The Way You Say Cheapie Night

It's so awful to meet magical people on the town and then not be able to remember what they looked like a couple days later.

A ranking of all the bars I've been to in the Twin Cities:

1. 19 Bar
2. Turf Club
3. Townhouse
4. Gay 90s
5. CC Club
6. Jetset
7. The Cardinal
8. The Hexagon
9. Gladius (defunct)
10. Groveland Tap
11. any I might have forgotten; I was not wooed


19 Bar wins for a number of reasons, primarily its jukebox. If I'd ever given it much thought, The Magnetic Fields' "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" is how I would've imagined the great gay life of the city when I was 13, so the fleeting minutes during which this song played from the 19 Bar jukebox on the night of March 10, on the promise of my dollar bill, were like the past's unseen future suddenly visualized and validated. I've also been so lucky to hear Yaz's "Nobody's Diary," Belly's "Feed The Tree," A-Ha's "Take On Me," and, I guess it goes without saying, La Roux's "Bulletproof" on rare nights of social, musical and beery alignment. The name "19" may suggest some exclusive nightclub, but it's merely the bar's address on 15th Street, a reminder of its dismal and triumphant origins as a hidden gap on the sidewalks of the 1950s. There's still no sign, only a number on the door.


I'll try to mash together a new long post soon, but I at least wanted to make sure that March 2011 shows up in the blog archives. Have I mentioned how much I loved Poetry (the movie, and, on the occasion of the pure seeingness of its cinematic language, the form)? Well, I will.