City's Nightlife Research Articles

Noise dynamics in city nightlife: Assessing impact and potential solutions for residential proximity to pubs and bars

The vibrancy of city nightlife, particularly within pubs and bars, brings with it a nuanced soundscape, with sounds ranging from operational activities to animated conversations. While these spaces serve as pivotal social hubs, the accompanying noise can become a concern for proximate residential areas. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the noise dynamics inherent to urban nightlife spots, accentuating the implications for those living nearby. It further outlines strategic guidelines designed to alleviate noise disturbances in alcohol-serving venues, promoting a serene urban atmosphere alongside bustling nightlife.

City after Dark: Cultural Planning and Management of Bhubaneswar's Night-time Economy

The nightlife in India includes a variety of cultural events, such as music performances, pubs, theatres, museums, markets, drive-ins, and social gatherings. It has the potential to provide economic and social benefits, and local governments, people, the police, local companies, and transportation providers should collaborate to make it a successful sector. India's culture is broad and adaptable, and its nightlife is unique and expanding. There is a lack of studies on how to boost a nation's economy by promoting night-time commerce, particularly in emerging nations like India. The night economy has a lot of promise, but there are difficulties in the areas of rules and additional policy directives. This thesis examines the night-time economy of Bhubaneswar, using a multi-method approach, examining policies and documents while engaging in key informant interviews, focus groups, observational research, and documentary analysis, as well as patterns of activity and governance, and regulation. The project's key findings show how a variety of factors, such as the city's nightlife is constrained by the concentrated and linear pedestrian traffic flow, the division of recreational areas and activities, the underutilization of a public setting, and notions of risk and peril. These findings will help planners and politicians understand the advantages of building and recycling urban areas, developing thriving cities, and creating dynamic, inclusive urban centers.

A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017 by Janet Hamill

Reviewed by: A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017 by Janet Hamill Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) a map of the heavens: selected poems, 1975–2017 Janet Hamill Spuyten Duyvil http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/a-map-of-the-heavens.html 213 pages; Print, $18.00 Of all the nostalgias for the before times—before the pandemic, the internet, even before MTV and the Reagan Revolution—the art and musical movements born out of the 1970s downtown New York scene are among the most potent. The late Keith Haring’s works are ubiquitous on greeting cards and billboards. David Byrne of the Talking Heads, which rose to prominence during the golden age of New York City nightlife, performs now on Broadway as an elder statesman of rock ’n’ roll. Patti Smith, poet, performer, songwriter, and winner of a National Book Award for her memoir, is regarded as a national treasure. The poet Janet Hamill witnessed the birth and nurturing of these scene-makers and their styles, particularly the ascent of Smith, her friend since college. (They once stayed up past midnight to hear the first FM radio broadcast of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a night Smith documented in an introduction to All the Songs: [End Page 135] The Story Behind Every Beatles Release.) But Hamill did not use the fame of her friends, nor her proximity to it, to ingratiate herself. Nor did she remain on the sidelines; she painted, took photographs, and wrote eight books of poetry and fiction, work that has been recognized by Publishers Weekly and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. In her latest collection, A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017, Hamill documents her navigation of the multiple worlds she inhabits with nostalgia and innocence. It’s a combination that could overwhelm a lesser poet, but one Hamill rides to spectacular effect. Smith’s remembrance of that fateful night she and Hamill shared tags Hamill as the more innocent of the two; she was the Beatles fan, while Smith favored the harder-edged Rolling Stones. A preference for the Beatles does not foretell a career in poetry, but Hamill has maintained a stance of wonderment before her subjects. “I run my hand across your chest / It comes away with diamond dust / destined to be scattered / wide among the stars when we die / returning to our source in the sky” is how Hamill concludes her poem “Aria.” The poem is not only an earnest and instructive attempt to capture a particular moment in the vastness of cosmological time, but it also describes Hamill’s relationship to the words and work of poetry. Celestial bodies are frequently used in her poems, which speaks to the type of innocence and nostalgia that suffuses these works. For stargazing is a journey into the past; the stars we perceive today are the record of light from hundreds of thousands of years earlier. This fact continues to startle Hamill. Rather than whitewash social problems of another, “better” era, her nostalgia celebrates moments of individual emotional clarity. Hamill has been called a trance poet, a surrealist and science fiction writer, and a post-Beat curator, or inheritor, of the original tradition. She is name-checked with the likes of Anselm Hollo and Tom Disch. In this volume, Hamill reveals herself as a poetic polymath, exploding the restraints of one aesthetic to plumb the freedoms of another. She began her career, as it’s depicted in this volume, as a romantic, though not necessarily with a capital “R.” Her earliest verses are centered in locations and situations exotic yet familiar. The dusty Third World village, alternately luxurious, or hellish hotel rooms; a transporting view of the ocean or from the top of a mountain; the doubt that rises and falls within the artist contemplating where she belongs: [End Page 136] these works conjure youthful expeditions to foreign soils in search of the self, the auditioning of potentially annihilating ideas, and the discovery of sensuality in the ordinary. A comparison of two poems from relatively early in her oeuvre reveals how Hamill progressed from a poet seeking authenticity in the usual settings...

