Cocktail Renaissance:  The Re-emergence and 
                 Re-Invention of the Cocktail Way of Life

Richard McKewan


	Back around 1990, at Boston's Paradise Club, during an evening billed
as the "Tiki Wonder Hour," a then-unknown band called Combustible Edison
seemed one huge anachronism.  Dressed in white tuxes and frilly shirts
and wearing gold chains, the band seemed from a time- warp, featuring
vibraphones and doing songs like "Cry Me a River."  Between numbers, the
band's frontman, known as "The Millionaire," read out the First
Manifesto of The Cocktail Nation, which stated in part:  "We, the
Citizens of the Cocktail Nation, do hereby declare our independence from
the dessicated horde of mummified uniformity - our freedom from an
existence of abject swinglessness. We pledge to revolt against the void
of dictated sobriety and to cultivate not riches but richness,
swankness, suaveness and strangeness, with pleasure and boldness for
all."  In the eight or so years since the Millionaire's proclamation, an
entire cocktail lounge culture has arisen, complete with lounge fashion
and style, lounge music, and an entire lounge aesthetic; "lounge" was
transformed into an adjective.

	In my paper, (1) I examine the rise of the contemporary cocktail lounge
culture, (2) I try to pin down what precisely is meant by "lounge" (as a
noun, as an adjective, and as an aesthetic), and finally, (3) I point
out some feminist, post-colonial, and racial critiques of "lounge."

	Since the cocktail is fundamental to the ontology of the cocktail
lounge, I begin my analysis by examining the cocktail itself.  Within
the American imaginary it has been endowed with a surfeit of meaning,
and therein lies its symbolic power.  In the words of "The Millionaire,"
the cocktail "is one of those elegant symbols where the very sight of it
means something, and the more you think about it, the more aspects you
discover that relate to everything."  In my paper I show how the
cocktail's ability to "relate to everything" comes about by means of
profound ambiguities ^× the historical ways in which the cocktail has
simultaneously marked, for example, class and criminality, the social
and the individual, civility and licentiousness.

	Second, I examine how the cocktail and its ambiguities become embodied
in the cocktail lounge.  Like other drinking establishments, the lounge
offers an escape from the demands of daily existence.  Kavadlo contends
that the lounge differs from bars and taverns in the way that it
"promotes its form of escape by utilizing a combination of virtually all
of the sensations and emotions."  Using this formulation as a starting
point, I try to develop a sensorium of the lounge drawing on historical
accounts of lounges and my own experiences in them.  I focus
particularly on music, since the current revival has, to a large part,
centered on (and been marketed through) music.

	It is through my analysis of the lounge as a space that I try to come
up with a definition of "lounge" as an adjective, an aesthetic, or an
overarching principle.  While I do make some headway in describing
"lounge-ness," in the end I get little further than a tautology: 
"lounges define lounge-ness" and "lounge-ness defines lounges."  At
first this may seem totally not-useful.  However, according to the
Second Manifesto of the Cocktail Nation, the "Doctrine of
Inauthenticity" states that inauthenticity is the "active principle of
the exalted state of fabulousness . . . That a thing is the original is
no guarantee that it is the best.  That a thing is not ^Ņreal' does not
mean that it is ^Ņfalse'".  What could be more "inauthentic" than an
entire aesthetic based on a tautology?  I link this privileging of
inauthenticity to the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the
cocktail.

	In the final part of the paper, I articulate some critiques of the
lounge revival.  The historical period that the revival "emulates"
(i.e., late 50s through early 60s) was virulently sexist, racist, and
homophobic.  These biases surface most noticeably in some of the lounge
music that has been "re-discovered" from this period, albums entitled
"Afro-desia," "Rituals of the Savage," and the like.  In formulating a
response to would-be critics, I cite the Doctrine of Inauthenticity just
mentioned.  The lounge movement does not "emulate" a sexist, racist
past.  It doesn't "emulate" anything, for emulation would imply some
sort of privileged "original" that one is trying to approach.  Rather, a
newly re-imagined and newly re-invented lounge is what is truly
fabulous.  I would hope that this new lounge could be freed or absolved
of the evils of any perceived antecedent.  However, I realize that
hiding behind a postmodern screen of irony fails in a certain way to
address the critique.  In the end, all I can do is chalk it up to yet
another ambiguity of the lounge's quintessence, the cocktail.


Richard McKewen                 *  "Phallologocentrism was the egg
rqm9261@is.nyu.edu              *   ovulated by the master subject,
Dept of Performance Studies     *   the brooding hen to the permanent
Tisch School of the Arts        *   chickens of history."
New York University             *                    --Donna Haraway
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