terrific article from GQ, about clubbing

"So that from our high-priced bottle-service real estate we still had the valuable sensation that we were at a place where the party, like the music (or the Ecstasy), would never, ever end, where more and more girls could be fed in from still more flights out of Kansas City and Sacramento and you could start to think that the you who has a job back in Pittsburgh or Irvine doesn't exist, and also that after this you'd better go find some coke or else deal with the reality that awaits you back in the rollaway suitcase in your hotel room. Or if you're the fourth-generation heir to a toothpaste fortune who doesn't have a job in Pittsburgh (and there are people who come here they can drop $500K in a night and not feel bad about it), that there's a world where no one has those jobs, that this is the one place built for you."

"All around us women were dancing on makeshift stages—tabletops, banquette benches, dancing plinths. There must have been a hundred of them, and all of them, like really all of them, were wearing virtually identical tiny dresses and platform shoes that used to be a kind of sartorial wink that meant: I get paid money to give blow jobs."

"We let Jessica pour rounds and rounds of drinks for these female Asian chem majors from Cal who kept waving and winking to their boyfriends who were railbirding it on the lower level of the dance floor, watching as their dates got their free drinks on."

"Going to a nightclub, like going on vacation, sometimes gives rise to this really stressful internal-feedback loop that initiates when some dark part of your brain transmits a pretty obvious question: "Am I having fun?" Then: "Is this fun? What about that?" Or, "Those people look like they're having fun—are they pretending like I am?" Or, "I should be having fun, but am I really? How about now? Or...now?" And then this other part of your brain says, "Shut up, this is your dedicated night for fun, you paid all this money for it, and if you're not having fun now, maybe you're not capable of fun, so please for the love of God just shut up." "Okay. Okay... But how about now?""

"Another way to deal with that anxiety, the balm Jason and Noah offer, is to make the customers believe they are at the party that other people wish they were at. Marquee must always feel like the place to be tonight. "We always have photographers on hand," Jason told me. "The key is to recap it the next day so we can be like, 'Look what you fucking missed.' "

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/201209/marquee-las-vegas-nightlife-gq-september-2012?currentPage=1