Just don’t go home mad.Booze has been marketed forever as a high impact spirit , designed to get you real inebriated, in fact quite drunk, and the faster the better.If people actually drank responsibly, the companies themselves would be seriously impaired. There is a certain appreciation at the higher end of the price scale, say in the connoisseur and rarefied strata of single malt scotches and certain cognacs, but for the most part the idea is basic mathematics: volume X %alcohol X time elapsed. In other words getting drunk as a performance sport. That means, to invoke the principle of non-benign, or potentially non benign consumption and all its volatile potentials and pitfalls.One could say it about the destination and not the voyage, of being, but not being in the present…
“The Face on the Bar Room Floor was Chaplin’s first attempt at parody, satirizing a popular Hugh Antoine d’Arcy poem of the same name. The poem, which was well known to 1914 audiences, relays the story of a vagabond who enters a saloon and begs drinks off the barflies in exchange for telling the tale of how he was laid low. According to the drifter’s story, he was once a great artist, but he turned to drink after the girl he loved ran off with a fair-haired youth. After relaying the narrative, the vagabond sketches a picture of his beloved on the floor of the bar and falls upon it dead.”…
Read More:http://www.boozemovies.com/2010/03/review-face-on-bar-room-floor-1914.html
Despite the realization that alcohol is a drug and a depressant, it retains a central role in American culture. Alcohol is said to “cue” the transition from work-time to playtime ; in this context, alcohol is a suitable symbolic vehicle for the ritual transition from work to play because “it is already segregated and separated from work, it is an index to the appearance of a night-time attitude”, in addition to charged symbolic meanings. Alcohol is associated with”time-out”, with recreation, festivity, fun, spontaneity and the dissolution of hierarchy: it “possesses a meaning in contrast to organized work.” Thus the stop off at a bar on the way home from work, institutionalized (and commercialized) as the ‘cocktail hour’ or”happy hour”, or the drink taken immediately on crossing the threshold of the home, “embodies the symbolism of a time period between work and leisure . …
There is no doubt that heavy marketing establishes thirst, preferably as indiscriminate as possible, and maximum consumption without tippling over into increased regulation. Its easy tax money for governments. Beyond that, there is a certain ethos that we are drinking the country, or part of its aura, when we down, say a Glenlivet, or a Canadian Club. But when the image is less …
“One unknown genius invented a ritual involving a shot glass, a salt lick and a lime wedge, which had the dual benefits of promoting heavy consumption while masking the bone-rattling bad taste of many tequilas on the market. Pop culture did its part too: U.S. newspapers carried accounts of tequila-fueled deviance in Mexico, and Billboard hits like the 1958 pop number Tequila by The Champs evoked the drink’s allegedly hallucinogenic effects…. There have been attempts to bring Tequila in from the saloon and over to the drawing room, but the process seems bewitched by an identity trap and crude national stereotypes that have imposed themselves on the back of the very divisive illegal immigration issue and the low income status common among first generation citizens. Also the imagery of the drug war has lent a whole urgency to the act of imbibing tequila.