raving about Raving

 

Here's a book that will interest Energy Flash readers and that's getting a ton of well deserved attention right now:  McKenzie Wark's Raving, a slim volume that weaves together speculative theory and experiential sense impressions drawn from the micro-raves and queer + trans clubs of Brooklyn, into a seamless rush of readability.  

Here's my blurb: 

"Raving is an electric mingling of memoir, theory and participant-observer ethnography. With loving precision, McKenzie Wark’s eyes and ears pay attention to the innumerable tiny interactions, gestures and rites that make up the all-night drug-and-dance party. This book radiantly understands the rave as a construction site for transitory kinship structures - a pocket in timespace that serves as a haven for fugitives from consensus banality and the intolerable pressures and oppressions of normality - a miniature home world for the aliens already on this planet. Tribal initiates in the night as an adventure playground, ravers occupy the city’s abandoned places and turn them into zones of abandon, where identities dissolve. Where you can lose yourself and find yourself.  Above all, Wark’s work is a font of deliriously inventive and witty language - immerse in her text and learn how a rave can be cute and discover what unearth are speaker demons, rave condoms, punishers, and sidechain time" 

Other testimonials can be found at the publisher's website, where Raving can be purchased. 

There's an excerpt from the book at Resident Advisor

And McKenzie has been doing a heap of interviews and parallel pieces around Raving: 

Essay about rediscovering raving in her fifties, for The Guardian

buzz in The Cut

interview in Interview

profiling in Nylon

documentation in Document

advising about xeno-euphoria at Vice

another essay about techno rebirth, for Frieze

dialogue with Pauli Cakes at Cultured

podcast with LARB

And that's not even all of it...