The weekend looms, but hard times are already upon us. We made a handy guide on how to have fun and fight for your rights to party (and survive!) during the financial freakout. Ready for a rent party?

  • Drinking is a traditional refuge in hard economic times. New York needs to save at least one industry, given that finance and media are fucked. Longtime nightlife chronicler Steve Lewis suggests that New York state

  • "wrest control of liquor sales from community boards and hand it over to the State Liquor Authority. The SLA used to be seen as a regulatory body with an eye on the bottom line. Issuing licenses to responsible people generated tax revenue and jobs... Right now a virtual moratorium on new liquor licenses and constant attacks on the club industry are severely hurting the New York economy."

  • Let's preserve the right to get wasted — and the right to make money out of other people getting wasted!
  • That said, if you're short on cash: bring a flask. Everywhere.
  • If you forget your flask and you meet some new people at the bar, try the "Oh my God, I just lost my job!" sob story. It will guarantee you a free drink if you say it with the right amount of patheticness.
  • Use a condom, each and every time. Just one, though! If you find yourself going through two or three a day, you may want to consider having less sex.
  • Rent parties? We read about them in Malcolm X's autobiography once. Bring 'em back! They used to have them during the last Depression: gather all your friends, buy some cheap alcohol, and charge money at your door. Rent: almost made.
  • Food: a problem. Wheat and grain or whatever else is going up, which is why $2 slices are now like $2.50. Blackbook suggests cheap Chinese food, but scoff at more lowbrow delights: "maybe getting lunch from a food cart is a tad too extreme." No it's not!

    We also suggest buying "groceries". As the gentle Megan told the protagonist in Bright Lights, Big City:

  • "'I'm going to teach you to purchase and make a meal.'

    In the next aisle she introduces you to two cans of clams. Ordinarily, she says, she would use fresh clams and fresh pasta, but she doesn't want to scare you on your first lesson."

  • Details has this thing on "yuppie survivalists" called "preppers." Like the old coots in Wyoming who bury guns in the back yard, except they stock up on Poland Spring in their home's mudroom.
  • Related: for no discernible reason, we recently received an old copy of a book called Tom Brown's Field Guide to City and Suburban Survival. Would you like to know some common urban edibles? Blackberries, burdock, cattails, clovers, and dandelions. Brown also suggests dumpster-diving, just like the common hipster freegans we (previously) liked to harass so much. However: he does not suggest you become a "dumpster gourmet" unless you are "truly hungry."



Finally, remember: we're all in this together.