Tales from the summer :IV: Albaniatek

A stream of consciousness report, intermittently typed on an Olivetti Studio 44 over five days of rave.

In the middle of beach-swamp... i.e. a large expanse of sandy & trash-filled coast in Albania. It would seem less sopping wet & murky if not for the constant influx of ravers, aggressors, addicts, bemused locals, homes-on-wheels, sound-systems, and pizza popups. It would seem more easily navigable if not for the high winds, roaring generators, van-mazes, and wooden chiringuitos.

So this story begins in the now better-defined beach swamp.

Our friends immediately got busy with their pizza shack. Still remains to be seen if the people here have interest in words, or if they are in need of something more immediately pleasurable. If only you could absorb stories & ideas by placing them in your fannypack or sucking them up your nose. If only I was a little more tech-savvy, I would pop these zine babies that I brought with me straight into an AI transcriber and have the DJs spin one zine per night to their fastest tekno set, one word per beat bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

I find myself at last having a limited grasp on Italonol, Spspspitaliano, or perhaps, even better, Spitalianglish. I would say that our crew would be able to settle into Spanish for the duration of the party, with the exception of S, who speaks almost exclusively Italian... except that we are not so robotic.

There is a living nature to the way we speak, especially with the Italians who switch mid-sentence to Spanish and then back to their mother-tongue in a pulsing yet random rhythm that leaves me fading in & out of comprehension.

About 24hrs into our stay here, the rave is still warming up. Different shops still popping up, and sound-systems still pumping slightly lazy sets into the sparse crowd. Undoubtedly the sundown will mark the in-earnest-start to the happening....

Too energized to wait without phones or other usual comforts for the start of the rave, we began the party last night in a rather wandering fashion, just trying to understand who & what are where......

We entered the strange fractured landscape of ketamine, which at thirty euros a gram is at least half the price and 2x the strength of the stuff I’d been exploring back in the USO. This is really the stuff for horses, not that cut-prescription for your poodle.

Walking to the farthest reaches of the occupation, we cut towards the coast, and for a moment I thought I was dreaming my way back to India the same way that earlier in the trip I could not stop smelling the cow psylage countryside that we drove through on our way here. Sandals. I don’t know why all the washed up sandals of Albania chose this piece of the beach. Stepping staggering & side-stepping as a crab. Cangrejo.

Why in certain parts of the world do people still let plastic fall out of their hands without a second thought, as if lifting a mature wind-dispersed seed up above their head and releasing.... the most natural and harmless thing in the world.

The trash. Our friend who I have yet to locate wrote me before we arrived about the trash. That they need help cleaning it. I didn’t know if they never found the hands, or if the material itself was never-ending. For that’s what it seemed to me. That you pick up one sandal and there is another slightly smaller one underneath, the Albanian-coastal-matryoshka.

So we fell in among the sandals, placing our own wherever there was a free space, or a free-er space, tessellating our feet with the ghosts of feets-past, attempting to recall the memories of Albanian children who drifted here, or how to say thank you in Albanian ((all we really recall is that it’s two multi-syllabic words probably with a hyphen as well)) or really trying to absorb, through our skin (the thin wall of it between our nose and our brain) the culture of ‘Albany’ without reading the history books, or communicating properly with the people, but under the same broken stars.... And it remains to be seen whether or not we care about them or they care about us BUT there is an undeniable shy curiosity.

What is this culture that rings Greek Mongolian Japanese Italian, this paradise that stretches long & open & not welcoming exactly, but welcoming in that subtle sense of lawlessness. At least, there is not a government that strangles. There are certain forces that cannot be tamed so easily. Cannot be overrun by bougie glitzy gentrifying humanity. Mexico City is one. The ocean is another. I haven’t spent enough time in Albania to say if this place is another. I haven’t spent enough time in freeparties to say if they are another. For sure they are smaller. But they have the same decentralization, which is key. We all know by now the story of counterculture and subversion and revolution in the USO... the leaders of movements get shot & disappear. It happened with the black panthers and it nearly happened with my green anarchy pals (luckily the USO is a big place and there are still plenty of nice little nooks to build your secret home in)

So, is the freeparty as powerful as the ocean?

Or, rather, perhaps it’s better to ask if we are as inevitable as gravity or money (currency), or change (EVOLUTION!). As in to say, is the party larger than the sum of its parts? Will it continue when we are gone? Did we create it or did it simply... come to be?

Or is it the dialectical collapse of capitalism? Perhaps Marx never meant that we would all all all return to primitive communism at the same time. Sometimes we as humans get caught up in the scale of things.

