Featured in Karma Magazine Fall 2002
by club editor ray hom
© 2002
You are out on a night that will lead into the rest of the weekend and you want to hit a club. And you have heard about Ten 15. Who hasn’t? So, you suggest it to your friends. They agree, and you encourage them to meet up early because the girls get in free before 11 p.m.
You arrive to see a line that has built inot a good crowd, backed up around the corner. You survey the long line. Ten 15 is tight on the security, but they’re not tight on the dress code–everyone is casually dressed. This pacifies your anxiety about your own outfit. When your ID is accepted and your entrance fee is paid, you are ushered into the club.
You do as other people would when they first enter a club: you explore every dance floor and bar and note every restroom. Laser beams swish across your body with every step you take in Ten 15, as if you are being scanned like a barcode. You push your way through the diverse crowd and take a deep breath to accept the large roominess of the club. There will be a lot to explore tonight.
You first attend to the room downstairs and find a booth in which to take comfort to slowly begin the night. Your watch people nodding their heads to the techno beats thumping in their noggins as your friend brings a round of shots for everyone. The decor of the room is intriguing, with evenly-spaced columns standing at all four points of the square dance floor. The sexual energy of bodies flowing within these columns is beckoning.
“Let’s dance!”
Everyone is quick to respond. The DJ spins quicker and soon a crowd has built on the dance floor. Thes causes such a prancing flare that most people cannot stay within the columns — dancing becomes addictive.
As you move on in your journey, a second room welcomes you with hip-hop beats and lyrical rhymes that get your buzz going. When you jump onto the dance floor, you begin grinding your body to the boom of the music taht is old school as well as new. You witness the presence of wall-huggers, but they are nodding their heads to the music, so you do not judge how they party. As the smoke machine screens your vision, you use your imagination to envision that you are dancing among the clouds, not caring where the beat takes you.
However, the main room finally succeeds in pulling your body onto the stage as the DJs spin the records of dance and trance beats. The disco ball above reflects the laser lights, sending prismatic colors onto every face in the crowd. The full-body scan experience from when you first entered the club has become a normal process, as numerous bright tints, hues, and shades hit from every angle. You suddenly feel as if a technological spirit has given you freedom to move your body in all directions, inducing a visual experience of euphoria that only a club like Ten 15 can bring. And you enjoy this with the alcohol that has succumbed you with all the stress of work and your relationships. Everyone here who’s dancing, or even wall-hugging, is understand the same thing.
At Ten 15, you feel you are one with the rest of the clubbing world. You’ll be back next week to start a new weekend.
