[I think I’m about to go on a bloggy rant here, full of run-on sentences and loose equivocations, so if you just want to skip to the pictures, just scroll down past the blah blah blah and voila, there they are!]

So five years ago, my best friend and across-the-street neighbor was a sex worker. She would have said hooker, but as a big supporter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, I feel like I should use the right term. She built a compound around herself and her lifestyle which was kind of a glamorous anarchist’s take on The Great Gatsby meets Absolutely Fabulous meets I don’t know… Caligula), with a cadre of dominatrix roommates, houseboys in suits serving absinthe flutes and naked submissive girls serving as trays and tables and furniture before returning to their cages, and sometimes the only thing grounding her lifestyle in reality was the fact that she was always one roommate short. She was always forthright about her lifestyle and she met literally the coolest women in Chicago who were young and fun and politically active but just couldn’t hack it, nesting in that bedlam. With a touch of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, one of her former roommates recalled to me, “You can only drift off to sleep, only to be woken up by the 4:30 AM rallying cry of ‘CHAMPAGNE ORGY!’ so many times before it stops being cute.”

I think that’s what it’s like being part of the Porn and Chicken family, of which I’m on the deep outskirts. These guys are the real deal. I live in a world full of djs who are blowing through lines and groupies but like nobody’s business on the sly, but demanding respect as artists and businessmen, and a world full of djs who are shrewdly calculating every move and every investment, while trying to convine their younger fans that they’re “just here to party and get fucked up!”

Then there’s these guys, who are pure, in a very twisted sense of that word. They’re party professionals, whatever that means. They’ve got a baseline confidence and competency, that they’re not afraid to see how much damage they can take before they go on stage and see what happens. Orville Kline is a genius technician who used to teach courses in the software he uses; Dom is a fearless host, brash and fearless and willfully offensive and fearlessly pansexual; Ammunition is a brilliant burlesque performer, well trained and a great improviser, and one of the first in Chicago to adapt her industrial grinder and fire performances to dubstep… so lets fill them all with so much whiskey and [whatever] that they forget their names, give them power tools and gasoline and a crowd of hundreds of paying kids and see what happens.

When Porn and Chicken took the stage at The Miramar Theater, Ammo opened the crowd by asking “Which one of you kids wants to do K off my tits?!” and then the bass dropped. They wanted to show the 18+ crowd that they could party harder than the kids could ever imagine, thus the kids could do whatever they wanted with impunity (within the confines of a PLUR-and-consent aesthetic), and in turn the crowd wanted to show the performers that they could go just as hard, producing all sorts of powders and flesh and sandwich bags, and after the party was the afterparty (where the “tour bitch” locked his keys in the car), and after the that party was the hotel lobby, where the harried Doubletree nightshift employee produced bags and bags of chocolate chip cookies, hoping to get the half-naked crew of mohawked weirdos away from the front desk before families started waking up for the breakfast buffet. Several times throughout the night, it looked like everything was going to evolve into an orgy or a fistfight, and by the time the maids were at the door for late checkout, we were all cleaned up, if a little worse for the wear, ready for pizza reviews at the Brot Stop and Pink Floyd singalongs in the cramped car back to Chicago. Just another day.

Music was provided by the Milwaukee Noize Collective, with MCZ, Apple Country, and ALBYDAMNED, with visuals by Brye. Scroll down to see the full set of images from the night. Right click any image to download, and click here for information on ordering prints and hi-res images.

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