Shots of paint-stripping vodka:
A Russian nightclub.
I'm really not quite sure how that happened.....
Friday, November 28, 2008
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Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... and not lose it on the way home.
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- Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars. [* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
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- Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien, aka Myles na Gopaleen) - Ireland's funniest writer
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- Keith Richards - incomparably ravaged troubadour
- Tom Waits - the greatest singer/songwriter in history
- Auberon Waugh - famously acerbic and witty critic/satirist
2 comments:
Yes - as soon as I heard "Russian bar," I knew what was in store, and I had no desire to repeat the Harbin experience.
I always find those places rather scary. Fascinating, but scary. I'm looking out of the corner of my eye for the gangster tats.
This place we went to had the biggest collection of glitter-balls I have ever seen.
And, of course, not-terribly-cute girls dancing in Russian army uniforms. And bad covers of 'I Will Survive'. And vodka bongs (??!!). And......
I'm glad we left after 45 minutes.
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