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Authors: Jim Geraghty
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within the central processing unit of Gore’s cerebral cortex, the phrase stuck.
When Gore’s “Reinventing Government” report debuted, the Agency of Invasive Species was surprisingly unmentioned. And the following year’s budget proposal from the president urged an additional $15 million in AIS funding.
The concept of a popular culture stuck on “repeat” had been the staple of cranky commentators for years, but for a short time in the early 1990s, Americans suddenly decided that the 1930s were cool again.
An exhaustion with a few years of slacker grunge gave way to an embrace of swank. At the same time that cigarette smoking became socially comparable to ritual murder, the nation—and the capital—suddenly embraced cigar bars. Double-breasted suits and fedoras returned; all at once, the movers and shakers looked like they were running with Al Capone.
Whiskey and martinis flowed. Pints of thick stout poured. Clubs and bars played neo-swing and lounge music. It was, for many Washingtonians, the split second they were cool.
The epicenter of this temporal inversion was Ozio, a club at 1835 K Street, touting itself as the city’s “premier martini andcigar lounge” offering two pleasures that had not too long ago seemed so dated as to be socially backward.
“All this place needs is firearms,” chuckled one off-duty ATF agent.
Modeled after the Paris Metro of the 1930s, Ozio was a subterranean, dimly lit, art nouveau temple of the era’s forbidden, or at least naughtier, pleasures. Every young thing inside was experimenting with hard liquor or cigars, what one had scoffed as “the drug of the 1990s,” or at least a genuinely socially daring habit for an “I didn’t inhale” era. (Of particular note to Washingtonians employed in the public sector, hard liquor and tobacco caused no complications in obtaining or renewing a security clearance.) The descriptions of the cigars rivaled those of the most ambitious sommelier:
“Heavy, with a hint of Portobello mushroom and an overtone of a decaf latte.”
18
“Busy, yet never precocious.” “A touch of irony in its Freudian allusions, but satisfying with a deep, nutty flavor that somehow distinctly evokes prerevolutionary Havana.”
One of Washington’s tallest pundits-in-training encountered an attractive young lady smoking a cheroot and asked her, “Do you really like that thing?”
“I guess. Hmm … not really,” she chuckled as she blew smoke in his face.
He coughed. “Why are you smoking it, then?”
She replied with a you-just-don’t-get-it smirk and left him alone in the clouds.
Celebrating one year of working at the agency, Lisa, Jamie, and Ava drank away their sorrows with selections from the martini menu. They weren’t really full of sorrow; they mostly felt irritation that life in Washington was nowhere near as exciting as the movies made it appear. Hollywood had suddenlystarted celebrating political heroes in a plethora of comedies:
Bob Roberts
,
Dave
,
The Distinguished Gentleman
. Michael Douglas was supposedly making a romantic comedy about a young, crusading Democratic president. But real life was, alas, boring and full of tedious, frustrating setbacks.
“It’s because we’re entry level,” Jamie asserted. “If we were a few more rungs higher on the ladder, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this.”
Lisa examined the cigar some guy had offered her. “I think every computer in the building is, like, three years out of date.”
Ava lit her cigar up effortlessly. “Try four,” she snipped. “Everybody might as well be using abacuses. Actually, that would be easier, because there wouldn’t be any old infrastructure to work around.” She puffed on the cigar a bit, and concluded the image of a cigar was more to her liking than the actual taste. “I’m not even sure where to start, because from what I’ve seen, by the time anyone responds to my recommendations of what kind of equipment we need, it’s obsolete by
When Gore’s “Reinventing Government” report debuted, the Agency of Invasive Species was surprisingly unmentioned. And the following year’s budget proposal from the president urged an additional $15 million in AIS funding.
The concept of a popular culture stuck on “repeat” had been the staple of cranky commentators for years, but for a short time in the early 1990s, Americans suddenly decided that the 1930s were cool again.
An exhaustion with a few years of slacker grunge gave way to an embrace of swank. At the same time that cigarette smoking became socially comparable to ritual murder, the nation—and the capital—suddenly embraced cigar bars. Double-breasted suits and fedoras returned; all at once, the movers and shakers looked like they were running with Al Capone.
Whiskey and martinis flowed. Pints of thick stout poured. Clubs and bars played neo-swing and lounge music. It was, for many Washingtonians, the split second they were cool.
The epicenter of this temporal inversion was Ozio, a club at 1835 K Street, touting itself as the city’s “premier martini andcigar lounge” offering two pleasures that had not too long ago seemed so dated as to be socially backward.
“All this place needs is firearms,” chuckled one off-duty ATF agent.
Modeled after the Paris Metro of the 1930s, Ozio was a subterranean, dimly lit, art nouveau temple of the era’s forbidden, or at least naughtier, pleasures. Every young thing inside was experimenting with hard liquor or cigars, what one had scoffed as “the drug of the 1990s,” or at least a genuinely socially daring habit for an “I didn’t inhale” era. (Of particular note to Washingtonians employed in the public sector, hard liquor and tobacco caused no complications in obtaining or renewing a security clearance.) The descriptions of the cigars rivaled those of the most ambitious sommelier:
“Heavy, with a hint of Portobello mushroom and an overtone of a decaf latte.”
18
“Busy, yet never precocious.” “A touch of irony in its Freudian allusions, but satisfying with a deep, nutty flavor that somehow distinctly evokes prerevolutionary Havana.”
One of Washington’s tallest pundits-in-training encountered an attractive young lady smoking a cheroot and asked her, “Do you really like that thing?”
“I guess. Hmm … not really,” she chuckled as she blew smoke in his face.
He coughed. “Why are you smoking it, then?”
She replied with a you-just-don’t-get-it smirk and left him alone in the clouds.
Celebrating one year of working at the agency, Lisa, Jamie, and Ava drank away their sorrows with selections from the martini menu. They weren’t really full of sorrow; they mostly felt irritation that life in Washington was nowhere near as exciting as the movies made it appear. Hollywood had suddenlystarted celebrating political heroes in a plethora of comedies:
Bob Roberts
,
Dave
,
The Distinguished Gentleman
. Michael Douglas was supposedly making a romantic comedy about a young, crusading Democratic president. But real life was, alas, boring and full of tedious, frustrating setbacks.
“It’s because we’re entry level,” Jamie asserted. “If we were a few more rungs higher on the ladder, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this.”
Lisa examined the cigar some guy had offered her. “I think every computer in the building is, like, three years out of date.”
Ava lit her cigar up effortlessly. “Try four,” she snipped. “Everybody might as well be using abacuses. Actually, that would be easier, because there wouldn’t be any old infrastructure to work around.” She puffed on the cigar a bit, and concluded the image of a cigar was more to her liking than the actual taste. “I’m not even sure where to start, because from what I’ve seen, by the time anyone responds to my recommendations of what kind of equipment we need, it’s obsolete by
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