Bashing our who-we-were with our who-we-wish-we-were
Another entry from the "Julian didn't want to write something new" annals of poetic prose or vice versa
Est. Read Time: 7 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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Hello Sternal Journalists,
This week, we’re back with another excerpt from Julian’s First Drafts of Things He may Never Finish But Really Would Like To. The following piece I’ve named Spuyten Duyvil, after the Brooklyn beer bar that it’s pretty much mostly about.
I wrote this in one go a few months ago after returning home from a night out and feeling a bit of antsiness. When I finished, I sent it to my friend Joe who had this to say:
It's good stuff but it feels like there are two pieces here. One about beer spots and one about artists. I think it's possible to make it feel more unified and have a big impact
Totally agree with his assessment but right now, I’m just going to share it with you in in its current, un-unified form because it’s Labor Day and I don’t want to labor much and also, I think it has some relevant themes, what with this being a day for socializing but also some considerations of work versus play and their intersections.
Anyway:
Spuyten Duyvil or Draw A Picture. Tell a Friend.
Tonight, I was sitting at the bar Spuyten Duyvil in Williamsburg. I had left a friend. His friends and I had spent about an hour drinking together which means they effectively were my friends as well. I left them to ostensibly go home.
That really was my goal, to go home and go to bed and get a great start on tomorrow. But and however, I had a little tiny crafty potential detour. Earlier in the night, I had walked by a beer bar while en route to the destination where I was meeting the friend and his (our) friends.
This beer bar advertised rare, new, and curious (!) beers. I like a beer bar like that.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a party spot where you are shoulder to shoulder with strangers and noise. I enjoy the womb-like serenity a packed bar gives me. But I also really love a quiet bar with only interesting beers.
Behind the bar, they have a friendly person who is indeed trying to get out of there as soon as possible because they value their time and freedom, but are very happy to serve and recommend and discuss beers with you. In the bar, there are maybe three others because it’s after midnight and this place probably does its highest volume just before or just after the city’s dinner plans.
It’s womb-like, but differently. A different womb. Or same womb, different day. I don’t remember my womb experience well enough to nail that metaphor down.
Anyway, I couldn’t remember the name of and therefore didn’t make it to the rare, new, and curious beer bar so I started to earnestly head towards home. But as I made my way supposedly home, I kept an eye and a google search out for any other bars that might scratch that itch.
And I found it, the Spuyten Duyvil. It was perfect. It was what it needed to be. I had a delicious time and it’s because friends weren’t there. Friends don’t get to be there. I love you, but it needed to just be for me.
The one thing I wanted to share is that a couple of guys came in. 40s, kids, revisiting the city they once lived in.
The bartender gave them a rundown of all the liqueurs, the nightcaps. They loved it. I loved eavesdropping on it. They drank. She talked to them about how long the bar had been there. They grimaced that it had actually been there while they lived there in their 20s and damn, why didn’t they know about it?
I know why they didn’t know about it. People in their 20s usually don’t know about places like this. This is a 30s and up bar in the best way possible. And your 20s are a not-this-bar-vibe decade in the best way possible. Still, they grimaced performatively. We all do when we bash our who-we-were with our who-we-wish-we-were and hope to find some gelatinous prize.
Anyway, he said he had moved to San Francisco recently. She asked about it. He lamented the culture. They talked about how San Francisco used to be so centered around the creatives and now it wasn’t. It used to be so artistic and now it wasn’t. And this is a conversation that has happened umpteen million times. It was taking place in Williamsburg, for gods sake.
But for the first time, I was hearing a piece of it I’d previously missed. That, yes, the artists are the victims in this fable we always tell. Pushed out, conformed, zapped of their cool. But they’re also unfairly being expected to, as a demographic minority, singlehandedly hold up the culture of an entire place.
Art is culture, culture is art. But non-artists should not rely on artists to save them. To save their culture. To keep their cool alive.
Take the least artistic, least cultural municipality you can imagine. Perhaps it’s where you grew up. Perhaps it’s a place you think poorly of. Then also take the place you think is most rich with culture, with art. If you could get everyone in Place A to simply take 90 seconds and scrawl a drawing in a notebook once a day, Place A would become definitively, easily, unequivocally more cultured and culturally significant than Place B in just the course of that very day.
The culture and art of a city or town or family or person are not reliant on great works being produced. That is actually irrelevant. They are only reliant on people indulging in creative processes and self-expression. That is all it is.
So nobody should ever complain that a place doesn’t have enough culture or enough art. They should just add it. It’s actually really fucking easy.
Draw a picture. Tell a friend.
I will eventually take Joe’s advice and finesse and squish this into something a little more cohesive, but today, for Labor Day, I’ll probably just draw some pictures and drink some beers. And speaking of those, are some other…
Recommendations!
Bottoms. Movie. It’s as fun and funny as everyone says it is and has cured me of my completely unfounded exhaustions with both Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edibiri.
How an Amateur Diver Became a True Crime Sensation. Article. If you like or hate true crime, I think this meta story about a YouTuber who flouted regulations to became a salvage diver specializing in missing persons will fascinate you.
Whatever Nikki Glaser’s Next Special Is. Special? This might seen very obvious as she’s been famous for like a decade, but I saw Nikki Glaser at a show tonight. She’s someone I’ve obviously known to be funny, but just has never been on my radar. She crushed it tonight. Dark, introspective, silly, relatable, shocking. And it felt like we were watching the nucleus of what I assume will be her next special. Check it out whenever that is (or if she’s touring! She is touring, I just looked it up, and holy shit, she’s doing 2 days in Rehoboth Beach! It never even occurred to me but that’s now a goal of mine!)
Revisionist History. Podcast. It’s back! And it’s exploring America’s fascination with guns. The first episode is all about how much our current gun laws hinge upon one guy’s actions in the 1600s. It’s nerdy and interesting.
Okay, before we go, I’ve got a little puzzle for you. I found something on the internet last week that was so astounding. It was the below image, as well as a few others like it. It is what it looks like: a parody of a Tintin comicbook cover, but about Bill Clinton instead. it’s from a couple decades ago. But the astounding thing is who drew it.
If you care to try to figure it out, let me know and/or comment below and if you get it right, I’ll figure out some prize for you. (Note: there are a couple glitchy bars in the image. These are not clues. They just appeared like that in the original image.)
Okay, that’s all! Draw some pictures! Tell friends! Drink beer!
Much love,
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.