Wine Bars

Over the past couple of months I've watched 'Beehive Hotel' slowly transform into 'Barkers' a 'wine bar'.

I must profess bias. In the 8 months I spent with no regular roof over my head, 'The Beehive Hotel' was pretty much all I sought in my life. Old, unpopular and in the middle (for a tourist) of nowhere. It kitsch style promised reasonable prices, reliable vacancy and something that if you haven't experienced it, you simply have not lived. Not at least as an animal like I did for 3 months in Europe. A bike riding chimpanzee maybe, but still an animal. What is this thing? This elusive thing? It is simply a dry place to rest your bones.

I've never stayed there, I don't know what it was like, and from a business perspective I'm sure it was a disaster made profitable for its owners only in the form of 'Capital Appreciation'.

But if there is any better physical expression of societies conforming pressures exerted on the awkward and brilliant youth to the decrepid and disillusioned elderly it is the transformation of the 'Beehive' into 'Barkers'.

Firstly take the name - the 'Beehive' is just one of those ideas that is in plain speak - bad. It says cramped, it says sticky, it says aggressive patrons. But it had a fibreglass sculpted beehive model crowning the traditional two story Victorian pub. They have removed the beehive model, and painted the whole facade a 'sophisticated' grey. And it probably is sophisticated compared to whatever tasteless colour had adorned it before. Then to match the bland sterile sophistication of grey, they named it 'Barkers' which isn't like 'Barking Mad' or anything, it's just the name of one of the streets its on.

The makeover in effect has been one to remove any distinguishing points where one may assert the building has a personality, where one could actually imagine what its patrons would be like, what they would drink and what volume they would speak at. And that is probably the distinguishing design point of just what makes money.
It isn't so much that the building has a 'sophisticated' personality now, it simply has none, because if something has a personality you have something to latch on to, or more crucially, something to take offense at.

Think if you will of a concrete sidewalk, if you can, and then try to imagine the kind of people that walk on it. This is the patron of Barkers.

Then of course, it occured to me, just recently that there are 'Wine Bars' now. Initially I foolishly thought, what a good idea, because previously people had to drive all the way out to wineries to enjoy wine. But then I realised this statement was a falacy. The advent of the 'wine bar' is not some long dormant market waiting to be exploited.

There was a place a winelover could go on a friday night and enjoy by the glass or bottle fine wines from various regions. It was called a 'bar'. Wine bar is not in fact something more, but something less. It is a special kind of bar for what it lacks, not for what its gained. Unlike a cocktail bar, one was able to get reds and whites even at irish pubs. No a wine bar clearly says to me 'a pub with no bear' to drive precisely the old slim dusty crowd off into the dusty netherworld.

Because those beer drinking swine also may cause offense, and offense doesn't make money. Placating and brown nosing makes money.

But I take offence, I take offence at their offence. That venues appealing to a blander individual can line their pockets with money while those that dare to say something, to be somebody go under. There's no blaming, but it does make me feel distinctly unwelcome.

Infact I could blame myself, I don't drink beer so contribute nothing to keeping interesting pubs open. But fact is I'm tired of this society that turns out sophisticated Eunuchs, the sheer ballslessness of Barkers Wine Bar strategy fly in the face of the old 'risk = profit' mentality. But I can tell it will be a raging success, because it will be filled with people who will spend money and revel in what a fucking 'clean' and 'stylish' place the old Beehive has become.

These people I have always felt spend money because they have to. They have to spend money because if they didn't there would be no point to earning it and if they didn't need to earn their money their lives would be meaningless.

Which reminds me of something I read of Bertrand Russell about the inevitable death of life on Earth some millions of years hence 'although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation'