I'm hotter under the collar than a clothing manufacturer with a warehouse full of black trenchcoats. What's got my belted outerwear in a knot, you ask? It's the glorified theme joints and hugescreen-TV hangars that pass for bars these days! And if I have to listen to Bono—the ne plus ultra of late-twentieth-century bombastic jerks—braying "I'm gonna be with you be with you night and daaaay" out of an ear-splittingly cranked-up, conversation-killing CD box one more time, well all I have to say is it's not gonna be pretty. Bono be with me night and day? Help! If it's gonna be like that, I may have to take my business elsewhere. The only question-now that every bar, lounge, pub, tap, tavern, saloon, and drinking fountain in this country is on its way to becoming an omnimax rave-stage for college students who're under the impression that they're sailors on leave in Havana 1958-is where? And get that cigar out of my face, goon! You look like Arnold Scharwzenegger's garden gnome.
While I'm on the subject of muscle-bound blockheads, is there a restaurant-supply lab someplace where Henry Rollins is being cloned and shipped out as an all-purpose barman? Wherever you find the tattooed, head-bobbing Rollins model pacing behind the bar like a trapped beast, moodily splashing vodka, crème de cacao, and Chambord into chocolate-raspberry martinis, you can be sure you'll also be subjected to blaring techno music and big-ass TV's showing sports. When did going to a bar become an experiment from the notebooks of B. F. Skinner? How much will people put up with until they stop pressing the lever that pours White Russians? I picture a lab-coated Skinner standing in the kitchen, staring into a security monitor, giggling and saying to a waitress, "Now I introduce the LOW HUM," as he turns up a black oven dial. "What would happen if on the TV's we just showed play-off games from 1979 all night?" he laughs as she exits with another twisted mountain of Our Own Patented Curly Fries.
The fact that many of these places are trying to pass themselves off as Irish bars is particularly galling. These faux pubs are the most blatant example of urban kitsch on the contemporary scene-and nobody notices! I'm afraid to go to Ireland now because I know as soon as I got off the plane I'd be lost: the Emerald Isle has been divested of all its road signs and now they're hanging at scalp-cut level in bars in America with names like the Frank O'Connor and the Synge. Twenty-five years ago these places would've been called J.G.W. McPaddywacker's Family Eating Establishment & Good Times Drinking Saloon and been in the mall. You thought these places had been laughed out of business. Now they're in your neighborhood, right next to the Gap. Wait a minute, wasn't that supposed to stay at the mall, too?
Maybe Flann O'Brien would be pleased to know that there's a bar in America named after him, but how much time would he want to spend in it if he came in anonymously for a drink? My guess is that the author of The Dalkey Archive would only be able to spend about two seconds in there before he started feeling like he was trapped in somebody's trunk with the sub-woofer. These places have all the authenticity of a premixed Black-and-Tan in a bottle. And what about this premixed Black-and-Tan that you can get on tap now? How does that work-like Aim toothpaste?
I am not talking about bars that have picked up and tacked onto their walls the detritus of thirty-thousand days of existence, all the campaign posters for forgotten ward heelers and JFK and losing teams and souvenirs brought back from the trips to the old country of every regular who ever haunted the place; nor am I talking about those sad little joints laid out like hallways that opened after the Second World War and haven't washed their windows since and have a leftover '50s idea of Irishness that's currently about as resonant as a box of Lucky Charms. I'm talking about these new Irish bars, the ones so steeped in peat and bog that their aroma seems pumped in by pipeline from the Other Side; the ones so crammed with shiny Eire-iana that you can barely find your way to the men's room; the ones that call themselves the Sean O'Casey or the Liam O'Flaherty instead of the name of the guy who opened it.
How are these places any more Irish than a shamrock shake? And it doesn't matter who owns them, who works there, or who goes there: Once you've larded-up the joint with decor that's supposed to advertise your credibility, you're lost. In fact, Shamrock Shake's is a better name for a bar than Finnegan's Wake. Show us you have a sense of humor, you pretentious bastards! It's all Pirates of the Caribbean now, anyway. The faux pubs have all been facelifted to make them look ultra-old-country, but they look more like photographs of bars than actual ones. This is Knott's Berry Farm with single malts, Epcot with pasteurized Guinness on tap, Busch Gardens on the road to Killarney with table service from the Rose of Tralee.
