Proof of authenticity

It was one late-spring evening – the kind of evening that takes you by surprise in climates that have actual seasons, the kind that’s warm enough to make you leave the sliding glass door to your balcony open knowing as you listen to the murmur of conversation, the occasional bubble of laughter and the drift of someone else’s music that your neighbors have done the same with their doors. It was an evening like this during my late undergraduate years in college when I got into one of those looping “what if…” discussions with friends. What would you do if you had enough money to do anything was the gist of it mostly because we were all sort of drunk and some of us were kinda stoned (and not sharing which still pisses me off to this day).

There were, of course, the typical college male fantasies (the mansion, hot and cold running Playboy bunnies, the fast cars and loud stereos (possibly so loud they’d blow the women’s clothes off…but I digress)). There were the travel fantasies: see the world and do nothing but soak up local culture.

Because the bulk of the group was made up of architecture students and DC was just beginning its downtown renaissance there was a lot of talk about restoring this building or that building to its former glory (there was one Beux Arts building that was a particularly favored topic of conversation).

And when it finally came around to me what was my answer? I wanted to run a salon, the kind of place where you could go and get a decent meal, sit, have a beverage, and discuss ideas. (It should be noted that at the time I was eyeball deep in the world of Kerouac, Cassady, and Kesey and the mythos of the Beats and San Francisco coffeehouses. I never looked at night time shopping the same way after reading Alan Ginsberg.)

I wanted it to be the sort of place where the chairs were overstuffed, and possibly threadbare in spots, the rugs on the floor looked like something your grandmother would pick out, and the brass on the bar shined like a mirror. The kind of place you where you could walk in, pick a book off the shelf and just read all day with your drink at your elbow.

I was reminded of all this standing in line and waiting for my sandwich yesterday (yes, I know, no one cares what I had for lunch) at Potbelly. The place is a chain, it’s true, started in Chicago and spread mostly to the northern midwest (and Texas for some unknown reason). It is purposefully folksy featuring rough hewn wooden booths, tables with tile on top of them, live music at lunch time (which can be a welcome distraction or a reason to avoid the place like the plague) and a certain general store atmosphere.

While I was waiting in line I noticed a set of shelves on the wall in the hallway that leads toward the bathrooms. Yes, books, actual paper books; hardcover, soft cover, mostly popular literature of the Tom Clancy/Faye Kellerman variety but still, books for anyone to take off the shelf and read (though probably not walk out with). And it made me wonder: where is the line between kitsch and authentic?

Where does something stop being real and start being fake? Is it in the motivation (i.e.: doing it because it’s what you want to do vs. what you think will “sell”)? Or is it in the uniqueness? Potbelly is, after all, a chain with floor plans and standard signs and a systematized way of doing things (thank Ray Kroc for assembly line food). If I walk into a Potbelly in, say, Lansing Michigan will there be a bookshelf and will it have the same things on it?

I’m not sure I have the answer but in an advertising soaked world (advertising in elevators, advertising above urinals in men’s rooms (so I’m told…most of the men’s rooms I’ve been in would have been better off featuring a sign that read “don’t eat the big white mint”)) where do we draw the line between what we actually want, what fits our needs and desires, and what we’ve been told we want? When does it stop being living and start becoming “an experience?”

Or in post-modern America are we doomed to lives suffused by “the Disney effect” where every risk is managed, every thrill predictable, and every event calculated to be just far enough outside our comfort zones to make us think we got our money’s worth but not so far that we’re forced to challenge our world view?

For my money, I’ll take the real thing every time. Dirty, messy, and unpredictable as life can be, I’d rather have authentic than pre-packaged.