{"id":7022,"date":"2014-02-08T11:13:26","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T22:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=7022"},"modified":"2014-02-08T13:00:53","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T00:00:53","slug":"station-ident-exhale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2014\/02\/08\/station-ident-exhale\/","title":{"rendered":"Station Ident: Exhale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cult<\/a>
Cult Beer sign from Hashigo’s portable bar at the inaugural X-Ale<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s Sevens Weekend<\/a> here in Wellington and that makes for a massively-stressful couple of days for a lot of people in this town, unfortunately. What could be a genuinely excellent two-day tournament has descended into a dress-up party that involves depressingly-much obnoxious behaviour, street harassment, and general carnage. A lot of it will get blamed on the booze, of course,<\/a>1<\/sup><\/a> but I’ve seen too much crap even in the a.m. before the pre-loading can\u00a0really<\/em> kick in and I subscribe to the Bartender’s Hypothesis: no one really acts any different<\/em> when they’ve been drinking \u2014 they just act\u00a0more<\/em>. It’s not the drinking that makes people behave like dicks, it’s probably their own underlying dickishness \u2014 which gets let off the chain even more in the anonymity of a group costume. And I worry about how much we exacerbate the myth that alcohol\u00a0causes<\/em> bad behaviour the more we freak out about the\u00a0drinking<\/em> of badly-behaved people, anyway. But I still owe you all a long-form piece on the Moral Panic, and I’ll get back to that another day.<\/p>\n

Because \u2014 as we mentioned in the most-recent podcast<\/a> \u2014 George and I are heading to the relative sanctuary of Hashigo Zake’s X-Ale mini-festival. The bar will be closed off for a tickets-only tasting session of some pretty weird and (hopefully) wonderful beers, which will skew strong enough (as is the trend, still) that it’ll probably count as a “binge” drinking session in the hysterical technical parlance. But this is Beer Geek Church<\/a>; gross behaviour is unlikely, and wouldn’t be tolerated if it arose. Just as appalling dickishness is possible when stone cold sober, so is it possible to enjoy a heady dose of incidentally-intoxicating and delicious beverages and still remain fucking civilised. It’s really not the chemicals, it’s the character and the surrounding culture \u2014 as I, and several-dozen others, will hopefully demonstrate today.<\/a>2<\/sup><\/a> Consider it my own little protest.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1:<\/strong> Then there’s the grotesque double-dealing and hypocrisy wherein the media celebrate the event, laud its “vibrancy”, use pictures of costumed groups to sell papers and garner pageviews, and pimp the (seriously dubious) economic benefit \u2014 only to wring their hands about the “excesses”. Plus the fevered misdirection of blame at the bars in town when the Stadium itself features a level of carnage that’d see any other venue lose its license.\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/a>2:<\/strong> And then<\/em> I’ll probably just retreat straight home, because \u2014 former Courtenay Place bartender and all \u2014 I think I’ve seen more than my share of the post-Sevens mess. Though it is<\/em> tempting to head back in to town and see how the universal 4 a.m. close goes… Yikes.\u00a0\u2191<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s Sevens Weekend here in Wellington and that makes for a massively-stressful couple of days for a lot of people in this town, unfortunately. What could be a genuinely excellent two-day tournament has descended into a dress-up party that involves depressingly-much obnoxious behaviour, street harassment, and general carnage. A lot of it will get blamed … Continue reading Station Ident: Exhale<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7022"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7030,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7022\/revisions\/7030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}