Glamborous
‘Hana Hou Disco’ kickoff party at Nextdoor ANTON GLAMB PHOTOS
I don’t have cable. I have a TV, but I usually just watch movies via Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or DVD.
In ninth grade, after hearing all of those warnings about how TV makes you fat and eats up your free time, I decided to stop watching and stick to skateboarding until the sun when down and doing homework until I went to bed. However, TV had been pretty formative in my early childhood.
Growing up, my favorite channel was MTV. I loved the explosive creativity of music videos and the funky attitudes of the hosts. When I was really young, my parents didn’t want me watching it, so I’d quickly change the channel when they walked into the room.
I loved the culture and energy built around music, but there was one show that I always thought was the worst, most boring show on the channel: The Grind. It was a dance show that featured a multi-tiered “night club” with no bar and everybody oddly spaced dancing toward the camera and not interacting as they would in a normal dance club. The moves often seemed as repetitive as the music. I thought it lacked any entertainment value, and I couldn’t believe it was actually on the air. I imagine the closest comparison would be a high school dance hosted at Rumours Nightclub.
At the time, I didn’t have any appreciation for dance music because I was still a virgin to the whole club dynamic that I grew to love when I lived in New York City. I thought the show was as one dimensional and tacky as it could possibly be, and I remember thinking it must have been a filler to keep the channel on the air.
But since I fell in love with dance music about 15 years ago, my opinion of the show gradually changed. For the past 10 years, I was hoping to find a way to see The Grind in its past glory, but unfortunately I’ve only found few-minute clips on YouTube, usually used as video-filler-remix material for somebody else’s track.
A couple years back, my friend and KTUH DJ, Julia Cornell, said she wanted to bring back The Grind‘s format to TV via public access and was going to start training at ‘Olelo. I hadn’t heard anything about it until a couple weeks ago when she said she was going to start it off.
She started filming last week with an invite only kick-off in the upstairs VIP area at Nextdoor. Barrio Vintage did the styling, and I can’t believe how many people showed up on a Monday night.
Even as a semi-posed party, it was the most fun that I’ve had in a club on a Monday since I left New York. Can’t wait to see the show!
