Club Party Quotes

No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

We raced around, drinking and shouting out the windows into the night, finding parties to sneak into or bars that never closed. We wandered the night without fear, went skinny dipping in Central Park Lake at 3 a.m., and found dark clubs playing deafening EDM to dance to until we collapsed.

The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

Jasper? What do vampires do for bachelor parties? You're not taking him to a strip club, are you?

You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome.

True love is jealousy in disguise: A man cannot restrict his lover from going to the club because he hates her, he actually hates the men who would come around and touch her.

2) Members will attend events together as a group, including, but not limited to, Homecoming, Prom, parties, and other couply events, despite possibly being labeled as freaks and getting jealous looks from guys who wish we were their hot dates, but instead have to settle for some lame wannabe.

I am the head cookie bitch and this is my party.

When three liberals get together they form a new party; that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes.

A VIP area is nothing without not-so-important people.

That depends. You’ve got to define ‘party girl.’ If you mean I’m a walking good time, then hells yeah. But I’m not wasted and stumbling out of clubs and getting DUIs. I’m not that kind of party girl. I may be blonde and fun as balls, but I’m not a moron.

I’m really quite simple. I don’t want to be in the business full time, because I’m a gardener. I plant flowers and watch them grow. I don’t go out to clubs. I don’t party. I stay at home and watch the river flow.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable...What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness? "So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.

On dit que la chance ne passe qu'une fois à votre portée, qu'il faut la saisir à son tour. Après c'est fini. Elle est partie ailleurs et ne reviendra plus. Seuls les amnésiques n'ont pas de regrets.

Any time women come together with a collective intention, it's a powerful thing. Whether it's sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens.

However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.

So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment.

I regret not having gone home with Spencer Jones after Marcie’s party when I was twenty-three. Jenny Bright took him home instead and said he ate her ass six ways to Sunday. She wouldn’t shut up about it at brunch at the country club for a solid month—

For a very long time I worked and worked and worked, and then I looked up one day and all my friends were married with children. These married-with-children people were still my friends, but they'd become part of a community I wasn't in, a club I didn't belong to. Socially, their lives had completely changed, and they were busy. Their attention had turned to carpools and birthday parties and school tuition, and I was playing catch-up:"Wait, so we don't have game night anymore? You guys, who's free for dinner Saturday? Oh, absolutely no one?

Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much. But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time "Dr.," rather than "Miss" Jamison.

As ever, it was fifty percent fashion show, forty percent club, ten percent sex party, and one hundred percent annoying.

I went to the club to escape my life and pretend I'm somebody else. Now I don't know who I am anymore.

Doors opened at seven, the show started at eight. In pubs and clubs and house parties across the galaxy, the viewers at home were drunk by six.

In attacking the young, the liberal, and the black, Daley was in the mainstream of America's mass prejudices. The Democratic party may have suffered by his actions, but Daley came out...even more popular than before because "bust their heads" was the mood of the land and Daley had swung the biggest club.

Music from the party throbs and echoes off the basement walls. I’m not sure how I got here, and I’m certain I don’t know how Charlie ended up on the other side of the room with Guy In Touch With His Emotions. Raising a bottle to my lips, I watch as the guy uncrosses his long legs and recrosses them. His tampon must be killing him.

She’d been hunting for an indescribable thrill, a feeling she remembered from nights out with her friends, but she’d misunderstood where the feeling came from. It wasn’t about drinking and partying in some dingy club. It had been about the people. The constant laughter they shared, too high on each other to care that they were being obnoxious. Group trips to the bathroom like a small army unit, where the mission objective was helping each other squat over filthy toilets without their dresses touching the seat. Belonging.

Fashionable debutantes in pastel chiffon party dresses wilt into leather club chairs like frosted petits fours melting under the July sun.

Fashionable debutantes in pastel chiffon party dresses wilt into leather club chairs like frosted petit fours melting under the July sun.

We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.

She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?

The party was a spur-of-the-moment thing for the kids Robert and I hang out with together. That's all. Is that such a big deal? I don't invite them to every BSC event, do I? They don't get insulted.

