Bloody Buddha Bar

I was setting out for a walk yesterday afternoon when I noticed a new poster ad on the street. It was a photograph of a golden Buddha statue against a fond of red and yellow streaks of a darkly candlelit room with cushions and low wooden tables. It said (and I translate the German): coming soon, Stuttgart's first Buddha bar. Based on the famous Parisian Buddha Bar, situated on the most prestigious commercial high street, Avenue du Faubourg St-Honore, these trendy bars are slowly gaining the rest of Europe and the USA.

http://www.altes-schuetzenhaus.de/

I find the idea of this sort of bar fascinating. Not because it's inherently different from other bars, after all it's just another place to sit and drink alcohol, but because it needs the association with Buddha. Once again, religion slips unnoticed into our everyday lives to show that even though we think of ourselves as 'progressive' atheists, we secretly love our religion.

The concept of the Buddha bar fuses the spiritual with the practical. Religion while-u-wait. These dimly lit bars (like the minds of the people within them) have become the trendiest haunts of metropolian bourgeoisie. As they can often afford to set up in the most expensive commercial streets of capital cities like Paris, London, and now even smaller ones like Stuttgart, the owners are clearly confident that the recipe is effective. Sit a few statues of Buddha into your trendy trip-hop playing bar, and it becomes an indispensible pilgrimage for the trendy thirty-something middle class movers and shakers. The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's account of the irreverant facetiousness of medieval pilgrimage, in which he denounces the hypocricy of the pilgrims' efforts to buy redemption. The poets of 2005 should write a poem to denounce the irreverance of unfaithful bar-crawlers who drink in these temples of consumerism without a care for the true meaning of their pilgrimage. True redemption for your sins of under-consumption can only be earned in the holiest of holy drinking dives: God speed the Buddha Bar.

In Paris, L.A. and now Stuttgart, Buddhism seems wholly adaptable to the world of the cosmopolitan drinker. A famous piss-up joint named after the prophet of moderation (who calls upon us to resist the aggressive impulses of the material world) doesn't even surprise us any more. But perhaps there is a reason for our lack of surprise. Perhaps the golden statue grinning at the barmaid with his suggestive squint doesn't shock us because our supposedly multicultural society is actually fundamentally (and fundamentalistically) Christian.

I would love to help set up a 'Jesus Bar' right next to Stuttgart's new chic cocktail-dive. I could borrow some old statues of from German churches and put them on a snow white background, so drinkers could experience the trendiness of their faith while-they-wait (purgatory?). I could adapt some 'lounge music' (there is a novel to be written on this term; it suggests that categories of music are determined by interior decor) to Gregorian chant or Sunday hymns. Since hip-hop is now fashionable (as long as the rappers only insult one another and not us), I could mix some fat tunes with 'Glory Glory Hallelujah' and serve 'Metatrons's Manhattan cocktail' or a 'Mount Sinai Special Sasparilla' to give that special biblical desert feel to my new bar. Perhaps hallogen halos for weekend hen nights? (alliteration is always good)

Having revisited the website, I find that there is a questionnaire in which the first lucky winners can win a New Year's trip to Bangkok. Without irony it asks:

WAS IST DIE BUDDHA LOUNGE?

	Ein Gummiboot
	Der Name des hawaiianischen Außenministers
	Der angesagteste Chillout Heaven in Stuttgart

Translation:

What is the Buddha lounge?

- A rubber boat (????????)
- The name of the hawaian foreign minister
- The coolest... (you got that bit)

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The Buddha Bar is a work of genius of modern marketing. It taps into the Zeitgeist of the 21st century, knowing that we want religion fed to us in trendy, expensive cocktails, provided it is not our religion. We can borrow the Gods of other faiths for the space of an evening to adorn our party with their novelty and coolness, a little like when black slaves were fashionable in London's Victorian parties. It is a hilarious example of how nonchalantly we accept the commercial enslavement of non-Western tradition, and still have the nerve to claim we are multicultural.

But come for a beer in my Jesus bar when it's set up, and I'll show you how to really raise hell.