Daytime was disorienting for club kids. You’d see them moving around in the streets to the same rhythms that pushed them around the dance floor the night before. The echo of the club sounds and the general morning grogginess of nighthawks conspired with the eyes to produce strange effects. Like jellyfish below, or angels above, their movements left tactile waves or visible auras; halos perhaps, extrusions from the abject joy overflow. Maybe it’s true that any vista of any crowd would produce something like this to the reddened eye, but it was certainly more evident with club kids, because of the latency of the party, and the muscle memory of musical beat that still governed their limbs. Their bodies had become dedicated to the rhythm, like good spouses, or addicts. It was what moved them physically and emotionally. It was what allowed them to dance three hours straight without a break in a smoky club, and compelled them to go back again, night after night. The clubs were not elite salons. Many were very seedy places where danger held the first table. All were expensive in a time of Reaganomics, where jobs were hard to come by in rust belt cities, where the factories just kept closing. Yet, the outside world seemed to matter little on the dance floor, so they came, poor, bucking danger and ruin, ducking bookies and exes to satisfy the craving for that certain euphoria only found where the music enters your body and you surrender. Better than drugs they’d say; and they were right.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

Buy books! My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

The lights would get so bright on the pulse that for a moment it would look like the dance floor had been transported out of doors, to some English garden party when the late spring flora  had exploded with color. Color – that moment of transformation from blue and black to psychedelia, on the pulse of a two-second strobe, was not something he imagined to take from this less than fabulous neighborhood club. The bodies moving within that light, the multi-hued swirling of pegged pants and skirts, cravats and headbands, against a sunbox of light, approximated a Lichtenstein in a centrifuge. Inside of this ordinary brick building with unfinished walls was a living museum of modern art, a prescient multi-media performance piece in a place where few had ever visited an art museum.

We are all artists in our ecstasy, he thought, and then girded himself for the thrill of the next pulse of light.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

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Excerpt from the story Opening Acts:

…For ten minutes or so they just played around, fumbling really, trying to find a bit of harmony, until Shirley yelled over from the bar: “Why don’t youz find yourselves a song in all that noise.”

“Ok, well, that sounds like a request to me,” Martin said, “follow along with me and give us some lyrics, would ya’ son?”

It was only a few minutes after that when they were chiming like church bells, and Bryan was singing:

And I heard ye now/

come calling to me/

from the abbey ground/

beyond the sea/

and the companion cries/

of the wailing shes/

who’d lost their loves/

in the troubled eighties.

–Danny Grosso

In the depths of it she could barely breathe, and even her shallow respiration sounded ominous, as if a small elderly man had fallen asleep in her chest and was snoring. In the depths of it she was all dark, and she was in the depths of it mostly always. Her appendages would morph, her arms heavy hammers a’swinging, her fingers fragile glass tubes. Her eyes were burning embers, her hair a swaying anemone, tentacles black and greasy with the ink of the sea.

In the depths of it she was unapproachable at the times when she needed affection most, and even as the pressure enveloped her with its own estimation of care, she realized it was a poor substitute for a human touch. Yet, as she contemplated the possibility of reaching out, and of someone reaching in, she invariably felt her arms too short to reach the surface, and others’ empathy to shallow to retrieve her. She waited in this purgatory for the end, but though her will was already gone, she was not, and would not be. She feared that this was all she knew now, and because of this, she would know nothing else in death. She sank deeper and deeper, sleepwalking through her days and nights, praying for the fatigue, and the fog, and all the water to clear, for a night terror, or a slap in the face, that would wake her and send her chasing after the sun.

–Danny Grosso 

Merry Memories.

–Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

A nighttime explosion for kids who had no war, the flash of the black light strobe in a vacuum of darkness, started the heart and seared the nearest image into the cortex. No one ever dancing, or even just moving in such an environment will ever forget it.

The sentiment was difficult to comfortably convey to the older guys, who had been to Viet Nam or even Korea, who had seen actual bombs bursting, filling the night with horrible light, but it was all they had, these club kids of the 80’s, to stir the spirit, with Cold War as it was, stagnated into intransigence. Besides, reveling in the momentarily controlled chaos of an out of control dance floor was infinitely better than charging the enemy’s lines. That was something everyone agreed upon.

The staccato animation of dancers within a space that is filled with darkness and music, and every other second, light would prove to be, over that short period, an enticement and a unifying dynamic. It would be only a short time before all of this was gone; and, broken apart as if in a strobe, the movement lost its continuity.

-Danny Grosso

He dreamed of a summer’s day, in Spain, near a tumultuous sea, over which the sun fought and won a battle to color the spirits below. There was a party that travelled on and off the cobbled streets to beach and glen and back again, colored banners marking the route of revelry.

They were already beautiful, but they were rendered more so, luminous even, by the sun, and as they twisted their bodies around they glistened, golden and brown, bronze statues blessed with the breath of life.

There was music playing, a combo, several songs at once somehow rising in harmony to meet a crescendo near the blazing disc in the sky. They would twirl with their hands in the air, and tilting their heads back, steal a second’s glimpse at the brightest star.

It all seemed to fill them with euphoric energy, and that party lasted into the next day and night, and as he’d joined in somewhere along the way, he wondered if the dream would ever end, or it it was even a dream at all.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

Buy books! My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Chickenhawk

This pitiful, featherless bird disguises its timid nature in seasons of conflict, when it emerges from its coop and dons false plumage with martial aplomb. Wrapping itself in armor, or flag pins, or a flag, the Chickenhawk belies its lack of courage with thespian craft, acting out scenes of bravado to audiences hungry for that sort of overacting. Most often, the runs of this farce are short, and the creature must recede to its dwelling and await another casting. However, in the unfortunate (for audiences) present era of endless war, the Chickenhawk seems to be permanently plying its unpalatable craft on multiple media platforms, there, by itself, lessening the intelligence of entertainment consumers who might hold their noses long enough to survive a soliloquy.

–Danny Grosso

It’s so American, really, to be built up on hype, to impossible heights, just to make the fall so much more devastating. He engineered and fed the world with his prodigious activism, before he was co-opted into laissez faire governments so they could share his shiny veneer – before completely undermining his approach. The smartest, brightest boy, who went west, like the country, from Iowa to Oregon and California, a sunny optimist about to run into the darkest depression in American history. Perhaps he became too much like those around him, after he was surrounded by power, in marble halls far from the prairie of his birth. Perhaps, this is all of our destiny, to become what others’ success demands, if we are all really powerless against the drumbeat of progress, or, alternatively, for those with plenty in hand, the status quo. 

It is hard to see photos of him as an elderly, diminished man, with the ghosts of Hoovervilles surrounding him like a grimy aura. Later presidents tried to humanize him, inviting him to public events, even soliciting his counsel. They, like those before him, were still taken by the sheer talent of that once golden boy. He acquiesced as they beckoned, for he knew what great things he knew, but he had already soured past potability. In ‘32 they practically ran him out on a rail, and 25 years later they wanted him to join up again. He must have still felt the sting of one of history’s great rebukes.

He may have managed the immense task, for him, in that late era, of smiling, of forcing his face to forget what was lost in that great fall from grace, but those pictures, just like his kind, are rarities. 

–Danny Grosso