Diplo, Def Jam at 25, and One Night Stands

Nightlife News for October 11, 2011

Compiled by Gamal Hennessy

Crime: Gothamist writes about a bartender who is stabbed by a fanatic patron on the Upper East Side http://bit.ly/oqa9AL"

Customs: Clubplanet tries to explain why some people dislike the nightclub scene. http://ht.ly/6S14F

Customs: Live the Lush Life and the New York Times offer tips to get a bartender's attention without getting on their nerves. http://nyti.ms/pQQaUR.

Drinking: New York City Sidewalker showcases the Ultimate Blast cocktail event going on this Friday. Oct 14^th: tinyurl.com/3mfhsu4

Interview: GQ offers an interview and photo shoot with international DJ Diplo http://gqm.ag/ni8wqW

Music: NPR introduces a new book that looks at the first 25 years of Def Jam music and its impact on hip hop. http://bit.ly/qjtvTr

Music: The CMJ 2011 performance schedule is out. Plan your week accordingly: http://cmj2011.sched.org/venues

Music: On the Eve of CMJ. Spin publishes an article on the state of homophobia in indie rock. http://bit.ly/qdzXQV

Reviews: Gothamist offers a list of the 10 Best Beer Bars In NYC bit.ly/mZPGVk

Reviews:  Prince of the City offers new venue reviews including Winston's Champagne Bar, Marble Lane, SoHo House, Fontana's, and B.B. Kings: http://bit.ly/nt4iwG

Sex: Clubplanet offers ladies in nightlife tips on how to turn the tables on men and enjoy a one night stand; http://ht.ly/6S16N

Venues: Urban Daddy previews The Fulton, opening in the Financial District this week. http://bit.ly/nDtLfb

Have fun.
G

The 10 Best Websites for New York Nightlife

By Gamal Hennessy

“Where do you want to go tonight?”

How many times has someone asked you this question when its time to go out at night? How often do you just shrug your shoulders and say “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” This is not a stimulating conversation. Luckily this is completely avoidable in the modern age of nightlife. The days when you found out about an event or a new venue from a flyer, the radio or word of mouth are long gone. New York nightlife has dozens of sites to help you navigate bars, parties and “secret spots that nobody knows about.” Since you don’t have the time or the patience to sift through hundreds of sites, here are 10 good ones to get you up off the couch and into the night.*

I’ve divided the top 10 into three categories. Venue sites help you find a particular kind of place based on your preferences. Event sites help you find a particular kind of party in the near future. Finally, New Venue sites help you stay up to date with the constantly changing nightlife environment.

Venue Sites
1. Blackbook has a detailed database searchable by part of town, type of crowd, price, features and vibe. It also has direct links to Good Night Mr. Lewis, giving you a chance to go beyond the specific venue and get the insight of an operator who was there when venues like the Limelight and Studio 54 were at their height.
2. Club Planet: has searchable database that allows you to search by neighborhood, venue type, music type and “begins with” for those cool spots you went to before and would have remembered if you weren’t so drunk. There is also a list of events and a guest list feature that has worked reasonably well in the past.
3. New York Magazine: Bars is a database searchable by neighborhood and feature. The nightlife homepage makes it easy to find newest venues and most searchable spots if you want to go where everyone else is going. New York Magazine is also connected to Grub Street, which can offer you some additional insight on changes in the industry as they happen.
4. Shecky’s: has a nightlife guide searchable by neighborhood and type, with dozens of different types of spots laid out for you at the bottom of the page. While the writing is geared towards the Sex and the City crowd, men shouldn’t avoid using this site. We want to go where the girls go, so if this site is telling them where to go, then it’s telling us where to go too.

