#apple-tini

Those that hold on dearly to their White Zinfandels, Appletinis and Cosmopolitans make me realize that history is not a real force these days.  Oh, those people are stuck in the 80s or the 90s, etc. -- really?  Is that why I am subjected to irony-free Zach Morris jeans and uni-sex mullets, women who look like Pamela Anderson in her "heyday", seeking desperately the endless reproduction of cloyingly-sweet, rococo cartoon-beverages.  No, I think that common-sense psychological assessment, that somebody is stuck in time, is a result of deeply impacted belief that we are all, as individuals, as a nation, as a people, going somewhere in a historical, linear sense and it has purposeful meaning.

That person who descends upon your bar like a transcendent being, appearing from nothingness without a flicker of self-awareness, who orders an Appletini is not the psychologically-impaired person stuck in a better time, but rather, an embodied sign that speaks to the breakdown of an evolution of history and culture.  Our culture at present is no longer the Modernist progressive quest for novelty, driven by information in fields of science, but instead has gone through an implosive whiplash, moving backwards into itself from the accelerated expansion of the past hundred years.

Everybody in the here and now populates a pastiche, schizophrenic culture that consumes at random isolated pieces of cultural artifacts at any point in human history for superficial desires of contemporary formulations of coolness, happiness and identity, moving backwards and forwards.  To be hip or cool, which means current, cutting-edge, something that, in our originally Modernist period has always been a force of historical evolution, is a re-appropriation of the past with ironic styles.  Everything comes back into style.  Hipster are dressed now how I dressed when I was 5, and they are the heralds of cool.  History is dead, stuck in an endless folding in on itself.  Appletinis will never die as there is no cultural or historical force left enough to wash its neon green glimmer away.

Bartending is stuck in this world, too.  Bartenders take at random from history and culture to create and keep their drinks relevant and interesting.  In this, they try to establish a meaningful connection to their obscure spirits, beers and wines, (here enters the bar-nerd) but having an endless knowledge of a product does not establish a meaningful relationship with a product.  The endless availability of new products in a consumerist market, the globalized relationships built on sterility of economics, and the bartender's slavish adherence to distributors that build markets for their products, these are the mechanisms at work that create your bar experience; it is not the authentic experience of a foreign culture as you hoped.