---: Highlights from the DEMF photobooth

Still not famous. Kinda full of self doubt watching my friends and peers climb further and further ahead of me while I've been having a slow couple of months. I just got back from Detroit where I was spinning at one of literally hundreds of afterparties for the Detroit Electronic Music Fest. It was the first time I've played outside of Chicago and I was so nervous, I couldn't plug my headphones into the mixer my hands were so shaky. It was a weird crowd, mostly consisting of sports fans there to watch the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, and the Tigers trounce the Twins by something like 19-3. Almost everyone else was a DJ who's been at it a lot longer than me. At first I was trying to play to the crowd, and it was just awkward. Eventually I went back to my comfort zone, and rocked it, but it was still a bit bummy. Sarah said that parts of the set were brilliant and parts of it were terrible. I asked my friend Qbot if she'd ever had a night that felt like half of it was her best ever and half of it was her worst. She said that, no, if parts of it are terrible, then it's a terrible set, and I tend to agree.

Sarah and I brought the GlitterGuts equipment with us to Detroit just in case there was an opportunity to do a shoot somewhere. We hauled it around to every gig and every party, but nothing felt right until Sunday when we ended up at a place called City Club. I didn't realize at the time that this was a real venue and not something underground, but apparently (and despite the generic name), it's a long running nightclub and a staple of Detroit's industrial scene. The place was like a cross between Neo and every weird loft party I went to in the early aughts (Charybdis, Buddy, Transamoeba...any of them) with it's grumpy old regulars looking for tail, Burning Man hippie ravers, always-on circus performers, and nerdo tough guys who looked like they'd rather be LARPing with broadswords in a field somewhere. As we climbed the steps, my partner in crime DJ Demchuk said under his breath, "Just keep walking, no matter what they say." Our sneak worked, but Sarah (my partner in everything else) was off her game that night and got stuck behind the velvet rope, where a phalanx of security guards were trying to bleed thirty bucks out of her. She wasn't going to budge, and our predicament forced me to do what I'd been wanting to do anyways. I started grabbing official looking people and telling them I had talked to someone about doing a photobooth there. Each time I got bounced to someone higher up on the food chain, until someone just told me it was cool. By this point Sarah just said fuck it and went back to the motel, but I wasn't going to leave so I figured I might as well go through with it.

Eric doing a photobooth in Detroit? The complete opposite of Eric as a DJ in Detroit. I was smooth as shit, confident, making friends and getting hit on. It isn't our best work overall. We only had it set up for a little while before the vibe of the place started to get a little weird (in a good on the dance floor, and full of tension for a half block radius in any direction from it), and we were limited to a one-light setup because of space. Still, I think we got some tight shots of some new beautiful, weird fuckers, and my only real regret is that I didn't stick around long enough to gain the trust of the heavy duty ravers and candy kids, who were decked out like it was Party Monster and the most colorful parts of the nineties.