Management and staff reception to overdose prevention in NYC nightlife venues

Background: Fentanyl has become increasingly present in the illicit drug supply, including in cocaine. Interventions that target non-opioid use are a necessary component of overdose prevention due to the increased presence of fentanyl. Objectives: To assess management and staff reception to overdose prevention messaging and access to naloxone in New York City nightlife venues. Methods: Between June and August 2019, we conducted a public awareness intervention in 75 nightlife venues (bars, nightclubs and music venues) to visibly display coasters and posters containing overdose prevention messaging for 6 weeks. As part of the intervention, staff were offered overdose education and a naloxone kit. A post-intervention survey assessed reception of intervention materials, staff and patron responses to intervention messaging and staff awareness of fentanyl, naloxone and access to naloxone. Results: Forty-one venues displayed posters and coasters and staff at 28 of these venues (68%) completed naloxone training. Respondents reported learning about naloxone and fentanyl through the intervention, and a majority of staff (92%) were receptive to the intervention’s messages. Partnerships with community-facing stakeholders and earned media facilitated the reach of the intervention. Conclusion: Venue management and staff were receptive to the intervention, its messaging and keeping a naloxone kit on the premises. Overdose prevention efforts in nightlife venues should consider low-cost strategies such as disseminating intervention materials through television, print and social media, collaborating with community partners to enhance venue recruitment and providing venues with naloxone training and communal kits. Further research is needed to explore retention of overdose prevention messaging and subsequent short- and long-term behaviour change.

Conflict of female sex workers in films Moammar Emka’s Jakarta Undercover

<p><em><strong>Abstract</strong><br /></em></p><p><em>Moammar Emka’s Jakarta Undercover is a movie that was lifted from four series of works by Moammar Emka with the same little. Moammar Emka’s Jakarta Undercover tells the Jakarta city nightlife that is full of surprises, which includes the ambitions of its citizens, various forms of prostitution and parties that claimed to be unknow, to drugs. This film has a mission voice humanity’s value to society. The director, dawn nugros wants to visualize and raise the issue of violence against women, thuggery, poverty, the screams of minorities. The purpose of this research is to find out the conflicts that occur in women of high sex workers. This research is a qualitative research using John Fiske semiotic analysis through The Televison Codes.<strong> </strong>The results of this study indicate that The Moammar Emka’s Jakarta Undercover movie, represents upper-class commercial sex workers as well some conflicts received by women. And shows the dark side of the Jakarta City, which is carried out by supermodels, officials, and other uppers classes. In addition, this study shows that some of the conflict underlying women work in the world of high class prostitution and invite many risks. That movie also gives a voice to women about gender inequality.</em><strong><em></em></strong></p>

