The Guardian (UK)

July 1, 2003

Where the bar never closes

by John Sutherland

Modern Drunkard magazine, we learn, has hit the spot in America and is soon to be launched here. It should go down well. There are a lot of them (OK, us). What was it those government spoilsports reported a couple of weeks ago? Four million problem drinkers in the UK? No problem for the reader of MDM. You can sample this month's wares on its website (http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/ - don't try spelling it after the fourth pint). Among them is a "fantasy drinking competition" between Jackie Gleason and Charles Bukowksi (both gone to the great saloon in the sky); "Drink your Way to Fitness! (Use Booze to get in shape for more Drinking)"; "The Lush Lexicon" (eg "Beer Queer: A straight man who will pretend to be gay so as to solicit free drinks from an unsuspecting homosexual").

Drinking, we apprehend, is a barrel of laughs. Which, of course, it can be. But, as always, "follow the money". In America, thanks to its powerful temperance lobby, you can advertise liquor, but you may not show anyone drinking. Beer ads on the big TV football games cost more than $1m (£605,000) a minute - and all you can show is some jerk holding a can of Miller Lite. "What this country needs," some entrepreneur clearly thought, "is a good home for all that frustrated brewing and distilling industry loot." Voilà: Modern Drunkard mag.

What, old Sobersides may ask, is "modern" about being a piss-artist? How is Hogarth's Gin Lane different from the modern drunkard's fashionable watering holes, the Alphabet Bar and Groucho's? Don't drunks still "drop their ring" (spew, that is), ramble in their speech, wet their beds, shrivel their testicles, beat their wives, traumatise their children, cause 60% of car crashes, corrode their livers, piss their bank accounts against the pub wall and die before their time to a chorus of "Thank God" from their nearest and dearest?

Modern drunks, it seems from their new house magazine, do none of these things. They have fun, live for ever, philosophise, have great sex, and are possessed of inexhaustible wealth. To paraphrase our greatest 20th-century poet, Larkin: "Modern Drinking was invented in 2003/ Which was rather late for me."