After all, cool is irrelevant when you have arrived at a bar at the insanely early hour of just after 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, in the company of a fraternity “most of us wouldn’t go to a mixer with,” said Michelle Guida, 21, fiddling with her orange Hermès bracelet and gathering three straws to drink from simultaneously. “But it’s their bar tab,” said Vanessa Gilen, also 21, who did not look up from her iPhone as she sipped and texted furiously.
The women, in the pre-fall evening-out uniform of tiny shorts and four-inch heels, had fortified themselves for the outing with tequila shots at home. They sat in Level B, a basement bar on the southwestern edge of the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., snapping photos of their two $18 fishbowls (each contains a half-bottle of vodka, or about 16 shots, and a plastic animal) and texting them to friends (no explanation necessary) to coax them to hurry over before the fishbowl special ended at 12:30. The bar was as dead as a strobe-lighted library until shortly after 11, when suddenly, as if the campus bell-tower chimed at a frequency only students could hear, the place was sweat-inducingly full.
Full Article.
Wow. That's some article. I predict that it will be analyzed in a number of communications, cultural studies, freshman comp., etc. classes, now and in years to come. The main audience is clearly parents and other older adults who will shake their heads and say "these kids today,"* but there are all sorts of cultural crosscurrents: these kids aren't even acting like the good little consumers they're supposed to be and buying lots of cheap drinks in bars! Oh, but they are consuming lots of tech and even renting designer duds for photos! And don't worry, however crazy they act, they're not hurting their job prospects (the new version of "at least they're practicing safe sex," or "at least they're not drinking and driving," I think)!
ReplyDeleteAnd apropos of the last point, the multiple notes and corrections at the end are amusing. I wonder how old the reporter who was sent out on this assignment is?
*Some things, of course, don't change (much). When I was an undergrad, the drink-served-in-a-fishbowl at a Chinese "restaurant" near the campus was called the scorpion bowl. It was pink, and (I think) involved a greater variety of forms of alcohol than the one described in the story, but otherwise identical, down to the presence of various decorations (umbrellas and plastic scorpions, I believe).
Stupid article. And what exactly is this website, yet another aggregator of any article that Google spins out as being about college? What a waste of space.
ReplyDeleteI went to a SLAC in the middle of nowhere. Nearest townie bar was 8miles away, and most of us didn't have cars. The ones who did drove carloads to the nearest university 25 miles west or just over the state line to Quaker Steak & Lube (which for my money is one of the dumbest names for a bar/restaurant I've ever come across). We did the pre-game, too, so my takeaway from the article is "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
ReplyDeleteIn our not-so-little college suburb, we've seen at least one bar close every year. In at least a few cases, though, it wasn't lack of demand, but rather The Law—turns out that, if the student paper publishes an op/ed mentioning how the meet market lets you in with underage ID's, the county liquor board starts snooping and finds a few other things (like, say, fraud) that Just Ain't Right.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that these bars are absolute shitholes (and not even in the charming "some townie just put all of Zep's catalogue on the jukebox" sense) has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
You are aligning the oeuvre of Led Zeppelin to the milieu of the "shithole" bar?! Surely you've allowed the truly horrendous -- the Billy Ray Cyruses, the Black Eyed Peas of the world -- to slip your mind in conjuring this post.
Delete1. We were thinking "charming, divey, and cheap shithole," not "actual shithole."
Delete2. Not so much "slipped" as "blocked."