The night out started with New York’s literati, and ended with a fog machine.
It was something of a typical Wednesday for Emily Witt, who knows how to float between worlds. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, she writes about abortion, climate change and, recently, Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. As a techno enthusiast, she spends her evenings going to raves, subsumed into a cathartic microcosm of New York’s nightlife, which she describes with clinical neutrality in her new memoir, “Health and Safety: A Breakdown.”
“The misconception that having fun is for young people, that there’s an expiration date, I don’t totally understand,” Ms. Witt, 43, said.
Early that night, at a party hosted by The Paris Review at its office in Chelsea, she looked a little uneasy.
“This is a professional space,” said Ms. Witt, who was wearing a long black coat over a sheer tank top and dark purple shorts. “Whereas, in the other, no one knows what anyone does for work.”
She snaked through the room in search of Emily Stokes, the magazine’s editor and an old friend and mentor of Ms. Witt’s. After a few minutes, Ms. Stokes appeared from the crowd. The two embraced, and Ms. Witt seemed to relax.
Ms. Witt had been attending Paris Review parties since 2011. The mood at the recent gatherings, she said, was “friendlier than it used to be.” She ate a scallion pancake and greeted a few writers she knew — Richard Beck, Zoe Lescaze, her fellow New Yorker colleague Naomi Fry — with a plastic cup of Prosecco in hand.
After a reading by Gary Indiana, it was time to get serious. Ms. Witt wanted to hit a few more spots: the club Nowadays for an electroacoustic gong set (yes, a gong); Earthly Delights, a new bi-level bar and music space; and the wine bar Mansions for an end-of-night dance.
All three venues — mostly unknown to her friends and acquaintances at the magazine party — were in Ridgewood and Maspeth, Queens.
“A big club filled with random people is not appealing to me right now,” Ms. Witt said. “I like going somewhere where my friends are hanging out, and where I’m not the oldest person in the room, honestly.”
In “Health and Safety,” Ms. Witt, who grew up in Minneapolis — where a rave was “something that took place in a cornfield,” she writes in the book — recounts stories others might consider off-limits for colleagues and family: having sex in the bathroom stall, not eating for 24 hours during a multiday bender, taking various substances given from strangers.
Personal revelations were nothing new for Ms. Witt, whose last book, “Future Sex,” chronicled her explorations of orgies and polyamory.
“Until you’re saying the stuff that upsets your parents, you’re not really doing your job,” she said during the 40-minute Uber ride to Queens. “You have to cross that threshold.”
We entered Nowadays from a side entrance. A sign on the door warned that the inside bar was closed, that phone use was prohibited and that voices should be kept low, conversations to a minimum.
The club’s dance floor, normally illuminated by pulsing lights, was dark. Black gymnasium mats were scattered around. The night’s attraction was an amplified gong, which the artist Sphente was slated to play for five hours.
Ms. Witt chose a mat and lay down with an exhale. At times, Sphente struck the gong with force, producing a clang. At others, the sound droned to a hum. With each variation, the deep sub-bass tones rippled out in waves, the vibrations pulsating through our tail bones.
After half an hour, Ms. Witt sat up from her horizontal sonic journey to watch more closely.
“I felt like you had to choose whether you’re going to go deep or surface,” she said once we were out of the quiet zone, grabbing a cup of water and a pair of green earplugs from the free dispenser.
Our bodies sufficiently restored and buzzing, we ordered another car to go to Earthly Delights, where Ms. Witt, who lives nearby in Ridgewood, had never been but had wanted to check out.
“My friends say it’s like the ending of ‘Looney Tunes’ when the credits roll,” she said, relaying their account of the décor.
That description turned out to be true. Ms. Witt headed up the stairs through a haze of blue and red fog and into the dance room, its walls lined with protruding curves like a rib cage. The concentric circles surrounding the D.J. were not unlike the tableau Bugs Bunny inhabits when he says, “That’s all, folks.”
“I feel like we’ve submerged,” Ms. Witt said, talking over the beat.
She contemplated how to describe the sound, landing on “slow,” “primal” and “chuggy.”
“I’m not the best at describing music,” she said. “I’m more metaphorical.”
We went to check out the bathrooms, in shades of blue, orange and green. Looking in the mirror, Ms. Witt noticed that her lips were a lighter shade than normal.
“Oh my god — you know what I did?” she said. “I put on concealer when I was in the car. It was so dark!”
Cosmetic fiasco averted, we slid into our third and final Uber at 11 p.m. to head to Mansions, a natural wine bar that books D.J.s well known in the rave scene.
Ms. Witt strutted in and was immediately greeted by a longhaired man named Kiddo Sincere, one half of the D.J. duo Pure Immanence. Soon after, the other half, Nick Bazzano, approached with hugs and a smile.
“I’m really enjoying this wine,” he said, bopping up and down a little.
Bunches of ceramic oversize grapes sat atop the bar like a rave-y still life.
They headed to the backyard to meet some friends, many of whom were fresh off a weekend at Sustain-Release, a small techno festival in the Catskills. (Mr. Sincere, Ms. Witt later revealed, is her boyfriend. They started dating last fall.) A joint was passed, a cigarette shared. A bottle of Slovenian orange wine, listed on the menu as “Adult Kool-Aid XXX,” sat in an ice bucket.
Soon Ms. Witt went inside, Mr. Sincere trailing slightly behind to lug the wine and ice bucket on his hip. She stuffed her bag behind a coat rack, stuffed her ears with foam plugs and stepped up onto the shag-carpeted dance floor, where the D.J. Cousin played under a beam of red light.
The sound was bouncy, with jungle music-like vocals. Ms. Witt shifted her weight to the beat and gently swung her hips. She looked at ease.
“I just love to go out at the end of the day,” she said. “Like, I’m not really a Netflix person.”
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