As we gear up for a few parties of our own, we asked Travis Cohen, the winner of the Creativ-Glu writing contest, to share one of his summer art party moments.

June 27, 2013

By sunset, the bay front terrace of the Standard Hotel’s Lido Grill was starting to fill. I was curious to see what the composition of the crowd would be, since the Pérez Art Museum Miami fundraiser was open to members of their ‘Contemporaries’ club—the museum’s name for donors who’d given $200 or more and gotten a year’s membership in return. That made this fairly a expensive ticket, even by Miami standards.

What’s more, I figured the friends of PAMM might find themselves befuddled by the performers, Los Jaichackers, a collaboration of L.A.-based multimedia artists Eamon Ore-Giron and Julio Cesar Morales, who’d been chosen to be the exclamation point for the Museum’s opening in December and would be giving a taste of things to come at the fundraiser.

The performance-artist duo’s work is well outside the typical realm of the safe and sensible, crossbreeding pirated Mexico City cumbia and Argentine disco with obscure musings of Pérez Prado and Miami Booty Bass. Eamon spun the soundtrack as DJ Lengua, while Julio ran the visuals: strange, often violent video trips projected onto a white screen and distorted with a Kaos Pad. I imagined that the evening’s entertainment would leave many of those in attendance wondering what the fuck they had just witnessed and why, but I was more interested in the people that would be asking those questions through smiles of pleased confusion.

I’d spent the last 2 days with the pair, along with their friend and perpetual co-conspirator Moi. Their first night in town, we drank beers and smoked Parliament Lights on the Lido terrace until midnight. The next night, we celebrated Moi’s birthday at The Corner until 4 AM, boozing and discussing woes of our parentage—administering 5-panel drug tests to our mothers and being sworn to secrecy by our fathers as they pointed broken bottles at our heads and told us where the money was hidden.

There’s nothing like an open bar to lubricate a deck full of socialites and unfamiliar donors. At first, they looked like several species of fish that had been swapped out of their everyday schools and thrown together and fed copious quantities of vodka and twice-pasteurized orange juice. Their colors defined their differences: grey blazers and slate pocket squares mingled like oil in water with electric blue mini skirts and Wynwoodian veils covering rainbow scalps dyed wild.

Once the sun had gone completely, Los Jaichackers began to own the nighttime. DJ Lengua’s set infused the soundscape with a crazy lilting groove, a hybridized mix of funk and cumbia, combining unmistakably West Coast synth lines with tinny guitar strings from the Southlands beyond Baja. Julio’s controlled Kaos worked psychedelia into the sonic mood and gave the whole night an added layer of complexity, an atmosphere that got everyone in tune with Los Jaichackers, regardless of whether they wore a suit or were dressed down to their skivvies.

By the time the fundraiser was coming to a close, the show was still in full swing. A number of the guests seemed surprised when Los Jaichackers pulled their plugs and started dismantling their interfaces, as if they weren’t ready for them to stop. Eamon and Julio and I sat around their cabana when all was said and done and drank Red Stripe, reveling in the warm afterglow that artists have a way of exuding after a great show. I would highly recommend that you do whatever you must to be part of that glow come December.