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press." [United States v. Rumely, 345 U.S. 41 (1953)]

A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame. But not in the OASIS. In there, I was the great Parzival. World-famous gunter and international celebrity. People asked for my autograph. I had a fan club. Several, actually. I was recognized everywhere I went (but only when I wanted to be). I was paid to endorse products. People admired and looked up to me. I got invited to the most exclusive parties. I went to all the hippest clubs and never had to wait in line. I was a pop-culture icon, a VR rock star. And, in gunter circles, I was a legend. Nay, a god.

The right wing of the Republican party-- which controlled the White House from 1980 to 1992, crucial years in the evolution of motherhood--hated the women's movement and believed all women, with the possible exception of Phyllis Schlafly, should remain in the kitchen on their knees polishing their husband's shoes and golf clubs while teaching their kids that Darwin was a very bad man. Unless the mothers were poor and black--those moms had to get back to work ASAP, because by staying home they were wrecking the country.

We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.

The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

Kimrean sighted purple caged dancers, mud wrestlers, tattooed devils, G-stringed Atlases erected like Pillars of Hercules out of a liquid crowd waving in worship of ancient twerk masters summoning cellulite tsunamis.

I’d be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.

The district attorneys were usually hand-picked incompetents designated by the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall Club, a group of party leaders who controlled nominations and elections in Manhattan, a Democratic stronghold.

When the Carlton Club, A Conservative Party bastion in London, was badly damaged by bombs and Churchill remarked that he was surprised that no one had been killed, a Labor Party official replied, "The devil looks after his own.

At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.

It is funny how people - millions and millions of people - go about watching the telly and singing and humming in spite of the fact that they lost brother or father or lover in a war; and what is stranger still, they contemplate with equanimity seeing their other brothers or lovers off to yet another war. They don't see the tragedy of it all. Now and then one of the millions reads a book, or starts thinking, or something shakes him, and then he sees tragedy all over the place. Wherever he looks, he finds tragedy. He finds it tragic that other people don't see this tragedy around them and then he becomes like Font or Edna, or joins some party or other, or marches behind banners until his own life, seen detachedly, becomes a little tragic.

You’ll be my old lady. You’ll stand by my side at club parties, at functions. You’ll sleep in my bed as much as possible until I can get it so you do that every damn night. You’ll meet my kids and suffer through that drama with me ’cause they’re my life and so’re you. You’ll take my cock whenever I want to give it to you and you’ll take my words whenever I need to give ’em to you. And when I’m an asshole, ’cause I’m a man and I got that in me to give, you’ll give me a piece of your mind and then forgive me.

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.

When he moved to New York after college, in the eighties, Arthur Less tried his hardest to be a good gay. He joined a gym that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a political party that turned out to believe a conspiracy theory about government health clinics. He joined a German-language society that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a book group that turned out to be only for a political party. He joined a role-playing game club that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a sex dungeon that turned out to be a government health clinic. It was all so confusing.

The trick to realize that the boys who talk so much about being rejected that it seems like the’re proud of it aren’t necessarily sweeter or more sensitive than the Bababooey-spouting frat bullies who line up at clubs like SkyBar to run game on girls they want to date rape. There are plenty of nerds who fear women and aren’t sensitive, despite their marketing; they just dislike women in a new, exciting way. Timid racists aren’t sensitive because they lock their car doors when they see a black person on the street. They’re just too scared to get out of the car and shout the “N” word. Fear can be the result of admiration, or it can be a symptom of contempt. When I see squeamish guys passing over qualified women when they’re hiring for a job, or becoming tongue tied when a girl crashes their all-boy conversation at a party, I don’t give them credit for being awestruck. They’re reacting to the intimidating female as an intruder, an alien, and somebody they can’t relate to. It’s not a compliment to be made invisible.

Truth to tell, the modern man is bored to tears in his home; so he goes to his club. The modern woman is bored outside her boudoir; she goes to tea-parties. The modern man and woman are bored at home; they go to night-clubs. But lesser folk who have no clubs gather together in the evening under the chandelier and hardly dare to walk through the labyrinth of their furniture which takes up the whole room and is all their fortune and their pride.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

We’ve had the works. Indy’s kidnappings and murder. Jet’s kidnappings and rape attempt. Roxie’s kidnapping and stalking. Car bombs. Grenades. Knife fights. Female wrestling at Chinese restaurants. Mayhem at a haunted house. Gunshots at a strip club. Showdowns at society parties. Now we got a vigilante on our hands.

