The second requirement for being a Modern Bachelor is having a bachelor pad. This means a place to bring a female to for undisturbed social activities. It may be a house or an apartment, but your parents' basement can never under any circumstances be a bachelor pad. Especially if it is decorated with Star Wars toys, in which case getting a woman to come home with you is not too damned likely anyway.

The third requirement is culture. Gone are the lowbrow days when being able to belch the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies counted one among the ranks of the cultural elite. Also gone are the days when one could do anything and call it art. All those so-called "performance artists" from the nineties have gone back to just being surly to customers in whatever Barnes and Noble in which they are currently employed. The Modern Bachelor is not only about culture, but also refinement. And here is where jazz comes in.

Jazz represents the intellectual and creative apex of American music. More cerebral than classical music, more visceral than rock, more emotional than country, more romantic than all the saccharin pop music ever recorded, and more men named Thelonious than any other form of music. It is only natural that the Modern Bachelor should gravitate towards jazz as the soundtrack for his lifestyle. You see, we live in the Information Age now. All that claptrap they gave us in school about knowledge being power has finally come to pass. In the old days, women looked for big, strong men to be good providers by earning good money in factories or other industries. Now, they look for big, smart men who know how to operate computers and earn money by exploiting the recent conversion to the mysterious Euro, selling Monopoly money and car wash tokens to clueless day-trading currency speculators.

But I digress.

Any git can look like a geek (no longer a pejorative term, unless you're talking about those guys who bite the heads off of live chickens in carnival sideshows) by carrying around a cell phone and a PDA. It is the man who can demonstrate both intelligence and culture that is more apt to win the fair maiden. Jazz says to a woman that the man listening to it is a man of substance. And what better way to encourage substance abuse than listening to the music of Charlie Parker? That wasn't exactly my point, but I'll take it because I enjoyed that gag.

So then.

Putting all of these elements together into one cohesive style is indeed a challenge. The trick is to appear intelligent and cultured without coming off like a pretentious know-it-all. As a Genius, I overcome this perception by keeping an alcoholic beverage in my hand at all times. Drinking is almost a lost art these days, obscured either by dull-witted frat-boy excess or florid girl-drink concoctions designed to taste like everything except alcohol, but one that is vital to the Modern Bachelor lifestyle. Alcohol makes the one drinking it witty and personable, and those around him more attractive and interesting. It is also the most effective pants-removal fluids on the market.

The key to proper drinking is knowing what to drink. Remember that the Modern Bachelor is a man of culture and refinement, firmly rooted in the classics yet thoroughly modern (or else I wouldn't be calling him the Modern Bachelor, now would I?). Thus, the hallmarks of the Cocktail Generation are always apropos; the ubiquitous martini, the Bloody Mary, the Tom Collins, gin and tonic, Harvey Wallbanger, Old Fashioned, Whiskey Sour, etc. The simple elegance of whisky, bourbon and Scotch most notably, can never be underestimated. And my personal favorite, beer, which has long been relegated either to the domain of the blue-collar Bud-loving everyman or the khaki-clad Heineken-swilling preppie swine, has gained new respectability now that a nationally-known jazz humorist declared it his personal favorite in his influential and widely-read column on AAJ.

WARNING: Alcohol may cause a bloated sense of self-importance.

That pretty much does it for this month. I'll be expounding upon the Modern Bachelor lifestyle throughout the year, interspersed with profiles of some of the greatest names in jazz history (like John, and Joe). I'll also be shamelessly trolling for those corporate sponsorships, using my position as a Genius to influence the course of American culture, and insinuating my way into that aching void in Nicole Kidman's life. It's going to be a good year.

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