Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark - Hardcover

Plimpton, Taylor

 
9780307716224: Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307716228 ISBN 13: 9780307716224
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

"Knight Errant Taylor Plimpton has written a very funny, insightful, honest, wistful, and intensely personal book about his quest for the Holy Grail, which, as everyone knows, is almost certainly located deep in the heart of the New York night, just behind the next velvet rope. Notes from the Night should be required reading for anyone who has ever woken up with a hangover."---Jay Mcinerney

"An intimate remembrance of countless dazzling, empty Arabian nights of the New York club scene that begin at midnight and end at dawn. Zoo, tall, completely cool, and friendly, can talk his way in past the waiting lines, taking Taylor and, in the end, you with him. This clear-eyed, touching, irresistible account belongs somewhere in with Kerouac, Jay McInerney, and J.D. Salinger."---James Salter

"In Notes from the Night, Taylor Plimpton tells one of the great hunting tales. His prey is that rare, elusive, dangerous creature: fun. He captures it alive! But somehow the damn beast always manages to escape in the morning. The adventures herein will raise the hair on the back of your neck, not to mention the scotch in your hand. Taylor doesn't chase his quarry---as so many have---right over the edge of a cliff. But it's a near-run thing." --- P.J. O'Rourke

"Notes from the Night is a veritable field guide for the young who are drawn to velvet ropes and morning hangovers. This book is also filled with beautiful sentences, co-medic self-deprecation, a watchful eye, and a questioning heart." ---Jonathan Ames

Here in New York, a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the bour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools, and the music is thumping and the lights are flashing and the whole place is pulsating like a massive beating heart, and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do not want to miss anything.

So begins Notes from the Night, Taylor Plimpton's account of a night out in New York City. Plimpton is part participant, part observer, a student and uniquely apt chronicler of human behavior---particularly at its most absurd

Accompanied by his best friend, Zoo, and a tight-knit band of other mischief-makers, and fueled by drinks, drugs, and big dreams, Plimpton journeys from one Manhattan hotspot to the next with boundless energy and an eye for the dark, often comic realities of club culture Exploring the myriad pleasures, mysteries, and pitfalls of that elusive world, Notes from the Night is guide to a place and a state of mind that has never been mapped.

Surrounded by celebrities, models, and the best of friends, the reader feels the rush of the party, the wonderful, heart-thumping panic of approaching a beautiful woman, and the often forgotten joy of simply having a good time. By relentlessly pursuing the truth of his own experience, Plimpton uncovers the sexy, and seamy, lining of the city that never sleeps, and in so doing exposes what at heart is sought by all those who leave their home well after dark---the singular thrill of being young and free and full of desire in a world where anything can happen.

Plimpton is both an unlikely clubber and a likely seeker---a little bumbling and somewhat aloof, often naive and unusually erudite. He's an insider who remembers what it was like to be an outsider, and from this unique perspective he invites you to experience the splendor, the sorrow, and the possibility of New York after hours. Lyrically written and vividly described, this brisk, surprising, and confident debut will stay with you long after the sun has risen

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Taylor Plimption is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Men's Journal, Dan's Papers, The Harvard Advocate, and The Rumpus.net. He is the co-editor of The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays, an anthology of dark holiday humor published in October 2009. He graduated with a degree in English from Reed College.

Taylor Plimpton is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Men’s Journal magazine, Dan’s Papers, the Harvard Advocate, and The Rumpus.net. He is the co-editor of The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays, an anthology of dark holiday humor published in October of 2009. He graduated with a degree in English from Reed College.

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1

The Day

Those who dream of drinking wine may weep when morning comes.

—Chuang Tzu

Here in New York, a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the hour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools, and the music is thumping and the lights are flashing and the whole place is pulsating like a massive beating heart, and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do not want to miss anything.

It hardly matters that the nightclub finally kicks us out. The lights back on, the music cut, its sudden absence ringing in our ears. The hulking bouncers herding us to the door: “You don’t have to go home,” they call out with those barrel-chested voices, “but you can’t stay here.” Even then, when we’re pushed out into the strange predawn night—a twilight like dusk but darker, cleaner, bluer—even then, we will not let the night end. Indeed, it is at times like these, when anyone in their right mind would say, “It’s four-thirty in the morning, I need to get the fuck to bed,” that I sometimes hear my friend Zoo say, “Yeah, man, so what’s next, man—I’m just getting started. . . .”

So we move things back to a late-night, to an after-party at my apartment, or someone else’s, and there are cold cans of beer there, beautiful girls we hijacked from the last club, blaring music the neighbors must not even be able to comprehend—they must hear it and think it a dream—and though soon enough morning light comes streaming through the curtains, it is still the night because we have not slept.

Here in New York, a good night does not end until you sleep—if you sleep—and even then, in the morning, or the afternoon, when you awake, the taste of it is on your tongue and in your throbbing head. You stink of it—liquor and beer and cigarettes—and you carry that stench, and its accompanying hangover, with you into the following day. But a good night out stays with you in another way, too. Because the next day, there’s this sense that you were on the verge of something, as if you almost got there, the night before, but didn’t. As if you’d fought this epic battle, there in the deep New York night, but that nothing had been clearly won. And you think to yourself that if only the night had continued on just a couple more hours, there would have been something good that would have come of it, something certain and fulfilling and right, a victory of sorts. But the night ended too early, even though it ended too late, and so there remains this sense of something unfinished, of a search not quite complete. You know that there is more out there, you can feel it, all the endless possibilities of future nights, and you go to sleep satisfied that you will never be satisfied, you go to sleep—and then awake—with the wonderful, starving feeling that life is not over yet, and you are young.

And, of course, here in New York, a good night never ends because somehow another one is always just beginning.

A New Night Dawns

Several hours later, my phone rings at work, and it is Zoo. You would think it would be a relief to hear from a good friend, but in this case, it’s not. Part of the problem is that Zoo has a way of calling at the precise time when you least want to hear from him. Like when I am just drifting off into a lovely early-evening, post-work nap, or when I have sunk into my couch to watch a really funny episode of The Simpsons, or the first scene of a good movie. Or like now, when I am at the office, hung over as hell, and do not want to talk to anyone, least of all my cheery good friend:

“What’s up what’s up?” he says. “What’s going on?”

I manage, somehow, to reply in the appropriate manner:

“Nothing, dude, what’s going on with you?”

But I dread these calls, I really do. Because I know what the bastard is going to say next:

“Yeah, so what do you got lined up for this evening?”

And I want to say, Dude, come on, we went out last night, it’s one in the afternoon, my head is soaked thick with scotch and cigarettes, I feel like ass, how could I possibly already have plans for tonight, leave me the fuck alone, let me do my stupid work and drudge through this day so I can just go home and collapse on the couch in front of the TV and just fucking chill. But instead I say:

“Not much, man.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about stepping out for a bit,” he says. This, you will learn, is an understatement, and Zoo is full of them. Last night we stepped out for a bit, and were up past five in the morning. “What do you think? You up for it?”

And I pause for a second and shake my hurting head slowly and sigh, but there is a grin on my face beneath the pain, and even though I’ve been out two nights in a row and my body is drained almost to transparency and I know that going out again is the last thing in the world I need to do, I say, “I don’t know, dude, maybe, dude, maybe—we’ll see.”

But this is not good enough for Zoo. “Come on, now, dude, it’s Thursday,” he reminds me, and he says it with such conviction you almost consider it a valid point, but the fact of the matter is he would say the same thing if it was Tuesday: “Come on, now, dude, it’s Tuesday.” The thing is, there is no way to argue with Zoo. His logic is circular, flawless, impenetrable. Yes, Zoo, it is indeed Thursday, that I can’t deny. But what about the fact that yesterday was Wednesday, and we were out all night, and what about Tuesday, my man, what about that, I could say, but I don’t. There is simply no way to win. Besides, I don’t want to win. It is an obsession for me, this night. And it is not the alcohol that calls, or the drugs, or even the sex (far too infrequent). No, I am in love with possibility. Tonight, I cannot help but to think, tonight could be the night. Because heading out on the town, you never know what will happen, it could be anything, everything, and whatever it is, it is not this, this whining blue computer screen in front of me, the phones ringing, the halogen lights humming and buzzing and casting that dead light all around the office. Whatever Zoo has planned, it is not this, and though sometimes I feel like killing the bastard when he calls me, somehow all well-rested and chipper and buzzing with plans and possibilities, I know that he means well. And I know that whatever we end up doing, it’ll be something.

Work—or, One of the Reasons I Enjoy the Night Better than the Day

In these early-afternoon hours, when somehow my night has already reluctantly begun, the great nightclubs of New York are slumbering—big and empty and swept clean. In some of them, perhaps, a forbidden shaft of daylight squeezes through one of the frosted front windows, a slant in thick red curtains, and lands on the empty dance floor, sunlit fingers peeking in like dreams to the sleeping beasts. The day is night for these clubs, as it is for the people who frequent them, like me and Zoo.

Back in the day, Zoo could sleep like the dead—long, dreamless hours in which he’d grind his teeth with a dull, crunching, squeaking sound that sent pigeons outside his window fluttering toward the hills. Indeed, back then, when he was home for break from high school or college, it sometimes seemed that the only light Zoo ever saw was that of the dawn after a long night out, and it was this that would send him scurrying like a vampire for cover of shade-drawn darkness.

And...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307716228
ISBN 13 
9780307716224
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
190
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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