Mashhad, City of Light

The night phase of cities is an extra source of time and space. Using this reserve of time and space efficiently can provide opportunities for users in populated cities to engage in a wider range of activities. Evolution of light in urban spaces and emergence of 24-hour networks within cities is reviewed briefly while the main aim was to investigate and document urban lighting and the nightlife in city of Mashhad. Keeping a light on during the night has had a long history in Persian culture. An objective appearance of this tradition is traceable in Mashhad's Samen District and its landmark, Imam Reza's Shrine. The city is observed at four scales, from inside houses to the boundaries of the city, within the context of Persian culture. Three key concepts were identified: population growth pushes activities and users into the night phase of cities, belief structure and local culture support and provide safety of urban nightlife while authorities play a significant role in the formation of 24-hour districts. In the case of Mashhad, ideology seems to have played a crucial role in the formation of urban nightlife, while financial and social aspects are subordinates to the belief structure.

Redefining the concept of the 24-hour city and city nightlife for holy cities, with the use of Islamic instructions: A Case study of the holy city of Karbala

The development of the 24-hour city includes the development of infrastructure, and economic, cultural and social planning. The approach taken in most of the western cities has been considered compatible with the lifestyles prevalent in those countries, and has three main parts: people, place, and creativity, and three basic principles: providing a safe city centre for people and their places of leisure, developing the night economy, and improving the city’s image.The interaction between proponents and opponents of 24-hour cities and their effects on the planning of the cities is also one of the challenges in cities in Islamic countries. Most proponents tend to encourage the creation of new urban places and the introduction of special activities compatible with nightlife. However, some cities already provide opportunities for attendance and activity at all times of day and night without formal organisation, including areas such as Karbala and Mashhad where the focal point is a holy shrine.Islam has a special view of urban life and lifestyle and therefore defines its own favoured activities, entertainment, residency, and purpose, proposing special times and places for all things. Reviewing the concept of the 24-hour city in light of the Islamic lifestyle using examples of holy cities can thus help redefine the 24-hour city and produce new patterns for it that are more compatible with the needs of Islamic countries.This research thus tries to answer the following questions using a qualitative method and surveys to develop a case study of Karbala city: What are the connections between an Islamic lifestyle and 24-hour city life? What capacities of the city are lost, based on the current local nightlife? The aim of this study is to begin to redefine the 24-hour city concept to make it compatible with both Islamic culture and local capacity.

Homicides with direct and indirect links to the night-time economy.

Alcohol use and homicide are a wide community concern with particular interest in understanding and preventing attacks (e.g. 'one punch' male on male attacks) in commercial nightlife settings with high levels of collective drinking. There is insufficient knowledge of the long-term patterns in this violence or the relationship between public drinking and flow on violence in other social settings. Alcohol-related homicides were those in which alcohol consumption was a contributing factor. Those also linked to purchase or consumption in locations where alcohol is sold after dark were classified as night-time economy related. The study comprised a first-hand analysis of files in the archive of the Australian National Homicide Monitoring Program in 2 years with a decade gap (1998/1999-2007/2008), and it classified 73 of all 238 alcohol-related incidents by direct or indirect relation to public nightlife settings. Related homicides in these years were not highly concentrated in developed night-time economies, but more spread outside major nightlife zones. Indirectly related killings were even more dispersed and included more women victims killed in domestic settings. There is a consistent though dispersed relationship between heavy public drinking at night and homicide. Concerns about homicide and night-time drinking leisure with mostly male victims attacked in well-known areas of busy city nightlife, must also consider the broader gendered patterns of 'flow on' nightlife-related incidents, including fatal semi-private and domestic violence that is indirectly but importantly related to drinking and alcohol purchase in public commercial nightlife.

