Les Cafes Des Artistes

Dallas isn’t Greenwich Village, but parts of it try to be. You’ll find the greatest concentrations of people who wish it were hanging out in the Deep Ellum area near downtown and the Fair Park area, but there are clusters of them all over town. Tip: if you really want to fit in, wear lots of black, dye your hair maroon-all the other good colors are already taken-and comb it in the direction that feels most unnatural. Then try to look Oppressed. As the evening progresses, fall back to Just Terribly Jaded.

Stale Bar. State Bar is so far out on the cutting edge you’d better take along a box of Band-Aids. Here’s how totally beyond cool it is: when the pony-tailed bartender gets up from the booth where he’s been reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for just long enough to get us a drink, he gets shot right in the head with a laser beam! And does not even feel it! And the customers don’t even notice! Can you dig it? Shoot, that kind of thing happens here all the time. There are four such beams prowling the walls at State Bar, apparently in search of bar codes, inching along perfectly out of tempo with the asynchronous, atonal “Yoko Ono Hits Philip Glass with a Drawerful of Cocaine Spoons” type music.

You can bet that nobody in here named Philippe or Wilhelm is going to get nicknamed Phil or Billy. And don’t look for anyone to order pig’s feet and a shot of bourbon while asking the score of the Rangers game. One nice thing about the State Bar: when you pull out a pad and start writing down profundities such as these, nobody notices because they’re doing the same thing.

The Lounge at the Inwood Theater. With all the black fixtures, neon trim, glass bricks, and the hologram of Marcello Mastroianni presiding eerily over the urinalesque, unfunctional streams of water chuckling along the walls, you know the joint has to be a magnet for folks who like for folks to know they speed-read Sartre: women who design and create earrings that are big enough to drag a horse straight to the bottom of the pool, and the men who wear them, and their dealers. The staff is not exactly-straight out of Bennigan’s, either.

Bar of Soap. This place is reasonably hip without getting right up in your lace with it: any bar that has “American Pie” on the jukebox- the bartender’s favorite-can’t be just too cool for school. The bartender does speak serious English English, but he can’t help it, he’s from Bristol. The nice touch is the work of local- make that nearby-artiste decorating the walls, and for sale on consignment. Some of it’s quite good. All of it’s interesting.

Club Dada. This is an eclectic little joint where young would-be hipsters come to unload some of dada’s money. You’ll hear conversations like this: Musician: ’’Read in the paper there’s only about twenty guys making a living doing studio gigs. ” Other Musician: “Yeah, it’s all one guy on a synthesizer. I don’t think one guy will have the same concepts as five guys working together. Unless he’s, like, Beethoven, you know. “

Making it worth checking out is the broad spectrum of entertainment given a venue here. One night it might be Maggot-faced Scumsuck-ing Bolshevik Bowlers from Heck gracing the stage, and the next, troubador-songwriter Ben Johnson playing his gentle, thoughtful ballads.