No country is completely free of those who would prefer to keep people separate. Even in countries with the most homogenous of populations, there will always be some who feel compelled to condemn, envy, and attack others, whether for belonging to a different political party or merely for supporting a rival football club. But

Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games.

Naturally society cherished itself alone; it prized what everyone agreed was precious, despised what everyone agreed was despicable, and ignored what no one mentioned-all to it's own enhancement, and with the loud view that these bubbles and vapors were eternal and universal. If June had stressed to Mabel that she was going to die, would she have learned to eat with a fork? Society's loyal members, having sacrificed their only lives to it's caprices, hastened to entrap the next generation into agreement, so their follies would not have been in vain and they could all go down together, blind and well turned out. The company, the club, and the party had offered him a position like bait, and he bit. He had embedded himself in the company like a man bricked into a wall, and whirled with the building's maps, files, and desks,senselessly, as the planet spun and death pooled on the cold basement floors. Who could blame him?- when people have always lived so. Now , however, he saw the city lifted away, and the bricks and files vaporized; he saw the preenings of men laid low, and the comforts of family scattered. He was free and loosed on the black beach.

party….” In New York, several thousand gathered at Tompkins Square. The tone of the meeting was moderate, speaking of “a political revolution through the ballot box.” And: “If you will unite, we may have here within five years a socialistic republic…. Then will a lovely morning break over this darkened land.” It was a peaceful meeting. It adjourned. The last words heard from the platform were: “Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us.” Then the police charged, using their clubs.

BEATRICE: Do you truly not know who he was? Mr. Dorian Gray, the lover of Mr. Oscar Wilde, who was sent to Reading Gaol for—well, for holding opinions that society does not approve of! For believing in beauty, and art, and love. What guilt and remorse he must feel, for causing the downfall of the greatest playwright of the age! It was Mr. Gray’s dissolute parties, the antics of his hedonistic friends, that exposed Mr. Wilde to scandal and opprobrium. No wonder he has fallen prey to the narcotic. MARY: Or he could just like opium. He didn’t seem particularly remorseful, Bea. JUSTINE: Mr. Gray is not what society deems him to be. He has been greatly misunderstood. He assures me that he had no intention of harming Mr. Wilde. MARY: He would say that. CATHERINE: Can we not discuss the Wilde scandal in the middle of my book? You’re going to get it banned in Boston, and such other puritanical places.

The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)

(...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris--all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies...)

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life—peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group—our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation—in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.

This is the part of the country that invokes terrible nostalgia, a morbid and phlegm-induced retrospective of parties, clubs, drugs, shows, people, and is the goiter of my Boston days. I wouldn't have a clue as to who I'd ever care to see in this town, though I've done time here. If it weren't for Daughters and company, I'd feel like a compete tourist in a ghostly, plot-less town...pulling hoods up and heads around, opposite directions, if I ever saw someone I thought I might have known. Young people feeling really cool in bathrooms, dancing to the same songs in the same clubs, with the same dropout students, artists, thugs, bullies, jocks, all game in the search for one's self and sex.

Courtney, McDermott and I have just left a Morgan Stanley party that took place near the Seaport at the tip of Manhattan in a new club called Goldcard, which seemed like a vast city of its own and where I ran into Walter Rhodes, a total Canadian, whom I haven’t seen since Exeter and who also, like McDermott, reeked of Xeryus, and I actually told him, “Listen, I’m trying to stay away from people. I’m avoiding even speaking to them,” and then I asked to be excused.