Kansas City lightning: the rise and times of Charlie Parker

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker's Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

Duke Ellington, Radio Remotes, and the Mediation of Big City Nightlife, 1927 to 1933

Histories of the career of Duke Ellington often give a significant, if somewhat superficial, place in the story to radio remotes of the later 1920s and the 1930s. These broadcasts from nightclubs like the Cotton Club in Harlem allowed those listening in to experience at least some of what the club's patrons did. The claim is often made that such broadcasts could be heard nationally and that they both account for and provide evidence for Ellington's rising popularity. However, a detailed examination of the radio stations and their place in America's media, cultural and economic life raises many questions. By focusing on the political economy of the three stations which originated the Cotton Club remotes, and setting them in wider discourses of jazz and radio listening at the time, this analysis proposes new ways to conceive of the reception of Ellington's music in the late 1920s. Specifically, the article argues that the broadcasts were far less extensive than usually thought, and that the reception of the music over the airwaves needs to be understood within the context of different radio stations and different radio audiences. Further, the connection between radio and sound film in this period is examined. Drawing on approaches derived from media and cultural studies, the article explores both the political economy and cultural meanings at play in the mediated representations of Ellington in this period.

Luc Xi: prostitution and venereal disease in colonial Hanoi

What does it mean when a city of 180,000 people has more than 5,000 women working as prostitutes? This question frames Vu Trong Phung's 1937 classic reportage Luc Xi. In the late 1930s, Hanoi had a burgeoning commercial sex industry that involved thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. It was the centre of the city's nightlife and the source of suffering, violence, exploitation, and a venereal disease epidemic. For Phung, a popular writer and intellectual, it also raised disturbing questions about the state of Vietnamese society and culture and whether his country really was progressing under French colonial rule. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney's thoughtful and multifaceted introduction provides historical background on colonialism, prostitution, and venereal disease in Vietnam and discusses reportage as a literary genre, political tool, and historical source. A fully annotated translation of Luc Xi follows, in which Phung takes readers into the heart of colonial Hanoi's sex industry, portraying its female workers, the officials who attempted to regulate it, the doctors who treated its victims, and the secretive medical facility known as the Nha Luc Xi (The Dispensary), which examined prostitutes for venereal diseases and held them for treatment. Drawing from his interviews with doctors, officials, and prostitutes and the writings of French doctors on prostitution and venereal disease, Phung provides a rare, firsthand look at the damage caused by the commercial sex industry. His sympathetic portrayal of the Vietnamese underclass is considered one of the most accurate, but he also provides one of the most acerbic, humorous, and critical views of the changes wrought by colonialism in Southeast Asia.

Drinking before going out—A predictor of negative nightlife experiences in a German inner city area

Objective The aim of the presented study is to identify target groups for early interventions to reduce negative effects of nightlife alcohol consumption and negative nightlife experiences (e.g. involvement in fights) as well as to examine the consumption patterns and identify the need for further interventions. Method A cross-sectional survey of 308 persons in a German city centre during night time. Measurements: A questionnaire including questions on basic demographics, alcohol consumed prior to and during a typical night out, drug usage and experiences of the city's nightlife in the previous 12 months. Results Two-thirds of the interviewees repeated a hazardous or high alcohol consumption pattern on a night out. We found several predictors for negative nightlife experiences: those who are male, younger than 25, have a low level of education, show higher alcohol consumption (especially before going out), and take illicit drugs are at a particularly great risk of experiencing negative nightlife events. Conclusions We found several factors which increase the risk of experiencing negative effects of alcohol consumption. In particular, drinking before going out seems to be associated with aversive consequences.

Comparing the Effectiveness of Two Forms of Time-Space Sampling to Identify Club Drug-Using Young Adults

Time-space sampling has been used to generate representative samples of both hard-to-reach and location-based populations. Because of its emphasis on multi-tiered randomization (i.e., time, space, and individual), some have questioned the feasibility of time-space sampling as a cost-effective strategy. In an effort to better understand issues related to drug use among club-going young adults (ages 18 to 29) in the New York City nightlife scene, two variations of time-space sampling methods were utilized and compared (Version 1: randomized venue, day, and individuals within venues: Version 2: randomized venue and day). A list of nightlife venues were randomized and survey teams approached potential participants as they entered or exited venues to conduct brief anonymous surveys. Over the course of 24 months, 18,169 approaches were conducted and 10,678 consented to complete the brief questionnaire (V1 response rate = 46.0%, V2 response rate = 62.5%). Drug use was fairly common, with nearly two-thirds of the sample reporting having ever tried an illegal drug and more than half of drug users specifically tried either MDMA/ecstasy and/or cocaine. There were few differences between young adults surveyed during Version 1 and Version 2. Time-space sampling is an effective strategy to quickly detect and screen club drug users. Although caution is urged, elimination of the third tier of randomization (i.e., individual level counting) from time-space sampling may significantly improve response rates while only minimally impacting sample characteristics.

