Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Grazian is associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ON THE MAKE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

1 Friday Night in Philadelphia: The Art of the Hustle.................................12 Dynamic Imagineering: The Staging of Urban Nightlife................................293 Spin Control: Public Relations and Reality Marketing................................634 Winning Bar: Nightlife as a Sporting Ritual.........................................935 In the Company of Men: The Girl Hunt and the Myth of the Pickup.....................1346 Hustling the Hustlers: Challenging the Girl Hunt....................................1617 Where the Action Is: Storytelling and the Imagination of Risk.......................1988 Smoke and Mirrors: The Experience of Urban Nightlife................................224Acknowledgments........................................................................235Appendix: Research Methods.............................................................237Notes..................................................................................243Index..................................................................................277

Chapter One

THE ART OF THE HUSTLE

At Tangerine, a fashionable French-Moroccan restaurant and cocktail lounge in the Old City section of downtown Philadelphia, diners enter a candlelit Mediterranean dreamscape of rooms within rooms. Red fabrics and pillows adorn this mazelike Casbah, each chamber draped with velvet curtains, providing pleasure-seekers with their very own Arabian nights. Patrons rhapsodize over North African-inspired selections that include king salmon poached in olive oil and served with potato tortelloni and hazelnut-basil mousse, and chicken tagine, a Moroccan stew prepared with green olives and preserved lemons.

Many of the city's sharply dressed men and women flock to Tangerine to bask in its exotic glamour, but not Allison, a twenty-one-year-old hostess and cocktail waitress who endures every evening handling unruly customers. On any given night at Tangerine, the complaints remain the same: "Where is my table?" "I want the best table." "Why am I not seated?" "My reservation was for 6:30 p.m.! It's 6:35-where is my table?"

While entertaining their demands, Allison must remain composed and empathetic. "Well, they are just finishing their dessert." "It'll be a few moments, if you would like to have a seat in the bar or lounge, or grab a cocktail?" she says.

"I don't want to grab a cocktail," they inevitably retort. "I want to sit down in my seat. I made a reservation."

According to Allison, "There was this one day, it was a Sunday and for whatever reason ... there must have been three parties of twelve, all arriving at the same time.... It was a really busy day, it was really tight in terms of table seating, and we couldn't get one table sat right away because there wasn't a table for them yet-you know, people sit down for a dinner at Tangerine, and they don't get up. Sometimes they will be there for five hours, and you can't tell them to leave-you can try to hurry them along, crumb them a lot, water them, drop the check, but you can't make someone leave.

"They are all sitting there in the lounge, and this man just comes up and he screams, literally screams, 'GET ME MY FUCKING TABLE! I don't care what you have to do!' ... I mean, he just came up and literally screamed at me, like, 'This is what you are supposed to do-if you tell me I am going to have a reservation, you are going to get me seated!' All this stuff, and I want to yell back so bad, 'Sir, take a look in the dining room. If you see a table that can accommodate your party, have a seat, by all means.' But you can't: you have to be nice. I remember as soon as that night was over, I just sat in the coatroom. I was crying. It was the worst."

Of course, from time to time Allison enjoys her revenge. As she confesses, "A lot of times people would say, 'I want a really good table-I want your best table.' And then you would kind of work it back with them in a way to make them think that that was a really difficult thing to do.... And then you would get side-tipped a lot. I have made $100 in a night sometimes, just letting people think that the tables they were getting were really difficult to get.... They'll either remember me on the way out, or they'll introduce themselves, shake hands, thank me, and there is money in their palm."

Across the Schuylkill River on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, undergraduates Mackenzie, Nicole, and Mia juggle countless phone calls, instant messages, and consultations-"Are jeans too casual to wear?" "Is it too cold outside to wear sandals?" "How heavy of a jacket do we need?" "Can I borrow your black belt?" before finally settling on matching outfits for their Friday evening of downtown barhopping. Casually clad in jeans and tank tops, the three young women hail a taxi to the bustling intersection of Second and Market streets a few doors down from Tangerine in Old City. Upon reaching their destination, the trio momentarily holds up traffic while disembarking from the cab; a pair of men in their mid-twenties admonishes them from their sleek silver sports car. Mackenzie, a nineteen-year-old sophomore, suspects that the men are just flirting with her and her friends while gratuitously calling attention to their flashy automobile.

