Professional photos of the bar

The photographer who took pictures of us for the Onion article was nice enough to send me a bunch of photos from her shoot, which all look really nice:

Saturday twilight poetry!

Pacific Standard Reading Series: The Prequel
Featuring Ciaran Berry, Abby Chew, and Claire Cheney

Saturday, September 29 -- Reading begins promptly at 8:00 PM.

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

http://www.pacificstandardbrooklyn.com./

Directions:

Pacific Standard is located at 82 Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, between St. Marks and Bergen Streets. It's a short walk from a dizzying array of subway and commuter rail lines at the Atlantic/Pacific station, namely, the 2, 3, 4, 5, D, N, Q, and R, as well as the Long Island Railroad. New York subway map. After you exit the Atlantic/Pacific station, just walk four blocks south on Fourth Avenue to get to our bar. We're not too much longer a walk from the F and G stop at Bergen Street, and are also close to the B61, B63, and B65 bus lines.

Readers:

Ciaran Berry is een jonge dichter die woont op het verlaten platteland van Noord-Ierland. Or maybe that is the other Ciaran Berry, not our scribe of bog-orchid, moth, and death-wish piano moving whose first book, THE SPHERE OF BIRDS, will be released this spring in North America by Southern Illinois State University Press (as the winner Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition) and across the sea by Ireland's renowned Gallery Press. You've read his poems recently in most all your favorite journals: Crazyhorse, the Missouri Review, AGNI, and The Threepenny Review. Hailing originally from the Northwest of Ireland, Mr. Berry currently teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

Abby Chew, the internets tell us, often visits you in your dreams, asking politely to borrow a cup of sugar, a towel, your dog-eared copy of Richard Hugo. In these dreams, which are her poems full of bears, coyotes, auto-repair and lost gloves, you are reminded of the time when "Oolie threaded his bird-bear-body through the gap between night and morning./ He said the mourner's prayer./ His crow-wings filtered the light —/ His bear claws raked rows into the land." A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she currently teaches in Ohio, where she teaches Quaker children to care for goats that are later asked to become stew. Her dog's name is Alice.

Recent public meeting minutes inform us that the South 48th Street water main from Old Cheney Road to Claire Avenue is nearing construction. Claire Cheney herself recently graduated from Oberlin College, where she won numerous honors for her poetry, and completed a study of the Maine "wild" blueberry industry. She will gladly challenge any New Jersey blueberry farmers to a one-on-one field hockey match, relying on such transmutating lines as "A sarcophagus of light, bearing the inscription of moths and cottonmouths. / Weeding the asparagus patch, dirt on my fingers, a shattered glint of mica— / I lick my thumb." Ms. Cheney lives near the old Baker Chocolate Factory in Massachusetts.

Our first two theme nights have arrived.

Today we officially begin Mike's Monday Midnight Movie Madness with "Hot Fuzz". "Teen Wolf" is showing next week. Woody and Becca, our lovely Sunday night bartenders, are hosting a pub quiz starting next Sunday at 7:30 pm. It will have both general trivia and a literary bent (get ready for some quote IDs, former English majors).

We have It's Its!

Yes, that's right. Oh, and of course we have the Cal game tomorrow.

Call for an artist

Is anyone a skilled pen-and-ink line drawing person? We need someone to help us design a top-secret item that we will be premiering at the bar in a few weeks. E-mail me at john@pacificstandardbrooklyn.com if you or someone you know can participate in this quick, easy, but glorious enterprise.

Onion party at our bar this Wednesday.

Cut-and-pasted:

Wednesday, September 19, 7 - 9 p.m.
Onion Society For The Preservation Of Alcohol
Meeting #28

Onion Society Party

Pacific Standard

This special meeting of The Onion Society For The Preservation Of Alcohol is set for September 19 at Pacific Standard.

As per usual, we'll meet to the honor and the pleasure of Jameson Irish Whiskey (while supplies last) starting at 7 p.m. The Onion Society welcomes all alcohol preservationists over the age of 21.

The Society meets monthly to discuss the issues of greatest import to alcohol preservationists: mainly, alcohol and the endless possibilities it bears. Heretofore, The Society has existed in near secrecy (thanks to poor handling by its publicist) since 1756, its meetings having been the catalyst for many of the greatest events, inventions, and gestures of philanthropy in the past quarter millennium. Among them: the American and French revolutions, nine feet of licorice-string fun, The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, gunpowder, and orphanages.

If you and your friends plan to attend, please RSVP to nypromo@theonion.com w/ "28th Society RSVP" in the subject.

Pacific Standard
82 4th Ave.
Park Slope, Brooklyn
(718) 858-1951
FREE w/ RSVP

One other way you can help us

is to post a review of our bar on CitySearch:

http://tinyurl.com/3b4plu

or Yelp:

http://tinyurl.com/27dw26

Good or bad. We just want some comments up there!

Thanks,

John

Football this weekend

I've been trying to get in touch with the Cal alumni association of New York in order to get them to list our bar as an alternate location for viewing Cal football games, but haven't had any luck. What's more, their usual location for viewing Cal games in Manhattan won't be showing the Lousiana Tech game this weekend, and yet they haven't mentioned our bar as a place where interested alumns can see it.

