A rant on cool, in The Inlander.
Booze ain’t what it used to be, or maybe it’s more what it used to be than ever. And it’s everywhere — bottles set out in a Seattle boutique, for example, where you’re invited to mix yourself a little something while trying to figure out what this store actually sells. Plant cuttings, buck knives, $500 skirts. Carefully curated vinyl by bands you love, bands you might now have to hate, their albums so desperately and so effectively branding this dress shop/haberdashery/greenhouse as cool. There’s poetry, too (isn’t this place itself a kind of poem?), Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” stacked with the cocktail hardware. You read a few lines and wonder if you’re looking for “the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” or if you simply want a vintage martini shaker.