the politics of pleasure and profit.....

liquidocean

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Joined
Nov 8, 1999
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Part I - Bars and Clubs - a Bluelight exclusive
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Ignoring underground parties and raves for now, let's take a look at our love/hate relationships with out typical venue: the bar and club.
Let's examine the typical operation, explore alternatives, and relate experiences that can shed light on our different scenes and possibly improve them.
Typical scenario on a Saturday night: a club has a party. The club might be putting it on, or a record label / collective / party crew / soundsystem might be throwing it at the club's space.
You, a punter, not deeply connected with the people throwing the party, come up to the door and pay your cover, ranging from $5 to $20. You get lightly searched, and prevented from bringing in any liquids. Same with your friends. It's 10:30 pm, and the place is starting to fill with people.
You like the vibe, the people, the space and the dj, so you pop the pill you had stashed in your wallet. 11pm. Same with your friends. You have a beer, maybe two to pass the time, then stick with Red Bulls or H2O. You get a call on your cell phone. You convince a couple friends that were at a house party to come over, it's worth it and they trust your opinion.
You have a couple friends that drink heavily with ecstasy, but that's their deal. They've heard it cuts down your e buzz, but they seem to like the combo. You've heard it's dangerous, but have yet to hear of something really bad in the news.
You either buy your water in bottles, get it from the bartender's tap, fill up emptys in the bathroom, drink from friends, or just sip on random bottles. 2$ is ok, 3$ is a little steep for your taste.
Well, you're not worrying about water anymore, at this point people are offering it to you. You're buzzing nice and hard, but in control. Thank god this dj got this time slot, he's ripping it up right now. It seems like later, but it's just 12:30 right now. You might want to think of an afterplan, but not just right now. This is the peak of the evening for you, and you're loving every second of it. Your buddy asks to go have a smoke outside, you give them one and say "i'll stay inside and dance"
2am comes, the moment of judgement, either the place has a permit to stay open late or not.
If not, the lights come on, the music stops, everyone is bewildered. People start macking, looking for an 'afterhours', a house party, some good lovin', some stimulants, a ride, whatever. Everybody smokes. Many pupils are huge.
If the staff is polite and professional, they will cut the dj and play lite music on the house system and turn up the lights slowly and allow people to socialize and find a ride home / hook up
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If they are rude, they will cut the music sharply, throw on bright lights, take cups out of patron's hands, and start raising their voice.
Regardless, in this situation, people have to leave and find somewhere else to be. Cabs are scarce outside. Every one is taken. Some people are trashed, some will get into cars, one or more may get an accident or get pulled over. Many who are driving may be hallucinating. Many women may be in the cars of untrustworthy people.
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If they are allowed to stay late, you probably knew about it and are smiling as you keep grooving along to the beat as 2am passes unnoticeably. The drunken masses out there (you can tell by now who drinks and who rolls) slowly fade on their downer drug and decide to go home and have sloppy sex
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. They can't be in a public place without a drink in their hand. And tonight you noticed they never take off their jackets!
More dancing room for you, less sexual pressure in the place, and less people spilling those damn beers on you!
3am. Everybody is drinking Red Bulls, water, sodas, or smuggled alcohol by this point. The majority of people you think at this point are rolling, and the dj gets everybody on a second wave with some more serious, deeper, mindfucking tunes, shit he or she was saving for this point.
You've noticed some new people filter in the last hour that you haven't seen yet this night, they probably migrated from somewhere else that closed at 2am, maybe a bar, a house party, a club, work, sex, or maybe they take a real long time to make it out the door. (chicks!
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)
People are on a second collective chemical wave as well, either dropping another pill or half or doing a bump of coke, speed, meth, or whatever.
It's 4-5 am, your g/f is hungry to snuggle, your friends want to chill on a couch in a house. You're still feeling the e but are ok to drive, so you make it back to a friend's house, chill, listen to music, smoke out of a bong, eat a little, and pass out by sunrise.
A couple hardcore heads out there on meth and speed, or who dropped their mdma late, or who dropped acid at 2am and have missed their window of sleep, they'll make it out to a 6am-on afterhours, or if a city government is not progressive enough to allow these, a 6am alcohol bar for the hardcore boozer crowd.
At this point, it's hard to follow anymore. Let's work with the dynamics and try to match up our needs with the needs of the establishments which we visit on a regular basis.
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[email protected]
[This message has been edited by liquidocean (edited 11 April 2000).]
 