Now where to go? Nicole knows a bouncer at Bleu Martini, a swanky cocktail lounge just around the corner, but he does not appear to be outside the bar as they pass by, so it is off to Saint Jack's so Mia can use the restroom. They flash their fake IDs and enter the darkened bar as the eyes of the all-male clientele follow them down the length of the room. Distressed by their stares, Mackenzie and her friends quickly escape back to Bleu Martini, where they fight their way through the well-heeled crowd to the backlit bar for their drinks. A gentleman attempts to converse with Mia, tapping her on the back several times even as she waves him away. She is eventually saved by Nicole's bouncer friend, who invites the trio into the VIP lounge and hands them over to another host.

The three friends are led downstairs into the lounge, an illuminated cavern bathed in red light and decorated with mirrored walls, tiger-skinned couches, and low cocktail tables. Two groups of guests are already seated: a young group of about eight men and women in the far corner and a group of four older gentlemen on a couch in the middle of the lounge. To the trio's surprise, the host instructs them to join the group of older men, promising that if they talk to them and "keep them happy," the gentlemen will likely ply them with drinks.

Mackenzie is disgusted. She had incorrectly assumed that the three of them were the lucky recipients of special privileges brokered by Nicole, rather than merely singled out as attractive young women chosen to surround the nightclub's male high rollers. ("I feel as if they were trying to whore us out," she later admits.) Much to the host's dismay, they reject his offer, opting instead for a couch across the room. No matter-ten minutes later he returns with another set of three young women willing to do his bidding in the meantime. A man selects one and places his hand on her leg, rubbing it as he attempts to draw her into conversation. As another pretty young woman in a short skirt passes by the table, the men suddenly stop all conversation and stare, following her with a full 180-degree head turn before bursting out into laughter.

Meanwhile, the host continues to replenish the VIP lounge with different groups of females, each wearing progressively skimpier outfits. Two waitresses work the room dressed in tight black pants and tiny black shirts, flirting with the men to keep them entertained in between the arrivals of new groups of female companions.

At a certain point Mackenzie departs for the restroom and returns to find her friends talking to these big spenders. One of the men approaches Mackenzie and offers to buy her a cocktail, which she accepts. She guesses he is at least fifty years old. He asks her what she does for a living. Admitting she is a student, she returns the question: he mysteriously replies that he does "everything," has "been everywhere," and "no one fucks with him." As Mackenzie recalls, "Everything he says is calculated to impress me with his power and elusiveness, but instead I feel as if he oozes sliminess." He continues to converse with her as he begins kissing Nicole's back. This causes enough discomfort for the trio that they get up to leave, but not before the mysterious gentleman gives Nicole his telephone number and asks for hers. (She gives him a fake number.) The three friends hastily retreat from the VIP lounge and Bleu Martini, only to be harassed on the sidewalk by yet another male passerby in his mid-twenties who shouts to Nicole, "You're crazy!" in a drunken slur. Finally, they seek refuge in a taxicab bound for campus, but the driver assumes that they are drunk and attempts to drive them home by way of a circuitous and unnecessarily expensive route. Catching on, Mia instructs him to make a turn to avoid going all the way around campus-a turn the driver conveniently misses, and when the trio insists on getting out of his taxi, he tries to shortchange them $2, a ploy that Mia catches as well, demanding the correct amount back.

THE ANONYMITY OF THE CITY

In movies and television depictions of urban nightlife, fabulous dudes and divas sip cocktails in enchanting fantasy worlds where friends and lovers meet. But while evoking the glamour and allure of the city, downtown entertainment spots also function as aggressively competitive environments in which participants are forever on the make, challenging each other for social status, self-esteem, and sexual prestige in a series of contests, attacks, and deflections that fill the evening hours. On any given weekend, club bouncers match wits with queued-up thrill-seekers desiring admittance; dinner parties of six argue over available tables; cocktail drinkers vie for the attention of a bartender or server; hip-shakers attack the dance floor with their eyes directed toward all onlookers; taxi drivers and their customers argue over the fare. Single men and women take obsessive measures in their attempts to "score" with (or else avoid) their fellow revelers; and occasionally nighttime patrons confront one another in escalating moments of high-stakes interaction over the smallest of disputes. In many ways, the city at night is a playground for engaging in elaborate games of strategy and chance, especially for young affluent men and women who approach evenings out at upscale bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and lounges as if they were sporting events: combative games of negotiation, deception, and risk.

