It is not often I get to hang out with a particular friend of mine. She is a very cool person, with a great taste in music and with a lot of great ideas. Very rarely has she ever even hinted at letting me down. However, let’s call you Carlita… I hate you forever now.

For those of you who don’t live in the Waterloo region, you are mostly safe. However, for the rest of you, and I want to be 100% clear about this, The Starlight Lounge in Waterloo sucks so much, I’m surprised the town isn’t concave.

So I suppose you’ll be wanting the story. I was supposed to meet Carlita at 10:30 at the aforementioned Tower of Babylame. Knowing her to be in possession of functioning ovaries, I arranged myself so that I would arrive there at 11. I climbed the stairs, somewhat troubled by the pounding bass lines descending from the lounge above. I walked through the doors, and this is what I saw.

The Decor

The place was clearly decorated by an opium addict who lives and dies by the maxim “Everything cheap and 20 years old is automatically cool”. There were cheap pop-art posters advertising shows that have either already happened or are fictional by bands with names like “The Runnerups” and “Maggie’s Ovarian Cyst” and “I Left My Wallet At Home Can You Please Lend Me Some Money So I Can Buy A Razor And Kill Myself?”. The place was kept in almost complete darkness, which I can only assume was done to disguise what the rest of the place looked like. An orange disco ball and some multicolored pot lights provided only enough illumination for a person to recognize their cocaine balloon from their heroin baggie. Short red leather couches and sofas bordered the room, centred in a completely vacant dance floor. Small wonder when you consider…

The Music

I try to be open-minded about music, because it is a reflection of the creator’s world view and like food or visual art, it is in the eye of the beholder. That being said, house music licks my ball. The DJ spinning the records was almost comical if the whole scene hadn’t been so sad. Picture Marge Simpson, then turn her head upside down. This guy had a beard that would make the wisest kung-fu master in the most stereotypical Chinese movie jealous. He made the guys from ZZ Top look prepubescent. What was the most incredible is that he was really into the ‘music’, bobbing his head and making odd hand gestures. I’m not sure how anyone can listen to house music, since all of the songs are virutally identical. And yes, I realize that this is a claim commonly made about hip-hop, but really people… any idiot can listen to three hip-hop tracks and discern them. House music is completely beat-driven, and the composers have only figured out how to use one of the pre-set beats on their Casio™ synthesizers. I saw a screen running something, which is when I started watching

The Movie

I must admit, this was the first time I’ve ever seen a bar show a film in the background. I was almost impressed, until I actually saw what was playing. This guy gets hit with a pie, then he trashes the roadside pie stand, and his friends break some stuff. Then some girl wearing leather pulls out a molotov cocktail and blows up someone’s van. The guys walk around the corner, when these two 12 year-old black kids with automatic weapons start shooting at them. So they duck into a nearby bakery, go to some lockers, grab their own automatic weapons and take to the streets. A lot of shooting ensues, seemingly between a gang of hippies and a tough-as-nails chick gang (with a station wagon converted into a tank).

(I just want to interject that I am not making up or exaggerating anything in this recounting.)

It’s time for one of the female gang members to undergo her initiation by murdering the last member of the male gang. She has him cornered at the bottom of a stairwell, but can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Luckily a chick with a metal eyepatch and a belly-topper is there to finish the job. Back at their hideout, the women’s gang celebrates their triumphant rise above male tyranny by… BAKING A CAKE. At this point I had to leave.

The only way the Starlight could have been any worse is if I had to pay money to get in. Oh wait, there is a $3 cover. Never mind, zero redeeming features. The phrase ‘powerfully lame’ kept flitting through my mind. To paraphrase a friend of mine, I imagine that the Starlight is what hell must be like, only with louder music. Some day lingustic scientists will invent a word capable of encapsulating how terrible that bar is. Until then, I advise you hide under your bed, read your dictionary, and don’t trust anyone with a metal eyepatch.