Bubbly on a Budget

I'm Cremant to you

On a whim I bought the eleven dollar Blason de Bourgogne Crémant de Bourgogne (Blanc de Noirs) from Trader Joe’s.  It is fun, goes well with food and tastes great through a Twizzler.  Seriously though, it is a great little wine and I’ll tell you why.  On the nose it has some faint mineral notes, but sliced green apple is the predominant scent.  Up front you get some pears in syrup and sugar cane.  The sugar cane is actually a negative because as many sweet notes as I’ve named, it isn’t enough to mask the alcohol, which comes off a bit like aguardiente.  The bubbles are sharp and rapidly dissipate, but the finish has some great vanilla and candied notes.  On the whole it has some great characteristics with only a few off flavors mixed into the transitions.

Weighing in on Alexander McQueen

Exerpt from McQueen's Fall 2009 Men's Line

I’m not a fashion expert, but because of my sister I keep up a bit. I was very sorry to hear about Alexander McQueen’s Passing. I can’t afford to dress as well as I’d like to, but McQueen created high fashion clothes that still came off as masculine and that is something I try to achieve in my own look.

Some designers put out a men’s line as a complement to their women’s line; as an afterthought.  Some don’t even bother.  I don’t want to dress up as a male parody of a female original.  I want a unique point of view interpreted especially for men.  Just look at McQueen’s 2009 Fall line, “the McQueensbury Rules”, and you’ll see what I mean.  I don’t think everything is wearable, but it is all beautiful and masculine.  The coats are especially amazing.

Are you still looking at the purples and the tight pants and questioning the masculinity?  You might be focusing too much on the codpieces.  Forget about the codpieces and the boxing gloves for a second and imagine striding into a meeting dressed like you walked off the set of Scorcese’s Gangs of New York.  Trust me, jaws would quiver in fear.

While I’m on the subject of intimidating men’s fashion.  You could also rock some John Fluevog Executors, and ”execute your will”.

I brought all this up only because I think Gucci is the perfect company to take over based on quality and reputation, though it still won’t be the same.

…It’s a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere.

"I will punch you in the Thoreau-t"

I attended Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. When I meet alumni from other small schools there is usually something to talk about.  More often the only question I’m asked is “why did you go there”?  I’m going to try and explain why in the most self-serving way possible.  Just sit back, relax and try to peer through the nerdiness into the unadulterated awesome.

I think the real reason anyone goes to school in the wilderness is that they need to focus. Walt Whitman, who incidentally was a great fighter, knew this.  Henry David Thoreau, who could swing a mean stick and set pretty good traps, also understood the intrinsic intellectual value of a secluded setting.  You might point out that we still had running water, toilets, fire extinguishers, and alcohol.   How then did the secluded intellectual sanctuary manifest itself?  The main elements were uninterrupted quiet and time and long distances to walk between buildings.  Time to come up with weird ideas and time to make other people listen to them.   There were late nights reciting poetry about pez, and many lunches playing my favorite game.

My friend and I used to sit at wide solid tables in a long hall for lunch. The sun would lazily saunter in through stained glass windows decorated with themes from Great Books.  The two of us were usually trying to prolong lunch as much as possible, procrastinating in increasingly complex ways.  One of our favorite games, which we occasionally coaxed others into playing, was called something like “author war”.  Shakespeare and Marlow are both great writers, but are they both great fighters?

The basic premise is which authors would win in a fight. As on any schoolyard, we would first decide on a number of authors per team and a list of more or less evenly matched opponents. By the time we had hashed out what authors were fairly matched it was pretty clear who was going to pick which author for their team. The fun really began as we worked out the details of the brawl.

Hemingway was a staple because of his man-bear strength and alcoholic pain tolerance. Ginsberg was usually a setter of maniacal traps and thrower of molotov cocktails.  If you watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we usually played Ginsberg like Charlie…WILDCARD! I took a lot of Latin American literature, so I liked to pick Borges whom I described as a Napoleon; capable of understanding the entire battlefield at once.

The idea is to take some element of their writing style and translate it into a fighting skill.  Using the example of Ginsberg again, the prospect of finding a dirty asshole in my sandwich always stuck out, hence the surprise attack or WILDCARD!  Being horrible chauvinists we usually played Emily Dickinson as a sacrifice piece.  She would play the injured fawn and then kill Pablo Neruda or Hemmingway.  She spent a lot of her life secluded, which meant to us that in a fight, she was good at hiding.  To our credit, I’m pretty sure we also had a game that ended with “that’s why you don’t fuck with Susan Sontag”.  If you can write fiction and theory you are definitely badass.

So, next time you are stereotyping liberal arts schools, just thing of this story and validate yourself completely.

Yawn…what is a hipster, anyway?

Hipsterism is fun

Hipster is brown seaweed floating inert in the crystalline wall of a breaking wave. By refusing to arch and foam with the leading edge it can be simultaneously part of the undertow and the tube; responsible for the vanguard and a part of the past. After the wave breaks it bounces and rushes to the shore.

Hipster as a term has been corrupted by the same vanities that created it: It is used as an insult, it is confused and cross-bred with terms like “emo” and “scenester”. I was recently told that, “all the hipsters are dead. There are only scenesters now.” In the same breath this individual seemed to lament the loss of an “authentic” movement and despise that same movement for being identifiable. In the context of the conversation, hipster meant original and scenester meant copy; Hipster meant vintage tee-shirt, while scenester meant store-bought reproduction. The distinction is worthless because in any movement there are pretenders. There is no authenticity of that kind.

