Note: I took this post down earlier today (9/25/06) on the advice of a friend of mine who has had a lot of experience with interventions.  She cautioned me to be very clear about my intentions in writing it.  "When someone jumps the shark," she explained, "it's an extremely vulnerable time for them," so I should, at the very least, take a moment to reaffirm that while some might delight in the painful observations that follow, that was certainly not my intention.  We all know that the jumper is not the only one to suffer when he jumps the shark.  We all do.  Because when one of us jumps the shark, in a sense, he takes us with him.  That said, I hope you've got your water-wings on, Joe.


In this week's Dig, they've done a big "5 Drink Minimum" thing, reviewing various venues in and around Boston where you can get variously smashed.  First of all, I like a pint down the pub as much as the next guy, but I've never elevated alcohol to a religion (although drinking puts me to sleep just like every church service I've ever been to has, so I understand how it could happen).  The problem might be that I don't have even one drop of Irish blood in me.  I think it helps a little.  (Here at The Purge, we love the Irish, by the way, so don't get your knickers in a twist.)

Cultural differences aside, what I noticed about the "5 Drink Minimum" thing is that most of the ordinary Dig staffers who reported from bars and pubs around town were able to do so without coming off all pretentious.  And why should they, right?  I mean, pub crawls are by their nature unpretentious.  It's not clubbing, for chrissake.  But The Dig proclaims "special insight" into what is hip (or "fly" or "dope," or whatever youngsters are calling it nowadays—I have no earthly idea) in Boston, and Dig staff clearly believe (sometimes erroneously), and openly profess (sometimes embarrassingly) that they're uniquely qualified to poo-poo what is not.  In so doing they set themselves up, the whole lot of them, for eventual neck-bloat, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). 

The problem is, there are actually very few adults who can read and write, who are so bored they're able to keep their eye on the bouncing ball of youth culture for long.  What's in it for them if they do, after all?  No, you find your niche in your tweenie years, dig in, get comfy, and leave the radical chic to the twelve-and-under set.  

That's a glorious moment, when you realize that what was of world-historic significance just yesterday—say, which band played which venue last night—no one gives a fat rat's ass what you think about today.  Let me reiterate, because this is an important point: YOU may still care, but NO ONE cares that YOU care.   

You know, there is an invisible border—like in that old Perry Como song "Toyland": 

Toyland, toyland
little girl and boy land
when you dwell within it
you are ever happy there! 

Childhood toyland
mystical merry toyland
once you pass its borders
you can never return again! 

Message:  not only do you look ridiculous in those low-slung jeans, Muffin-top, but NO ONE CARES.  And it has nothing to do with anything but how old you are!  Oops!  Did I just poke you in the eye?  Sorry.  Couldn't see you.  Because you're INVISIBLE now!  Get used to it! 

Of course, ours is not a culture willing to concede anything to youth.  Age-appropriateness is not our strong-suit.  And so we go on, well into mid-life, either acting like we did in the days of our youth, or aping the youth of the day. Like bumbling spies who can't speak the language of those they're spying on, we fumble through a culture of secret handshakes we don't know, and winks and nudges that might as well be ticks, spasms, and petit mal seizures, fooling no one but ourselves.  But our gracious hosts can see we're harmless.  They ignore us.  We go away.   

Here's the deal: the secret (and the secret fun) of getting old gracefully is simple:  let go.  Let go, and let God. 

See, youth is effortless.  The essence of hip is authenticity.  The essence of authenticity is effortlessness.  Youth is the thing itself.  It cannot be but what it is.  Old age is effortless, too, in its way.  Mid-life is the problematic part.  Thing is, you spend so much time being young—really, it feels like an eternity—and most of us will spend so much time being old, that mid-life seems like a ten-minute intermission between two grand Wagnerian acts.  It's over in a flash—you've barely had time to drink your champagne and have a cigarette and a quick trip to the john.  And yet that brief, busy interlude is when all the important things actually happen: you come into your own professionally, gain psychological stability and spiritual insight, raise a family, and so on.  You may have day-dreamed through the first act.  You may sleep through the second.  But in between you are acutely conscious, and aware of passing time.  And there's the rub.  

Each age has its special insights.  We fixate on youth because sadly, we seem to think that the only way to maintain our storied optimism is by looking back to a time when we were semiconscious at best.  Let go.  Be here now.  Mid-life is all about the guilty pleasures! You liked Wham! but could never admit it?  Now's the time.  Prefer Dunkin' to Starbucks (or Starbucks to Dunkin')?  Have at it.  Because NO ONE CARES.  Now's the time to be utterly unpretentious, because your pretentiousness will yield you nothing.  NOTHING.  Because NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU DO.  Got it?  Now, LET IT GO.

The problem for editors of snarky free weekly papers dedicated to youth culture (or rebelling against The Phoenix, whichever comes first) is that their very livelihood depends on hanging on.  But at some point you start to see those white knuckles.  And this week was the week I noticed Joe Keohane's. 

It may be time for the man behind the curtain to, er, stay behind the curtain. 

The "5 Drink Minimum" theme works for college kids, the intended audience here, but unless you're Charles Bukowski, there's nothing appealing about being a middle-aged bar-fly.  Drunkenness and dissolution in youth can lead to easy sex.  That's the appeal.  Drunkenness and dissolution in mid-life leads to more drunkenness and dissolution.  And, occasionally to pissing yourself in your bed after chewing off the barkeep's ear for nine hours, throwing up on the sidewalk as you stumble back home, and passing out alone.  ALONE is the operative word here.