Alcohol, nightlife and violence: the relative contributions of drinking before and during nights out to negative health and criminal justice outcomes

To explore differences in alcohol consumption and negative nightlife experiences between young people who drink prior to attending city nightlife venues and those who do not drink until reaching bars and nightclubs. A cross-sectional survey of 380 young people (aged 18-35 years) in bars and nightclubs in a large city centre in the North-west of England. An anonymous questionnaire explored participants' basic demographics; frequency of utilizing nightlife; quantities of alcohol consumed prior to and during a typical night out in the city; and negative experiences in the city's nightlife in the previous year [fighting, being verbally abused, being sexually molested (e.g. groped) and being too drunk to walk]. Participants who reported drinking prior to attending nightlife (e.g. at their own or a friend's home) reported significantly higher total alcohol consumption over a night out than those not drinking until reaching bars and nightclubs. Over a quarter (26.5%) of female and 15.4% of male alcohol consumption over a night out occurred prior to attending nightlife. Individuals who drink before going out were over four times more likely to report drinking >20 units on a usual night out and 2.5 times more likely to have been involved in a fight in the city's nightlife during the previous 12 months. Measures to tackle drunkenness and alcohol-related violence in nightlife should expand beyond those targeted solely at nightlife environments. Continued disparities in pricing and policing of alcohol between on- and off-licensed premises may increase at-home drinking prior to nights out and alcohol-related problems in residential areas.

Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture

As media coverage of city nightlife continues to highlight the problems of weekend ‘binge drinking’ and violence, this empirical investigation of what it is like to be young and to be embedded in a life that is punctuated by these kinds of experiences is both timely and a refreshing addition to this debate. Winlow and Hall's study explores the nature of contemporary youth identity in a society characterized by a fluid labour market, consumerism and generalized insecurity. Rooted as it is in the testimony of the respondents who took part in this study, it makes salutary reading for those who might have held an optimistic vision of the benefits of the emergent cafe society in the United Kingdom. This study endeavours to capture a picture of the lives of young people who occupy the city at night ‘in the round’. It explores their views on the labour market, relationships, education, leisure, as well as their use and experience of alcohol and violence. In the case of the latter, this is experienced both as victims and as perpetrators. There is also a taste of the policing views of these issues thrown in for good measure. The authors offer a deep analysis that is situated in the existing literature in such a detailed and thorough manner that it provides the reader with a clear understanding of what has changed and what has remained the same over the last three decades for a significant number of young people in our society today. Such is the detail offered by this study that a review of this kind can only offer a flavour of its coverage and what follows reflects an effort to offer such a taste.

Fat Tuesday at Dixie's: Jack Robinson's New Orleans Mardi Gras Photographs, 1952-1955