So we're making this plea to our fellow Cal alums: please contact the NYC Cal alumni association and tell them to mention our viewing parties in their weekly events e-mail to NYC Cal alumns. I'll leave the wording to you guys, but mention you're a Cal alum, really enjoy our bar and the viewing parties there, and that you think other Cal alumns might be interested in our bar as an alternate viewing location. You should e-mail their president, Natasha, at derivi@yahoo.com.

Thanks for joining us in our alumni-reaching crusade. See you this weekend!

A glorious first weekend/experiments in controlled delirium

Excuse any fuzziness in this post, since Jon and I have been working nonstop since Wednesday. The 12 and 16 hour days tend to add up into a kind of long day, glorious nonetheless, since we're actually working for ourselves and our own idea. We've been continually impressed and flattered by how many people have come by who have read our blog, are from the West Coast, or are hopheads like us. Working here alone for so long gave us the idea we were in some kind of vacuum--that appears to be not the case at all. We really look forward to meeting more of you soon.

In more pragmatic news, we will have the Cal-Louisiana Tech game on Saturday, for the Bear fans out there. We're also near to completing our initial food and liquor inventory buys, so you can expect more options in both those categories soon. We're training other bartenders who should start working on Wednesday or so. Our bar ethicist and therapist are fielding questions, and we've placed a public gentlemanly-or-ladylike-prediction-recording device near our bulletin board for your use. Finally, the Fortnight of Fury is going swimmingly, with several people vying for the overall lead, and slaving for tiny golden stars in ways not seen since first grade.

Opening Night Pictures!

Hey everyone! Here are some pictures from our soft open last night:














The tap list, from the bar.















The back room.
















So many taps!















Some of the first customers milling about.















The "boob" mirror above the faux fireplace. Looks nice, no?















If you look closely, the sign says 'OPEN.'

Thanks everyone for making the opening!

I just sent this e-mail to the Pacific Standard mailing list.

From: fiatlux@pacificstandardbrooklyn.com
Subject: We're open!/Fortnight of Fury
Date: September 6, 2007 6:07:55 AM EDT
To: noreply@pacificstandardbrooklyn.com

Dear Friends of The Standard,

Thank you to everyone who made it out tonight for our first official night of Pacific Standard. From now on you can expect to see us open Monday-Friday 4 pm-4 am, and Saturday-Sunday 12 pm-4 am. Look for us to add food and hard liquor very soon, as well as additional bar features and events (I premiered our "Ask the Bar Therapist" corner late tonight).

I'm writing this e-mail not just to tell you that we're open, but to discuss our Fortnight of Fury, a (roughly) two-week period during which we'd like to see all of you, our old and new friends and neighbors, as much as possible. We very much want to set a laid-back, affable tone and clientele for the bar early on, and of course we don't want to seem like some kind of vast, unexplored rift of a bar. Regardless of your plans to frequent our beer-hole in the future, these couple weeks are paramount, seriously, in getting our bar off on the right foot population-wise.

And, yes, we wouldn't ask you to sacrifice your time and energy towards the excruciating task of drinking and enjoying yourself without providing some kind of reward. Though we imagine all your gases during this fortnight will be noble, we have decided to honor three distinct levels of fortitude, named after three distinct noble gases:

Radon: Attendance at all 14 days, with consumption of at least 50 total drinks. Plaque with your name on it placed at an as yet undecided (but fine, fine) location in the bar, three books of your choice from our library, 10 old-school baseball cards of your choice, 4 Pacific Standard beer cozies.
Argon: Attendance at 9-13 days, with consumption of at least 30 total drinks. Two books of your choice from our library, 10 old-school baseball cards of your choice, 4 Pacific Standard beer cozies.
Helium: Attendance at 4-8 days, with consumption of at least 20 total drinks. One book of your choice from our library, 5 old-school baseball cards of your choice, 2 Pacific Standard beer cozies.

Special Prizes for Pacific Standard-Related Valor may also be distributed, which may include posters, beer, food, or Other.

How do we verify your attendance and drinkitude? You'll see. Just ask your bartender for a card.

The official beginning of the Fortnight will be this Friday, September 7; it will run through Thursday, September 20. But for those of you who have already begun a streak tonight, on Wednesday the 5th, we'll count that if you so choose, so your Fortnight will last through September 18.

Any questions? Just write back or ask at the bar. Now, by all means, let's get furious.

All best,

John and Jon

We're open

As of 6:45 today, we're officially open for good. We feel ecstatic; after all the obstacles, we're doing what we wanted to do a long time ago when we sat in a bar in Berkeley and sketched out a bar business plan on napkins. (Napkins: the official paper product of half-assed ideas). Come by during our Fortnight of Fury, our first fourteen days, to earn our gratitude (and possible prizes--more details soon). Huzzah!

Hold on for one more day

Our soda system is operational, our walk-in refrigerator is delightfully chilly, and we've got part of our initial keg inventory, but the Labor Day weekend has really slowed the delivery pace of our distributors. So rather than open with just a couple kegs tonight, we've decided to wait until Wednesday evening to open with a full selection. See you then, and thanks for this final morsel of patience.