How do we account for the competitiveness of those who participate in scenes of urban nightlife? One line of research gaining increasing interest among evolutionary psychologists suggests that men and women are biologically hardwired to interact as rapacious creatures fighting in a Darwinian contest for survival of the fiercest by any means necessary, as extravagantly displayed on televised courtship competitions from ElimiDATE to The Bachelor. Others argue that while all human animals may be capable of demonstrating competitiveness in the urban jungle, some individuals are far cagier than others, driven by sexual lust, insatiable greed, deficiency of morals, or else an unquenchable desire to pull off a spectacular nocturnal stunt or caper, whether in a casino, billiard hall, nightclub, or singles bar. Our exemplars come from the world of popular American film-Tony Curtis's press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the brat-pack thieves of Ocean's Eleven (1960), Paul Newman's pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) and The Color of Money (1986), Will Smith's professional "date doctor" in Hitch (2005)-as well as from journalistic accounts of confidence artists who stalk the city's nightspots in search of susceptible victims. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City, a team of MIT students moonlight as blackjack card-counters by employing mathematical dexterity, false aliases, and elaborate hand signals to win big hands while living double lives. In Los Angeles, predatory men pay $500 for four nights of on-the-job training in the timeless art of seduction by self-proclaimed pickup artists with presumptuous names like Mystery, Juggler, and Style. In New York City, a website named Wingwomen.com offers men attractive female escorts for the night-not for the companionship, but for the purposes of luring other unsuspecting women into conversations at nightclubs and bars throughout the city. In Miami, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York, average Joes hire gorgeous accomplices from PartyBuddys to shepherd them past the crowded queues of hot nightclubs, guaranteeing them coveted access to their exclusive velvet-roped VIP lounges amid throngs of envious onlookers. While these exemplars may illustrate a credible Sleazy Man theory of history, a more sociological approach instead emphasizes how wider populations of more or less conventional individuals and groups are shaped by their social circumstances. In fact, perhaps it makes more sense to look beyond these unusual cases by refocusing our attention toward the larger landscape of urban nightlife in which more normal schemes are enacted. The last decades of the twentieth century mark a tremendous shift in the organization of urban life, particularly as cities formerly known for industrial manufacturing, like Philadelphia, have transformed into centers of entertainment, leisure, tourism, and professional business travel. Downtown areas and their public spaces strongly reflect the urban renaissance experienced by many American cities during the 1990s, as illustrated by the rise of shopping malls, flagship stores, and cultural attractions. Amid this consumerist landscape lurks the spectacle of the new urban nightlife, a bonanza of gentrified entertainment zones, themed restaurants, velvet-roped nightclubs, spectator-sports bars, gaming arcades, and multiplex theaters. These places tend to be highly stylized, demonstrating a concern with aesthetic imagery, playful design, and trendy eclecticism. The new urban nightlife similarly evokes an overindulgence in branding, both among franchised outposts that celebrate trademarked popular culture (Hard Rock Cafe, ESPN Zone, Coyote Ugly), and more generic efforts at homogenizing nightlife through all too conventional tropes: the faux-Irish tavern, the swinging martini-tippling cocktail lounge, the beach party-themed dance club, and the beer-soaked and graffiti-stained hipster dive bar where nobody really knows your name.

In fact, through all the urban renewal efforts and branding campaigns characteristic of the rise of the postmodern city, one aspect of urban nightlife has remained constant throughout the last century: many downtown restaurants, bars, nightclubs, cocktail lounges, and popular music venues continue to represent anonymous worlds of strangers where patrons lack any strong sense of social solidarity with one another. Sociologists have long observed the anonymity within cities as a primary motivator of competition and caution among dwellers interacting in the urban milieu. As the German social theorist Georg Simmel contemplates in his seminal 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life":

The mental attitude of the people of the metropolis to one another may be designated formally as one of reserve. If the unceasing external contact of numbers of persons in the city should be met by the same number of inner reactions as in the small town, in which one knows almost every person he meets and to each of whom he has a positive relationship, one would be completely atomized internally and would fall into an unthinkable mental condition. Partly this psychological circumstance and partly the privilege of suspicion which we have in the face of the elements of metropolitan life (which are constantly touching one another in fleeting contact) necessitates in us that reserve, in consequence of which we do not know by sight neighbors of years standing and which permits us to appear to small-town folk so often as cold and uncongenial. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, the inner side of this external reserve is not only indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact which has arisen any way whatever, can break out into hatred and conflict. The entire inner organization of such a type of extended commercial life rests on an extremely varied structure of sympathies, indifferences and aversions of the briefest as well as of the most enduring sort.

For Simmel, this cautious aversion to the city of strangers can only be adequately handled by deploying meticulous if crafty strategies of impression management. By incorporating what he refers to as "the strangest eccentricities" and "elaboration of personal peculiarities" into one's public persona, "the attention of the social world can, in some way, be won for oneself." In doing so, the anonymity of the city emancipates the metropolitan individual by providing limitless opportunities for self-expression and reinvention, the art of everyday life.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ON THE MAKEby DAVID GRAZIAN Copyright © 2008 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.