The chap with wings there. Five rounds rapid.
I’ve spent the past few years bemoaning the gentrification of Silver Spring. How the town has lost her charm, her spice. How our dive bars have died. How we’ve been colonized by hipsters, transplants, neo-yuppies, armchair liberals, and the saccharine, mindless masses of salary serfs and condo owners. How we must endure the herpes-like sores of places like Firestation One and 8407.
Continue reading ‘The Golden Flame’
Silver Spring’s historic dive bar, the Quarry House, is dead. What it used to be, that is. The old Quarry House.
It’s taken me six years or so to come to grips with this.
Continue reading ‘Quarry House’
I set out to review The Nest, a slightly off the beaten path yuppie hangout in Bethesda, MD, but then I found myself with the same problem as when I tried to review Fire Station One in Silver Spring. The Nest, while obviously a great date spot if you’re into that noisy herd of transplants thing, is, essentially, boring. Yet another overpriced and soulless watering hole.
Continue reading ‘The Nest’
It’s time to answer the question that, I’m sure, is foremost in everyone’s mind: Where can I get a beer in Union Station at 8:30am?
And I don’t mean buying one at the liquor store, or getting one down at the weird pizza joint in the gladiator pit food court and drinking in a corner like one of the bums. Fingerless gloves, covered in ash from sweeping chimneys, drinking from a plastic cup and staring at the deaf girls from Gallaudet. That’s what I do every morning!
No, it’s time for A Touch of Class. I want to sit at a bar like a normal yuppie and be served a beer by a bartender. And I don’t want to have to cajole the bartender into doing so, or be given a judgmental stare like I just sat down and screamed, “I CAVORT WITH SATAN!” I want someone to serve me a beer at 8:30am like they do it all the time.
You’d think that, at a cosmopolitan railway station, and here at the Capitol of the Empire, bartenders would serve you in the early AM without hesitation. “Hiya Floyd, I just signed a bill that’ll murder millions. Can I have a beer?” Or, maybe, “Hiya Floyd, my motherfucking MARC train was just delayed for 17 hours because of a flash flood warning 1500 miles away in Louisiana. How about a beer? And some heroin?”
The plan: I leave home early, hit Union Station at 8:30 or earlier, find an open bar, and gauge reactions and quality of service. I’ll drink like a fish, scribble insane notes in my little reporter’s notebook, then totter to work and pretend like everything’s normal as I throw up on my supervisor’s shoes and then feverishly masturbate in the bathroom stall to mental images of the deaf girls from Gallaudet.
The thing I miss the most about Bethesda, MD, is the somewhat downtrodden have/have-not divide of the 80’s and early 90’s. Before it became a glittering jewel in the Galactic Empire’s crown.
People make fun of me when I rant about gentrification but, seriously, retards, look around you. Most days, I feel like I woke up from a hundred year sleep. Look at your space buildings! And you’ve exterminated the Spanish and the lower income people! Well, Bethesda did that long ago. Silver Spring’s the suburb with active extermination camps. But, still, what the fuck happened to Hot Shoppes?
Continue reading ‘Harp and Fiddle’
I wanted to be open-minded. I wanted to embrace Fire Station 1, Silver Spring’s newest bar. I wanted to write a good bar review. So I hit them Friday night, two hours after they opened their doors for the first time.
From a marketing perspective, good bar reviews at GS are poison. I write a bad review for 8407, and it’s as if I confessed to sodomizing the historical society’s president’s grandmother. But the dozen or so bars I’ve given a good review to go without comment. You all want to hear me go off. You all need a touchstone for your rage.
So I figured Fire Station 1 was a great opportunity to thwart you. How can it go wrong, really? They’ve spent a fortune working on the old fire station for the last year, they’ve been training their staff for weeks, the location is simply worth killing for, they have more outdoor seating than seems decent, they’re family friendly, they have two bars, and they just seem…cool.
But it can go wrong.
Continue reading ‘It’s so perfect, that it’s boring: A Fire Station 1 Review’
After nine years, I’m sad to report that the so-called “NoMa” section of Capitol Hill really sucks when it comes to drinking. I’m talking about the Mass Ave stretch…and beyond! NoMa being the wholly imaginary neighborhood “North of Mass Ave” which is Union Station and the dismal former-ghetto rolling down past the bus station to New York Avenue.
Any news item – a new bar, a closure – is exciting, and so I latch onto it in the hopes that something will break up my sad workaday life.
I hate working, see? I want to be a drifter like David Banner. Isn’t that what that show was about? Angry drunk drifter who befriends small boys?
That’s what every show in the 70’s was about, I think. Highway to Heaven! That was the 80’s, right? But that’s even worse. Two homosexuals, one big and simple and the other with a predatory intellect, travel the country in a windowless panel van taking advantage of the weak and the needy.
Sick, man.
Continue reading ‘Capitol Hill Drinking: The Cap City Rumor’
I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with my town. I’ve watched it grow up from scary urban wasteland to gentrified post-suburban neo-yuppie masturbation sock, and there’s just a little something that’s off. A sort of sanitized soullessness that breeds boredom and frustration. And hookers can fix that. Wouldn’t it be nice to walk down Georgia Avenue and get propositioned a few times? There are certainly some individuals who need a good, cheap blowjob — from the arrogant, socially-retarded president of the historical society to all of those whining simpletons who defend pretentious shit bars.
But, I will admit that streetwalkers may be crossing a line. Therefore, I propose that the next Silver Spring bar not be a pretentious shitfest but, instead, we do what Bethesda has done for their hookers. Open up a place like Tommy Joe’s, which seems to mysteriously shirk all the Orwellian laws of the People’s Republic of Montgomery County.
Continue reading ‘Silver Spring Needs Hookers’
For this final part in my randomly selected tour of Irish bars in DC, I’ll continue along the Red Line to Gallery Place, and finally Cleveland Park.
Continue reading ‘Irish Pubs of DC: A rant and a guide. Part three: The Irish Channel, Fado, and Cleveland Park’
There’s an oddity in Wheaton, MD: A Scottish-themed bar. Though the theme is about as far as it goes. The only thing Scottish about the food is that all the dishes have names like “The Nessie Fish and Chips” and so on.
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