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Cheers!
The 'CityBeat' Drinking Issue

Buzz on the Tracks
Plan carefully, or drinking along MTA lines might harsh your high

Dive Bombs
The best Koreatown bars for historic vibes, mixed crowds, and cheap drinks

Principles of Pintmanship
A pint of Guinness should be pulled just so. These L.A. pubs get it right

10 Simple Rules
No Time for a booze run? Improvise!

Zombie Jamboree
At these SoCal Tiki bars, the Rum Godswill help ease your troubles colorfully

The Literate Hangover
Feeling the effects of too much drink in story, film, and song

Don’t Use as Directed
Why you absolutely should not use cold medicine to keep your buzz going

Stardust Memories
Many classic L.A. bars are gone, but indelible moments remain

Talent Show
The Palomino, 1949-1995

Color TV
‘Report cards’ on TV’s minority representation suffer from dated methodology

Saving Tookie
Executing the reformed Crips founder would tell young gangbangers that it’s pointless to change your life

Frank Kelly Rich
The editor of ‘Modern Drunkard’ magazine on why drunks are the backbone of society

Chairmen of the Bored


Cartoon By Ted Rall


Photographs by Gary Leonard

Pinot and Paint

Lager Lager Meta Meta
Dance-floor pioneers Underworld herald a trackless future with download-only releases

Bad Reputation

Kanye’s Way
Ambitious rapper West shows his strengths and limitations at the Gibson

Meet Da New Ting
U.K. MC Lady Sovereign freshens up hip-hop with a dose of grime

Distant Lands
‘Geisha’ and ‘Narnia’ take us to faraway cultures, real and unreal

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~ GIVE IT UP! ~
~ DANCEBEAT ~

Vino on the Knife Edge
Wine dinners are a delicious way to educate yourself about what to drink with a meal

~ GUIDE ~

The Literate Hangover
Feeling the effects of too much drink in story, film, and song

~ By MICK FARREN ~

Illustration by Jordan Crane

There is only one cure for a hangover, and that is to drink a bottle of very, very dry champagne the next morning.” –Dean Martin


he plop-plop was painfully deafening, and the subsequent fizz approached pain threshold. The morning was one in which even Alka-Seltzer was an ordeal.” See? Writing about the hangover is just amazingly easy. Far easier, in fact, than writing about the drunk that preceded it. The hangover is present, lucid and indelible. With the hangover comes a terrible Edvard Munch clarity. The clarity is what makes the pain so awesome, and the guilt-wracked fog of obscured memory so dark and threatening. The idea that alcohol is nothing more than a chemical analogue of Christianity (or vice versa) becomes totally plausible. A peak of euphoria is followed by a deep vale of tears, retribution, lamentation, and the agony of the damned.

Attempting to accurately portray intoxication from the intoxicated’s point of view is hard, since drunks rarely maintain the same point of view from one moment to the next. He or she is adrift on a sea of swaying incoherence, nearly impossible to reproduce except in broken English, or small, subjective vignettes of how gravity warps out of whack. The only true grandmaster of literary inebriation was, of course, the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who could reproduce the high drunkard’s logic as well as the hallucinating hungover horrors, but Hunter was Hunter, and we will not see his like again in our short lifetimes.

The hangover may actually be so easy to write that it represents something of a health hazard to the jobbing scribe. Back in the days when I labored in the salt mines of rock journalism, I and a couple of other scribblers developed a critical technique by which we went to a show, partook of the optimum ambience, and then rated the performance by the intensity of the next day’s suffering. Maybe imprecise, but the readers understood, because these were the halcyon days when music was still measured by its excesses. Keith Moon drank cognac for breakfast, Keith Richards was still the Witch King of Angmar, and “Sister Morphine” was a communiqué from the front. Later, when too many peers became so grimly clean and 12-step sober, and health was equated with virtue, the hangover ceased to be anything to boast about. No more the next-day Jack Daniel’s hero. One risked being talked about as having “a problem,” and thus suffered in diplomatic silence. Which is never easy, especially as so many aspects of the modern world are best regarded with the jaundiced eye and toxic glaze of malevolent morning, particularly when looking east to Washington.

Best ever hangovers in literature? Alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities comes close to the fictional crest, as does musician Larry Underwood in Stephen King’s The Stand, but my personal, and admittedly highly subjective, prize has to go to the monumentally hard-boiled headache with which Mike Hammer awakes at the start of Mickey Spillane’s The Girl Hunters, when Hammer has been a down-and-out rummy for seven years but must sober up and go rescue Velma from the Commies in the Kremlin.

The choice in movies is packed with even more contenders. Obvious nominations have to go to Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, Paul Newman in Harper, and Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty. (Although Nolte is actually suffering the effects of not only booze, but also Percodan, steroids, and playing wide receiver in an NFL game.) The top honor, though, has to go to Jane Fonda as the washed-up actress Alex Sternbergen in Sidney Lumet’s The Morning After, when she confronts every drunk’s worst nightmare – that, somewhere in the density of the blackout, she has committed an unremembered murder.

Best hangover in song? Simple. Johnny Cash’s “Lonesome to the Bone”:

The sun is roughly risin’

On the roofs of Stagger town

The time for sweatin’ poison out

Is just now comin’ round

The mention of sweating poison reminds me that no discussion of the hangover is complete without touching on possible cures. Some swear by black coffee, Valium, or hot showers. John Belushi thought a Turkish bath was the perfect balm, but look what happened to him. I favor a large ’n’ greasy diner breakfast, Coca-Cola, and codeine if I can get them, but the unfortunate truth is that only two things cure a hangover. One is time, and the other – be it the very, very cold dry champagne cited by Dean Martin at the head of the page, a cold beer, a Bloody Mary, a Greyhound, a Margarita, or a suicidal Sam Peckinpah shot of straight tequila – is simply to go out (call it hobby, habit, or hair-of-the-dog) and have another drink.




Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.

12-8-05




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