What you say about 'dives' and 'drunks' is mostly true. I have really run the gamut of dive bars up and down the west coast, from San Diego to Vancouver B.C. Two of those bars stand out in my memory because of the 'mix' for want of a better word. I have had astonishing conversations in bars, mostly one-way. I was a good listener. The talkers were men who had been through WWI, the great derpression, WWII, and a whole lot else. The ones I remember are the ones that stood out, for their intelligence, or for their character. But, in the past twenty to twenty-five or so years I have noticed a drastic diminution in the level of conversation in bars.
I am just old enough to remember when there was no television! As boy of seven I came home from school and listened to the "Lone Ranger" on radio. The bar patrons today mostly grew up in the age of television. Now, the bars themselves have television sets (note the plural; some have multiple TVs, either all tuned to the same station or all tuned to different sations). If that weren't bad enough, the bars I go in (I rarely go out anymore) also play extremely loud rock music...constantly, at the SAME TIME that the televisions are on. It never stops, and it's LOUD. So, those inarticulate boobs of today's generations sit and drink and stare. They can't even hear themselves think. The noise serves mainly as a counter irritant, to the pain they're in all the time. And their brains are so inept at sorting and storing the vast input of cacophany and confusion of modern life into any meaningful order that there's scarcely a store of ideas in their minds that could be converted to so much as a simple declarative sentence. Without the vocabulary to corale their confusion into any meaningful concepts, they sit there mute, or repeat of few stock snipets that serve to estblish mutual recognition, the mere presence of another blob of protoplasm in the same room.
There was a time, however, when there was conversation; and, if that isn't astonishing enough, there was sometimes facinating, memeorable, converstation, not in all bars, nor even in many bars. But...if you found the right joint...at the right time...well, let me tell you, there were diamonds in the rough out there who had seen something or been somewhere...and who could tell you something. I can remember well the faces and words of men from a time before some of you were born.
In a city the size of New York, even as it was a century ago, you may have found somewhere in the bowels of the city, down in the Bowery, a place not unlike Harry Hope's, a dead-end for the human detrious of this mega rat-cage experiment called variously, social darwinsim, capitalism, private enterprise, free enterprise, etc., a terminous for the terminal, with very revealing snitches of their memories and pipe dreams filtering through the smoke and the whiskey vapors and into the ears of a young Eugene O'Neil.
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Edward_de_Vere
18 years ago
You make a lot of interesting observations. Perhaps 80 years ago having people as articulate and interesting as the residents at "Last Chance" would not be as unrealistic as it would be today.
For one thing, people back then had to read if they wanted to be entertained -there was no TV, no loud music playing at every joint. Therefore, they would speak in complete sentences rather than little sitcom soundbites. This isn't just true of drunks and bar patrons, it's true of EVERYBODY today. I rarely hear complete sentences, much less interesting thoughts or observations even from the mouths of the college educated today.
I probably like "Iceman Cometh" for reasons other than what O'Neill intended. If I found a bar with the sort of patrons that you see in the play, I would frequent it and prefer it to the sorts of people that I meet anywhere today.
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