In an effort to be somewhat productive as I procrastinate on yet another paper for school, felt that I should write a blog post, especially since, as always, I’ve been so infrequent with them recently.
I love pubs. I like the easy camaraderie that is available in the best examples of the public house. I love their unique combination of weakened inhibition and desire for connection and good company. I love the fact that they are so often divorced from the blatant sexuality that is part of the club scene. I love that you can actually hear people’s voices. As you can tell, this is going to be slightly idealistic and skewed. After all, it’s not like i’m trying to write a peer reviewed paper here, I can let my inner biases out to play.
I’ve read some academic papers that discuss the role of pubs as public space, how they can act as a space to tie people together, even as they offer a space for public discussion on public matters. Albeit, usually more passionately argued than rationally, but hey, them’s the breaks. My father’s generation of Vietnamese doesn’t have a bar culture. There is the ritual of nho, in which the older men come together to drink and eat and make merry, but this is fundamentally different than a pub culture.
The fundamentally private nature of nho, which takes place within the intrinsically exclusive space of the home, disallows public consciousness and bonding. In the ideal pub, anyone can come in, get smashed and offer their opinion forth because the pub is a public space, and as long as you don’t infringe on another’s right to make use of that space, you can harangue at will. Because anyone can walk in, it allows for bonding and the building of social capital across larger sections of individuals, which the nho, because of its private nature, prohibits.
In my life, i’ve been lucky enough to be part of the community’s of enough good pubs to know how rewarding it is to get to know people I would never normally talk to, liberally lubricated with alcohol of course. I’ve had talks about the nature of life, about poetry, about the dead, about gentrification, politics and the vagaries of the heart. They’ve allowed me to see humanity in its nakedness, as people get progressively more sloshed, but usually there isn’t the same amount of hostility and unpleasantness too often seen in other types of bars and clubs. There is an openness that a good public house engenders that allows for connection and humanity, even when a person is completely drunk off his rocker. These good memories are among the ones I turn to when I need a reminder of the goodness of human beings, the beauty that is ever present in the human condition. When I’m beat down by the ravages of life, which is all too often, the embrace of a good pub can be enough to make a courtship with alcoholism be so much more. The pub is where I go to relax, to let the tensions drain from my shoulders, washed away by whiskey libations and the undulating lift of good conversation.
This stands in stark contrast to clubs, which with their loud music, blatant sexual tension and private culture, are about as conducive to human connection as an isolation chamber. You don’t go to a club to meet people, you go to be with your own clique in a huge public space. People create little spheres of the private in this massive arena of the public. If you wanted to talk about anything other than weak pick up lines, you wouldn’t be able to because the music is too loud and because ain’t no one talking to you son. Clubs are meat markets that too often act as nothing more than fields for people to posture their masculinities and femininities. The sway of a woman’s hips, the squared shoulders of a young man protecting his section of the room, those harken to an almost animal-primalness that, while I find it compelling, don’t find to be beautiful.
Of course this is not to say that all pubs are the amazing and all clubs are wack. I like to dance and occasionally lose myself in the mass of humanity as the next guy. Sometimes, you don’t want to talk, you just want to move.
But what can I say? I’m a pub boy at heart.
The next round’s on me.