Pho Bang ran as a weekly show for 59 weeks at Foxes, and it's now a monthly event (renamed Faux Bang) at Sit & Spin in Belltown. The evenings closed with DJ Baby J spinning the best of indie, punk, and harder new wave, inevitably drawing the whole damn audience onstage to dance with drunken joy. Their darkly funny escapades were augmented by unrestrained sets from up-and-coming bands (everyone from the Gossip to the Turn-ons). For a mere $5, audiences were treated to Ursula and Jackie's ever-evolving catalog of wretchedly funny skits, typically involving sexual deviance, slapstick violence, and any number of pleasingly sociopathic scenarios. Marcus and David have gotten their broadest public exposure through Pho Bang, a sordid cabaret of John Waters-toned drag performances, live punk bands, and superbly unconventional DJ stylings, formerly housed at the now-defunct homo dive Foxes.
PUNK GAY BARS SEATTLE ANDROID
And most specifically, I'm talking about 27-year-old Marcus Wilson and 32-year-old David Latimer, better known as Ursula Android and Jackie Hell, two underground performance artists who've spent the past 12 months rattling the Seattle music scene's rusty cages and earning themselves a following of remarkable devotion and diversity. I'm talking about the reason Lou Reed had a drag queen girlfriend during the Velvet Underground's heyday.
Ask any San Francisco or New York hipster: Drag queens are an essential part of the underground scene-and I'm not talking about a queen lip-synching to Cher in a $200 wig, while Dockers-wearing fags scream, "You go, girl!" I'm talking about genuinely subversive performance artists: whiskey-drinking, thrift-store-trash-outfitted, fright-wig wearing, Vaudeville-inspired, gallows comedians. Seattle's music scene can certainly hold its own with most major American cities: We've got the snotty attitudes, the political guts, the DIY smarts colliding with rock star struts, and more drugs than any of us would care to admit.Ībout the only thing missing from Seattle's rock landscape-until two ferociously smart young men brazenly infiltrated the scene last year-was the presence of truly unnerving, edgy, and ugly-cool drag culture. (And it felt good to send a little love their way, too.You can say whatever you want about the quality of Seattle's musical output, but no one can deny that our music community has always been rich with possibilities. The love they put into operating during a pandemic just to help their employees get by. Even though these establishments weren’t open in the traditional, save-me-a-stool sense, I still had to experience them. And I can’t come close to making the bacon-y Benton’s Old Fashioned that was handed to me in a paper bag outside of PDT ( Best Bars, 2008). Do I like martinis at home? Yes, but not as much as I like martinis at home delivered by Mister Paradise ( Best Bars, 2019). Could I make a semi-decent daiquiri at home? Yes, but it wouldn’t be as transcendent as the one I picked up from the window at Brooklyn’s Leyenda ( Best Bars, 2016). Many transitioned into makeshift to-go operations, and that’s where my saccharine “What makes a bar a Best Bar?” reasoning became honest fact.
When I returned home to New York, my favorite watering holes had started to close, with messages like “Stay Safe, See You Soon!” hastily taped to their doors. Best Bars are places you need your best pals to know about. It was at the Prince in L.A.’s Koreatown, a place that made this year’s list not only because of its horseshoe bar, red banquettes, and cocktails and Korean fried chicken-what a killer combo!-but also because I just had to share this old-school, slightly weird, still sort of under-the-radar experience with my friend Amanda. A trade secret: While we spend most of the year going to bars to compile this list, a flurry of reporting happens in the spring, right before our deadline, because (a) it’s a great time to travel and drink and (b) writers never turn in stories early.īut this March, as the trees began to bloom and the country started to hibernate, I squeezed in one last reporting trip to Los Angeles and had one final drink at a bar before the Great Quarantine.