In February 2006, the Sophie Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University in New Orleans exhibited over eighty of Jack Robinson's photographs taken in Louisiana. Much of his work can be viewed online at http:// www.robinsonarchive.com/or in person at the Jack Robinson Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee. The first Fat Tuesday at Dixie's exhibition opened at the Robinson Gallery in Memphis on August 26, 2005, just before hurricanes Katrina and then Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, flooded much of New and scattered the region's population. It was temporarily closed on August 29, when Katrina tore through the coastal counties of southeast Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The exhibition was later reopened and a new section, For Love of New Orleans, which highlights everyday street scenes and Robinson's photos of African Americans, was added. This exhibition and the following essay are dedicated to the victims of these storms. ********** The 1997 discovery in Memphis of thousands of images taken by a southern photographer, Jack Robinson (1928-1997), has thus far attracted only slight attention from the art world and the national press. This is, in part, because so little is known today of Robinson's success as a fashion and celebrity photographer in the 1960s, when he took more than a hundred thousand photographs of the era's rich, famous, and beautiful for trendsetting magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. And yet the extraordinary images that are Robinson's legacy also give us a rare and remarkable perspective into the lives and lifestyles of southern artists and bohemians in the 1950s. This small representation of his 1950s photographs, published here for the first time, is part of an overall effort to bring Robinson and his early work out of the shadows. As a Memphian and southern historian, I took it upon myself in May 2004 to unlock the mysteries of Robinson's life growing up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and honing his skills as a photographer in his twenties in New Orleans. A few letters, two clippings, and a postcard were about the extent of the primary written record from the period, but hundreds of negatives from the 1950s promised to provide clues to the artist's past. Very little was then known about Robinson's life in the South. He graduated from a Clarksdale high school in 1945 and attended Tulane from 1945 to 1948 but left after his junior year without graduating. He was back in New Orleans by 1951 and had started taking photographs. In 1955 Robinson left the South for New York City and the world of fashion photography. Editors Diana Vreeland and Carrie Donovan recognized Robinson's genius and tapped him to shoot portraits of 1960s rising stars in music, art, film, fashion, and entertainment. From 1965 to 1972, Robinson's work was published in Vogue more than five hundred times, and his portraits advanced the careers of Joni Mitchell, Clint Eastwood, Tina Turner, Warren Beatty, Lili Tomlin, The Who, Rod McKuen, and dozens more. (1) On some occasions, Robinson's personal life entered the frame. His photographs of Andy Warhol and The Factory indulging in New York City nightlife seem to include the photographer as a participant and hint at Robinson's own homosexual identity and self-destructive lifestyle. By 1970 he was purportedly downing a fifth of vodka a day. Jobs dwindled as the alcohol took its toll, and in 1972 Robinson left New York and moved to Memphis, where his parents and brother lived. He never worked as a serious photographer again and even hid the fact that he had been such a success. He seemed to gain control of his drinking and found work designing stained glass in a local studio, but Robinson was bitter and difficult to work with. He died in anonymity in 1997. (2) After Robinson's death, his heir, Dan Oppenheimer, in whose studio Robinson worked, discovered in the artist's modest and austere apartment banker's boxes filled with envelopes containing thousands of negatives and contact sheets. …

Spectacular Striptease: Performing the Sexual and Racial Other in Vancouver, B.C., 1945-1975

This article explores the postwar performance of striptease in Vancouver, British Columbia, and sheds new light on received understandings of exotic dancing's "golden age," which flourished until the mid-1970s. Specifically, the racialization of the industry is charted using the hierarchically structured geography of the city's nightlife—West End vs. East End—as a frame through which to analyze archival documents and interviews. Inequalities structuring the business of bump and grind unsettle notions of stripteasers as a homogeneous category, while simultaneously revealing the diversity within dancers' experiences of stigmatization and their strategies of resistance. The article discusses the ways in which white women and women of color were differentially located within local and transnational circuits of erotic entertainment. That striptease staged the performance of not only sexual but also racial Otherness prompts a comparison of the prestige and profitability of white headliners with the resilient stereotypes and limited marketability that constrained dancers of color. An approach that probes the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class captures the complexities of this industry and the rich histories of the business insiders, especially the erotic dancers, who gave it life.

Vicarious Identities: Fantasies of Resistance and Language in Juan Ibanez's Los caifanes (1966)

