So, I thought I was really sad about
the Roxy closing its doors this Saturday night. Not that I ever went to the Roxy except once or twice for
Motherfucker. But it just seemed like the Roxy should be there. That great cavernous space filled with shirtless Chelsea boys every Saturday night has been a part of New York clubland for over a decade, and its demise at the hands of real estate developers is just another sign that the city is heading toward something dim and homogenous and really depressing. It seemed a little bit like a tragedy.
Then I read
this article in today's
New York Times and realized that the Roxy already symbolized something dim and homogenous and really depressing:
The clubgoers were in their 20s and 30s. Most had short hair or shaved heads. They wore low-slung jeans, sneakers or work boots, and faux-vintage T-shirts that bore the insignias of athletic departments that don’t exist...A good number of men on the dance floor went with a bare-chested look. This typically included barbed-wire tattoos encircling their biceps, dog tags around their necks and baseball caps with curved bills, such that a visitor unaware of the event taking place might have thought he had walked onto a set where somebody was reshooting the volleyball scene from “Top Gun.”
Where
will we go to find tweeked out pseudo-straight Jersey boys now?
Last night, I briefly toyed with the possibility of making a late appearence at the Black Party. Like, 4 a.m. late, when the price drops for boys under 26. I'm glad I didn't. And here's why:
