Weekly bon mot

"The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes."

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Sunday drinking poem

This is a scribbling from quite some time ago, but I suppose my post at the start of the week on the affront of being asked to leave a bar brought it back to mind.

When your pockets are empty
And your credit is shot;
When the room starts to spin,
Faces floating around you;
When you can't rise from your stool,
Can barely hold up your head;
When you open your mouth to speak
But each sentence sounds like one long word;
When you're the last person in the bar,
And the dawn's not far away;
When they just won't serve you any more –
That's when you think that you've only just started;
Though, in truth, you've probably had
A bit too much already.

Great Drinking Songs (10)

After making mention the other day of that great rollicking Northern Irish folk song, The Belle of Belfast City (also known as Tell Me Ma), I couldn't resist posting it as this month's 'Great Drinking Song'.

This is a version by the late Kirsty MacColl (no video, unfortunately). It's quite rare to find it performed by a woman - odd since the song, in part at least, takes the woman's (young girl's!) perspective.

And here's another version by the band Gaelic Storm. I'm pretty sure the Dubliners have done this too, and I think Van Morrison recorded it with The Chieftains, but I haven't been able to find those versions yet on YouTube.

Aha, further investigations have turned up this charming (but rather brief) very early clip of The Dubliners performing it - and cheekily changing the lyric from Belfast to Dublin.

And this is a lovely (though sadly incomplete) performance from The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

HBH 96

Moments of insight

Arise on the seventh drink,

Or on the fourteenth.

It is the curse and the blessing of drinking, the blessing and the curse, that we sometimes achieve these terrible moments of clarity - and then forget them again.

Music of the old country

The lovely accordionist, Zoe Wang, has, it seems, been cultivating her interest in Celtic music. She's now put together a group of like-minded Chinese musicians (guitar, fiddle, bodhran - and I'm told they have a tin whistle-player too, though absent on this occasion) to play traditional Irish and Scots folk tunes - the ideal bar music. They've been playing together for a while now, but I think Wednesday's performance at Salud might have been their first public appearance (the first that I've seen advertised anyway; they might have been doing a few stealth jams at places like Jianghu).

Indeed, it was at Jianghu just before Christmas last year that I first heard Zoe and her boyfriend play The Pogues' A Rainy Night In Soho. I got even more emotional during yesterday's show at Salud (where Rainy Night had apparently been the first song of their set, and I managed to miss it; but they did it again as an encore - just for me!), dreadful Plastic Paddy that I am sometimes. There's something wonderfully desolate about this music, with its themes of colonial oppression and lost love and inescapable doom - it somehow sings the cold and damp of windswept moors into your bones. On this occasion, there was a further overlay of nostalgia for me, because they played The Belle Of Belfast City - one of the tunes that Scottish folk trio Yard Of Ale always plays during their week-long residency at The Guildford Arms in Edinburgh, during the Festival in August (one of my favourite bars, one of my favourite musical evenings, one of my favourite cities, one of my favourite events - I really, really miss not having made it there this year).

More on The Guildford, perhaps, on another occasion.

Bar birthdays

Congratulations to the 12 Sq M Bar on Nanluoguxiang, which passed its 1st anniversary yesterday.

I happened to have been tipped off about this imminent celebration at the start of the week by the lads who run Ned's, a new Australian bar a bit further up the street. It seems there's quite a little Australian quarter establishing itself at that south end of NLG; I hadn't realised on my handful of previous trips to 12 Sq M, but apparently it's a side project of a Greek Australian businessman [I stand corrected: Mr K tells me his ancestry is Hungarian - not sure how that works with his decidedly Greek surname! And he's only a tour-leader-turned-office-manager with the travel company, not the head honcho...] who heads up an adventure travel company (the charming Chinese lady who usually tends the bar there is his wife) - so, between his employees and the inevitable 'Aussie mafia' he's got a good ready-made core clientele. Not that they can cope with too many customers at once. The bar's name is straightfowardly descriptive: they have only 12 square metres of space (and probably over a third of that is taken up by the fairly large bar). They proudly boast of being "Beijing's smallest bar", and jealously compare the floorspace of any new bar openings in the 'postage stamp' bracket (the similarly diminutive Ned's is, they assure me, at least a couple of square metres larger - even without their tiny [and not currently in use] upper floor). Their previous attendance record (inside, at least; they can spill over into the street on a really good night) was 25, set on Australia Day last January. They were hoping to break that on Wednesday night, although it was still a bit quiet when I looked in mid-evening. I'll have to check back in a day or so and see if they made it. I figure they could probably squeeze in 30 or so, at a push.

