★ = bar inside a thrift store

NOOOOO, le Palace of Industry est mort!

"However, what I seem to have made is a bar that sells some treasures on the side, when what I set out to do was to make a shop that sells some drinks on the side. I had no idea when we first opened that we’d eventually be open till midnight, have 4 beers on tap, & that I’d be booking DJs & events 5 nights a week-and it’s been amazing, and fun. But in the end, my heart is in finding and purveying the treasures, and I’m going to be moving on so that I can do that, and only that."

The irony, of course, is that Cristin was a really good bartender! I don't know anything about the gals taking over the space (the former Palace will re-open at some point as the Lost and Found Lounge, and Cristin is taking over Flutter, on Mississippi Ave), but they have some fukkin shoes to fill. I've been in maybe three other joints that could go toe-to-toe with the erstwhile Palace in being really welcoming and yet making every patron feel like a member of some super-cool secret club.

(What was the Palace, you ask? This was the super improbable thrift shop bar that I first found on the 2011 Serial Park run.)

( The relevant map, which I think we left in the boiler room back at the old place. )

Anyway, I liked the joint a lot, although I didn't make it up there that often, and I really regret missing the farewell party. Good luck to everyone involved.

(Also, there may be a vacancy in the PDX ecosystem now, if anyone's feeling opportunistic. I don't know of any better way to nudge a customer toward that vintage dress or jacket purchase than a $5 champagne/lavender/lemon twist cocktail.)

(no subject)

Via dreamwidth_meta comes this article about Tumblr's David Karp. It is about the most New York Timesy thing I can possibly imagine. Did the reporter even bother to talk to a single Tumblr user? Does he personally know any? WHO KNOWS. Let's tell a story about some dude being special and quirky. With a tangy ambiguous moral edge involving advertising. YEAHHHH. Unf. Something something something West Village.

Anyway, that reminds me I still want to write my Hey Let's All Talk About Tumblr For a Few Hours essay one of these days. I've been using it off and on for the last year or two, and it's one of the oddest and most subtly frustrating tools I've ever seen, and I remain honestly a little afraid of it.

EDIT: On the way home, something occurred to me: Nora Ephron totally called this one in one of the forwards to Wallflower, in which she said something to the effect of: when she was working on one of her early magazine jobs, for some at-the-time tragically disregarded rag (I can't remember, was this Cosmo? Or was that a different job?), she would get assigned a profile of someone and end up unable to cadge any fucking access. So she'd have to do some actual reporting, chasing down ex-associates and peripheral figures, hashing through public records, digging up dirt, assembling cultural context, and then if she actually managed to get fifteen minutes with the subject she would damn well make it count.

The above-linked useless article is a perfect example of the toxic influence of access. Note that it contains no actual reporting or assemblage of context.

EDIT AGAIN: Whoops, never mind. Via granulac comes something even New York Timesier and even more idiotic. (No, this has nothing to do with Tumblr, but damned if I'm going to give that link its own tweet.)