Some needs are currently not being met right now, that is painfully obvious.
1) People like to party at all hours on their own terms. Cities like people home early after spending their cash downtown.
A 24-hour Manhattanized culture is emerging in the working world, the stock market, banking, the internet, transportation, television, entertainment, and dance music culture.
Dance music space is often the battleground in a cultural cold war between the youthful innovators and the entrenched elite.
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Establishment View - Cities have to deal with having extra people on the streets late night (drunken drivers, police prescence, drug trafficking, auto accidents, lighting, fires, street crime). Plus people that are up late they suspect of being drug users. Plus police stations are thin in the early hours, there is not enough prescence to control more than one or two big encounters without leaving the city's control compromised. Bars, restaurants, and clubs have to cover responsibility for their patrons (tired, aggressive, intoxicated, overdosed, or just plain rude), a condition that's exacerbated by hours of extended partying.
People's View - People, especially non-drinkers, start late, end late, have energy to keep going, and like to hit multiple parties on big nights.
10pm-2am gets old real quick, and it prevents visiting more than one quality club in a night. Four hours is barely enough to get there, find parking, wait in line, get inside, decide where to sit, get drinks, hit the bathroom, look for friends, then enjoy.
People resent being thrown on the streets at the peak hour for auto accidents with the drunks, not to mention their own peak hours. The ecstasy experience is about 5-6 hours long and goes well from 11pm-4am, for the nighttime partiers. 12-3am DJ sets are usually the most prized ones as most people are feeling very groovy.
It's not like any significant majority is drinking anyways, plus you let people ride out their buzzes so they could be driveable when they choose to go. And so that people can leave in waves.
2am creates a bottleneck that puts a crush on cabs, pizza joints, ATM's, parking lots, cops, buses. Plus, if you let people drink past 2am, they probably wouldn't last much longer anyways. Alcohol as an all-night drug sucks.
----1) Questions: Is alcohol drinking past 2am something that should even be discussed? How do you allow people out past 2am without destroying the fabric of a city? What as a city should we realistically expect from people that want to stay up past two (social contract, party expectations)? What is it about going out in the eighties bar, club, and glam style that doesn't work for today's different society?
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[This message has been edited by liquidocean (edited 11 April 2000).]
 
