An arsonist doused a carpeted stairwell in gasoline and lit it on fire shortly after midnight on New Year's Day as approximately 750 patrons celebrated the new year at Neighbours, one of Seattle's oldest gay clubs.

When a popular nightclub learned it had been the victim of a brazen theft, it didn't get mad — it offered the thieves a cash prize in exchange for sneaking the stolen items back in.

E.D.M. will be the death of our culture, if molly doesn't kill us all first. That is what I gathered from "Night Club Royale," the New Yorker's semi-profile of Paris Hilton's ex, producer/DJ Afrojack, who amused me so when I saw him at the Electric Daisy Carnival in 2012, and through whom writer Josh Eells gives us a good look at the entire Vegas nightclub casino scene. (Between this and the Rolling Stone Miley Cyrus profile, Eells having the best culture-writing week ever.)

In another throw back to '90s club culture, XL, Manhattan's brand new and still retro disco, issued membership cards to some lucky potential patrons. But they modernized it with a website. Too bad they spelled the website address wrong on the card.

Last night was the opening party for XL, the new nightclub in New York's embarrassing (and dirty) soon-to-open gay hotel The Out NYC. The club is absolutely gorgeous. But it's never going to be cool.

Your crush on Prince Harry is about to end. At a nightclub in Croatia, he was videotaped climbing onto a banquette and performing a catastrophic sideways shuffle dance, culminating in a loss of balance and a dive into the swimming pool behind him. Then he gets up, pulls the ol' "I totally meant to do that," dances his way to shore and climbs out, saggy denim butt dripping all the way. Apparently if he were not a prince of England, Harry would be an overgrown frat boy in the Meatpacking district. Good to know.

Going to nightclubs would be a lot more enjoyable if people knew how to behave properly. Follow these seven simple yet important rules and you'll make life easier for everyone.

You can go to over-the-hill sex tape actress Kim Kardashian's 30th birthday party in New York on Friday. You just have to pay between $1,000 and $2,500 to reserve a table. Your personal invite below.

Is two a trend? Today, in the NY Times: Greenwich Village residents who hated Paul Sevigny's uber-hip nightlife destination/coke den, The Beatrice Inn. And in the LA Times: residents speculatively hating the forthcoming Sunset Strip outpost of SoHo House. Viva!

New York nightlife is in an incredibly bad place if the biggest spender on the scene is an Episcopal priest who drives in from Wilkes Barre, Pa., to drop tens of thousands of dollars on bottle service. The New York Daily News tries to figure out where Gregory Malia, the youngish fellow second from the right in the photo, gets enough cash to drop $52,000 in one night. He was ordained as a priest in 2002 and otherwise runs a pharmaceutical business that specializes in supplies for hemophiliacs. "I work hard. I make good money. How I spend it - that is my business," he tells the News. "I haven't done anything inappropriate."

Always first on the scene when gunfire is exchanged, weaves yanked, or drunken opinions expressed outside Hollywood's most action-packed drinking establishments, TMZ's cameras captured footage of the disturbing aftermath of a shooting that took place near Les Deux last night.

• Anna Nicole Smith and Kurt Vonnegut were both featured in the same issue of Playboy, but only one of them was naked. [Lard Biscuit]
  

As Amy Sacco either A) fades into middle age and social irrelevance (soon she'll be just a Wikipedia stub) or B) plans a second legendary take-over of the world of nightlife, her underlings are graduating from beneath her. One underlord in particular, the "irrepressible" Bungalow 8 doorman Armin Amiri—protector of the realm and accused bruiser of p(r)etty boy Fabian Basabe—is set to open his own spot, called Socialista. It will apparently juxtapose Castro kitsch with Veblenian conspicuous consumption, down at Jane and the West Side Highway. "I believe in a healthy balance of capitalism and a socialism," he tells Spencer Morgan. So chin up, Amy Sacco—in case you ever need it, surely there's a dacha for your dotage in the offing.

So you know how you're not allowed to dance in any bar or club in New York City that doesn't have a cabaret license, and Rudy Giuliani was known for, among other things, closing places down that didn't have the appropriate licenses? Well, you still can't do it, and you won't be able to in the foreseeable future, either. The state Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the 80-year-old cabaret law could be upheld because there's no constitutional right to dance. Oh yeah? Try telling that to, like, Junior Vasquez! The people just want to dance! Enjoy your shuffling-in-place moves this weekend.

Rod Townsend (aka our commenter Momo), sometimes receives telephone calls from The Past, a mysterious entity that remembers where things used to be in New York before Starbucks and Whole Foods came to town.