Perhaps I'll offer a fuller review at another time. I've long had the beginnings of a soft spot for the place. The service is friendly, the prices are reasonable, and they have a much better than average selection of imported beers. The crampedness of the space is winningly cosy, and - unlike almost all the other bars on that street (which are either coffee-shop twee or industrial-minimalist sleazy) - it is a proper bar: dark wood, low lighting, bar stools. Unfortunately, they don't often seem to have many customers.

And the place is at the wrong end of the street for me: I rarely venture that far south.

However, with the plethora of new bars that have opened up down there this year, I am tempted to revive my oft-discussed, oft-postponed plan for a comprehensive Nanluoguxiang Bar Crawl someday soon........

The Way It Is

Every night in a million different bars, in almost every country in the world, a sour-faced barman, impatient to shut up shop, will try to dislodge the last lingering customers stubbornly glued to their barstools by calling out, "Haven't you got any homes to go to?"

And always one of the late-staying drinkers will rouse himself to mount a token resistance on behalf of his fellow barflies and meet this taunt with the stock reply, "But this is my home." And then, as often as not, he will pause, and sigh heavily, suddenly recognising in this plaintive little quip a bitter kernel of truth - that this place is more a 'home' to him than anywhere else.

That's how Beijing has been for many of us expats over the years - not quite a real 'home', but certainly something akin to a favourite neighbourhood bar: always an entertaining place to hang out; friendly, comforting, reliable; a ready source of diverting conversation and like-minded company; and yes, a space somehow removed or insulated from the tiresome responsibilities of the workaday world - or the world that we've tried to leave behind in our countries of origin. Plus, of course, the drink is very cheap.

And then there's the added appeal that Beijing really is a 24-hour city: there's always somewhere you can go for company and conversation, food and drink. They never send you home earlier than you want to go.

And so, for the last several years, many of us have been having the time of our lives: on the go 24/7, constant stimulation, almost limitless fun - a non-stop party.

And then, at the start of this Olympic year, the sour-faced barman started reminding us that this isn't our real home, that we're no longer welcome here, that we should make ready to leave. It was bitter indeed to realise that this place we have come to love does not love us back, that we are not necessarily all that welcome, that our tenure here is ever precarious.

It is not so much the lack of a party vibe around last month's Olympics themselves as the fact that we expats have all had to face that threat of arbitrary expulsion in the last year, and that we all know many friends who've had to leave, which leaves me feeling so flat and jaded now.

But that was just a temporary blip in the Beijing experience, right? Everything should be more or less back to normal in a few more weeks. All this Olympic 'security' nonsense can be forgotten, and buying our visas will once more be an inexpensive and hassle-lite routine.

But what is the post-Olympic Beijing going to be like? What is expat life here going to be like from now on? So many of the foreigners working here in the last few years were employed in fields specifically related to the Olympics: architecture and construction, sponsorship and PR, security and hospitality consultancy. These people are all moving on. Many of them have left already. Many more - people like me - came here in the last 7 years primarily because we were fascinated by the idea of witnessing the reshaping of the city in preparation for the Games; and 2008 was thus always - at least in some vague, unspoken way - a likely terminal date for our stay here. Many of this group, too, have left, or will soon leave, or are searching around somewhat forlornly, somewhat desperately for a new reason to stay.

And the 'next wave', the new expats who'll be coming out for the first time over the next few months, the ones who didn't give too much of a damn about the Olympics and the transformation of the city they have triggered, but are hoping to be a part of a continuing economic boom here - what of them? Well, I don't think there have been any sightings yet - because it's still next-to-impossible to get visas. In a month or two, they may be arriving in droves.

It will be interesting to see what lies ahead for all of us. At the moment, there's a kind of vacuum, and a sense of hopeful anticipation mixed with a slightly anxious uncertainty.

The year ahead, I think, could be a very good one. It will almost certainly be quite different from the last few we've known.

I really don't mind too much how it turns out, just so long as that miserable git behind the bar doesn't try to send us home early again.

How not to run a bar (No. 778)

Or, Rickshaw fucks up AGAIN.