Event Sites
5. Facebook (C’mon, Do you really need a link to FB?): The good news about using FB to decide where to go is that you can find events your real friends are having or going to and you can invite your other friends seamlessly. The bad news is that if you live in NYC then you probably get 6-12 random invitations a day from promoters you have never met, for events that you have no intention of going to, that are going to be overbooked so you couldn’t get into them anyway. Stick to your actual friend and FB can be an event gold mine.
6. Going: reference to specific events, searchable by night of the week, types of event. While it isn’t very easy to navigate, it does have a wide range of venues and events for those who don’t want to go to the same places with the same people all the time.
7. Guest of a Guest: The event calendar on GofG lists events by the hour, so you can bar hop in style. But be warned, the listings are not exclusively for club events (they mix in book signings, fashion shows, charity events and other types of parties) and they often list events that you or I can’t get into without a prior invitation. Sometimes I feel like they aren’t listing the event so you can go. They’re listing events to show you what you’re missing.

New Venue Sites
8. Thrillist: might only have one nightlife listing per week, but it is probably going to give you info on the venue of the moment. You can sign up for their newsletter and always know what is opening up whether it’s a beer garden in Brooklyn or a rooftop in Midtown.
9. Urban Daddy: is like Thrillist’s rich cousin. It offers weekly listings of the newest venues (among its fashion, leisure and food reviews) as they open but it serves an older, more affluent crowd. If Thrillist wears a graphic tee and skinny jeans, Urban Daddy has an Armani suit with a pocket square.
10. Eater: tracks venues as they open, but the site goes farther than other sites in this category for two reasons. First, they go behind the scenes of the process of opening a venue, showing the development of the space, liquor license updates and struggles with the community boards. Second, they also let you know which venues have closed so you don’t bring your friends out to your favorite spot on a Friday night only to find out that its been shut down for weeks.

Picking a site (or sites) from this list is mostly a matter or personal taste. If you like Blackbook you might not need New York. If you’re happy with Thrillist, Urban Daddy might be redundant. You don’t have to visit all of them to find somewhere to go but spending a little time with at least one of them can make a night on the town much less confusing and much more pleasurable. And in the end, that is the point.

Have fun.
G

P.S. You will not that I didn’t list New York Nights as one of the best sites for New York nightlife. That is not a function of false modesty. If you’re reading this, you already know what NYN is about. You know what it offers and you already know that all the sites listed here have links on our homepage. The sites listed here offer something that we don’t and we offer something that they don’t. Your best bet is to visit them and us to get a more complete picture of the nightlife you live in.

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The Halloween Party Guide

A New York Nights Special Report

So you went out and got the slutty flight attendant/ nurse/ vampire costume and now you need someplace to wear it, right?

You can’t go trick or treating. You’re about 15 years too old for that and you can afford your own damn candy.

You could go to the Halloween parade in the Village, but what about the weekend before? And what are you going to do after the parade, just go home?

The answer here is simple. You need a party. We can help.

New York Nights has compiled a list of the major Halloween resources in the city. Use this as your one stop shop for finding parties, buying tickets and planning your night.

Halloween 2007 List
Clubplanet
Going.com
Joonbug
Myspace Events
New York Magazine
Parties This Week
Shecky’s
Time Out New York

After Halloween, you can use our Lifestyle page to find the latest events on a regular basis.

Now you’re ready. All you need to do is buy some candy.

Gamal

Nightlife News for October 11th, 2007

Nightlife News for October 11, 2007

Hell’s Kitchen becoming new gay haven? (Dan Allen- OutTraveler.com) While the West Village and Chelsea are considered the foundation of gay life in New York City, changes are taking place. As the NYU glacier moves in from the Village and B&T crowd make more in roads into Chelsea from the Meatpacking District Hell’s Kitchen (or Hellsea, or Clinton or NoChe depending on who you ask) is becoming the new focus point for the LGBT population. Since some of the biggest club trends follow them around, don’t be surprised to find the hottest spots in the city here very soon.

Miller and Coors join forces (Andrew Martin- New York Times) There has been a major shift in the Beer Wars (you didn’t even know we were having a beer war, did you?). This week Miller, the number 2 beer distributor in the country, and Coors, the number 3, have joined forces to become MillerCoors. The new entity is expected to generate 6.6 billion sales every year(which by the way is more than the GNP of Fiji). What does this mean to you when you get to the club? It will probably mean less selection and higher prices if the deal goes through since Busch and MillerCoors would have 80% of the US beer market and can effectively squeeze smaller players out.

