Posts Tagged ‘Deep Thoughts’

Hamptons: A One Year Reflection

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008


Exactly one year ago, I voyaged to the Hamptons for the very first time. The experience was not…how to put it kindly…a positive.

After drinking and changing clothes, it was time to hit our first destination. Memorial Day weekend means the grand opening of most Hampton clubs. We arrived outside of an establishment called Dune after paying twenty dollars to self park our car in a weedy patch of sand. If that cost twenty I was afraid to know the cost of valet? Fifty? It was just midnight and the heard of people already outside Dune resembled this fall’s massive immigration march in New York City. After many uncomfortable moments in line, Scruff finally picked us out of the crowd. We then past a large Maxim ad where certain douchey individuals chose to pose and have their picture taken by some kind of fake paparazzi.

When I envisioned a Hamptons club, I was thinking outdoors and on the ocean with men in suits and women with backless evening gowns sipping champagne. Instead, Dune was entirely indoors and smoky with the décor of a dive bar. It was so crowded that moving literally equaled pain. I was stepped on and shoved by some vicious Long Island girls on the way to our table, which was of course was typical toilet bowel size and squeezed between a wall and a wooden stool. For our party of twelve to fit into this area we’d have to learn the trick of the sixteen clowns who stuff themselves into one car.

The DJ was spinning a different song every thirty-five seconds. We’d literally hear ten bars of a piece of music before it changed, and we were doing transitions like Fifty Cent to the Beach Boys to Madonna to Fergie to The Red Hot Chili Peppers to Bon Jovie to Ludacris. My ears almost went into epileptic shock. Perhaps as an artist I’m overly sensitive, but songs in my book actually have a beginning, middle and end. Blending is fine, chopping them down to twenty seconds each and tastelessly scrambling them together is just unacceptable. Songs changed so often that I worried that by twelve thirty this heinous DJ would run out of material having already played every song in the English language.

As someone who goes out often, I’ve seen many drunken people in my day. I’ve seen very tipsy women leaving Marquee, I’ve seen people dancing with themselves at four thirty in the morning, and I’ve heard occasional rude remarks from people fighting over a five a.m. cab. None of this prepared me for the Hamptons, where people were just shit-faced. Behavior at the Dunes was so wildly inappropriate that it made your average New York club look like a monastery. People were dancing obscenely like monkeys, many seemed like they were attempting to imitate fourteen-year-olds at a high school dance. I saw one fifty year old man joyously try to climb the wall. The majority of the women couldn’t even stand. My male friend went to the bathroom only to witness a full-fledge fight break out – and it was only twelve thirty.

If these people were the Hamptons classy and fabulous I wanted a one way ticket back to Manhattan stat. Me and one of my girlfriends looked at each other with such confusion and disillusionment, shrugging our shoulders as to how it was possible each of the tables in this horrific institution were selling for a thirty five hundred dollar minimum. What was the world coming to?

After half an hour we escaped Dune through the back door and piled into our cars to go to Pink Elephant. I was in disbelief about what I had just seen and clung to the hope that there had been some mistake, that the fabled Hamptons nightlife was still somewhere out there.

The good news was the music at Pink Elephant didn’t make me want to knock myself out with an ice bucket. There was also an outdoor section of the club – not on the ocean mind you, but in the courtyard of some motel with fake sand. In addition, everyone from patrons to staff of Pink Elephant Manhattan was there. Creepy.

I bee-lined for the outdoor area. If I had wanted to be in a muggy indoor club I could’ve stayed in the city and gone to the bar below my apartment. While Pink’s music and ambiance was a definite improvement, the condition of the people mirrored Dune. I saw older women jumping erratically around the outdoor beds like chimpanzees and an attractive blonde hump a tree only to break into a full out striptease. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge supporter of drunken fun, but there’s a difference between a party and a shit-show.

The story ends with me taking a jitney back to NYC before my scheduled departure in an effort to save my soul. I’ve clearly learned nothing however, because now, one year later, I’m going to do it all over again.

Why?

Because this year I’m not a naïve outsider expecting backless evening gowns and elegant ocean side clubs. This year, I’ve mastered the game of the share house, the back up share house, and the back up-back up share house, and the sleeping bag. This year, I won’t be discovering. I’ll be aware and ready to pounce. This year, I won’t be expecting people to take care of me. I’ll be a resourceful superwomen with a premeditated plan. I’ve already negotiated 12 entrance and exit routes.

So with my fantasy Hamptons bubble already burst and the shock factor eliminated, will my feelings be as hostile as last year’s?

More about my exact plan of attack and its results coming soon…

Marquee’s ‘Red Room’ Renamed ‘Room3,’ Attempts to Launch House Music Wednesdays

Friday, April 4th, 2008

It’s a New York nightlife staple: when things get rough, rename. I’ll spare our local club friends the embarrassment and not list the thirteen trillion examples that come to mind.

Yesterday, I found myself intrigued after receiving emails from both the folks at Marquee and promoter friends I knew announcing the debut of a ‘house music Wednesday’ inside the club’s private room called Room3.

“Huh?” I thought. “I don’t remember Marquee having a private room.”

Naturally, I let my imagination run haywire and was soon fantasizing about this hidden chamber I’d heard of but never been to. An unfulfilled mission. How had I missed it? Would there be a secret password? Morse code-like knock? Entrance through a liquor cabinet?

Wrong.

Room3 is just Marquee’s Red Room (the unexciting space below the stairs where people never want tables), which isn’t even really a room. I’d define it as an area. The decoration committee attempted to make it a room by adding curtains and a dude wilding a velvet rope, but in reality this was just the ‘red under the stairs area’ stripped of its red wallpaper.

Lame.

This Wednesday House night idea will fail for a couple reasons:

1. Unless you grab some barbed wire and actually trap patrons inside, there’s no way of keeping people in Room3. House music parties thrive on energy and oomph. It’s gotta be packed and over-the-top lively, otherwise guests are going to feel stupid singing along to David Guetta. The rest of Marquee is too distracting (and fun) for people to want to stay inside the most notoriously uninteresting room. Exhibit A, I spent most of the night bouncing around like those magic fun balls from amusement parks.

2. The DJ on the main floor plays all the hot house hits anyway.

3. House music generally tends to attract an older, slightly wordlier crowd, and Marquee is essentially Manhattan’s playpen for youngsters. One hour into the evening, my girlfriend stopped me, sniffed around, extended her hand and proclaimed, “It’s so young in here.”

I hadn’t been to this New York staple in forever and had forgotten. No one who’s lived in Manhattan for more than two years frequents Marquee. It’s the club of the fresh crop: upbeat promoters ready to take on the world, uncorrupted baby models, naïve bankers. The optimistic enthusiasm’s palpable (and almost eerie). Not to be a downer but give these kids a year and they’ll most likely be hardened, smoking cigarettes, wearily hunched over a bottle of gin at Socialista focusing more on drinking than dancing. But that’s okay. There was something lovely about watching girls happily jump around like apes, grinning, free-spirited and wildly tossing their hair and recognizing that “Wow, that once was me.”

It’s somehow beautiful to witness that raw, inexperienced version of yourself and even for a brief moment, reconnect with it. So while Room3 and House Music Wednesdays may fail, Marquee itself will never die or lose its charming ability to make you celebrate the fact that you’ve come a long way.

Miss Model Behavior’s the new nightlife writer for theBlaqlist.com. Feel free to post any nightlife comments or questions on our forum or contact her at MissModelBehavior@theBlaqlist.com