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| Domino | sprorgnsm.bandcamp.com |
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Reflection is sacred. It is to be done alone, in the company of a private mirror, a scrying ball, a purpose-shaped pool. Away from the reaching eyes and grasping hearts of the world.
Except actually no it’s not. That's super dumb. There are reflections everywhere. Just pop down to your local bar.
Beloved and well-worn, oak and brass threaded with split and rust, ancient light fixtures tinged slightly but not unpleasantly yellow. Nowhere to be found is anything as cold or clinical as a colour palette or a design guide or even the slightest evidence of unifying theme. Friendly mismatch.
Between the even-keeled tap shadows and the oddly-arranged stools, a spilled puddle of refreshing carbonated fizz slinks across the bartop, behind which a dozen twins stick handles upon handles to shelves upon shelves, shining gummy in the multi-coloured bottle dapple. With unseeing eyes, a goofy faux ungulate casually spectates a game of pool. Cracked balls are encouraged by splintered cues across a faded table of green once-fuzz, tilted noticeably in the direction of a jukebox. Behind the lacquered wood sits a proud collection of three warped vinyls: the Avalanches’ bricolage Since I Left You, Massive Attack’s spindly Mezzanine and Daft Punk’s funkstravaganza Random Access Memories. On the next table over, a forlorn little prawn sits alone and forgotten in a solitary smear of salsa.
It’s warm and inviting and familiar. A golden glow of safety and security. An old pair of pyjama pants for the soul.
These are not signs of neglect, but signs of life. Proof that real people have sat here and stood there and misunderstood the nature of charcuterie all over the squelchiest and most discreet corner of the carpet. Proof that this place is, if nothing else, a footnote in the minds of countless strangers, bound together by a sticky gossamer strand of location metadata.
It was people who decided that wiping beneath the whisky and the wine was time that could be better spent imbibing it, people who in their exuberance accidentally ripped open the thinning pool baize, people who turned an eye that was not so much blind as selectively focused.
It was at least one person who found themself compelled to tip heavily for badly scratching Mezzanine. And it was probably the same person who, fortified with liqueur, demanded that ‘Intertia Creeps’ be looped the whole night long because it is such a damn banger.
This person was definitely not me.
Reflections are everywhere: in ceramic and vinyl, in glass and plastic, in our fickle friend ethanol, and in the faces of twoscore co-passengers on tonight’s journey of delight and drinking.
For the bar is not its decorations and fixtures and accoutrements. It is nothing more or less than its patronage, engaged in a patchwork of conversations about everything and nothing: an upcoming business trip Tokyo, resentful ruminations on the nature of power and fame and glory, a heroic saga of fiction spun around the aforementioned cold wet prawn. Fragments of people woven together by a million knots and splices and adhesives and transitions: the clamour of laughter at a well-timed pun, the cheer of crowd on an ancient television displaying a decade-old match, a faint tootling of perturbed traffic from outside, the joyful chirrup of a phone, everywhere bubbling and frothing and spilling over with life.
For thousands of reasons, and for none at all, the bar has come together as one.
Food for reflection.