As for The Dig's reports from local pubs.  Most caught the flavor.  Lissa Harris's report from my local dive, the Banshee, was perfectly delightful.  But then you get to Editor-in-Chief Joe Keohane's—now there's a good old Irish name for you there—and it's just oozing and dripping with pretentiousness.  And it's not like I've got anything against Joe, God knows.  But come on, with the Dig's "Media Farm" column, he takes on the local press for their pretentiousness every week.  Could he finally have become what he despises, and not even know it?  Or does he know it full well, and he's finally ready to come out? Obviously, an intervention's in order.

Let's consider his report from The Cellar, a bar he goes out of his way to describe as "unpretentious and cheap." By naming these qualities, we assume he not only esteems them, but can accurately identify them.  But more and more his esteem sounds to me a lot like the aesthete's condescending appreciation of the rabble.  In other words, saying something is unpretentious can be, well, pretentious.  Because it can go without saying.  What Keohane wants you to know is not so much that The Cellar is unpretentious, but that he, himself, is.  His elevated consciousness of authenticity, however, reveals more than a glimmer of pretentiousness in itself. In sad fact, the pretense of unpretentiousness is perhaps the most pretentious of all pretensions.

I mean, if you're going to write about a place you're going out of your way to label "unpretentious," shouldn't you be able to write about it unpretentiously? Well, there are at least 16 instances of bald pretentiousness in Keohane's five paragraph review.  And there are probably many, many more on many, many levels.  Here's my at-first-glance list:

1) He's drinking Boddingtons, tellingly.  "Bodds" is a self-consciously middlebrow "premium import," with a 200 year history.  But it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be.  Originally made in one of those little-breweries-that-could (The Strangeways Brewery) in Manchester, it's now produced by InBev, the world's largest producer of beer by volume, and the second largest alcoholic beverage company in the world.  Talk about pretense.  Joe spews attitude about PBR, which is produced by Pabst (in Miller Breweries) and is owned by the Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, which also owns Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, Old Style and Stroh's.  I'm just saying.

2) Joe mentions "a Portuguese carpenter I know," but leaves out vital nation-of-origin information on other quirky barmates he encounters.

3) He relates a bit of their banter at the bar.  "The conversation turns to MASS MoCA," he tells us.

4) He describes another nameless "acquaintance" as "a Harvard PhD with a case of nerves over an unfinished book he's supposed to deliver to his publisher soon."  What an interesting and diverse group of "unpretentious" bar buddies Joe has!

5) He throws in a gratuitous mention of "a live bit with 'BCN," a college radio station, for which he needs to "down" a Dewars.  Damn those nerves!  When the phone interview is over, he calls it a "wrap."

6) Leaving out the W in WBCN makes it sound wicked cool, doesn't it?  It's like calling your moustache a 'stache.

7) He praises The Cellar's "unpretentious" pub grub: "a dish of warm olives," "rosemary fries," and "a braised pork panini." Whatever happened to stale popcorn and cheese fries?

8) The next snippet of conversation Joe reports has to do with "whether Harvard kids are as retarded as they seem."  (Disingenuous and pretentious.)
 
9) Mention of "the chef" follows Joe slagging off "two girls, intrigued by a Dig photographer."  Come on, Joe, isn't that why you brought him along? I mean, you've got a freakin' entourage of Portuguese carpenters, Harvard PhDs, local reporters and photographers, in your cheap, unpretentious dive, making this big-ass scene, and then when the local skanks come out of the woodwork with their PBRs you're gonna diss 'em?  Well, after telling them who you are, and what "the deal" is, of course.  (What was "the deal," by the way?)

10) I think it had something to do with the chef of our "unpretentious" pub bringing out an unpretentious "dish of cheese in oil with spices," to the delight of our ordinary, unpretentious Joes, who are bellied up to the bar, unpretentiously chit-chatting about the Huang Yong Ping Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, and the extent to which he was influenced by Pascal’s Pensées and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, while smacking away those pesky PBR drinking skanks who keep wanting to horn in on the cheese dish and get their picture taken (savages!—you'd think they'd never seen a camera, they were so intrigued by it).

11) Joe refers to the neurotic Harvard doctoral student's girlfriend merely as "his lady." Harvard's lady.  Harvard has his school and his degree to define him.  Harvard's Lady has her man.  This is pure lowbrow pretense here.    

12-15) After his fifth drink, Joe launches into what he's "pretty sure" is a "profane and incomprehensible tirade..." (three of the last four words were pretentious—so, one point for launching into this tirade, and three for describing it in said terms).

16) "...about how Vanity Fair is the best magazine in America." Gosh, is he serious?  We'll never know!

It could, of course, be that I, myself, am so out of touch that I don't realize that "a dish of warm olives" is not utterly pretentious pub fare.  The way I see it, olives belong in martinis.  But everything, from the topics of conversation, the short-hand he uses to describe his barmates—from his gratuitous mention of the nation of origin of the ethnic carpenter, to his utter fixation on Harvard, to his identifying women as either "girls" or another man's "lady"—everything not only fairly oozes pretense, but then it's wasted pretense.  Because everything: these observations, their rendering, the language, the tone—it's all so gosh-darned jump-the-shark wrong. 

What he reveals of himself is someone who understands the social-economic dynamic of Boston and its environs, can't manage to rise above it, and doesn't quite know it yet.  But we do now.  So it's too late for "don't jump!" But don't lose all hope.  There may still be time to avert the neck-bloat.