I figured the most insane place to be on New Years was Webster Hall. I was not mistaken. When I got there I had just polished off my bottle of rum and I was having trouble explaining to the door people at Webster why they needed to let me in for free. Eventually I made it up stairs and went straight to my favorite bartender Kate. I made a pretty wise decision at that point to switch to water and to try once again to get my shit together. I made it on stage somehow and I had never seen anything like this. I have seen MSTKRFT sell out Webster before and it is always madness, but I have never in my life seen so many people so close together dancing so hard. I took more photos of the swarming crowd than I did of MSTKRFT. At one point I pulled out my video camera and Alex English grabbed it from me. He jumped into the crowd and started filming while crowd surfing. Unfortunately I think I was too drunk to hit record on the camera. I still haven’t looked to see for sure.
That’s when shit got awesome. I decided that I would jump into the crowd with my camera. This was a really dumb idea, but I was really drunk. I at least had the presence of mind to give DJ RekLES my keys, wallet and phone before going in, but I don’t reccomend to anyone crowd surfing with $2000 worth of camera equipment. It was so packed that there was not much of a risk of being dropped up front, but as I got farther back in the crowd I did come crashing down. They caught me the first time and I went back up, but the second time I crushed a girl, but managed to save my camera. She was pissed but her friend helped me back up and then a bouncer reached across the crowd and pulled me back on stage. I really should have shot the band from the crowd, but I mostly only got shot of the people right below me. When I saw the pictures I was pretty disapointed to see it just looked like I was standing on stage taking the shots except for the occasional shot of my shoes in the frame. It is pretty hard to compose a shot while drunken crowd surfing. But at least I went for it right? If anyone finds any shots of me in the crowd, let me know. I am sure someone took photos of it…
The best part about crowd surfing was that it sobered me enough to get my act together. Before I went in I could barely stand, after I could almost complete full sentances. With the cold walk back to Lit I was pretty much managably sober by 5am. After the visit to Beauty Bar and a little felid trip to Bushwick, I was pretty much just hung over when I got home at 10am, but I still couldn’t manage to get to sleep until 1pm.
It was a crazy fucking night and I had a blast at every place I went. I wish all 5 parties could have happened on different nights so I could have spent more than an hour or two at any of them. There are so many other parties I missed that I wanted to hit up, especially some sick house parties. If only we could end a decade every night of the week. Happy 2010 guys. Let’s make the next decade as fun as this one.
Click here to see the photos from the late night New Years MSTRKFT show at Webster Hall.