I complained a little while ago that the Stella Artois at Rickshaw has been all but removed from the early evening Happy Hour, since it is now offered at a paltry - thoroughly vexing - discount of just 5kuai per 500ml glass.

You wouldn't think they could do anything to make this nonsensical and irritating policy worse, but...... over the past few weeks they have introduced a new 15% surcharge on everything. This is not advertised anywhere, as far as I can see. The staff do not alert you to this fact when they take your order. They are unable to explain the reason for it when challenged. I have heard it conjectured that it is intended as a 'service charge' - which is pretty rich! 15% is kind of high for a service charge. And the service at Rickshaw is notoriously wayward. And it's hard to justify a service charge on drink orders only - especially when you've served yourself at the bar (paradoxically enough, the waitresses are much more alert and attentive when the place is moderately crowded; when business is slow, they invariably slide into a bored torpor and gaze vacantly into space for minutes at a time). No, I think this must be a pure-and-simple Olympic price gouge. And it appears to have backfired on them bigtime, because the place was fairly deserted the two or three times I looked in there during the Olympics.

This stealth surcharge is particularly infuriating when you are drinking Stella on Happy Hour, because 15% happens to be - almost exactly - the amount of their puny Happy Hour discount on this brew. In fact, I think they should have given me 5mao back on each drink. But they'd forgotten to do this, or miscalculated on my first two drinks, and so, when I made to leave, they solemnly tried to present me with 5mao change on a 105kuai tab. 5mao!! Unbelievably fucking STUPID! I told them to keep it.

I've seen a couple of other punters get similarly exasperated over this outrage. Unfortunately, there never seems to be anyone around with whom to take up these gripes any more..... presumably because the owners are all too busy counting their money over at their new uber-successful venture, Saddle Cantina.

Rickshaw now rather has the feel of an abandoned child, and it is, I suspect, about to make a rapid slide from mediocrity (on a good day) into utter crappiness. I shan't much miss it.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for August

Posting on the Barstool last month, despite a certain preponderance of emphasis on Froogville, kept up to its typical average with 40 posts and nearly 10,000 words.

Froogville set a new monthly record (mainly thanks to the Olympics, of course) of 76 posts and some 26,000 words. I promise not to overdo things so much again, honestly. Let's all relax and cultivate other hobbies a little more this month......

Visitors numbers seem to be increasing slightly, with new log-ins in the past week or so from Santiago, Lima, Helsinki, Hong Kong and Adelaide.

Bon mot for the week

"It doesn't matter if you call the glass half-full or half-empty;

it was a very short pour."

Froog

Another little jibe at the Olympics? Possibly.

A Chinese drinking poem

Mountain Drinking Song

To drown the ancient sorrows,
we drank a hundred jugs of wine
there in the beauty of the night.
We couldn't go to bed with the moon so bright.

Then finally the wine overcame us
and we lay down on the empty mountainside -
the earth for a pillow,
and a blanket made of heaven.


Li Bai (701-762)

The wonderful world of Chinglish

I just posted this little item on Froogville about Tsingtao beer's special Olympic website, www.cheers-china.com.

It's worth giving a shout on here as well, I think, since, well, beer is one of my major topics over here on the Barstool. And also Chinglish.

You see, despite the fact that Tsingtao is now an international company (strategic partnership with that other great producer of gassy horse piss, Budweiser, so I believe), with millions, perhaps billions of dollars in annual revenue, and is increasingly seeking to sell its products all around the world.... for this major Olympics-related online promotional effort it has spent not one cent on having a native English speaker (or even a competent non-native speaker) polish the copy on the "English-language version" of the website. The English is just horrendous; but amusingly so - it's worth spending a minute or two looking around the site, for the cheap belly-laughs it will afford. (Correction: There is actually some decent English on the site [although occasionally prone to a certain floridness of style: check out the 'History of the Olympics' section!], although it's a struggle to get to it since the titles and menus are so bad. And my jibe that the company had spent "not one cent" on native-speaker polishing may in fact be true: I know one of the guys that contributed to this, and I gather he hasn't been paid yet!)

The banner that greets you when you first click on 'English' is the comprehension-defying:

"Chinese never have condensation like this time."

Eh??

The Zen Drinker

At the start of this week, I quipped morosely that I only made enough money "to stay drunk".

It was, of course, just a throw-away line, a neat aphorism; it was not intended to be taken seriously. However, one of my 'drinking companions' pitched in, in a rather moralising vein, seeming to imply that this statement was further evidence of my alcoholism or 'drinking problem', along with my famous imperviousness to hangovers. (Initially I misidentified who this commenter was, supposing that this was a pot-on-kettle attack by an associate of mine who really does have a drinking problem.) Since I write about drinking so much on here (and since I am an unashamed fan of - occasionally - drinking to excess), it is only to be expected that I will attract such attacks once in a while. It's not the first, and I don't suppose it will be the last.

It prompted me to mount a defence of my drinking. I feel it had a lot of good points in it, so rather than leave it languishing in the obscurity of the 'comments', I thought I'd reprint it here.

*****************

I was kidding about the "staying drunk" thing. I meant I have enough money to get drunk-ish whenever I feel like it..... which is a few times a week (and can cost as little as a couple of bucks each time). Hence, the fact that I spend a lot of time in bars or restaurants does not mean that I enjoy any very significant level of financial security out here. That was my point.

My "no hangover" thing isn't really about "staying drunk"; it's about mental attitude and pain threshold.... as I think I've discussed on here before. After an occasional very heavy night out I might feel just a little fucked up; but I've been really fucked up in my life, so I know it ain't all that bad: I just shrug it off, ignore it.

I am a "serious" drinker in a different way than is commonly intended by the use of the term. I'm almost 'Zen' about my drinking. I recognise that it is an important part of my life, and I genuinely enjoy it - in, I think, a very pure and non-destructive sort of way. I enjoy the places it takes me to, both geographically and in my headspace; I enjoy the people I meet through it; I enjoy the conversations we have, and the ideas it helps to birth.

I don't drink to hide from realities or inadequacies, I don't drink to try and drown my demons, I don't drink out of self-doubt or self-loathing. I'm a "serious drinker", not a "problem drinker". There are very few of us around.

Of course, it's a fine line between the two, and I may cross over it one day.... but I don't think so. I have an 'exploratory' personality, not an 'addictive' one. It's the difference between riding a rollercoaster and driving your car over the edge of a cliff. A lot of drinkers have that 'crash & burn' impulse in them; I don't.

Highlights of my Olympics

As a balance or contrast to my recent Boyce-bashing, "Olympics? Bah, humbug!" post, I will now record just how much fun I had over these past few weeks.

The Elements of a Fun Olympics:

My Top 8 Moments of the Beijing Games

1) Watching the Opening Ceremony in Room 101.

2) Wading through ankle-deep torrents of water with The Choirboy during a stupendous downpour as we made our way to the judo venue on the USTB campus.

3) Watching the Lin Dan v. Chen Jin men's badminton semi-final with a gaggle of Chinese guys on the sidewalk opposite the US Embassy.

4) Watching the climax of the China v. USA Women's Volleyball match next to the chuanr stall by 2 Kolegas.

5) Watching a bunch of little Chinese kids ecstatically playing in the fountains on the Olympic Green.

6) Watching Usain Bolt's storming 100m victory on the little TV behind the bar at the Pool Bar.

7) Watching the thrillingly close final of the Men's Volleyball..... in the comfort of my own living room, with some chips'n'dip.

8) Watching the Closing Ceremony in Room 101.

Yes, that was about it. And alongside these moments of joy, there were many, many moments of extreme suckiness too: the absolutely undrinkable pint of Tiger I was served at Bar Blu, taking hours to get back home from the Olympic venues, CCTV failing to broadcast the bronze medal match in the Men's Football at all, the Holland House's outrageous decision to show hockey rather than athletics on the final night, the Goose & Duck cutting the athletics coverage just before the final two events, the local fans' tiresome devotion to basketball to the exclusion of almost all else.

No, not really a great Olympics experience, overall.

HBH 95

Changed - but charm lingers.
An old friend revisited.
Jianghu once again.

I've been neglecting this cosy little courtyard bar for the past couple of months, so it was great to have an excuse to look in again last night. Alas, there's no music on at the moment, and the place was pretty much deserted (although saxophone god Li Tieqiao did drop in to hang with a few of his muso buddies); but it's still a very mellow place to while away a few hours.

Not so much FUN

I was only mildly annoyed by "Beijing Boyce's" first "The Olympics are going to be such fun!" piece last month. Since then he has parlayed this attitude into a lifestyle, a career, becoming a kind of Da Shan of the bar-blog world - grinning ecstatically and spreading his "fun" gospel to anyone who will listen. This I am finding really irritating! I suppose I should just stop reading him. (Hm, yes, that would be easy enough.)

