Love/Fuck parade Review

The Love Parade was eh all right. The street
procession going down the Embarcadero was pretty cool.
it is always good to see partying in the streets.
Some of the floats were great, particularly the Sicko
Clowns and the Thump, Thumpin Pussy float. The other
floats were alright, some had weird plastic las vegas
style people on them, almost all the floats had some
sort of corporate/commercial sponsorship. But even
with those detractors, the party in the streets is always great.
It was no Reclaim the Streets!, but it was better than
stepping in dog shit.
The after party or party or whatever at the end was
pretty bad. It felt like the worst apsects of
rave/dance/club/BM inc. culture on parade in the
daytime. Fake fur gallour, clashing sound systems,
ODing teenagers, voyears, gratuitous straight people,
and more white people than you can shake a stick at.
There was a lack of funkand soul. Some of these things
could have been minimized if the festival was in a bigger space
and there was more seperatiion of the individual sound systems. But things were just nice too, just having a festival based on
dancing, even if there wasn’t so much of that going
on. But whether or not there is a dance music
community is still up for debate after being there.

I was with someone, who remembered all the things
that used to be there in the 3rd Street china basin
area. All the railroad workers that lived there, all
the poor and working class people that used to live in
that area. All that is there now, is giant parking
lofs and industry and all those new biotech campus
buildings. It is a thow away culture, out with the
old in with the new, emptiness and consumption. This
is what allienation looks like.
There is just no connection to the past, to history,
to community. Community is both a physical place and
a constructed relationship. That is something that felt tangibly
missing at the parade, a connection to something.
The Fuck parade was off a couple of blocks away in a
construction site. It was interesting and surreal.
But with it’s own texture of allienation and
emptiness. .. when you play music to no one are you
still playing music?
With the bone chilling wind, the day felt more
melancholy than boundlessly loving, but that is fall
for you. Perhaps the festival should be in the spring
and perhaps it should be in a neighborhood, like South
of Market where there is a connection to a history of
dance music culture in this city. Except all the yuppies
in their new lofts might not like the noise, or the disruption of "their neighborhood".
What does history or community mean in a city where everything is new?