On, no. I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by people who’re pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they’re there because they are all interested in gold, or because they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires — everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend’s house, or course.” A rarely long speech for her.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their marks Made everything from toy guns that sparks To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much Is really sacred. While preachers preach of evil fates Teachers teach that knowledge waits Can lead to hundred-dollar plates Goodness hides behind its gates But even the President of the United States Sometimes must have To stand naked. An' though the rules of the road have been lodged It's only people's games that you got to dodge And it's alright, Ma, I can make it. Advertising signs that con you Into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on All around you. Although the masters make the rules For the wise men and the fools I got nothing, Ma, to live up to. For them that must obey authority That they do not respect in any degree Who despite their jobs, their destinies Speak jealously of them that are free Cultivate their flowers to be Nothing more than something They invest in. While some on principles baptized To strict party platforms ties Social clubs in drag disguise Outsiders they can freely criticize Tell nothing except who to idolize And then say God Bless him. While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in. Old lady judges, watch people in pairs Limited in sex, they dare To push fake morals, insult and stare While money doesn't talk, it swears Obscenity, who really cares Propaganda, all is phony. While them that defend what they cannot see With a killer's pride, security It blows the minds most bitterly For them that think death's honesty Won't fall upon them naturally Life sometimes Must get lonely. And if my thought-dreams could been seen They'd probably put my head in a guillotine But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

In the summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the “paraphernalia” common to parties where people took Ecstasy—accessories like bottled water and glow sticks. After attempting to sneak the bill through Congress with various parliamentary maneuvers, Biden was finally able to get a slightly modified version folded into the bill that created the Amber Alert for missing children.

In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.

Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening. "Where's the cloakroom?" "The what?" "The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom." "What's your problem?" "We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom." "Fuck." Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you.

Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS.

fighting for the cause since I tried starting a Working Families Party club in middle school.” “How did that work out for you?” Polly asked. “In New Haven? It was awesome. The only problem,” I admitted, “was that we could never get anyone from any working families to show up.

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition.

I thought leaving home would be a liberation. I thought university would be a dance party. I thought I would live in a room vined with fairy lights; hang arabesque tapestries up on the wall. I thought scattered beneath my bed would be a combination of Kafka, coffee grounds, and a lover’s old boxer shorts. I thought I would spend my evenings drinking cheap red wine and talking about the Middle East. I thought on weekends we might go to Cassavetes marathons at the independent cinema. I thought I would know all the good Korean places in town. I thought I would know a person who was into healing crystals and another person who could teach me how to sew. I thought I might get into yoga. I thought going for frozen yogurt was something you would just do. I thought there would be red cups at parties. And I thought I would be different. I thought it would be like coming home, circling back to my essential and inevitable self. I imagined myself more relaxed—less hung up on things. I thought I would find it easy to speak to strangers. I thought I would be funny, even, make people laugh with my warm, wry, and only slightly self-deprecating sense of humor. I thought I would develop the easy confidence of a head girl, the light patter of an artist. I imagined myself dancing in a smoky nightclub, spinning slackly while my arms floated like laundry loose on the breeze. I imagined others watching me, thinking, Wow, she is so free.

We are supposed to consume alcohol and enjoy it, but we're not supposed to become alcoholics. Imagine if this were the same with cocaine. Imagine we grew up watching our parents snort lines at dinner, celebrations, sporting events, brunches, and funerals. We'd sometimes (or often) see our parents coked out of our minds the way we sometimes (or often) see them drunk. We'd witness them coming down after a cocaine binge the way we see them recovering from a hangover. Kiosks at Disneyland would see it so our parents could make it through a day of fun, our mom's book club would be one big blow-fest and instead of "mommy juice" it would be called "mommy powder" There'd be coke-tasting parties in Napa and cocaine cellars in fancy people's homes, and everyone we know (including our pastors, nurses, teachers, coaches, bosses) would snort it. The message we'd pick up as kids could be Cocaine is great, and one day you'll get to try it, too! Just don't become addicted to it or take it too far. Try it; use it responsibly. Don't become a cocaine-oholic though. Now, I'm sure you're thinking. That's insane, everyone knows cocaine is far more addicting than alcohol and far more dangerous. Except, it's not...The point is not that alcohol is worse than cocaine. The point is that we have a really clear understanding that cocaine is toxic and addictive. We know there's no safe amount of it, no such thing as "moderate" cocaine use; we know it can hook us and rob us of everything we care about...We know we are better off not tangling with it at all.

What you said about me hesitating going in to the party, it wasn’t solely nerves that stopped me – it was the last place I wanted to be. I had a pile of paperwork on my desk all about you. Since five o’clock that morning I’d been reading report after report, and I couldn’t get you out of my head. Even as I got dressed to go out, I was thinking of you. Even when I was buying this dress, I wondered what you’d think if you saw me in it. Although it was three years away, I was already counting down the months I had left until that thing came from me. When I called that taxi to take me home, I thought about telling it to take me to the border of Blackthorn instead. I thought about walking into one of the clubs where I knew you hung around, a club just like this one. And my choice was nothing to do with the soul ripper; it was nothing to do with catching you – it was about me. It was about what I wanted. And I wanted you. I’ve always wanted you.

So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.

He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.

I lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the evening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw them out in 1956.” “Why did he throw them out?” “He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got scared and left. By the way, what’s your opinion of Abd el Nasser?” “I was born after he died. I don’t know. Some people say he was a hero and others say he was a criminal.” “Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt. He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damage he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.” “So why do people love him?” “Who says people love him?” “Lots of people that I know love him.” “Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or did well out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregs of society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a good man and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the Military College and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruled Egypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of course they have to love Abd el Nasser; he was the boss of their gang.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls. Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America’s founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny.60 More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”61

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.

By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.

The whiff of whatever I’d gotten in the ladies’ room had definitely taken a big chunk out of any embarrassment I may have had left. Tonight had been my first time in a big-city club of any kind, let alone a strip or sex club. I had questions, was intensely curious, and between the clover weed and my partner’s hands all over me less than a half hour before, I wasn’t the least bit shy anymore about asking those questions. The little voice in my head was frantically waving for me to stop. I kicked the door shut on my little voice. Party pooper. I half turned on my tuffet toward Ian, my right leg crossing over my left, also toward Ian. My little voice was banging on the door and screaming at me. “Are people listening with our table anymore?” I whispered. Ian glanced at the glowing surface. “No.” “Good. So, what is it with men and titty bars?

Today each nation flies its own flag, a symbolic embodiment of its territorial status. But patriotism is not enough. The ancient tribal hunter lurking inside each citizen finds himself unsatisfied by membership of such a vast conglomeration of individuals, most of whom are totally unknown to him personally. He does his best to feel that he shares a common territorial defence with them all, but the scale of the operation has become inhuman. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging with a tribe of fifty million or more. His answer is to form sub-groups, nearer to his ancient pattern, smaller and more personally known to him - the local club, the teenage gang, the union, the specialist society, the sports association, the political party, the college fraternity, the social clique, the protest group, and the rest. Rare indeed is the individual who does not belong to at least one of these splinter groups, and take from it a sense of tribal allegiance and brotherhood. Typical of all these groups is the development of Territorial Signals - badges, costumes, headquarters, banners, slogans, and all the other displays of group identity. This is where the action is, in terms of tribal territorialism, and only when a major war breaks out does the emphasis shift upwards to the higher group level of the nation.

I come from the heart land of New Zealand. A place where men are men and there is no such thing as a latte. Where a day’s work is only done one way. THE HARD WAY. Where the vehicle you drive doesn’t symbolize who you are. A place where a beer is a beer and it comes only one way, ICE COLD. Yes the great land I like to call home the Waikato but yes all this beauty comes at a price obviously where men actually act like men not knob head; makeup wearing, tight jean wearing homos there will always be a shortage of real women. So just as the last generation of real men, almost every weekend we head into every bar, club, party or music festival we can in the hopes of finding a real women. Don’t get me wrong, bars clubs a music fests are the best fun ever. And I drink alcohol like it’s going out of fashion not that we care about fashion round here. See you in the heart land

Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense. And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental. The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it?

HYGGE TIP: CREATE A COOKING CLUB A few years ago, I wanted to create some kind of system that would mean I would get to see some of my good friends on a regular basis, so we formed a cooking club. This was in part prompted by my work, as the importance of our relationships always emerges as a key indicator of why some people are happier than others. Furthermore, I wanted to organize the cooking club in a way that maximized the hygge. So instead of taking turns being the host and cooking for the five or six other people, we always cook together. That is where the hygge is. The rules are simple. Each time there is a theme, or a key ingredient—for example, duck or sausages—each person brings ingredients to make a small dish to fit the theme. It creates a very relaxed, informal, egalitarian setting, where no one person has to cater for the guests—or live up to the standards of the last fancy dinner party.

You choose to work». «For us!» «No, Tatiana, for you». «Well, who do you work for? Don’t you work for you?» «No,» said Alexander. «I work for you. I work so that I can build you a house that will please you. I work very hard so you don’t have to, because your life has been hard enough. I work so you can get pregnant; so you can cook and putter and pick Anthony up from school and drive him to baseball and chess club and guitar lessons and let him have a rock band in our new garage with Serge and Mary, and grow desert flowers in our backyard. I work so you can buy yourself whatever you want, all your stiletto heels and clingy clothes and pastry mixers. So you can have Tupperware parties and bake cakes and wear white gloves to lunch with your friends. So you can make bread every day for your family. So you will have nothing to do but cook and make love to your husband. I work so you can have an ice cream life.

We need to straighten out some personal matters between us. Why don't we do it over dinner tonight?" he suggested. Lauren courteously refused with a half truth. "I'm sorry, I already have a date." "All right,how about tomorrow night?" he asked,holding out his hand for hers. Lauren plunked his messages into his outstretched palm. "You already have a date-Miss Moran at seven at the Recess Club." Nick ignored that reminder. "I'm leaving for Italy on Wednesday-" "Have a good trip," Lauren interrupted lightly. "I'll be back on Saturday," he continued with a trace of impatience. "We'll go-" "Sorry," Lauren said with an amused little smile that was intended to annoy him. "I'm busy Saturday, and so are you. Vicky called to find out if the party Saturday night is formal or not." And then because she was thoroughly relishing his visible frustration, she added with a dazzling smile, "She calls you Nicky.I think that's adorable-Vicky and Nicky." "I'll break the date," Nick stated tersely. "But I won't break mine.Now,is there anything else?

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution. The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in a her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankellior Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Daniel." He looked up. "El-la.I was wondering if you'd catch me." He offered me a cigarette. I gave him a shame-on-you look;he grinned. "This is your band?" I asked. Visible piercings aside, no one looked like that went by the name Ax. "Nope,but I go to school with the lead's sister. Regular guy got food poisoning at a Christmas party last night.I've played with them before." "Weddings?" It wasn't quite how I'd pictured him performing. "Usually clubs, but the last one was a bar mitzvah. Musicians have to eat, too," he added, a little sharply. "Sorry." I wanted to wave the smoke away, but figured that might be adding insult to inury. "I thought you played the guitar." "Guitar, piano, a little violin, but badly, and I'll have to garrote you ith one of the strings if you tell anyone." That's the thing about Daniel. Obviously-the violin being a case in point-I don't know him very well,but he seems to hold a grudge for even less time than Frankie. "Secret's safe with me." He shrugged, telling me he didn't really care. Then, "Nice dress." "Just when I start liking you a litte.." He made his vampire-boy face. I could see why it usually worked. "You like me,Ella. Wanna do something when this is over?" "Tempting," I said. "No, I mean that. But no,thanks. I'm not at my best these days." "You're good," he said quietly, blowing out a stream of smoke. "You'll be fine." "Yeah." I shivered. It was bitter outside. "I should go in." "You should." The cold didn't seem to be bothering him at all, and he wasn't even wearing a jacket over his white dress shirt. I turned to go. "Oh, I think I figured it out, by the way." "Figured out what?" "The question.The one everyone should ask before getting involved with someone. Not 'Will he-slash-she make me happy?' but 'Does it bring out the best in me,being with him?'" "Him-slash-her," Daniel corrected, clearly amused. Then, "Nope. No way. Wasn't me who posed the question to you, Marino.I would never be so Emo." "Of course not.But it was one smart boy." I waved. "Hug Frankie for me." "Will do. Hey.Any requests for the band?" "'Don't Stop Believin'," I shot back. He rolled his eyes. "I'm curious, in that last song-are the words really 'I cut my chest wide open'?" "Yup.Followed by, "They come and watch us bleed.Is it art like I was hoping now?" Avett Brothers. Too gruesome for you?" "You have no idea," I told him. How much I get it.

On closer notice of her apron, he said, "Is that-?" "The Mad Hatter," she said. "I told you, I have a collection." "You collect aprons?" "Since I was little and my mom taught me to bake." When he smiled, she arched a brow. "Some find it charmingly quirky." "You never wore any to Gateau." "Shocking, I know. Because I'm certain the staff would have greatly appreciated the humor in them." His smile twitched wider at that. "You have a point, I suppose. I must say, this dry side of you is surprisingly appealing. What does it say?" He nodded toward her apron front. She lifted her arms away so he could read the script that accompanied the copy of an original pen and ink art rendering of the Hatter seated at a long table, holding a teacup aloft. "YOU'RE NEVER TOO OLD TO HAVE A TEA PARTY," he read out loud, then smiled at her. "I rather agree. You make a charming and somewhat more quirky Alice than I'd have expected. I seem to recall Alice spent the better part of her time being irritated and flustered, too. Perhaps if I'd come bearing tea and crumpets, with a bewildered, bespectacled white rabbit clutching a pocketwatch in his paw, you'd have been more willing to give me the time of day.

I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get

These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ought to teach--not so much Latin or Greek or Chemistry or Mechanics. And you couldn't expect to test that sense of proportion by setting papers and granting certificates...

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

I now pronounce you husband and wife. I hadn’t considered the kiss. Not once. I suppose I’d assumed it would be the way a wedding kiss should be. Restrained. Appropriate. Mild. A nice peck. Save the real kisses for later, when you’re deliciously alone. Country club girls don’t make out in front of others. Like gum chewing, it should always be done in private, where no one else can see. But Marlboro Man wasn’t a country club boy. He’d missed the memo outlining the rules and regulations of proper ways to kiss in public. I found this out when the kiss began--when he wrapped his loving, protective arms around me and kissed me like he meant it right there in my Episcopal church. Right there in front of my family, and his, in front of Father Johnson and Ms. Altar Guild and our wedding party and the entire congregation, half of whom were meeting me for the first time that night. But Marlboro Man didn’t seem to care. He kissed me exactly the way he’d kissed me the night of our first date--the night my high-heeled boot had gotten wedged in a crack in my parents’ sidewalk and had caused me to stumble. The night he’d caught me with his lips. We were making out in church--there was no way around it. And I felt every bit as swept away as I had that first night. The kiss lasted hours, days, weeks…probably ten to twelve seconds in real time, which, in a wedding ceremony setting, is a pretty long kiss. And it might have been longer had the passionate moment not been interrupted by the sudden sound of a person clapping his hands. “Woohoo! All right!” the person shouted. “Yes!” It was Mike. The congregation broke out in laughter as Marlboro Man and I touched our foreheads together, cementing the moment forever in our memory. We were one; this was tangible to me now. It wasn’t just an empty word, a theological concept, wishful thinking. It was an official, you-and-me-against-the-world designation. We’d both left our separateness behind. From that moment forward, nothing either of us did or said or planned would be in a vacuum apart from the other. No holiday would involve our celebrating separately at our respective family homes. No last-minute trips to Mexico with friends, not that either of us was prone to last-minute trips to Mexico with friends. But still. The kiss had sealed the deal in so many ways. I walked proudly out of the church, the new wife of Marlboro Man. When we exited the same doors through which my dad and I had walked thirty minutes earlier, Marlboro Man’s arm wriggled loose from my grasp and instinctively wrapped around my waist, where it belonged. The other arm followed, and before I knew it we were locked in a sweet, solidifying embrace, relishing the instant of solitude before our wedding party--sisters, cousins, brothers, friends--followed closely behind. We were married. I drew a deep, life-giving breath and exhaled. The sweating had finally stopped. And the robust air-conditioning of the church had almost completely dried my lily-white Vera.