2) The club makes money from alcohol. The music it's been playing has been filling it up, but the people seem to drink and spend less.
People's view - The people want to spend as little as possible. After $20 for e and $10 for cover, and $10 for drinks, squandering any more cash is gonna hurt. Better to save for a little coke, ghb, or k to party with afterwards.
Gone are the days where you would put a tab at a bar and run it up $80+ with buddies and spend $20 on a cab to arrive home, shitfaced, hurting, and without a girl. Now you try to use your money wisely, and will go the extent of getting loaded or eating before going out so you can save money and dance more. It's an expensive world and it's tough to make it on your own, don't want to break the bank.
You're definitely not going to spend money on alcohol, which is going to kill your ecstasy buzz. Maybe a beer or two. Definitely not if you took ghb. You'd buy a better non-alcoholic drink if they had one, but red bull tastes like carbonated urine and you think pulling water from a plastic bottle isn't classy.
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Club's view - Clubs, on the other hand, are constrained. Drugs aren't going to be legalized anytime soon, and every dollar you spend on them is one less dollar you spend there. Unless they're dealing, with which they will either have to pay off the cops or risk being shut down and arrested, or if they have house dealers. But once a club gets a rep for being a haven for druggies, it gets sort of excommunicated from the holier-than-thou chamber of commerce businesses. This kinda sucks when you're trying to lure lucrative happy-hour rich yuppie tech crowds, or special events, or business functions, not to mention the relationship with the city is always a precarious one, and you never know when they may pull a raid or a bust.
You wish people would pick up drinking again, but it seems like it's in hibernation, no longer cool. You've expanded your non-alcoholic selection to include Gatorade and Calistoga water, smokes, and have noticed that there is a potential for making a little change from selling new drinks, the clientele seems pretty open to trying new things.
You've tried increasing security pressure at your door, but that has changed the crowd into a bridge-and-tunnel set that is sure to ruin your reputation. You want to start hosting Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights like the other progressive clubs in town. You need to stay hip and cutting edge, and if you turn these people off, they you're doomed. You're willing to tolerate some pot smoke in the patio and whatever as long as it's done discretely and you don't get in trouble for it.
You've also tried doing generic Friday and Saturday nights when you haven't had a party crew take over the space, and they kinda bombed, so you don't want to alienate the party organizers and their friends by invading their personal rights and having a huge security prescence.
Now you're just concentrating on weapons, nondiscrete dealers, and G-hole fools, and hoping nothing catastrophic happens to put you on the police chief's list. (like a shooting, a rape, a GHB death, an overdose)
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Alternatives:
Bottle Clubs - "The breaks scene fared batter due to what Eli Tobias, the former Firestone bartender, calls "a sroke of good luck." After the antirave legislation passed, the owner of close-to-bankrupt redneck "bottle club" just outside Orlando city limits changed his Saturday-night policy from Lynyrd Skynyrd to breaks; he'd twigged to the fact that there were many breaks kids and breaks DJs and no breaks clubs. There are only two clubs with bottle licenses in central Florida - a bottle license allowes the patrons to bring their own drinks to an establishment (BYOB) but does not permit that establishment to sell liquor. With no standard liquor license and the right to stay open all night, this redneck club, soon retitled Cyberzone, constituted a useful loophole." (Rave America, 146, author Mireille Silcott)
Juice Clubs - popular in Greenwich Village and parts of Manhattan around the late 70's / early 80's, these places had all night licenses and sold non-alcoholic beverages. Some were drug havens, some were strictly juice only. All had dance music all night long. Made money from sales and from cover charges.
Underground raves - most of us have been to one. No permits needed, some sell alcohol discreetly, most don't care, some discourage it. Many are BYO whatever, others check with intimidating security at the door. Many use drug sales as a stream of revenue, sometimes as a reason for existence. Many are very prone to bust, depending on civic climate, police presence, profile of event, location, and luck. Many are held in disregard, sometimes blatant, of safety and comfort rules, particularly overcrowding, heat, and inadequate water, bathroom, and emergency facilities. Not to mention cleanliness.
Taverns - Instead of patronizing a corporate motel that is unconnected to the scene, how about if a good club (or multiple clubs) had a connected inn that was its official hotel, fresh with swimming pool, restaurant, micro brewery, lounge, and rooms and suites. Where every other person there would be found at the host club that night. How much more sense of connection and community would that foster, and how much more revenue would that pull in? These clubs do extensive promotion to pull people in, but at 2am, they kick them out into the streets when they could still be contributing money! How many more people would hook up if there was a hotel next door. Plus it could fill a certain vaccuum in many cities' social scene. There is a hotel/club in San Francisco called the Backflip, which hosts these Sunday daytime 'Wet' pool parties and sell out their hotel big time on those days. And it's quite a scene.
Chill zones / VR cafes / Arcades / iCafes - I saw a couple of these in Atlanta a couple years back. It wasn't a bar, it was a sort of new-agey lounge where you paid a couple bucks and lay down on a liquid crystal bed that had a subwoofer built into the box, and you would listen to trippy music and watch a VR flick on a pair of stereoscopic glasses. In the lobby they sold trippy books and optical illusions and stoner stuff like that.
Becoming 'full service' clubs - If a big club in your city included hot tubs, pool, sauna, and massage, would you eventually try it? How about a revival of 'smart drinks'? How about selling merchandise, including clothing, glowsticks, photon lights, rave-toys, soft cloth, whatever? How about an internet terminal? How about a VIP room or membership scheme to pay for this? There arent' many in SF, but i think in LA, NY, and London, they do. Or a strip club or gambling hall? Or tarot card readers, palm readers, belly dancers, or henna tattooists?
----2) Questions: Can we eliminate alcohol from the equation so that it is not a factor in our motivation? What other strands of income can a venue create other than rental, cover, or booze? (raising prices has always received a backlash in the past). What other kinds of legal spaces can we utilize that will give the people what they really want and need, while still making enough money to justify its existence? And how can we convince cities to give us alcohol-free spaces that will satisfy the most people with minimal impact? Does it give the people any advantage to link similar businesses so that they can partner their services, i.e. bar to club, club to restaurant, club to hotel., head shop to club
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[This message has been edited by liquidocean (edited 11 April 2000).]
 
Miami Beach has The Mix Afterhours.
Opens at 4:30 am, closes at 9 due to laws.
Weekends only since there's an elementary school across the way, guess it wouldn't be good for the kids to encounter cracked out people like us
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'Juice Bar' only cause Miami Beach laws prohibit alcohol sale at clubs and bars between 5 and noon.
They've recently opened their doors during daylight hours as a 'music cafe' where you can get a Red Bull, sit down at a barstool equipped with it's own SL-1200 and headphone/amp and listen away. Maximizing their rent value is what the manager told me
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Club Space opened recently in downtown Miami (Not Miami Beach). Cash-starved Miami gives them a 24-hour liquor license...who knows what they're gonna do with it...
Oh and as for 4/5 am making most girls ready to snuggle, yeah right...most women I've met are pissy and irritable at that hour
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-pod
[This message has been edited by pod (edited 11 April 2000).]
 
