloor. (Note to the organizers: pockets and cash were scarce at that moment, but we do want to give back, let us know how.) I was reminded of the potlatch—the Northwest coastal indigenous practice of giving away or destroying massive amounts of food and precious goods, banned by the Canadian government for decades because of its disruption of private property and settler colonial values. Both the beach rave and the potlatch are huge expenditures of effort and resources in service of ephemeral, experiential, and perhaps largely symbolic outcomes. They bestow gifts upon people who have been spurned by capitalism and the state. But where the potlatch is usually meant to demonstrate a leader’s power through a show of largesse, this gathering was leaderless, and we were essentially turning detritus into collective abundance. More than once, on certain dancefloors including this one, I have thought: these are the people that I want to face down the apocalypse with.
Looking at this gives me hope, I told Shawn. We are united by our willingness to go through a ridiculous amount of effort—waking up at ungodly hours and biking or carpooling across boroughs to destinations far from subway stations with gear in tow—in order to experience brief moments of dissociation, beauty, and maybe even transcendence together. In this hyper-extractive society that tells us that our priceless skills are essentially worthless, it’s easy to forget that we are the source of real value. We have to put up with so much shit to live in this city, which makes us feel poor and disposable even as we give it so much, and this is why we go through the trouble. We bring the magic through what we do, how we do it, and who we do it with, and Scrap Time is an ode to that.
If we can do this despite all the obstacles, imagine what we would be capable of if everything that saps our energy was eradicated, I said. What if this waterway wasn’t polluted, and there were no landlords or cops? Imagine what we could create then. Shawn pointed out that in some way, we are already doing it—here we are, and look at what we made. The water wasn’t that bad and the cops had come and gone. When the last set ended, friends came around with trash bags, and I’m pretty sure that we left the shoreline cleaner than we’d found it. Maybe this was actually a beach clean-up party with a good speaker system and a weird start time, riding out this apocalypse and laying the groundwork to weather the next. I foraged a bouquet of discarded purple smoke and pitcher plant flowers from the sand.