When they got to the table, it was easy to recognize some of the dishes just from their pictures in the book. Skillet Broken Lasagna, which smelled of garlic and bright tomato; Fluffy Popovers with Melted Brie and Blackberry Jam (she started eating that the minute she picked it up and could have cried at the sweet, creamy-cheesy contrast to the crisp browned dough). There were also the two versions of the coconut rice, of course, and Trista had placed them next to the platter of gorgeously browned crispy baked chicken with a glass bowl of hot honey, specked with red pepper flakes, next to it, and in front of the beautifully grilled shrimp with serrano brown sugar sauce. Every dish was worthy of an Instagram picture. Which made sense, since Trista had, as Aja had pointed out, done quite a lot of food porn postings. There was also Cool Ranch Taco Salad on the table, which Margo had been tempted to make but, as with the shrimp dish, given that she had been ready to bail on the idea of coming right up to the last second, had thought better of, lest she have taco salad for ten that needed to be eaten in two days. Not that she couldn't have finished all the Doritos that went on top that quickly. But there hadn't been a Dorito in her house since college, and she kind of thought it ought to be a cause for celebration when she finally brought them back over the threshold of Calvin's ex-house. The Deviled Eggs were there too, thank goodness, and tons of them. They were creamy and crunchy and savory, sweet and- thanks to an unexpected pocket of jalapeño- hot, all at the same time. Classic party food. Classic church potluck food too. Whoever made those knew that deviled eggs were almost as compulsively delicious as potato chips with French onion dip. And, arguably, more healthful. Depending on which poison you were okay with and which you were trying to avoid. There was a gorgeous galaxy-colored ceramic plate of balsamic-glazed brussels sprouts, with, from what Margo remembered of the recipe, crispy bacon crumbles, sour cranberries, walnuts, and blue cheese, which was- Margo tasted it with hope and was not disappointed- creamy Gorgonzola Dolce.

Separated from everyone, in the fifteenth dungeon, was a small man with fiery brown eyes and wet towels wrapped around his head. For several days his legs had been black, and his gums were bleeding. Fifty-nine years old and exhausted beyond measure, he paced silently up and down, always the same five steps, back and forth. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . an interminable shuffle between the wall and door of his cell. He had no work, no books, nothing to write on. And so he walked. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . His dungeon was next door to La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, less than two hundred feet away. The governor had been his friend and had even voted for him for the Puerto Rican legislature in 1932. This didn’t help much now. The governor had ordered his arrest. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Life had turned him into a pendulum; it had all been mathematically worked out. This shuttle back and forth in his cell comprised his entire universe. He had no other choice. His transformation into a living corpse suited his captors perfectly. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Fourteen hours of walking: to master this art of endless movement, he’d learned to keep his head down, hands behind his back, stepping neither too fast nor too slow, every stride the same length. He’d also learned to chew tobacco and smear the nicotined saliva on his face and neck to keep the mosquitoes away. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The heat was so stifling, he needed to take off his clothes, but he couldn’t. He wrapped even more towels around his head and looked up as the guard’s shadow hit the wall. He felt like an animal in a pit, watched by the hunter who had just ensnared him. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Far away, he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks of San Juan’s harbor and the screams of demented inmates as they cried and howled in the quarantine gallery. A tropical rain splashed the iron roof nearly every day. The dungeons dripped with a stifling humidity that saturated everything, and mosquitoes invaded during every rainfall. Green mold crept along the cracks of his cell, and scarab beetles marched single file, along the mold lines, and into his bathroom bucket. The murderer started screaming. The lunatic in dungeon seven had flung his own feces over the ceiling rail. It landed in dungeon five and frightened the Puerto Rico Upland gecko. The murderer, of course, was threatening to kill the lunatic. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The man started walking again. It was his only world. The grass had grown thick over the grave of his youth. He was no longer a human being, no longer a man. Prison had entered him, and he had become the prison. He fought this feeling every day. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf—by all accounts as mad as a hamburger—left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: “The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,” the arriviste king is alleged to have said. The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but he can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumors of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, his visits to strip clubs, and his fraternizing with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behavior for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed allegations that the father of the king’s German-Brazilian wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar. The

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.