8BC — Inventing Culture While Civilization Teeters
8BC. It sounds ancient, like a marker of a bygone civilization, doesn’t it? And walking into 8BC was like descending into an archeological site. You entered at street level into another world; a cavelike room with towering walls of pitted concrete, where the floor dropped away in front of you and you descended rough wood stairs to a dirt pit filled with people, the ceiling vaulting high above. The stage, also at street level, floated on the other side. Often the performers on that stage seemed to be enacting some obscure ritual; a duo cavorting in hulking masks; a towering figure with a great cloud of white hair howling a song of survival; a woman slathering gooey orange and brown slop on her naked body.
Behind the bar, which was my turf, hung an enormous painting of agonized women in Greek robes, struggling to hold up a stormy sky as wolves tore at their legs — tearful caryatids, trying to sustain a world collapsing around them. Dennis and Cornelius, 8BC’s owners, always insisted that the painting, by artist Don Herron, was just the requisite picture of a naked woman over the bar. (They didn’t have a liquor license, but they knew what was important.) The painting may have been called Civilization Teeters, but it was not a metaphor for artistic desperation as culture crumbled, not a warning vision to those of us partying amidst urban chaos. No no no. But of…