Like most identities in the post-modern United States, being a hipster isn’t exactly something to take pride in. It isn’t usually something we “claim”. However, hipsterism has identifiable characteristics that get tangled in the constant need for Unitedstatesians to be individuals. Much like the attendees of Woodstock increased over time, so will the number of people who say they “used to be a hipster”.

Hipster, scenester, emo, these are all stripes in the same plaid; they are all chipsters off the old blockster. I’ve settled on the term hipsterism as a way to describe a generation, not because it is without other connotations and complexities, but because the term is already a throw back to “hippie”. As with the hippie, the term hipster is distorted and re-appropriated. That is, it is specifically the ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term hipster that makes it powerful and worth discussing. Eventually, hipster will have a static meaning, which will also be a distortion of the truth.

In a television interview, Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones said that he had to pretend to be on both sides of the Mods and Rockers divide during the 60’s.(1) In order to escape getting beaten up he had to tread the line between the two gangs. Our reality is somewhere between the cheap terms we use to describe ourselves. Since the 60’s, physical violence has dissipated, but the battle rages on in style, music, art, and politics. Hipster is knowing “no man who bothers about originality will ever be original” (2) and still bothering about it anyway.

Hipsterism, as I am defining it, has many identifiable characteristics. Here are a few:

1. A resolution to salvage many of the disposable, ugly, or campy trends from any time period. This component arises out of the necessity created by recession and an aesthetic appreciation for all things “retro”. A sixty year-old antique collector, particularly one who flaunts their appreciation for out-of-date style, is a less deliberate hipster, but exhibits hipster tendencies. The hipster ideal would be finding an Eames chair in a dumpster and bringing it home. The usual would be buying and Eames chair and saying you found it in a dumpster.

2. A broader definition and use of irony. It is perhaps not a new idea to poke fun at previous generations, but annoying your parents by growing a moustache from the nineteenth century is somewhat novel, because you have to go shopping at CVS with a curlicue moustache. It is, perhaps, out of simultaneous embarrassment and nostaligia for the eighties and early nineties that the invention of amplified irony emerges. For example, you still love Alf so you wear the t-shirt “to be funny”. You might also play “Informer” by Snow at a party “to be funny”.

3. Hipster Humor includes acute self-deprecation, amplified irony, and lovable oddball characters. “Napoleon Dynamite” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” are perhaps the most easily recognized as hipster. Nonetheless, without dark comedies like “Welcome to the Dollhouse” (1995) newer hipster comedies might not have been successful.

As a nation America is already polarized.  We are a part of hipster and in order to control how we are understood in the future we must define the term now.  Will it be limited to tight jeans, 80′s skater hair and crazy mustaches, or will it include a sense of humor, musical taste, literary objectives, and new social patterns?

(1)  Top Gear Season 10, Episode 3

(2)  C.S. Lewis

Let me know where you stand.  Take my poll:

A Yankee Way of Knowledge: Thoughts on Carlos Castaneda

As a student of Latin American Literature Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, was a little outside what I am used to, though I enjoy anything that talks about Mexico and the Southwest. I read it because any time I mention Magical Realism or the Marvellous Real someone seems to bring up Castaneda.  I’m not sure why this particular book has been read by so many people. They were right that I would like it, but wrong about why. The story is great, but it shouldn’t be compared to works by Juan Rulfo or Alejo Carpentier.

The book is unique in its perspective and fascinating in an ethno-fiction kind of way. It teaches a great deal about brujería with an almost scientific tongue. I can see how Castaneda’s detail and factual approach would make a newcomer to the dynamic world of altered realities more comfortable. It does not, however, fit in well with Latin American authors who use the fantastic, other worlds, or altered states in their writing. There are many differences, but two is sufficient for this casual review.

First, there is a kind of value judgment. The narrator commits to the teachings of Don Juan and experiences the extraordinary, but he remains grounded in a singular reality. Though the narrator becomes a part of something new and different his perspective is fairly static; you can almost feel an ethnographer’s presence.

Second, the doubt experienced by the reader is not used as you would expect in a fantastic work from the Latin American tradition. Your faith in the narrator’s perspective is not used against you in the end. You are fairly sure of what has actually happened, or at least sure that the narrator did not really turn into an animal. Rather than creating a new reality from two incongruent ones, you glimpse alternative ways of understanding the same experience.

This alternative understanding is one of Castaneda’s strengths. He gives us an intellectual dilemma and a philosophical debate rather than a vision to try and interpret or synthesize. If you rely on his ethnographic descriptions and understand his experiences only as hallucinations, you are missing the point. The real action occurs in the conversations he has with Don Juan. For this reason it would be more fruitful to compare Castaneda’s work in The Teachings of Don Juan to Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nacío la conciencia and other works dealing with testimony. El Hablador by Mario Vargas Llosa might even be a more appropriate comparison.

In short, I’ll definitely read another one of Castaneda’s wonderful books, but I won’t expect the same things from it.

Scotch Tasting – Cragganmore 12

Cragganmore 12

If you like Sherlock Holmes, you’ll like this scotch.  Why? because it tastes like it feels when you read The Hound of the Baskervilles, as in, crag and moor.  Cragganmore is herby (cut grass, lichen), earthy (humus, moss) and malty (dry grain).  It tastes like what I thought scotch would taste like before I tried it.  Don’t be fooled by the light green-yellow pond water color, this scotch has a lot to it.  Because of the subtle sweet notes (dried apricot) If you want to drink a scotch in the summer, the choice should be ”elementary”.