Kat Says: “I’ve Watched You Chaaaaaange”
Reflections on III Points, Dillon Francis, Miami and myself.
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Me hugging the giant disco ball that hangs over the III Points main stage
Hey Friends,
It’s an inescapable fact of three-dimensional reality that all things will change with time. People, cities, DJs and music festivals all grow and change; age and evolve.
With change being the inevitable case, the best we can hope for ourselves, our friends and family, our favorite musician’s careers and our own bustling communities, is that we all age gracefully, remembering who we were in earlier years while leaving space for change to make us even better versions of ourselves.
This awareness of change has been a bit of a hyper-fixation for me in the past two weeks, not least of all because my 35th birthday looms as near as next Thursday, Nov. 3 (side note: if you’d like to get me a present, consider subscribing to the paid tier of this newsletter!).
It’s also circled ‘round my professional conversations, in the form of a recent interview with Dillon Francis for the Miami New Times, and as the backbone of my narrative for my forthcoming III Points 2022 review vlog.
It’s also something that permeates every conversation you have with someone in south Florida as soon as you talk about housing, which of course comes up for me a lot as I recently moved into my own apartment in Fort Lauderdale.
When you move anywhere in south Florida, everyone wants to know how much you’ve been forced to overpay and how little space you're getting for the deal in return. South Florida has absolutely exploded in the last couple of years. Rents skyrocketed 40 percent year-over-year in early 2022, the largest increase of any region in the United States.
Florida’s no-close policy during the pandemic led many rich escapists from New York and California to fuck around and find out why anyone lives here in the first place. It’s a literal fucking paradise where people are free to be themselves (as long as being yourself means going to the gym a lot, because WOW will you feel the pressure to be a hard body). Also, at that moment, it offered a more affordable cost of living.
It wasn’t just the pandemic that signaled a shift. Miami has exploded with high rise development in the 10-plus years of my career. When I first moved to Miami, the Intercontinental and its scandalous dancing woman light show was the gaudiest thing around. I could see it clearly from my balcony in Edgewater, some 20 blocks away.
Me and Jose Duran explore a blow-up version of downtown Miami at III Points
Driving down Biscayne Boulevard now feels like winding your way through a steel forest. So many new buildings have popped up in the last five years, it’s hard to recognize the place.
I came back for Art Basel 2018, having been away on my life-in-a-suitcase journey for only a year. When I decided to walk home from Club Space at 8 am, happily drunk and ready to take in the morning sights, I made a wrong turn somewhere and stumbled around downtown until I just fell onto the grass of Museum Park, so dizzy and exhausted by the unfamiliar skyline that I had to sit and convince myself “yes, you know where you are.”
I’m flabbergasted and a little afraid of how quickly the city has changed, but part of me is also proud, because I know my friends and I who manifested this.
When I first moved to Miami, nobody cared about the “mainland.” All the tourists wanted to go to South Beach. All the famous clubs were across the bridges. LIV was not only a “thing,” it was part of the popular cultural parlance.
Meanwhile, every actual local I knew dreaded leaving the mainland, preferring to go to spots in Wynwood; Bardot, Electric Pickle, Wood Tavern. Mostly, we just wanted to go to every fucking show ever booked at Grand Central; a god among gods that haunts every Miami millennials memory forever and ever, amen.
We’d all get drunk until 5 a.m. and opine about “we’re gonna make something for ourselves over here,” and in 2013, my college friend David Sinopoli and his crew of tastemaking homies really did. They started III Points, and they put it in Wynwood, because they felt strongly that the burgeoning art district had something special to offer.
Me in Wynwood in 2014, standing in front of a mural of the thing that will save and destroy us all
It’s hard to describe to folks who weren’t around then, so I’ll tell you the story of the first time I went to Wynwood: It was 2012, and I had been invited to participate in the Miami New Times annual Best Of series for the first time in my life. I nabbed the Best Public Art category, so I went to Wynwood to find something dope. I brought my friend with me who knew the area, because she insisted I bring her, because she was a junkie and she said “no white woman goes to Wynwood unless she’s looking to score.”
We walked around in broad daylight, and it was amazing! We had the whole neighborhood to ourselves. Panther Coffee was the only modern business around, and the place was full of empty art galleries that actually had artists in them.
I didn’t pick this piece to win, but it’s the piece I remember to this day: It was a werewolf in a varsity jacket showing its teeth, and a verbal message that read “don’t go into dogtown after midnight.” It reminded me that, yeah, I could walk around and see the world’s greatest collection of street art right now, but when the sun went down, I better skedaddle.