Mr Boyce seems to have had a whale of a time this past couple of weeks. Because he appears to have had no 'day job' to distract him and was able to go Olympic 24/7. Because he was able to get plenty of tickets to events. Because he was able to rub shoulders with a number of athletes/celebrities (but only by hanging out in the sort of nightclubs I wouldn't be caught dead in, even if Lolo Jones herself invited me). Because he's become a kind of D-list celeb himself for the fortnight, courted by several overseas reporters for a 'Beijing is FUN' quote.

I don't at all begrudge Mr Boyce his moment in the sun. I'm glad that he had fun. I've never suggested that it was going to be impossible to have any fun during the Olympics in Beijing. Heck, I even managed to have a little myself, here and there. But it's all a matter of perspective. I'm definitely of the school that says: "Hey, that glass was at least three-quarters empty."

I am quite confident that London in 2012 will be way more fun (even though I dislike London, and consider it one of the least 'fun' cities in the world). I am absolutely sure that Barcelona and Sydney were way more fun. I suspect that even Athens (which suffered many of the same problems of over-zealous "security", disappointing visitor figures, and local apathy) was quite a bit more fun.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the Beijing Olympics were way more fun to experience in just about any major European city - and probably in many other places in Asia, Africa, and the Americas too. Just about anywhere would have been more fun than here.

Amongst the reasons why the Beijing Olympics were not much fun:

1) A large number of my foreign friends had been driven out of the country by the ridiculous visa restrictions introduced this year.

2) A large number of Chinese - including most of the regular staff at several of my favourite small neighbourhood restaurants - have been driven out of the city because they couldn't get the requisite hukou (residence permit).

3) A large number of people - both Chinese and foreign - just got so fed up of all the hype and hassle surrounding the event that they chose to quit Beijing voluntarily for the month of August.

4) Aside from athletes and journalists etc., the number of foreign visitors was tiny - perhaps only one tenth of what you'd expect in a typical August. There just weren't any big crowds anywhere.

5) The local Chinese were pretty apathetic about the event on the whole. Football and basketball enjoy a big following amongst the young. A few other sports - like badminton and table tennis - have traditionally been very popular here. Most of the other competitions produced boredom and incomprehension in the domestic audience. I base my observations on what I found people watching outdoors, when shopkeepers had set a television on the sidewalk for passers-by to gather round (the most fun way to experience these Olympics, in my opinion): opening and closing ceremonies, yes; basketball, yes; football, table tennis, badminton, pretty popular; volleyball, (surprisingly?) not so much; everything else, just about no interest at all (not even in the diving and gymnastics, in which China did well; certainly not in the swimming and athletics, in which it did not).

6) Chinese street life - for me, the single greatest charm of this country - was largely suppressed. Bars and restaurants across the whole city were prevented from putting tables and chairs out on the sidewalks as they usually do. Street food vendors were banished. It's become next-to-impossible to buy a jian bing (a kind of sweet/spicy pancake with an egg and crispy waffle filling), for heaven's sake!

7) The live music scene was suppressed, subdued. The feared complete shutdown of live music venues did not happen (though outdoor music events have been outlawed for pretty much the whole year!), but they've suffered so much disruption and intimidation recently that the programmes they put forth this month were extremely pared down - hardly any gigs of note. And one of my favourite spots, Ritan Park's Stone Boat Bar, has been prevented from staging concerts all summer.

8) Apart from the occasional knot of people watching something on a TV outside a restaurant or xiaomaibu, there's really been very little open-air enjoyment of this Olympics. The handful of big outdoor screens set up around the city rarely attracted much of a crowd, and I gather they stopped operating some of them during the daytime because of the lack of interest (I wandered through the new Sanlitun mall complex, The Village, one evening when China's women were playing volleyball - and found only a couple of dozen people watching the big screen there, and very half-heartedly at that). During the last Football World Cup, every bar in the city bought additional TVs, some got fancy projectors, and many set them up outside; almost every game drew large numbers of fans to watch. That just didn't happen this summer - whether because bar owners didn't think it was worth their while, or because the police discouraged or forbade it. (I don't know how the worldwide TV viewing figures compare, but here in China I'm quite sure that the Olympics is nothing like so big a deal as the World Cup.)

