by Jean Marie Carey | 6 Apr 2013 | Music, Re-Enactments© and MashUps
Some intermittent institutions … I’m probably not going to see them again. I always wonder what “the last time” doing something or going somewhere will be like, if it’s better if you know beforehand or preferable to find out the continuum is now a memory afterward.
I have been going to the Castle, Tampa’s gothic and industrial music nightclub, in its various iterations, since I was a teenager. No matter how long I would move away for, it would always be here when I returned. Over the years, I was able to compare it experientially with all sorts of clubs, from Sanctuary in Salt Lake City to Warsaw in Miami to Berghain in Berlin and scads of “rave-themed” house parties in Antwerp and Brussels.
This past year I haven’t gone out as much in general, but I still met up with longtime friends on Mondays once in a while. We wouldn’t set up a date or anything, you’d just show up and some of the crew would be there. Attendance has been down on Mondays and while Ybor-City-in-the-Nineties legacies like the Senator and Theo Wujcik still make the scene regularly, eventually, the world will move on. It’s sad in a way to think of this last vestige of the once incredible Tampa Bay electronic music scene, which at one time including rotating DJ nights at Rene’s, Empire, Trax, Palladium, Club Detroit, Masquerade, and pop-ups at Act IV and other places (not counting London Victory Club, which began it all) falling into history but … I was really happy that the Castle has made so many attempts to keep up to date with electro and added lots of cool newish elements to its rotations, particularly in the music video department, mixing in Ladytron, Interpol, Cut Copy and Presets to the “hits.”
The last night I went to the Castle, I was braced to be a little disappointed, since I’m one of the people who actually prefers the new material to, you know, the entire Hacienda playlist from 1987. But actually it was just perfect. My friends were there, it wasn’t too crowded with glowstickers, and there was a lot of room to dance, yet it wasn’t empty. I don’t know if I will see the Castle again but this was a good way to remember it if I don’t.
by Jean Marie Carey | 7 Sep 2007 | Art History
Crack at the Edge of the World
It is clinically and physically possible to inhale a heart-stopping dose of crack cocaine. Yet in the majority of death-by-rock cases in Tampa and other urban centers during the drug’s heyday in the Eighties and the years since, the cocaine dilute has been no more than a contributing factor.
In fact most crack-related fatalities were caused not by toxic rock but by lead poisoning courtesy first of small-caliber handguns and then by increasingly high-powered automatic weapons, often wielded in crimes auxiliary to the actual use of the drug. As convenience store and gas station clerks were gunned down for twenty dollars by desperate rock fiends and hollow-points blasted through children’s bedroom windows, crack’s collateral victims came, almost obsessively, the attention of affluent, white Floridians.
Throughout the Seventies and the early Eighties, Tampa Bay had a fearless if uneasy relationship with cocaine, the party drug of the wealthy and popular. In 1980, suffering hallucinations and insomnia, comedian Richard Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine — the drug is rendered with ether making it smokable as well as highly flammable — and suddenly it seemed the free ride the suburban white powder had winkingly got in the media was over, becoming the gritty slush of the ghetto.
Juvenile Ibis, August 2007
Freebasing, in which cocaine hydrochloride was chemically converted was clearly too uncontrollable for even the most high-craving fiends. Crack — a mixture of coke, ammonia, baking soda, and other filler ingredients solidified into rough pellets for consumption via a glass pipe — was more stable. Containing only about ten percent pure cocaine, it was also much less expensive than the polar powder inhaled in discos, selling for as little as ten dollars a hit.
The physical effects of smoking crack are instant, extremely pleasurable, — and very brief. Like modern-day scourge meth, crack produces a spurt of intense euphoria, reduced hunger, and trenchant wakefulness .As the rush evaporates after as little as fifteen minutes, these sensations are replaced by an intense depression and the irrational but seemingly irresistible desire for more crack.
The so-called crack epidemic victimized mostly the poor, and inordinately the black, so much so that claims by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton that crack was introduced to African American population centers by the CIA were taken quite seriously. Throughout most of the Nineties, gangs dueled for crack-selling corners in housing projects in Tampa and St. Petersburg with frequently fatal results, while police waged a “War on Drugs” in those communities and the justice system executed a no-tolerance-for-possession policy which resulted in insanely long sentences for those caught with just a few rocks.
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