That piece isn’t around anymore. It must have been painted over somewhere between the opening of Zak the Baker and the loud monolith that is Wynwood Marketplace—and why would it be? Wynwood is the new Lincoln Road. It’s a mall for wannabe Instagram models and European tourists, and while it still holds some truly remarkable street art by some of the best muralists in the world, not one single inch of its streets is dangerous or even edgy.
A picture I took in Wynwood in 2012
We’ve all now come to see that Wynwood was a real estate developer’s dream, and the cultural lightning strike we thought it could be was but a flash of Florida rain; here one minute as if out of nowhere, fierce and awe-inspiring, then gone as fast as it came.
That doesn’t mean the cultural excitement of local Miamians has evaporated. Mainland is in fact the coolest place to be these days, whether that’s stalking the always-open streets of downtown’s nightlife scene, or the vibrant cultural cropping-ups in Little River. Shit, even Hialeah has Factory Town.
But Wynwood still has III Points, and 10 years and eight festival laters, I can firmly say our home-grown music, art and technology fest has aged gracefully indeed.
I’ve never missed a III Points. My life is all twisted up in its history. My friends plastered all over its lineup, and some of my best memories with them caught up in its mythos.
I was there when Boiler Room took over my buddy Kairo’s warehouse for the inaugural III Points after party. Jamie XX was wandering around the kitchen, and there was a door with a piece of paper that read “coke room,” behind which everyone got fucked up on all manner of drugs. I ran into a buddy from high school in there. It was great.
My buddy Kairo playing Boiler Room at his house in 2013. They were evicted for noise complaints the next day.
I was there in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew threatened to cancel the fest, and the organizers pulled a bunch of bruja magic to move the storm. LCD Soundsystem was supposed to headline that year but canceled. They were the only band that did, and the rest of the fest went on without a hitch.
I was there in 2017 when The Gorillaz performed “Plastic Beach” on the main stage, a drunk Damon Albarn waxing poetic about how this was the plastic beach doomed to flood that inspired the tune. I was there in 2019 when A$AP Rocky went HAM on an MPC. I was there in 2014 when Flying Lotus brought his 3D experience to the fest, the only year it was held at Soho Studios.
I was there when SOPHIE played at 2 pm. I was there when drones brought weed to Method Man and Redman mid performance. I was there when MF Doom performed via Zoom call. I was there. I was there. I was there.
Gorillaz perform “Superfast Jellyfish” with De La Soul
I was there in 2021 when the festival returned triumphant after the shutdown of COVID-19, having doubled or tripled in footprint thanks to a massive injection of cash from a LiveNation buyout. Just like that drunken morning in December, I stumbled from stage to stage so bamboozled as to where I was. I had known this festival like the back of my hand, and now I couldn’t tell you where Mind Melt ended and Main Frame began (those are stages, by the way).
We’re all quick to call out that III Points is officially part of the Insomniac festival family, but LiveNation has been smart not to touch the soul of the thing. Local artists are still creating the witchy atmospheres of the festival, and local musicians still make up 60 percent of the bill. It still feels like walking into the urban lair of a techno vampire clan, with shipping containers and graffiti sprawling through the concrete jungle.
This year was a lot easier to navigate. I now understand how to find each stage, and I’m happy to report that it’s not so big that it takes more than seven minutes to get from any one stage to another.
Orbital playing “Chime” at III Points 2022
I’m also happy to report that this year’s event was one of its best. Rosalia pulled off a game-changing performance that put cameras in the hands of on-stage dancers and probably evolved the entire art of live concerts. Orbital delivered a moving, nostalgic performance that made one woman break down in tears of joy. Dispacio played for a total of 12 hours in a dark room full of hi-fi speakers, writhing bodies and one singular, smartly-leveraged disco ball.
Uncle Luke, Trick Daddy and Trina showed up 30 minutes late only to serve a balls-to-the-wall performance of classic Miami anthems (but we could have used the full hour, for real). Amtrac unveiled a host of new tunes from his forthcoming album Extra Time in a show-stopping live performance. Nala got on the mic and screamed loud enough to raise the ghost of bloghouse and riot grrl.
Shygirl made panties wet, A.G. Cook broke the brain-noise barrier, La Femme rocked the universe with bone shaking psychrock, and yes, LCD Soundsystem finally made its III Points headline performance. It was fucking incredible; a dream come true, and I was there.
