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human interaction of working in an office," says Chris Tokunaga, a freelance graphic designer. "I get my social fix at Murio's, because I know everybody in the place and the bartender has my Pampero and Coke waiting when he sees me come through the door." For many, the dive, with its homey décor and community roots, offers an authentic, human experience difficult to find in today's technology-dependent world.
"I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future. I needed an isolated place to hide. Skid row was disgusting. But the life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death."
- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
We live in a culture of success, where health and beauty are prized above all else. Legions of white-collar professionals hit the gym before work, get Botox treatments at lunch, and participate in 12-step programs at night. The body and the mind must be fit, the bank account swollen, and the eyes wrinkle-free. The dive bar, on the other hand, eschews this self-help, fitness-fetishized culture that strives for physical and emotional perfection. Instead, the dive encourages eccentricity, acting out, and self-destructive indulgence, which makes sense when you consider its heroes (the crazy old man, the drunk, the belligerent brawling writer). In the dive, therapy is not an option, alcoholism is not a disease, and the only exercise one needs is a leisurely stroll to the commode.
The popularity of dive bars can be viewed as a reaction to a slick, over-processed world of homogenous strip malls and faceless warehouse super stores. People are longing for something beyond big corporation cookie-cutter establishments, and the dive serves this up in spades. It goes back to authenticity - The gritty, unpolished nature of the dive offers a rare excursion to a place weathered by the touch of human experience. People flock to these bars because they are a dirty mess, and they revel in their imperfections. Some of the best dives can be found in industrial areas, near docks, factories, or any place that employs working class toughs. After laboring for long hours, these blue-collar men are looking to relax their aching bodies and numb the pain with a stiff drink, or seven. Perhaps it is this connection with working class culture, now viewed as authentic, which accounts for the popularity of dive bars among "the elite." Yuppies and white-collar workers may wile their days in tidy, sanitized cubicles, but a trip to the neighborhood dive can serve up a mighty refreshing glass of mud.
In his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There , political journalist David Brooks describes the new establishment as, "highly educated people who've got one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success." These bourgeois bohemians or Bobos, according to Brooks, have successfully combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving 80's into one social ethos. Even Wall Street tapped into this in the mid-1990's, when The Gap used Jack Kerouac in advertisements ("Kerouac wore khakis"), and Nike co-opted counterculture heroes William S. Burroughs and Dennis Hopper. But this has created something of a dilemma for the Bobo. Though they admire art and intellectual pursuits,