Glacial Errata, No. 54

One

For about 15 years, from 2005-ish until 2020, a thing called Betalevel operated out of a basement in Los Angeles’s Chinatown (Betalevel itself was an outgrowth of another thing, called C-Level, that occupied the space before that). Performance space, venue, logistical nightmare, it was behind a nondescript door that you had to go down two alleys to find, and it always smelled a little weird (very weird).

There was a roving core of individuals who ran it over the years, but its membership usually consisted in some form of Jason Brown, Heather Parlato, Sean Deyoe, Amar Ravva, Amina Cain, Dave Eng, Ariana Kelly, Amanda Ackerman, Casey Anderson, Matt Timmons, Scott Cazan, Harold Abramowitz, Carmina Escobar, and myself.

Everything was free and open to the public. Events ranged from movie screenings to poetry readings to music to potpourri to stranger events with names like “Corpse Bludgeon” and “The Paranormal Olympics.”

Two

Perhaps the most successful event we did, pioneered by Jason and Sean initially, was called “Swap Meet.” It started as a monthly meet-up to exchange pirated music files, with a little bit of karaoke on the side, but it gradually just became karaoke. But it was karaoke as an avant-garde art project, so to speak: it was free, we had an open bar, and the karaoke files ranged from the professional to the utterly janky and unworkable. You never knew quite what you were gonna get. We never had any idea how many people were going to show up.

Going through the archives, I was reminded that this was an exciting night, because we got a door for the bathroom.

Three

After lying mostly dormant for the past five years due to the pandemic, and, well, life, Betalevel is abruptly coming to an end (buildings get sold, you know how it is).

I’ve been revisiting the strange art that is Jason Brown’s webpage design, particularly in the form of the event listings on Betalevel’s archive. All of us posted event pages and wrote copy, but Jason set the tone, edited a good many of my earlier posts so they’d be more “Betalevel” and, I think it’s fair to say, is generally the most responsible for the vibe of these pages.

Which is not to take away from anyone else’s efforts—we all had a hand in what Betalevel was (I can hear Sean’s voice in a great deal of the Swap Meet posts, for example), which is why it would gradually evolve as new members joined and other folks dropped out. So this stuff is a product of everyone’s genius and everyone’s madness, in varying combinations. A collective blurring of idiosyncratic tastes and aesthetics.

Four

It’s hard to talk about these pages as “art” in a traditional sense—partly due to the semi-collective way in which these pages came together, but also in the sense that they are meant to be primarily informational, disposable, and only semi-serious.

But of course, there’s a long history of concert posters as art, so I think these webpages must count too. The Betalevel archive is worth viewing in that light: its primary purpose is to convey information (date, time, description) while enticing you to come, but it’s also a reflection of a time and its aesthetic: the glitchy early Internet, ephemeral and insular, obtuse and excessive.

These pages are nicely static (save for the occasional low-res gif), don’t link to anything, don’t encourage sharing on any social media platform, and, like a good Summer of Love concert poster, evoke a time that is now fading quickly behind us. I’m trying not to be nostalgic about this, but one of the things I’m trying to do with this newsletter is excavate, celebrate, and even recreate a pre-social media Internet, when pockets of weirdness could still exist and the Internet didn’t suck as much total ass as it does now.

Five

Betalevel ends on January 31. We’re doing a flurry of final events, and if you’re in LA, I encourage you to come on down if you can navigate a couple alleyways in Chinatown and join us.

If you can’t, I invite you to check out the archive of past events, which documents (sorta) a twenty-year ongoing project of weirdness and ephemera, a testament to a dozen or so people’s odds interests and obsessions, and the kind of free play, experimentation and pure joy you can get away with when the rent is low and you don’t need to make money or please donors. It was through Betalevel that I really understood that the less “return” you need to get from your art, the more possibilities get opened up.

Honestly, we should have more of stuff like this.