LCD Soundsystem singing about getting old at III Points 2022
Some people were not there. We’ve lost a few friends along the way. Lauren Perlstein, the original publicist for III Points, passed away suddenly from a private battle with cancer in 2018. My friend Kairo, who played every III Points until he lost his battle with heroin, also is no longer on the bill—but those people are always with us, spiritually. It’s just another part of the inevitable change.
“Growing up sucks.” That’s what Dillon Francis told me when I got him on the phone last week. “People just start dying; friends dying—especially in the music industry. It's just a bummer, and as you get older, it just happens more and more.”
Forever the funnyman, Francis got pretty candid with me about his own reflective aging process. He turned 35 just a few weeks ago, and we related on how much more important it seems to spend time with your family when you and your loved ones grow older everyday.
“My grandma, I think she just turned 90 this year,” he says. “She is still going full force, but I always get really sad because her husband passed away 10 years ago, and then a couple of her other friends. When you see it, you're like, ‘Fuck, I really got to go and make sure I'm spending time with her, making her happy and being involved in her life, because that's just—it's a bummer!”
The whole conversation was not morose. There’s actually a lot to enjoy about getting older, but being in your mid-30s does feel like the moment of real awareness. You’re old enough to understand how you got here, but young enough to have the energy to take full control of your future. You’re energized, but you can feel the energy starting to slip away. You know for sure that you’re mortal, and you have to start doing your best to keep limber while you can.
“I got something else for you. This is a good one,” Francis says. “It's called Magnesi-om from moon juice. I swear to God. You take a teaspoon of this before you go to sleep. You sleep through the night. You may have crazy dreams when you first start taking it, but after that, you're going to wake up and feel so much more well-rested.
“The other thing is drink a liter of water in the morning, and I swear to God, it will jump start your day better than coffee. Then you add the coffee on later, and then you're zooming.”
A really old Dillon Francis remix of CSS that my friend Lisa once requested of him at Grand Central that he totally played but she had already gone home LOL
We laughed a lot during our call, swapping millennial mid-30s thoughts like, don’t you just wish you could play the Rapture and The Shins in the club? And don’t you miss when you could just shipost any song you wanted on Soundcloud and no label gave a shit? And whatever happened to all that art I made when I was a teenager?
“My brother, I love him but I also hate him,” he says, “I used to do graffiti in my black books, but my brother decided to throw away all my books because he just thought I didn't need them anymore. So all of my art that I did from high school is gone!
“My friend Forest still has the old dubstep songs that didn't make it to the internet that I made back in 2010, 2009. He'll play it for me and I'll yell at him ‘dude, please turn that off! I cannot believe that I used to like—I can't believe it. I'll get it from him one time.”
He also told me how a random visit to a fancy gym with Chris Lake—“because I’ve always wanted one ab”—led to his discovery that he’s pre pre-diabetic. His dad, an alternative medicine doctor, knew his family was predisposed the whole time.
“‘Why didn't you tell me?’” Francis yells in mock exasperation. “He goes, ‘Yeah, when you were five.’ I'm like, ‘I'm not going to remember that!’ So, I’m back on my health journey thanks to Chris Lake for saving my life.”
Now 11 months sober and fully aware of his need to curb his sugar intake, the “I.D.G.A.F.O.S.” producer is doing his best to age gracefully, too. You can and should read our full chat in the Miami New Times, and be on the lookout for my III Points vlog, coming to my YouTube page asap.
The next time you hear from me, I’ll be 35 years old, still stressing about deadlines but much more confident in what I am worth and what I have to offer; paying out the nose for my own little corner of the world; proud of my city, my family and my friends—and proud of you for reading this whole thing if you did. Fuckin’ A, this was a long one!
Coming Up Next
No Kat Calls next week, because I’m taking Thursday off to celebrate my birthday. I will be back with another Friday newsletter, though! And my YouTube page is about to get some fun updates, so check it out.
Alsooooo
If you’re still in the mood to read, this piece from Caleb Larsen for Billboard Dance is absolutely worth a read. It takes you inside the walls of Kyiv’s hottest dance club, which just this month re-opened after months of wartime. It’s still wartime in Ukraine, of course, but these dancers are defiant.
Absolutely Necessary
(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)
I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.
Once again, because this week’s essay is exceedingly long, I’m foregoing the song write-ups and just telling you that the playlists has been updated. I still have a day job to do, don’t you know. Want to help me afford more time on this newsletter? You know what do to!
Thanks for tuning into my newsletter. Listen to the playlists on Spotify. One is updated weekly with all the songs from each edition. The other is cumulative with all the updates ever!