9) The authorities repeatedly soured the atmosphere with a string of petty (and not so petty) repressions and PR disasters: fibbing and faking elements of the Opening Ceremony (I thought this was pretty trivial actually; but the culpability lay not so much in the original decisions as in the subsequent PR handling of the stories); reneging on promises of completely liberalised Internet access; attempting to 'cover up' or downplay stories about the murderous assault on American tourists in the Drum Tower and the crippling of one of the dancers in an Opening Ceremony rehearsal; haranguing (and occasional roughing up) of reporters and photographers who tried to report things other than the sport; the arresting of people foolhardy enough to apply for 'protest permits' (including a couple of grannies sentenced to 're-education through labour'); and the attempt to stonewall through the gymnastics age-faking scandal.

10) Boyce cites a handful of bars and nightclubs where good times were to be had during the Olympics. This rather overlooks the fact that 98% of the other venues in the city were pretty much DEAD this past month. And even at Boyce's award winners, I suspect the "fun" often had not that much to do with the Olympics; places like these would probably have enjoyed some bigger nights, higher times in any regular August.

No, all in all, these Olympics were a big disappointment. We've all spent the last 7 years hoping for, looking forward to THE BIGGEST PARTY IN HISTORY - and it just didn't happen.

I have elaborated a little further on this theme over on Froogville too.

My China Crisis

I just got back from a bar where they had a bunch of flyers for some upcoming theatre festival. It's all in Chinese, so I'm lost - except for the headline/slogan, which seemed so frighteningly appropriate to me (and to many of my foreign friends here) that I felt I had to record it immediately:

Leave before getting old

Am I just an 'Inbetweenie'??

Reflecting on yesterday's post where I complained of how none of Beijing's bars really seem to suit me, it occurs to me that The Goodies may have identified my problem some 35 years ago, with their song The Inbetweenies (I think, perhaps, their very first single).

I do find the younger crowd rather crass and vacuous these days; but I'm not yet ready to join the ranks of the middle-aged expats, who really are a bunch of sadsacks, for the most part. I suppose my official age (I wonder if He Kexin would tell me where she gets her passports made) puts me in that middle-aged bracket now, but in my head and heart I still feel much younger (twenty-somethings these days, alas, don't seem to have much to say, or at least not anything that I can comprehend or take much interest in). I try to position myself mostly with the still-zestful mid-30s/early-40s segment of the population..... but that's a fairly slender demographic.

Anyway, here's The Goodies' song. I couldn't find them performing it on Top Of The Pops, but this is a good recording - accompanying an amusing montage of micro-clips of Graeme Garden (the 'boffin' member of the trio) from the show.

Now, sing along with me:

Too old (too old!)- to be a teenage idol!
Too young (too young!) - to be a mother's pet!
Are we (are you?) - just the Inbetweenies
Everyone tries to forget?

I also rather like the later line:

Oh, we can compete with the best
So long as you give us a rest.

You might also want to check out (oh, the bizarreness of YouTube!) this version of the song, lip-synced uncannily convincingly with a Japanese high school anime.

This, by the way, was Post No. 800 here on The Barstool. They just keep on coming, don't they?

I don't like bars

A somewhat shocking realisation, given that I spend such a large amount of my time in them!

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I do not like the way bars are in China (although I find increasingly that I do not like the way bars are in the UK either.... and it's been a while since I checked out the scene in the States; although the DC/Alexandria area where I usually hang out is not particularly well served, I think - far too much trendiness going on!).

I do not like bars that chase the young'n'trendy crowd by trying to be discos or nightclubs (Kai, Bar Blu, Kokomo, etc.).

I do not like bars that are full of fat, middle-aged, affluent, "Yellow Fever"-afflicted expats (The Den, The Tree, Goose & Duck, Maggie's).

I do not like would-be upscale cocktail lounges (Centro, Q, i-Ultra Lounge, Zeta).

I do not like bars with fucking stupid names (Minty, Lugar, Siif..... and, of course, Centro, Q, i-Ultra, Zeta, etc.).

I do not like bars that look more like coffee shops (the standard model for China: see the Houhai and Nanluoguxiang areas passim).

I do not like bars with KTV/Filipino cover bands (i.e., the whole of that Sanlitun North strip).

I do not like bars that think they can charge anything approaching Western prices.