City Launches Multimedia Project to Promote NYC (Press Release) New York City is trying to attract 50 million tourists here by 2015. In an effort to draw more people in, the city has announced a long term ad campaign that will stretch from Boston to Pretoria, and include TV, billboard and online advertising that showcases what New York has to offer. The New York City tourist website has been revamped, with a search engine powered by Time Out New York. Of course, nightlife will be included in this push, but it doesn’t look like it will be pushed very hard. The nightlife section of the site is painfully short and there isn’t any mention of all the clubs they’ve closed or refused to let open over the past couple of years. I guess that’s not good for business…

Have fun
Gamal
gamal@newyorknightsonline.com

Free Food! (Almost) Free Music! (Almost) Illegal Liquor!

Nightlife News for October 4, 2007

Absinthe in New York: (Jonathan Miles- New York Times)
Since Prohibition ended, there has only been one type of liquor that has remained illegal in the United States. Absinthe, popular with the literati in Paris crowd at the beginning of the 20th Century, has been banned in the US since 1912. Recently a N.Y. company called Viridian Spirits began selling Lucid, which is supposed to be the closest thing you can get to real Absinthe without breaking the law. The spirit has been creeping into New York bars over the past few months, so I guess it's only a matter of time before the club set starts mixing it with Red Bull.

Radiohead Announces Pay What You Want Song Downloads: (Kyle Sutton- PC World Magazine) We might be witnessing the next big shift in the music industry, or it could be just another gimmick. The international rock band Radiohead recently announced on their blog that their new album In Rainbows will be available on their website on October 10th. This release is special because fans will be able to pay whatever they feel the album is worth, not a price dictated by the record company or iTunes. While some see this as another blow to the traditional music industry, others point out that it won't stick because most bands can't afford this type of distribution of their music. Besides, even if no one pays more than a dime for the album, Radiohead is still planning to sell In Rainbows as part of an $80 compilation set later this year and as a traditional CD in early 2008. (Additional Coverage from Dan Kois and Lane Brown- New York Magazine)

Find Free Food in New York: (Amanda Kludt – Gridskipper) What's the perfect compliment to happy hour drinks? Free food of course. While you're not going to get a five star menu from an executive chef this way, but it beats drinking on an empty stomach. On line guide Gridskipper offers seven alternatives in Manhattan and Brooklyn where you can eat and use the money you saved to buy something important, like another drink.

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The Art of Happy Hour (An NYN Special Report)

By Gamal Hennessy

There are a lot of profound and complicated issues in the world today. Understanding happy hour isn't one of them. Happy hour is actually a place where we can go to get away from work, school, home and the stress of our every day lives. Life is meant to be easier (and cheaper) during happy hour.

Like anything else, you can enjoy happy hour more if you know just a little more about it. And since you don't read New York Nights for coverage of the 2008 presidential race, this is probably the proper forum for this discussion.

Happy hour in New York usually starts around 4:00 PM and ends around 7:00 PM. While the majority of bars, pubs and some early opening lounges have some kind of happy hour pricing, most nightclubs and lounges don't either because they aren't open during that time slot or they don't make their money off that kind of volume.

The classic business rule says buy low and sell high. But a bar during happy hour works on a slightly different principle; it's buy lower and sell low. Often, their goal is to serve cheaper well liquor at reduced prices in the hopes that people will stay after happy hour is over (when they will start paying full price for drinks) or reject the well liquor for top shelf spirits (and agreeing to pay higher prices), or order food (which may not be discounted). As a business, a bar exists to make money. Happy hour gives them the ability to bring people into the bar during a time when it would otherwise be dead.

