On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife (review)

David Grazian's On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Night Life was a book I read with great interest. Grazian is an accomplished writer of urban ethnography, and in this book he offers great into the troubling reinvigoration of Philadelphia's night life. Grazian's central hook is the idea of the hustle which he invokes to understand the interactional and commercial stagings that have given life to this emergent urban landscape. Grazian sets out to show us how this dizzying urban mystique is fabricated — all a sham, through which we are hustled but are also hustlers.

He has gathered a range of materials for analysis: participant observation, interviews and focus groups with both cultural producers (restaurateurs, PR folk, service workers of varying type) and written narratives by consumers of the new urban landscape, in this case undergraduates at Penn where Grazian is a professor. The chapters move easily between different materials for analysis, each detailing a different type of hustle that breathes life into the urban landscape.

One detects traces of dialogue with sociologists long concerned with the character and form of American urban life. Yet the scenes Grazian captures stand in sharp contrast to the corner bar and the sidewalks just outside that played a central role in the urban networks of a former industrial landscape. There are no "regulars" or "old heads," no community rooted in a place to be found. In a neighborhood where the sense of community was once rooted in labor, Grazian describes decidedly anonymous, up-scaled scenes rooted in lifestyle. Thus, Grazian's is a tale of transformation. The urban landscape defined by a largely working-class base that had captured the interests of sociologists for nearly a century is all but absent in this transmogrified terrain. The city Grazian introduces to us is peopled by "prosperous, yet nomadic consumers"(10) where a global post-industrial era resplendent in the "theatrical spectacles of global cosmopolitanism and myth" serves as backdrop.(32)

Early chapters detail the elaborate stagings involved in producing the contemporary urban nocturnal experience. Grazian demonstrates how clubbing and upscale dining have become the new theater as the aesthetic value of cinematic experience are grafted onto a downtown's built environment by the brokers of "nocturnal cool," PR folks — one among many categories of hustler Grazian discusses. The chapter on Spin Control, a particularly interesting chapter details the PR work in the global economy of mass-consumption of popular culture, in which branding (of night spots in this case) is achieved through the manufacture of "pseudo-event" where A listers, B listers and even D listers (reality TV has-beens) and pretty people with high levels of nocturnal capital are hired out as shills to create a "synthetic excitement."(86) Here Grazian demonstrates how the work of urban swank depends on the emotional labor of bartenders and waitresses, most of whom are women.

The anonymity of these urban scenes, Grazian argues explains the push and pull of another kind of hustle, the elaborate confidence games where all urban club and restaurant goers are con artists who adopt a strategic orientation to night life. Later chapters focus primarily on the hustle of the urban sexual marketplace, zeroing in on the distinctly gendered sporting rituals undertaken: "the masquerade," "winning bar," and "the girl hunt" defined by Grazian as "ritualized homosocial activity" shared principally within all-male friendship groups. Little in the way of fresh insight as to the situational machinations of gender is provided in these chapters, however. Men hustle. Women engage in their own hustle, aiming to out hustle or defend against the hustler, all of which become grist for a gender mill.

On the Make also offers some compelling and curious observations: the changing urban landscape coincides — but perhaps not coincidentally — with transformations in the life course as adolescents' transition to adulthood is prolonged, giving way to an extended moratorium on adult responsibility and the promise of limitless fun. Yet a large number of these...