I do not like bars that think they're so fucking hip and cool and trendy and full of "beautiful people" that they can charge more than Western prices (Suzie Wong's, Song).

That really doesn't leave very much. I suppose that explains why such an overpriced charm-vacuum as Paddy O'Shea's actually manages to do quite well.

In all my time in Beijing, there have probably only been a couple of dozen or so bars that I've had any time for at all, and only a handful which have inspired real affection in me. And the majority of these have been chai'd - or suffered changes of name and ownership, or an inexorable decline in standards. These days I spend about 90% of my free time in just two bars.

I should consider myself lucky: many Chinese cities don't have any decent Western-style bars (I'm still looking for one in Shanghai!).

Another maudlin exchange

I appear to be in the grip of a 'post-Olympics depression' already. Or perhaps it's my ongoing mid-life crisis reasserting itself after a couple of weeks of comparative buoyancy (and non-self-reflection)......

Late on Sunday night, after all the Closing Ceremony ballyhoo was concluded, I came up with the following bitterly philosophical insight.

Me: "I'm fed up with being poor."

Drinking Companion: "You make enough money to live well."

Me: "I make enough money to stay drunk. It's not the same thing."

Bon mot for the week

"It's amazing how grimly we hold on to our misery, the energy we burn fueling our anger."

Matt Dillon (as Henry Chinaski in the film Factotum, based on the novel by Charles Bukowski)

In search of that Olympics 'buzz'

A search that went on most of this past week or so.... and proved entirely vain.

I hear Kokomo's terrace drew some good crowds, but I've never been much of a fan of the place - the clientele a bit too young, the prices a bit too steep.

Nearby Saddle Cantina was also doing pretty well, I gather; but they only had the one screen (a huge projection on the whitewashed wall of the building opposite their open-air deck), so not much variety in the coverage; and, I suspect, given their predominantly American crowd (and predominantly raucous, young Americans, which can get to be a bit of a pain), that they were probably showing most of the basketball games, to the exclusion of anything else.

The rather larger and nicer roof deck at Bar Blu seemed to be attracting only a scant handful of people, even on their extended Tuesday evening 'happy hour'. Maybe that's because their prices are so high, or because their beer is disgusting skank. At least they'd managed to locate an Anglocentric satellite channel that was highlighting British performances.

Most other places around Sanlitun and Tongli were deathly quiet. Huxley's new place, Tun, seems destined to be a white elephant, and even his old favourite Nanjie has been very slow over the summer. Rickshaw, too, was pretty much deserted the couple of times I dropped in (perhaps they can thank their ridiculous 15% Olympic surcharge for that!). The newer bar street on Nurenjie was even worse: when I cruised by there last Saturday, there were only about half a dozen punters on the entire strip.

Perhaps all the custom - what little there has been in this tourist-starved August - was being siphoned off by the big sponsors' venues (one has to suspect that the real reason for closing all the clubs and restaurants around the Workers' Stadium was to placate these commercial interests). Budweiser had set up a huge 'Bud House' on the East 3rd Ringroad. The beer, apparently, was free. But this is Budweiser we're talking about, for Christ's sake: that's not really much of a draw. I think you'd have to pay me to drink that shit all night. Not that I got the chance to check this out anyway, since admission was by ticket only and the tickets were being distributed at the Olympic Village - a nice little 'private party' for people involved in the Olympic industry, locals not invited.

The Holland House exhibition area (sponsored by Heineken, and thus colloquially known as The Heineken House) just up the road at the Agricultural Exhibition Centre was originally intended to be similarly exclusive (only Olympic pass holders or people with Dutch passports were supposed to be eligible for admission), but it wasn't attracting big enough crowds, so they threw it open to any old Tom, Dick or Harriet. I had heard a few people say that there was quite a good atmosphere here, but I was a little sceptical; some people, I fear, equate a good vibe with mere numbers. There were apparently some large crowds showing up there later in the evening, after the events had finished, but it was a pretty lousy venue for trying to watch the Games on TV (only two screens: one large one in the small outside courtyard, where there was hardly any seating; one huge one inside, but at the far end of a long, narrow room, and again with very little seating). It was a pretty lousy venue, period. It was a beer tent, for heaven's sake: cheap carpeting, minimal decor, large echoey spaces, tacky temporary serving counters rather than comforting hardwood bars - utterly, utterly charmless (although the snack stalls were offering something that looked enticingly like a Gregg's sausage roll; I resisted the temptation, but enjoyed the brief nostalgia-wallow anyway). And fairly crappy beer, dispensed in tiny plastic glasses, for an exorbitant 30kuai a pop - no, thank you!

