After dinner last night, I briefly checked out new nightlife venue Suzie Wong as it was kicking off the celebration weekend for prodigy DJ Orazio Rispo’s multiple twenty-first birthday bashes, easily the most anticlimactic birthday of his life since he’s been professionally DJing in clubs throughout the world since puberty. Guess now he’s officially allowed in. I tried to muster a “wooo!”

Suzie Wong, apparently hot-shit in Beijing, is just shit in New York. We already knew they needed some PR help, since as I mentioned, their “opening” went right over my head.

Why it doesn’t work:

-It’s where the failed eatery / club experiment Pre:Post used to be (problem)
-All they did to redecorate is paint a bunch of Chinese symbols everywhere (big problem)
-It’s on the 27th street strip (elephant size problem)

Ultimately, this space is awkward: A long hallway that ends in a bar (which doesn’t look like a bar, but looks like a coat check space…weird) with a square room off the side, which was so empty you could hear cockroaches plotting to take over Chelsea. It’s an odd L shape, smaller and more severe than Room Service’s, and it doesn’t work. It was awkward for Pre:Post, and now it’s even worse.

It’s hard to launch a successful nightlife venture with no PR and no angle other than ‘sounding Asian.’ You can’t re-paint walls, stencil in a bunch of Chinese symbols, smack a three faced Buddha-esque head on the DJ booth, buy a green strobe light and expect to be in business for more than three months. But what do I know?

Let’s see how long it lasts.



For those of you who participated in yesterday’s medical guessing game / happen to care:

I had Cellutlitis, similar to a staph but more dangerous since it’s completely under the skin and can penetrate your nodes and enter your blood stream, in which case you’re dead pretty damn fast. The technicalities:

Cellulitis is a spreading bacterial infection of the skin and tissues beneath the skin. Cellulitis usually begins as a small area of tenderness, swelling, and redness. As this red area begins to enlarge, the person may develop a fever—sometimes with chills and sweats—and swollen lymph nodes ("swollen glands") near the area of infected skin. Unlike impetigo, which is a very superficial skin infection, cellulitis refers to an infection also involving the skin's deeper layers: the dermis and subcutaneous tissue.

See? Learning something everyday.