Clubland

Zusatztext Like a line of coke begs for another bump (or so we've been told)! Clubland is a compulsive page-turner.” — Miami Herald   “ Clubland satisfies by meting out the justice that many ‘90s party kids never got to see—or perhaps never wanted to. Clubland sees through the smoke! mirrors! and Ketamine.” — The Village Voice   “Positively riveting . . . to be enjoyed even by those who’ve never stepped foot anywhere more stimulating than a Howard Johnson’s.” — San Francisco Chronicle Informationen zum Autor Born in Manchester, England, Frank Owen received an American studies degree from Keele University, and later went on to earn his MA at the Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies. He trained as a radio journalist at the BBC. In the 1980s he moved from London to New York to become the music editor at Spin magazine. His work has also appeared in Details , Arena , Elle, LA Weekly, and US.  He’s the author of Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture and  No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth. He lives in Florida. Klappentext Outrageous parties. Brazen drug use. Fantastical costumes. Celebrities. Wannabes. Gender-bending club kids. Pulse-pounding beats. Sinful orgies. Botched police raids. Depraved criminals. Murder. Welcome to the decadent nineties club scene. In 1995, journalist Frank Owen began researching a story on Special K, a designer drug that fueled the after-midnight club scene. He went to buy and sample the drug at the internationally notorious Limelight, a crumbling church converted into a Manhattan disco, where mesmerizing music, ecstatic dancers, and uninhibited sideshows attracted long lines of hopeful onlookers. Owen discovered a world where reckless hedonism was elevated to an art form, and where the ever-accelerating party finally spun out of control in the hands of notorious club owner Peter Gatien and his minions. In Clubland, Owen reveals how a lethal drug ring operated in a lawless, black-lit realm of fantasy, and how, when the lights came up, their excesses left countless victims in their wake. Praised for his risk-taking and exhilarating writing style, Frank Owen has spawned a hybrid of literary nonfiction and true crime, capturing the zeitgeist of a world that emerged in the spirit of "peace, love, unity and respect,” and ended in tragedy.1 THE ONE-EYED DON New York City, Early October 1995 It was one of those brilliant autumn days in New York, the city radiant with luminous color. While the soothing afternoon light skipped gaily across the surface of the Hudson River, Peter Gatien's world was all grim turmoil. A couple of nights ago, in the early hours, the stony-faced Gatien saw his flagship venue in Chelsea, the Limelight, padlocked by the NYPD. Friday evening, just at the peak of business, and his temple of thump-thump-thump--located at the corner of Twentieth Street and Sixth Avenue in a weathered Victorian pile that once housed St. Peter's Episcopal church, then later a drug treatment center--was packed to the vaulted rafters with gyrating penitents hanging off the two tiers of metal balconies that surrounded the cavernous main floor. The irony wasn't lost on the revelers, who seemed to take a perverse delight in frolicking on the altar or sniffing blow in the pulpit. Out on the churning dance floor, the atmosphere was like the pagan party scene in some Hollywood biblical epic, the last fling of a primitive tribe threatened with extinction by powerful social trends few of its members could fully comprehend. Meanwhile, a string of stretch limousines idled impatiently outside the noisy nightclub, which was fast becoming a stone monument to an era of all-out licentiousness, now vanishing under the puritanical political regime that had taken over the c...

Product details

• Authors: Frank Owen
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 08.06.2004
• EAN: 9780767917353
• ISBN: 978-0-7679-1735-3
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories