Closing Time, 2014

I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there’s nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
And I missed you since the place got wrecked
and I just don’t care what happens next
Looks like freedom but it feels like death
it’s something in between, I guess
It’s closing time ~Leonard Cohen

Before I quit drinking, I spent many an hour in pubs and clubs and bistros, enjoying a beer, a glass of wine, or a shot of single malt.

When I wasn’t occupying a table in the corner, composing maudlin lines of poetry or journal entries, I enjoyed helping friends and strangers to hold up the bar. At those bars — plain, ornate, rough-hewn or polished (one of my favourites, it turned out, made from the same recycled Douglas fir I use to make my picture frames) — I have contributed to solving all the problems of the world. It is not my fault that the world did not cooperate, in the light of day.

I romanced and repelled, made friends and enemies, wrote drivel and the odd revelation, not to mention a number of these blog posts. And I made a few good photographs.

Since I’ve eschewed the common social lubricant of garrulous intercourse, business and pleasure, I’m spending little time in public houses. I do hope that the proprietors of those places survive the shocks of Covid-19 and the loss of my business. Do you have any idea how much money I’m saving?

I was introduced as a child to the social merriment of drinking establishments by way of my father, who entertained in British clubs. I went on to do the same in Canada, starting in my teens, sometimes on the same bill with my father’s act.

Inspiration in this genre of photography, with its antecedent in the paintings of Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, came to me via Brassaï’s photographs in Parisian nightclubs and bordellos, Andrē Kertēz’s candids in Budapest and Paris, and Robert Doisneau, whose famous Le Baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss) earned  him accolades, and a lawsuit when Jean and Denise Lavergne erroneously claimed they were the couple in the photo. French law, unlike US and Canadian law, which allows photographers to make photos in public places, awards ownership rights to persons in the photo.

In fact, Doisneau posed the photo with willing young lovers Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, after the photographer had seen them embracing on the street, in the City of Love. According to Doisneau’s daughter, the false accusation and court proceedings cast a shadow on the final days of her naturally shy father. “He died of sadness, ” she said.

Alcohol, until the recent legalization of weed, has been the approved “bonding drug” at social gatherings. Every “tea-totaler” will tell you how much pressure there is to join the party. “Just one won’t hurt.”

I haven’t tried it, but I’m guessing that sidling up to the bar and ordering a Shirley Temple will not gain entrance and trust with the elbow-to-elbow gathering down at the local.

Blending in, which has never come naturally to me, is important to candid photography, especially when toting a huge DSLR like the one used to make the photo above. So, it is likely to exist as one of the last of my pub life pictures.