What began as three or four days of candyland became more contemplative, as it is bound to, as our temporary zone encountered challenges. I myself dropped LSD on this day of nuance, and had myself a lovely time watching the clouds, swimming in the ocean (and pooping in the ocean for the first time ever! Kind of weird to watch it float to the surface & drift away, but also so clean & easy & fun to feel it come out of my asshole with my fingers like a little kelp being birthed from my detritus) and having some real nice conversation. And dancing, of course, at this sound-system of the pulpo, de los mariscos, the apparent organizers of the rave. Some real happy music. It was an especially incredible an hour or two into the trip, where I felt that I held my body and danced as naturally as a bird catches the wind. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that comfortable in my body.

But I suppose that every day I feel a bit more comfortable, so in that way today was a normal day. However. From the beginning I could feel that there were some sketchy vibes among us at the teknival. It was a bit spread out, and the far away stages

---life is your dream--

had more tweakers. I wandered there only to immediately turn tail and head back to the real taz-spaces. I could feel that there were certain spots where the zone was truly autonomous & SAFE, and some where it was autonomous & UNPLEASANT AF. Some dudes from I don’t know where high on I don’t know what came up to me with a toy ak47 and pretended to kill me with military, practiced military movements. I also reacted in a real way, grabbed the tip of the gun and pointed it away.

Well, maybe a lot of people would think that funny... no, who the fuck am I kidding, that is clearly wack to have two meth-heads pretend to execute you like you are in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So I located several taz’s during the course of the day. The squid stage. Of course. The shady place with the lounge chairs on the beach. The little postos of the Italians with fanzines from Bologna (2 or 3). I wish that my friend’s pizzeria had felt like a taz but it didn’t, just felt like a busy business.

The sun was setting and it was really just perfect with a thick layer of clouds prolonging the whole situation-- and over the Mediterranean. My friend invited me to come stay with him --there-- and pointed out. To Bari. Italia. That is a funny thing. I came to Europe with a lot of ideas but I did not think that I would be learning Italian or caring spending loving tootootoo much on Italy. But now I am likely poised here at this Albanian port, awaiting the mathematically correct date to return to Italy and thus return to the USO without getting some red stamp on my visa because YES I WANT TO COME BACK! Eheh. Three times in Italy on one trip to Europe? What is going on here?

My voice was returning as the sunset after 1.5 days of strain & screech and wow che bella bella bellisimo. I took the occasion to start smoking tobacco again like a little piece of shit, and just laid out on the beach and pondered my first big moral dilemma amidst new friends and naked women dancing in the clouds of the sky up above and the clean crisp light smoke of father tobbaki.

My dilemma: What to do with this fannypack? Marsupio?

On other mornings I had eagerly scouted the beach at sunrise for groundscores. I mean-- someone lifted my headlamp the first instant I dropped it a few nights ago. Something lost something found, ehy? And yet. This one. I had asked the people around the fannypack. No one knew whose it was. This was hours ago. Now it still lay there. I walked over to it to grab the cool little extendable lighter keychain. Then I sat with my action for a moment. It was strange. It was a slow process, and eventually I arrived at the only heartfelt solution: I had to return the whole fannypack to a safer space so that its owner had a chance at finding it again. Because if I had thought about lifting stuff off of it twice, then it is only a matter of time until someone takes it.

So I said goodbye to my friends, grabbed the fannypack, and was walking up to the sound-system when the sound all stopped. Tekno stopped. No more heartbeat. No more infinite perseverance. The entire humming bustling village was on strike. There was an announcement. There had been a gang rape.

. . . . ——-——-----------------------------------

The music stopped for two hours. All of it. So people could put their heads on straight. So all the weirdos were more obvious. I mean. It’s what I wished would have happened when Trump was elected. I thought it would, back when I still had some faith that the people wouldn’t let terrible shit happen. As if there had ever been a time when this was the case.

The crazy truth is that bad shit happens all the time, in humanity and in nature. Even the earth rubs against herself and spouts lava out of gaping holes of her own flesh.

And yet. And yet we are compelled to search for this cooperative future that we dream of. And that’s not wrong. We are also cooperative. It was just as evolutionarily necessary as competition. Harmony just as essential as violence. Perhaps society will persist as long as these two forces remain polarized with no resolution.

--Anonymous

Postscript

As a woman who has moved around the world extensively & alone, I would like to make a statement. The extreme, risky, masochistic & wild lifestyle that free-thinkers and countercultural revolutionaries are drawn to may lead us all to die a bit young. But for women the risks are larger. This is a reality & this is quite fucked up.

Although these facts weighed heavily on the minds of all of us, and for some in a traumatic way, I am still glad that we all know what happened. This way, not only did we experience the joy & freedom of the autonomous zone, but we were also all forced to consider what is the correct response. To crisis, crime, tragedy. These are the kinds of questions that change the world, if we take the time to sit with their disgusting complexity.

In a free zone, we make these decisions ourselves. It is like, somehow with all of our conditioning, we are in the first community on earth. Frequently, the weight of such questions causes us to dissociate. But not always!

Keep on, let’s see.