.: I've Been to Heaven.........

Saturday, December 17, 2005

I've Been to Heaven.........

Every Friday and Saturday night that is.... Club Heaven was located on the corner of Woodward and Seven Mile roads in Detroit and was basically the after hours joint to go to through most of the late 80's and 90's. Folks would start there evening at the Glass House down on Six Mile, for dinner and drinks... This was always starting the evening right, as people were grateful to be out of work for the week and would be ready for a party to start. From there everyone would go to Bookies for more drinking and definitely dancing to the beats of Greg Collier, and Melvin Hill. Bookies 870 Club was famous in the 70's and early 80's as the premier punk club, featuring Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Patty Smith to name just a few. In the mid 80's the club morphed into the best house music club in the city.

At 2am every night the club would close and the kids would flock over to Club Heaven for some of the best house beats ever often dancing till the sun came up. Heaven was Detroit's version of the Paradise Garage, it was all about the dance. The club was broken up into three rooms one huge dance floor with giant speakers at one end and two smaller rooms for folks to gather in... one of which was only for a select few....

Spinning every week was Ken Collier, the Godfather of house! Look up every DJ of stature today and you are likely to find Ken listed as an inspirational force in their development. "If Heaven was a club it would have two floors, one for Ken and the other with Frankie Knuckles... and heaven would be a sea of sweaty men getting their groove on to old school house beats!"
I was one of the Heaven faithful for years.... it was not uncommon to see the famous there from time to time, from Dennis Rodman to the groove is in the house kids from Delight! They might get a momentary "oh wow" before Ken would change up the tunes and people would converge in a rush to dance... Through out the evening circles would form and informal dance offs were held to the cheers and jeers of the crowed! To see and be seen, to dance and maybe find something more was the promise of Heaven.

The images from tonight post are the cast and crew of the House of Charles. Its to my knowledge some of the only images from the Heaven dance floor ever. They were taken for the premier issue of Kick Magazine, which was a pet project Curtis Lipscomb and definite outgrowth of our work on the MOC Motivator. `Ken came in early one saturday, lit the floor and the turntables while I photographed a bit of the flavor of the evening to come!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: I go looking trying to find Heaven and run into you.

Good thing; 8:32 PM
Unknown said...: I've been trying to find info on Club Heaven as Carl Craig recently mentioned the club in an interview and found your account most informative, thanks so much!; 9:12 PM
EpiphanyNoir said...: Glad you found it interesting! If you need more fell free to email me!; 10:05 PM
Anonymous said...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_BmXq39qmyY; 2:19 AM
Anonymous said...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_BmXq39qmyY; 2:21 AM

The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com