Electric in the Night
It’s almost too damn garish until you realise that garish is exactly what it’s meant to be; this is not accidental or poorly-thought-out, this is not excess electricity at work or the softly-humming brainchild of a one-time manager who took his decorating tips from peacocks. This is by design. This calls out to the Friday and Saturday nights where even by nine o’clock, your boundaries and your borders have started to slip a little.
This place and all the others like it thrive on glare and dirt, on wooden bar stools and groups of people never smaller than four or five. It thrives on noise and laughter and it will not make allowances for you; you come here to seek it out, and not the other way around, and this is its leverage. This place and all the others like it stand side by side on crowded blocks and at one, two, three in the morning, they are still overflowing and noise and sound cascade out onto the streets. People still slip out the front door with Coronas in their hands to light cigarettes and watch the college girls in jeans and sleeveless tops walk by on their way to other places exactly like this. This place and all others like it have long bars and cold cases of beer stacked high in cool rooms out the back.
This is a part of a kingdom marked out by streets with Latin names and ascending numbers; where streetlights and bar signs soak into each other brightly and the sidewalks are crowded. Eateries and convenience stores stand on every corner, and cars that wait at red lights with all four seats occupied by passengers blast out music through rolled-down windows.
And maybe you might come here on a weeknight, when the place is a little emptier and a little quieter, and you might talk to the bartender about what it is you do. You might get to know the black-shirted guys with easy smiles, or the wild girls with leather straps around their wrists, while they mix your drink and ask your name and then on the weekend when the place is surging with people once again they’ll see you and remember you and you’ll know that, more so than every other patron here, this is your place, and you are part of this kingdom of drinking and laughing and letting go. For tonight, at least, and that will be enough.
georgelondon
Welcome! There’s something so very strong in the calling of this image I think that keeps pulling all thoughts back to telling the story of the bar behind it, even when you transpose it to a new world like Ian did on Tuesday in The Poets of Mars.
I really like the way this reads like the introduction to some bigger story – it feels quite cinematic to me actually; in spite of its very modern references, something Noir… I hear Richard Burton or James Earl Jones narrating the opening shots, helping set the tone of something at odds with what we’re seeing…
Great start Simon. Looking forward to the rest!
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Simon
Hey, thanks George!
I’ll see if I can get Michael C. Hall… I like his narration a lot.
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Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Lovely piece of writing, Mr Smithson… Like George says, the image seems to be prompting posts with a strong sense of place, and each piece seems to have a different relationship with the place in it.
Which sounds really pretentious, now that I read it back. What I’m trying to say is I liked it!
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Rivka Jacobs
A wonderful, descriptive short. I agree with George, that this seems the prelude to a larger story!
Beautifully written, I also got the feeling (like George again) that it’s almost cinematic. One can feel the camera panning, hear the narrator’s voice.
The best part for me was the sense of humanity, and the subtle exploration as to why, psychologically speaking, such establishments exist in the first place. The people, the sense of community, the sense of belonging in a world that can be alienating and lonely.
The narrator almost, very subtly, stood outside the neighborhood he described, as if looking in but not being a part of it, communicating this to the reader. So when you take the reader into the the bar at the end, the reader is struck strongly by the social, the convivial, the idea of this being an island of belonging
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Simon
Nicolas: thanks! It doesn’t sound that pretentious to me, but I’m sure you know best.
Rivka: thanks! That juxtaposition of belonging and loneliness was something I was hoping would come through.
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