The Quarter Bar Baffler
Posted on | June 28, 2009 | No Comments
Quarter Bar & Cafe on 20th st and 5ave in Park Slope is a smallish bar with a row of shallow, perpendicular booths along its back wall. I’ve sat in those booths many times enjoying typical bar booth confabs. Since my friend began working as barback, however, I’ve spent more time at the bar.
David Moo, ridiculed anime voice actor and head bartender, works Wednesdays and Fridays. David is well known in the greater Park Slope area among civilians and service industry folk for his creative and precise cocktails, not for Xellos on The Slayers: NEXT and The Slayers: TRY. He is known even less for his wit and wisdom, the topic of this haphazard new Aantiks series, Lessons from Quarter Bar.
This past Wednesday, or was it last Friday?, I was blessed with a sneak peak at David’s new cocktail, You And Me, a play on umami as well as a little liberal counterculture news. ‘The Baffler’s Back!’ raves the Chicagoist in a bland fanboy post. The news was broken on the 24th by some news organization, honestly breaking news doesn’t matter at all anymore, that ‘Thomas Frank is reviving The Baffler, the beloved left-wing magazine of business and culture he started in Chicago in 1988.’ I stole the words in quote from The Observer which provides a quick, informative read to get you up to speed on this cult mag.
David had subscribed to first incarnation of The Baffler, as had a beautiful, married Brazilian girl sitting at the bar with her boyfriend. They gushed over its return providing me and my drunk compatriots with the facts: Frank had criticized our new found prosperity under the Clinton administration – buy now, pay interest – and the budding consumer culture that left no room for any other culture; The old mag was published sporadically, the new mag would be published twice per annum; Frank was from Chicago.
Doesn’t sound terribly counterculture does it? We all put a healthy amount of hot air into the ‘American culture of excess’ balloon. The media doesn’t though. While The Baffler’s critical pronouncements have become mainstream ideas, we still lack an authoritative, or organized, voice dedicated to this particular cultural theme. Hence the exhuming of The Baffler.
David seemed excited about The Baffler 2.0, though I didn’t get a chance to really quiz him on it – my bar mates didn’t quite understand the gravitational pull of the mainstream on fringe ideas (the mainstream is a blackhole, hehe). He made it a point to characterize the mag as counter/fringe culture with a self awareness of its own mainstream mutability. Much of what David talks about is well crafted and thoughtful, but he said this with a hint of pain in his voice. Typically there is alternately fire, love and muted condescension in his voice, but seldom real pain.
Ideas are like summer thunderstorms, hundreds of bolts of electricity arcing from an ether of clouds illuminating your own musings, before you are again left in a long drought with no complementary or supplementary flashes falling from the sky to complete your angle or turn you around. Twitter struck with a June 24th tweet from @BBHLabs asking its followers to discuss the rise of #fringeadvertising signaling the medium’s death at Adbuster Culturejammer HQ. Creative twentysomethings now scoff at older admen wtih such disdain that they forget what the true power of their creativity is. Not only is their power true, but it is great. Uncle Ben’s (Spiderman not rice) words will never be lost on our generation: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. (I’m trying to make sure the clarity this storm brought for me is not lost but attaching something rather weighty and mainstream.)
Are we to rely on old men like Thomas Frank to bail out our culture? Blogging, twittering and Facebook status updating these ideas does not a revolution make. Publishing a magazine, actually fucking publishing a magazine is way harder than blogging, has a weight and tangibility that I’m afraid the Internet does not. Even if the writing on the Internet were to get to a 9th grade level, it still seems an unlikely springboard for a modern “renaissance”. We can write creative copy, put Patrick Ewing in a Snickers commercial, and continually polish an already shiny Apple, OR we can write about things that really matter to each of us. Possibly, in the process, spending less time in the office.
Tags: Anime > Chicago > Criticism > David Moo > Internet Publishing > The Baffler > The Observer > Thomas Frank > Umami
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