That's great (for the bar) but happy hour can cause its own share of problems. The main potential problem is overdrinking. This can lead to illness, hangovers and questionable decisions made under the influence of alcohol (if you don't believe me, just think about the time your friend told you the story about how he woke up next to that midget after going to happy hour. You don't want to be that guy.)

Happy hour is still a great place for pre-parties, after work meetings, or just for those people who don't want to pay $10 for a drink. The question is how do you satisfy your need for inexpensive drinks and let the bar satisfy its need to make money?

We've got a few tips that might help you navigate the treacherous waters of happy hour without injuring your wallet, your liver, or your reputation.

1. Happy hour times can vary. Ask the bartender or waitress when you get there when happy hour ends, so you're not drinking up a storm after happy hour is actually over.
2. Some places offer special drinks during happy hour that go beyond well liquor. Again, it pays to ask questions.
3. If your happy hour spot offers food, get some. It can help you deal with your the increased alcohol intake.
4. Make drinking part of a larger activity. Maybe you're playing pool, or watching the game, or talking about what an asshole your boss was today. It doesn't matter. If you drink while doing something else, you can have a good time for less cash. If you're just drinking because it's cheap, don't be surprised when you're dry heaving over the toilet.
5. Bring friends. Happy hour is early enough for the B&T commuter to have a drink and still catch her train home. It's usually cheap enough for the intern or the student to drink without forcing themselves to eat Ramen noodles until they get paid again. You can use happy hour to connect with people that you won't see in the clubs on the weekends. An added benefit is the more people you bring to the bar, the better the bar does in terms of money, and the better they feel about you. This can lead to good things later. It always helps to be in good standing with your regular bartender.
6. If you are staying at the bar after happy hour is over, try to close out your tab and start a new one. This will help to remind everyone you're with that the prices have changed and it avoids any potential problems with your bill later.

Happy hour can easily live up to its name with a little planning and a couple of questions. Whether you just grab a drink before watching Survivor: China or you're having a pre-party before a long night on the town, happy hour in New York can be the best way to start the night.

Have fun.
Gamal
gamal@newyorknightsonline.com

New Event Sites from DKNY and NYN (Nightlife News)

We've Got News about New Club Sites from NYN and DKNY in the October 2nd Issue of Nightlife News




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Beer, Hip Hop and The Fall of Forty Deuce

Read All About It in the September 27th Issue of Nightlife News!





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Finding Your Nightlife Style (A NYN Special Report)

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Nightlife News for September 25th, 2007

Stay in touch with your world.

Read the September 25th Issue of Nightlife News!

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We Help You Find the Perfect Drink... and Cabfare.

Find out all the tools you need for the perfect night in the September 20th edition of Nightlife News!

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Skipping the Line (New York Nights Special)

Do you love going to clubs?

Do you hate standing in line to get in?

Then read this article and find out how to skip the line...




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CMJ! Underground Comedy! Television on the Ceiling (Nightlife News)

Festival Time is ready to hit New York and we've got the details for you in today's Nightlife News!

Click on the banner for the September 18th Edition...

Why New York Nights isn't Citysearch, Clubplanet or Time Out

Q: So you’re pretty much like Time Out, Club Planet or Citysearch, right?

A: Not exactly. Each one of those services covers New York very well, but New York Nights isn’t really like any of them.

Time Out is good at covering a lot of different aspects of the city every week. Movies, restaurants, shopping, theater, clubs, books and TV have to share the same space. This gives them the ability to provide a wide overview of weekly events, but not the one specifically tailored for you. NYN only covers nightlife, but we do it in a way that links people to the places they want to go, not just a few places.

Clubplanet (and other sites like it) are good for getting on the guest list of certain clubs, but if you’re not into the types of spots clubplanet offers, you have to look somewhere else. We plan to cover all the places the other sites cover AND more.

Citysearch is also a good site for a general overview of the city, but it doesn’t allow you to tailor your search, it doesn’t provide much updated information on individual events. NYN will strive to be the authority for New York nightlife.

So while each of the other sites has its strengths, NYN fills a void that isn’t currently being served. That’s why we’re different.