liquidocean, you totally hit it on the money. i've tasted the two opposite extremes..in new england, specifically rhode island, everything shuts down at 2am...i mean for god's sake, you need a permit to stay open 24 hours! their thought is that the fabric of the city CANNOT withstand those who wish to stay out after 2am. for example, even store24 down the block from me can't stay open 24 hours, let along some club or party that's going to be involve *gasp* alcohol or drugs...but i guess that's the puritans for you...
then there is new york. the 24 hour metropolitan. most clubs stay open until the wee hours of the morning, so when you're leaving the club people are going to work.
but anyway, more addressing your question..can alcohol be eliminated from the equation. in some instances yes, the establishment can, but the patrons won't. like the juice clubs of new york (there are still some in existence, the name escapes me) and others, but alcohol, while it is on the slippery slop for many of us here, for the general public it isn't. alcohol is very much a part of many people's nightlife and it's still the majority of the income for clubs.
zen
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Bars and clubs stop serving booze at 2am in NZ, but they stay open till bout 3-4. When have a 'Guideline for safe dance parties" put out by our goverment and while its not law, it a threat of sorts - follow these guidelines of we'll make an anti-rave law. And thus as you can expect, the dance community has embraced the guidelines. Must have chill out areas, ventilation, free running water and st johns medical support..
While some may skimp on the med support, most have at least the first two...
I find this to be much better than clubs, but then i dont party every week. If you do want to party and theres no raves on, why dont you hire a generator and sound system (skip the lights its unnessesary) and go out into the bush/desert and make your own fun..
 
::sips from Liquid Oceans glass o' wisdom:: you amaze me everyday, thank you. plurness
 
Very well done post indeed.
I am glad that I am in Australia when you saythat some places close at 2. Damn the parties only start to get good here at 2 and then go till 7 in the morning. After that you have a choice of a few day clubs where you can keep going if you have the dancing bug still in you.
Alcohol is satans work in my books. I only drink about 2 times a year at BBQ's or something like that.
A example of alcohol sucking...
We went out last sat night to a club where we had an awesome time. At about 3:40 we needed some more ciggies and a friend had a huge craving for candy. (how can you eat when rolling?) We went out side and had to go past a bar to the quicky mart, and on the way past there were about 10 guys out the front just about to fight each other. They were all tanked upon liquid courage and looked like fucking morons.
Who needs this kind of crap? If you go out with people on X the only thing that will happen is you will get a hug and maybe a massage from a stranger.
I know what I would choose.
PS loved the post liquid.
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Life is short, Roll hard
All information by Faust is FICTION created by a 14 year old Borneo tribes woman.
 
Liquidocean, I highly enjoyed reading your thread! Thank you. Have you ever considered being a professor of ethics or sociology? You are so educational to me. I am such a reader of everything that is posted on bluelight however I do not post as often as I want to. I just had to tell you that, that's all for now, love to you, Renee
 
Loved the post liquidocean but fuck it I'm glad to be living here. 2am finish?? That's the time the DJ's here fight to play. 6am finish for most normal clubs....7am for parties....10am on big weekends like mardi gras. Then like Faust said, onto the day party.
Not boasting here....but wondering why the US can't get their act together.
miss apple
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A dream is a reality that hasn't happened yet
 
atl club closing times vary.
some close at 3am,12pm,8am.
Its nice to live here.
a*n*g*i*e
 