Vicarious Identities:Fantasies of Resistance and Language in Juan Ibáñez’s Los caifanes (1966) Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson Los caifanes (1966), director Juan Ibáñez's first full-length motion picture, became instantly popular with the Mexican middle-class. Los caifanes presents a middle-class fantasy of empowerment and resistance against the upper-class, experienced vicariously through the actions and bodies of lower-class men and accomplished without challenging middle-class privilege. Set in Mexico City, the film portrays a nocturnal encounter between a group of lower-class men and an upper-class couple that produces an intellectual battle through language and social performance. The lower-class men represent positive forms of masculinity; the upper-class man, on the other hand, is portrayed as negative and effete. The upper-class woman, the film's true protagonist, is unsatisfied by her male counterpart and seeks new experiences. The encounter allows the upper-class woman to "vivir intensamente" ["live life to the fullest"] and to abandon her fiancé in favor of independence. Los caifanes continues to be an important film almost forty years after its release. Thanks to regular broadcasting of the film on Mexican and U.S. Spanish language television and the frequent references to it in music, newspapers, and magazines, the film has become a favorite of most Mexicans, regardless of class background. Today, Los caifanes is considered one of the best Mexican films of all times, and its plot and dialogue have become common referents. The word caifanes is a caló [Mexico City lower-class slang] reworking of the Mexican phrase "caer bien" meaning to get along with or to be perceived as pleasant. Because caló usually incorporates English, the word caifanes is created through the fusion of "caer" and "fine," the English equivalent of "bien." The "caifanes" are those who are pleasant or easygoing; in other words, the "cool guys." Thanks to the film, to be "like the caifanes" has become synonymous with ultra-coolness and masculinity. At the start of the film, Jaime de Landa (Enrique Álvarez Félix) and his fiancée Paloma (Julissa) leave a party in search of some other form of entertainment that challenges their bourgeois perspective. Their chance encounter with a band of auto mechanics, headed by Capitán Gato and his band of caifanes, gives them the opportunity to experience Mexico City nightlife from the perspective of the lower-classes. The caifanes' tour of the city forces Paloma and Jaime to temporarily interact with several members of the lower-classes in their "native" spaces. They visit a barrio nightclub, a mortuary, a fonda [lower-class eatery], and several important Mexico City street locations. At each location, the caifanes manage to cause chaos; their actions range from the stealing of a hearse, which is subsequently abandoned in downtown Mexico, to causing a riot at a nightclub. As the plot develops, Paloma feels drawn to vicariously experience the lives of the caifanes and participate in the mayhem; she is also sexually attracted to one of the men. Paloma feels trapped in her bourgeois lifestyle; she does not want to abandon it or its privileges but is unfulfilled by her relationship with Jaime. The film's climax is a fistfight instigated by Jaime's jealousy; he is easily put down by the caifanes. Paloma is impressed by their behavior and finally decides to act drastically. After her night with los caifanes, Paloma literarily leaves Jaime on the side of the road. Through its marketing and presentation, Los caifanes claims to contain genuine portrayals of the "real" lower-class male experience in Mexico City. Yet the film makes a very important omission—the middle-class is entirely absent. The characters only represent the upper- and lower-classes, leaving the middle-class entirely out of the action of the film. It is no accident that the middle-class would favor a film that does not feature them. Through the use of the dichotomy of order and disorder to portray imaginary acts of confrontation that situate resistance in the lower-class man, the film structures disorder as a weapon of the weak; a form of resistance targeted at the upper-classes and allowing the vicarious participation...

Changing times for an old industrial city: Hard times, hedonism and corporate power in Newcastle's nightlife

Here, focusing on the experience of Newcastle, Chatterton and Hollands continue debates around culture, capital and the 'creative' city already initiated in this journal (see Chatterton, 'Will the real creative city please stand up?' in City 4(3) (2000), and Harcup in City 4(2) (2000), for example). Research on the form, origins, regulation and ownership of the city's nightlife lead to an image of a city which in many ways exemplifies patterns of socio-economic adjustment following the decline of manufacturing evident in other UK cities, especially in the north east region. However, 'beset by problems of visible decay, social polarisation, and deprivation from its industrial past', Newcastle also has its distinct idiosyncrasies. The authors argue that in a more thoughtful approach to the city's development, room should be provided for the growth of a genuinely creative, inclusive and regionally specific urban nightlife, less dominated by large-scale corporations, and more responsive to local cultural factors. Their optimistic conclusion is that the opportunities are still there to 'strike a balance between commercial and local need, and the interests of corporate capital and users of the city, whoever they may be'.