Fun at the Art Museum.

The other week I had to go to some offices in the basement of the art museum for preliminary paperwork, because I'll be teaching a class at the associated art school in the spring.

The basement offices were no frills, full of dingy gray walls and no decoration and white lettering-on-black nameplates outside offices, but when I left and passed the packing room, there was all these big cardboard boxes sitting around, and some people putting gigantic paintings into them.

On a sidenote, I heard it's typical for instructors at the art school to swear a lot.  One former undergrad I talked to said this Scottish sculptor woman she had her first class ever with was like "Feckin' this!" and "Feckin' that!" on her very first day of class.

"I was like this," she said, making a gesture showing how wide open her eyes were.  "I was only eighteen and it was my first day of college!  But, I got used to it pretty soon."

Newtown Shootings: My one British friend's take.

The other day I ran into my one (half-British) (half-Sudanese) (Muslim) friend at the gym.

"Did you hear about the school shootings?", he was like, and when I said yes, he said, "All those children were white, and so was the gunman, I really wonder if this is a white cultural thing.  They always say it's a male, he had mental problems, but they never mention that he's always white."

"Gun violence affects young black men, too," I was like.

"Yes," he was like, "But you don't see them going into places and shooting a ton of random people up."

I then said that he was using the term 'white' very loosely, as if there was a unified white culture across space and time.

(He's into anthropology, and likes it when people make points like that.)

"You know," he was like, "You're very right, I should watch what I say.  It's only Muslims who are always the baddies everywhere."

Bar Numbers are simply unreal.

On Tuesday I got up to 1094 bars (yes, 1094, that's not a typo).

These numbers are just getting to be unreal; if I didn't have a logbook of bar names, I wouldn't believe it myself.

Bar problems...

The past month, I've been very surprised when I walk around the city, to see that easily 10 bars have recently closed that I had already been to.

Add that to other bars I've noticed, and that makes 15-20 bars that have closed since I began my project.

I wonder how many others there are out there that I haven't even noticed - and, more importantly, how will I ever know, since the bars are so scattered around the city, it's not like I'll pass by every one again?

Another Bar Low.

I forgot -

On a long night of barhopping like 3-4 weekends ago, I stopped through this Polish bar out by the airport that looked like a chalet, and had a lot of union decals slapped to the inside of the front door.


As I was halfway done with my beer, the (younger) Polish guy next to me got up, leaving like a quarter of the beer left in his very large stein.

As I sat there drinking more and more, the waitress never cleared his glass, even though he had obviously left.

Just as I was about to grab it, the bartender, this younger, kind of stand-offish (Polish) woman sweeps up and picks up the stein and puts it in the crook of her arm as she goes to get some other glasses.

"Wait," I was like, "Can I finish that?"

She just stopped and stared at me, then was like, "Okay," and put the beer in front me.

It was some kind of lambic, and tasted like raspberries.

Ten minutes later, the young bartender woman was back, and was like, "Here, I start to pour new keg and it is no good," and she put a small, very foamy mug of beer in front of me.

I tasted the beer, and it was sour and awful, and I drank it.

Cop corruption story.

The Mexican guy who kept buying me beers a few weeks ago was telling me about how cops shook him and his friend down last year.

They had left some bars and picked up a 6-pack and were driving home, and the cop pulled them over.

"If this is your 1st time," the cop said to the guy's friend, who was driving, "I'll let you go, if you go straight home."

The guy promised it was, and the cop ran his license, and let him go.

When they got home, the guy checked his wallet, and all his money (like $180) was gone... He had been drunk and handed over his entire wallet to the cop when the cop asked for his license, and the cop had tooken the cash.

Overall, the guy got off cheap since a DUI would have been much more expensive, and the cop knew that if he got the money, he'd make something and the guy couldn't or wouldn't complain.

Then, I told the Mexican guy about my one lawyer friend from Missouri's neighbor who's a swinger and f*cks all the cops and firemen and who gets away with stuff b/c the cops won't file anything on her, like the time I called the police on her after she drunkenly destroyed a neighbor's glass door by pounding on it with her fist.

Bar developments (2 of 2): New Bar Lows.

That night that I hit up all the Korean bars, I discovered the city's only Mongolian karaoke bar (that I know of - yet!).

It was in a row of Korean restaurant-bars (Koreans love bars in restaurants, where you eat food with friends and maybe sometimes get a drink), and was in what I was told was a Korean karaoke lounge where all "the old Koreans" go and get drunk with their bartender friend who owns the place.

So, I walked next door, and on the door is the words "Mongol Karaoke", with Mongol in Cyrillic.

But, I step inside, and it's a typical karaoke lounge, with an older (female) bartender, and like a mixed crowd of 5 clients sitting at the bar, with one of them holding a microphone and singing while looking at the karaoke screen hanging over an empty stage.

The bartender takes my order then disappears, then some woman starts singing karaoke and I can't tell who, and then suddenly the bartender reappears and drops off a bowl of peanuts in front of me and I thank her, and only when she nods do I noticed that she has the microphone and is singing, and that she knows the song so well that she went back behind the bar away from the TV screens, dropped off the peanuts, and thanked me with a nod, all while singing (and she had a great voice!) and not missing a beat.

I was impressed.

Later, I asked her why the place was called Mongol Karaoke, and she said that was just the back karaoke rooms that they rent out.

After a while, I got the story -

Some Mongolians used to drift in every now and then and do karaoke, and they'd complain that there weren't enough Mongolian songs.

So, the owner got a lot of karaoke CDs of Mongolian songs and put the name "Mongol Karaoke" on the door to corner that section of the karaoke market; the bread-and-butter of the place is still Koreans, but the Koreans know it's a Korean place and keep coming, and now the Mongolians are devoted to it, even though they usually come around on weekends.

Right after that, the bartender offered me the book and said I should sing, so I flipped through pages of Koreans songs (in that Korean alphabet) till I got to some English stuff, and I looked for a singer that would have international appeal.  I remembered that the Carpenters were big in Korea (or maybe Japan?) from a bio of them that I read, so I sang chose "Superstar".

The version was a knock-off, and I was flat, and halfway through the 1st verse, 4 of the 5 clients called it a night and left.