Yeah, we're going home to bed right as the Aussies are dropping another half.....
We do have afterhours and clubs that go til 6am and clubs that sometimes start at 6am, but it's a hodgepodge and you really have to know what you're doing.
Clubs have a bitch of a time getting permits here, and it's almost better to avoid the whole snafu and throw it in a private or an underground space. In SF you need a Cabaret licence to operate past two. The city's pretty much stopped handing them out, and is concentrating on eliminating the ones that exist.
The South of Market area (SOMA), that has a reputation for being a 'hip' place due to its nitelife, has attracted the attention of silicon valley dot.com clones who have the power of paper money through overvalued IPO stock options and want the 'hipness' of living in a loft in San Francisco while having the convenience of hopping in their VW Jettas and jumping down the freeway to San Jose. Of course developers are foaming at the mouth to make this sort of profit, so in addition to using legislation to rob local SOMA schools of tax revenues, they also get the city's political backscratching team to attack the local clubs so that the residents can arrive safely in their new superpad without any noise or disturbance in their 600K place. Oh, don't forget that SOMA was the de-facto nitelife district before all this bullshit. It's a case of trying to shoot oneself in the foot.
A couple years ago, a venerable club, VSF was forced by the city to either give up it's cabaret license, or it's liquor license. It closed down within a month. VSF was a fucking kick ass place, that was the home of the Stompys of old.
The Endup, which has been around for 8-9 years? i believe has closed down. I visited it for the last time last Sunday morning
I don't know how many kick-ass events i've been to that have had to end at 2am. It kinda breaks your heart, and if obviously such an unnatural end to the night. It's like mommy and daddy telling us to go to bed, except that we're of age, and chances are we are in no shape to drive or move around, and we still have money to spend. I've never understood the logic. It's very anal, and very symptomatic of the protestant work ethics we've been fighting our whole lives.
From a business/civic side, i think fighting 24 hour culture is like fighting technology alleys in cities. You will destroy your city's chances of being world-class in the future if you resist grass-roots youth movements. Um, duh, if a city develops a world-class nitelife, it's going to attract world-class people, usually educated, young, artistic, creative.
And the bars and clubs here want to stay open, but if they can't make any more sales, what can they do. But ones that can stay open, it doesn't take much resources to have 1 or 2 bartenders selling redbulls and water, 1 guy cleaning up, and 1 guy at the door.
Just a couple thoughts. Thanks for your comments, keep 'em coming. Yeah, i would like a job where i could use my head and experience to my full potential. A professorship would be my ideal. I've had a bunch of professors who i know have done acid, shrooms, all the 60's stuff, and thought they got the life.
peace
[This message has been edited by liquidocean (edited 12 April 2000).]
 
Liquidocean,
Insightful post as usual. It is striking to me how we can begin a simple conversation about clubs that close at 2 AM and have it morph into a commentary on urban socioeconomics. I read a good article about the dramatic change in SF lately , if I find it I will email it. I am particularly interested in the topic as a grad student in urban planning.
I simply don't understand the 2 AM closing time from any standpoint. Obviously, the authorities will argue that the closing time decreases various vices. Instead you force inebriated people into the streets in droves, causing potential for accidents and violence. WIth the current trend of farther-reaching suburbs, partiers have to drive even farther to get home after a night of drugs and booze. Putting them on the freeway to the burbs at the same time on Fri/Sat night seems a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, party people moving around on the streets 24-7 decreases crime and violence and encourages small business growth in the inner city, as after hours clubs, shops, and restaurants can flourish.
increasingly we see dead downtowns in dire need of help, and I think the nocturnal consumption trends of our generation could be put to use in this area.
 
I live in Gainesville, Florida "home of the Gators" (haha I go to UF) and the city went through this big controversy and ended up passing an "anti-rave" ordinance, forcing clubs to close at 2am. I think (they either DID or are going to soon) they even went one step further and passed an "anti-dance hall ordinance" in case some places try to get around the law by not selling liquor but remaining open.
I think this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. The passed those laws mostly because of (no offense to the younguns but it is true!) 16 year olds managing to get into 18+ clubs and also people (sometimes the same 16 year olds) being really blatant about their recreational drug usage. I'm sure most of you have at least heard of Simon's...Now all the clubs try to satisfy everyone and end up playing techno towards the end of the night, which pisses a lot of the drunk people off. The whole club scene here is just not the same anymore.
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Gainesville is by no means a BIG city and it does put a big strain on traffic, ATMs, Denny's, etc when all the clubs have to empty at 2 - esp on a Friday or Saturday night! And though I still drink on occasion, since I've started rolling it has basically lost it's appeal and I hate being stuck on Later Gator (our free late night bus service) with a bunch of belligerent drunks who will often puke or be otherwise annoying.
And it really doesn't make any difference because people still use drugs - I see little epuddles and glowsticks at every club I've gone to so this new ordinance hasn't really solved any problems - if anything it has created more issues, because now there are drunk drivers on the roads. The security at one club flicks on these BRIGHT lights and physically removes drinks from people's hands, which causes even more drama. It is a big mess!
 
liquidocean
great post. it's nice to see an intellectual thread.
you bring up a lot of good questions. i too wish clubs would stay open later than 2 am. but if the cities don't allow them to be open later what can we do?
i would like to see some alcohol free events, but like others have said i'm not sure that would be viable for the clubs.
i love the idea of having a club that is also something else like a clothing store or anything. that's a good idea.
 
b-u-m-p
it took me awhile, but i finally got threw it at 4:20pm on 4/20! how's that for luck???
excellent post.
 
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