The preponderance of Dutch in attendance wasn't a help either; not that I have anything against Dutch people per se, but they didn't have many medal contenders, and so weren't engendering much in the way of audience enthusiasm. About the only sport they have a strong interest in is hockey, so there were a few dozen people there early on Saturday evening - to watch Holland go down to Australia in the men's bronze medal match. However, such is the Dutch enthusiasm for the game that the organisers had opted to show the Germany v Spain final afterwards - rather than any of the evening's athletics! Galling.

This unfathomable programming choice by the Dutch forced my companions and I to head further east, to the new Goose & Duck, out beyond the 4th Ringroad. It's too far away to have a chance of ever becoming more than a once-in-a-blue-moon destination for me, but it has a hardcore following of long-time expats from its previous incarnation opposite the West Gate of Chaoyang Park - it is, I suppose, one of the longest-established sports bars in Beijing. Its new location is huge, and quite well placed to draw in the more affluent expats (who tend to favour the east side of town, nearer to the airport); also, being just off the 4th Ringroad, it was conveniently mid-way between the main Olympic venues in the north and the expensive international hotels around Jianguomenwai in the south, and was thus becoming a popular stopping off point for what few Olympic tourists there were.

And they have lots and lots of TV screens, and a full range of satellite channels - so it should be no problem to watch the athletics there, right? Perhaps even on an English-language channel? Well, er, NO, actually. The new site is continuing the old one's tradition of using dopey, underpaid, poorly trained staff who have no idea how to operate the TVs. And there were only a handful of satellite channels available, none of which appeared to be showing the Olympics - so we were stuck with the shite coverage on Chinese terrestrial TV. We were barely even able to enjoy that. Two of the three screens in the main bar area were showing F1 qualifying, although no-one was actually watching that. The manager, alas, did not have his helpful head on this night; he was preoccupied with a large private party upstairs who were impatiently waiting for a South African rugby international to begin - and he actually cited that as his excuse for cutting the Olympics coverage in the downstairs bar completely: even though the half dozen other people there with us were all intent on the Games, at about 9.30 all the TVs switched over to the rugby; and then no-one seemed to know how to switch any of them back.

We thus missed the climax of the Women's High Jump and America's world record-setting performance in the Men's 4 x 400m. Beyond galling!

I generally take these dismal customer service catastrophes quite philosophically; but my gal pal DD, a huge Olympics fan, completely lost it. We pretty much had to put her in a straightjacket and bundle her out of the place.

Thank heavens for Room 101 on the way home, where I was able to watch the evening's highlights again and catch up on most of what I'd just missed. I have ended up watching most of these Games there, in fact. Good beer, reasonable prices, a friendly welcome, and a big screen right next to the bar (although it is only bloody CCTV - they've lost all of their satellite channels); no big crowds, but there are usually one or two familiar faces in there, and almost always a few newcomers too. It's a good atmosphere, and conveniently near to my home. Sanlitun? You can keep it! Crappy sports bars? Who needs 'em? I've got everything I need right here in the 'hood.

Great Love Songs (9)

This is another of my favourite songs by Tom Waits, Downtown Train from his utterly brilliant 1985 album Rain Dogs.

I have only two things to say about this. Well, perhaps three.

I would give anything to be able to play the guitar like this (I'm not sure who's playing on this, actually. Is it Marc Ribot?): deceptively simple, but the phrasing, the tone are sublime. I get shivers down the spine every time I hear it.

Rod Stewart should be arraigned by the International Criminal Court for daring to cover this.

Anyone who doesn't dig this has no soul.

Enjoy.

A life in six words

Blog-buddy and recovering Beijing-ren Leah recently tipped me off to Smith Magazine's competition for Six Word Memoirs.

A nice little time-waster. I haven't made a submission yet, but my opening effort (in a comment on Leah's post) was:

"The happy hours are too few."

HBH 94

Under constant fire
One shot after another
It's not safe out there

As if it's not bad enough that every Wednesday is cheap shots night in my local, Room 101, now, the boss has taken to treating me to random slugs on other nights as well. This has been a heavy week.