The most valuable and also vexing thing about nightclubs is that you can’t get in. Not to the good ones, at least. Not unless you are in the know, or in good standing with people who are, or are diligent and passionate and perhaps willing to part with a bit of cash. Nightclubs are not for public consumption — there is a clear demarcation line of knowledge and access, and the mythology of a great club is built as much by the curious kept on the outside as the revelers doing damage on the inside.
This is perhaps less true today, in an age when nightclub culture is heavily monitored and policed, or maybe worse, heavily commodified. But in the New York of the 1980s and 1990s, clubs were somehow both utopian and forbidding. They were a world where all the most relevant synergy was taking place, and yet to almost everyone they were a wholly inaccessible secret. [Read More]