The idiots at Zanzibar just look at your feet when you walk into a club. Bata, no Bata. I sorta understand pretentious nightclubs, but there’s usually a metric beyond your footwear. I mean, if you look at UNVOGUE or something modern fashion extends beyond the foot. Plus wearing shoes at all in this heat is, IMHO, the worst vestige of colonialism. I mean, the President doesn’t wear shoes, wtf. Plus girls wear slippy sandals all the time, and that’s totally kosher. I guess there’s the whole bathroom slipper thing, but Urban Thongs are urban. More to the point, pretentious clubs have something worth hearing and seeing inside, whereas here they just slap a new name on the same generational shite and maybe change the curtains. Regardless, they always have to toe tag and penis tax you at the door.

Perhaps I’d understand, but every club in Colombo is total fucking shit. Clubs in general are a bit pants, but you at least can listen to decent music sometimes, or different music. In Colombo, however, the self-conscious does and striped-shirt bucks all pile in to tiny places to listen to the same bad music over and over. But that’s not the fact which defies understanding. What’s crazy is that I occasionally pay to go into these places, scowl at the bar for a while, then flee in terror.

The Colombo nightlife was developing for a while, but then alcohol/tobacco sponsorships were banned, and the checkpoints multiplied, and law and order went to poops, and we got more Ministers and Ministers violent sons. And then the scene really atrophied. Now all they do is rename places, but it’s all the same. Nuovo is Onyx is MKOP. Zetter was something else. Sugar was presumably the servants quarters for H2O.

But not to begrudge, and perhaps its sour grapes. I don’t enjoy wearing shoes and I can’t stand the music so it’s really I who shouldn’t go. I occasionally wish there was somewhere to go, being too old for Sugar and too young for R&B. I also wish there was somewhere without 25 uncouth/unresponsive staff try to make class judgements on me while it is they who are rocking the mustaches. But I digress.

To my mind, the only things to do in Colombo now are hang out at friends places, go to wherever DJ Shiyam is playing, or – preferably – to get the fuck out of Colombo. Outstation is quite happening, and the outdoors of SL are still miles beyond any artifice of which, in the sense of art, we have none. Entertainment in Sri Lanka I think, should rely as much on the bounty of nature and as little as possible as the economy of constructed things. The economy is in the tank. Our land is not. But that’s just me. I went to Zanzibar last night, and promptly fled. The memory of nights that don’t suck is far to fresh, and I’d rather not corrupt them.

Posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 in Alcohol, Colombo, Personal, Photography, Sri Lanka.