These places are getting so popular that Disney has got to move in. Rumor has it that they're planning one for Orlando called the Informer--it blows up every first and third Friday and every so often the cops come in unannounced and take a few of the patrons in back and pretend to try to get them to talk. Way more fun than darts! Plus, you can brag to your friends that you didn't spill. All they got out of you were baseball statistics, as if there was anything else.
The corollary that tries to counter the faux pub is the Salvation Army art bar. There, the owners go into a perfectly good dive, remove its perfectly good lousy art from the walls and replace it, in a textbook example of overkill, with locally-produced paintings on black velvet in the style of Margaret Keane. Putting price tags on these paintings, of course, can only be a sly wink, and you have to hope that the act of replacing bad art with Art that is bad is an attempt to make the patrons long for a return to the fake as opposed to the phony. It can't be, can it, that replacing something already fake with an ersatz version of the same is somehow more acceptable to the new clientele?
But I'm getting sarcastic. One thing I've noticed faux pubs and SA art bars have in common: They've actually taken out booths and put in rickety tables and benches, even though everyone knows booths are better. They've been truly authenticated: The comfort of the drinker is exchanged for a look that in no way says we don't have a theme! and if your ass gets tired you can drag it on out of here and over to IHOP! This is the new definition of "authenticated," by the way. Not "established the truth or genuineness of," but "made to look as though you've established the truth or genuineness of."
The faux pub's Irishness and the SA bar's beatnik-isms bear the same relation to reality as a tiki bar's does to Polynesia, whatever Polynesia was supposed to be. How is a blowfish lamp less authentic than one of those round ones that says "Guinness"? At least the blowfish isn't advertising anything.
The tiki bar (but not the later, Margaritaville mutation) unashamedly admits that it's a world that doesn't exist except as a dream, a completely made-up universe in Technicolor denial of life-as-it's-lived, an ultimate escape into the tropics of the imagination. The new Irish bar tries to suggest a better world; one that you can glimpse out of the corner of your eye; a place you can someday return to where the beer tastes real-er, the people are heartier and more in touch with tradition, song and story are respected and admired. Exiting the fantastic world of a tiki bar for the world we live in is comically tragic; leaving a new Irish bar for a world that's close to the one the bar is trying to recall but not as good is merely sad. No matter how meticulously you reconstruct the Old World in the New, no matter how hard you close your eyes to the reality of where you actually are, doesn't having to leave it and re-emerge into the not-that make the pain of not being where you want to be even worse? With the tiki bar, however, which consciously attempts to recreate Paradise before Man's Fall in a lounge downtown, this failure, this blatant impossibility, the vast discrepancy between interior Hawaii and exterior Newark, turns the bar into a place of marvel, if not outright stupefaction. That and your third zombie. Plus they always have booths.
The problem isn't that bars today are fake. The problem is that they're annoying, dishonest, and trite, and that they try to pass those things off as desirable. If you want to open a bar the possibilities are endless. Why are they all cast from the same mold now? Why not a Cambodian bar, or Brazilian, futurist, or decoŠ anything but the same authenticated barroom on every corner serving up the same pasteurized image of itself. With the influx of Russians, why not a string of vodka houses? Isn't Russia just as ripe for pseudo-mystical, old-country nostalgia and booze-centric evocations of past injustice as Ireland is? That packs 'em in every time! Will someone please open a bar called the Gogol? the Gorky? the Blok? That one would make a mint just on the writers that came in! And don't even get me started on brewpubs. A brewpub is a T.G.I. Friday's that has the audacity to make its own beer. And a sports bar is a video arcade where the patrons are too drunk to play the games themselves.
A bar is not some kind of production number. You go into a bar to drink and talk, and those things aren't exactly promoted by thematics, multiple TV's, or brain-numbing stereo systems. The booze is supposed to numb your brain, not the music. When did bartenders start thinking they were DJ's? And everyone knows that when there's a TV on behind the head of the person you're talking with, your eye is unmercifully drawn to it, even if it's showing rugby. Once you can't even have a conversation in a bar anymore, what's the point of going? There's a great movie that's often derided for being fake in which Barry Fitzgerald, on his way to a bar, utters the immortal line "Well it's a fine soft night so I think I'll go and join my comrades and talk a little treason." Treason, my friends, not sports. Not that it matters. You can't talk to anybody about anything when the music's too loud anyway. Forget about planning a revolution.
Mr. Slotcar Hatebath is an anagram. So you figured it out, big brain. Pat yourself on the back, why don'tcha?
