Fabulous by Madison Moore

Author:Madison Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

From my safe vantage point on the step, behind the ropes, it was truly a sea. The crowd bobbed and undulated, forming gentle breakers that lapped inevitably over the ropes, receded, and broke again. Fifth Avenue between 15th and 16th streets was awash with people, smiling, expectant, eager, as far as the eye could see. The all new Peppermint Lounge had invited them to its opening and they had the invitations to prove it. By 9:30, the sea had turned ugly. No longer calm, it crashed violently at the ropes, threatening to turn into the biggest storm in history. The ropes, once a mighty bulwark, seemed suddenly flimsy against the surge. I stepped back, fearing for my life, my tuxedo. You see, I held the list.83

The crowd festers because it knows it is on the verge of something, feeling something is coming that can’t be missed, what the philosopher Brian Massumi called the “just-beginning-to-stir” or what we refer to nowadays as FOMO—fear of missing out. The audience realizes it is on the cusp. People are not waiting to go inside a nightclub or even to cross a threshold into a new sensorial experience. They’re waiting for something else. Being at the door to a hot nightclub, experiencing the “just-beginning-to-stir,” is about how space holds energy in an edgy anticipation of something that might happen.84 The “just-beginning-to-stir” emphasizes the exciting possibility, even uncertainty, of something that can’t be missed but that can’t be talked about because it hasn’t happened. This is akin to what we call nowadays the “fear of missing out.”

There’s a human drive to be where the line is, and somehow where there’s a line there’s also a party, as Jimmy Durante wrote about in 1931 and as Berghain made clear almost a century later. Tight door policies in nightclubs are often a process of curation that is almost always about protecting the subcultural capital of a space, the special world that exists on the other side of the door. This is particularly true of a venue that, for instance, started as a niche, underground space but that has suddenly become popular, or if the club wants to stay under the radar to avoid police raids.85 “The most important question a doorman must ask himself,” Stephen Saban wrote, is “would I want to hang out in a club with this person?” In one column Saban talks specifically about the kinds of people he didn’t let in. They included: “1) roving gangs of teenagers; 2) children; 3) unescorted men dressed in denim; 4) known drug dealers, abusers, and agents; 5) drunks; 6) people who called us assholes; 7) known troublemakers; 8) tasteless dressers.”86 What these groups have in common is their perceived inappropriateness for the club environment, and this inappropriateness is based primarily on legal status and the potentiality for igniting hostile situations.

When he decided not to let a person in, Saban used standard rejections that are actually deterrents meant to make the clubgoers frustrated and ready to leave on their own.

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