Stain
766 Grand St (btw Humboldt and Graham)
(L Train: Grand)
Phone: 718-381-0346
Hours: 5pm - 4am
Happy Hour:
Website: www.stainbar.com
Map: click

 

They've got music most nights, literature on Tuesdays, art openings every first Thursday, and more. The jazz tonight sounds like cool, from what I know about jazz. It works to sit with your back to the players and watch the evening pass along Grand Street; Latinos resigned to the back of the bus, slow to a stop in the traffic, are pulled forward to the beat of the band--they disappear and the lights sustain the soft afterglow--don't let your fresh homebrewed Stain Red get warm. Do sit on couches and wait your turn to play, instrument cases sewn-up--or pour over your Macintosh keypad in corner, or perch in index-finger-supported repose, jacket off. Still, situated where we are, we can't avoid bowing our heads to passerby who stop and peer into the windows on their way to nightly destinations, intrigued for a moment by whatever's going on, that wasn't going on at this same place just a year ago, until they catch that smug look in our eyes, as we raise our $5 beers, and they know it's time to move on.

But it's the little details you notice later, that stay with you--that keep you there. The lampshades: to the left a large rose-colored concavity, petalled on upper and lower rims, with a zipper-line offset to its side (a corset?). And to the left a soft earth (late summer/autumn) shaded cover, pasted by wax with strands of grass. And the ghostly human figures that peek out with splotches of exposed brick under painted plaster: cultural ancestors keeping us in check; prefiguring the future. If it happened there it can happen here.     

 

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