Souvenir

Posted on May 7, 2012 by cwatson

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hubski.com is taking submissions (ie., allowing posts) for it’s first phone photo contest, so I couldn’t resist. Neither should you!

My own entry is a visual souvenir from the bottom of a glass. I am frequently entranced by the view of the world from the bottom of my glass, and I really do believe this has more to do with the accidentally world warping effects of my proximity to two separate layers of translucence (glass and liquid) than with any internally world warping effects of substances quaffed. In this case, the liquid has dried from translucent to opaque, leaving the most entrancing of Rorschach blots. I still can’t figure out what red wine was doing drying to the bottom of a tumbler. My inner glascist twitches at the thought.

My phone camera is that of the 3GS, and while its autofocus is impressive, the resolution just can’t compete with the newer models in wider, more sweeping shots. It’s ability to capture textures at close range, however, is truly impressive.

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Urban Beachcombing: The Catch

Posted on March 13, 2012 by cwatson

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Inspired by Olive’s brilliant piece on urban beachcombing, I’ve decided to make this a semi-regular installment. We’ve both been working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way — a book which I can’t recommend highly enough to artists of any and all types, and all those who simply want to bring a bit more joy and sanity into their lives, for that matter — and one activity she recommends for feeding your inner artist is to collect and enjoy whatever found objects you find enchanting or intriguing. It’s a way of letting all the natural wealth and beauty of life soak in and become real to you, she says — or so I’ve paraphrased. So when my eye caught the above in the grime of an alley on the way in to work, hurried though I was, I decided I needed to stop and collect it.

What is it? That’s what I wondered at first. Just a bit of trash, came back the knee jerk response. Well, sure it is — or it can be, if you let it. It looks like a leaf, I thought. But it can’t be … Not here, trodden underfoot, still retaining so much rich color. But what else could it be? It’s so perfectly symmetrical — and what with the line down the center, like a leaf’s central vein. Could it be a bit of foil, from a bottle cap? Flattened perfectly, to look like a leaf? It seems so … improbable! So of course, I had to go back and find out for myself.
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As I began to get closer, I became concerned to notice that it also resembled a two dimensional representation of a football. What a sad disappointment that would be, I thought. A symbolic representation of an object which is itself the symbolic center of value, the fetish or totem, if you will, of a struggle which interests me not even the slightest bit. Should I flip it over? There’s no pang quite as piquant as that of crashing through a magical possibility to an utterly banal reality.

I decided to play the odds. I flipped it over, and sure enough, it was the foil cap from a bottle of Buffalo Trace bourbon, flattened by unknown forces into a perfectly symmetrical shape. This, plus it’s dark shade of green, transformed it into a leaf: synthetic trash, reborn by accidental artifice into verdance, life. It is the perfect example of a transmorphic object.
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Well, that’s mine. How about yours? Do you have an object, a stone or scrap of metal, something which somehow seems to be more than itself? Maybe you’ve been carrying it around in your breast pocket, worrying it occasionally for good luck. If so, and if you’d be willing to photograph and share it in reply, I’d be grateful. Stories are welcome, but not required.

Please send shots and/or stories to triplesequitur@gmail.com. If we have permission to credit you, please specify how you would like your name to appear.

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A Litany of Ironies

Posted on February 29, 2012 by cwatson

The Art of Losing, Part 3 (or skip back to part 1!)
But some of you may be remembering that our car was stolen. And that we were talking about that. Sorry to leave you all hanging, collectively … it’s just that I prefer long radio silence and non sequitur intermissions to banging on one note till the audience finally rushes the stage. It’s not that I don’t like Philip Glass, mind you: I just feel he’s worked that territory pretty well already.

Meanwhile, I worked the problem. I worried the grain of sand, and I listed the many, small rituals of coping. First among these was itself a type of list-making. I was gathering together a litany of the situation’s many small ironies. For example, this one struck me straight away: the night before our car had been stolen, I’d read a favorite poem to my colleagues. It’s called One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop, and it begins like this: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

Then of course, there was the car itself. What kind of sexy machine did the enterprising car-thieves run off with, you may have been wondering all this time? It was a ‘92 Olds. Now, this seemed deeply ironic to me, and I don’t just mean in the Morissettian sense. The very reason we drive what I’ve come to fondly call “grandpa cars” is that no one cares about them. No one ogles them in the parking lot of the 7-11. No one tries to bully me into racing in the old city aquaduct, or hoots and hollers as I roll down Main street — except, possibly, for actual grandpas, which is actually kind of encouraging to a laid-back, low-profilist such as myself. And of course, if a grandpa car has been driven and owned by an actual grandpa, as our own very lucky machine had been, it’s been babied and treated right at every step of the way. They also tend to be low-mileage cars, as grandpas are not notorious motorheads, and when they take their trans-American road trips, if they take them, they tend to do so in the style and luxury of motor-homes.

Now, I’ve made a lot of generalizations about grandpas in that last paragraph, and I realize that. I’m not apologizing, I just wanted to let you know that I realize that.

But simply put, because we aren’t people of means, we prefer cars with this kind of paradoxical value: low blue book, high utility. At the opposite end of the income spectrum, incidentally, you’ll find people who prefer the opposite kind of paradoxical value. The ability to laugh at those people somewhat assuages the pangs of the tax-bracket disparity. The irony of our stolen oldy, however, was that only a bigger fool than I would have purchased theft insurance for such a car. The cost of such coverage would have tripled the best case scenario pay-out inside of a single calendar year. So, after our enterprising car thieves hustled off our antiquated sedan, we kept on hearing a very funny question: “So, is your insurance gonna cover it?” We did just establish it was a 92 olds, didn’t we?

People were only trying to help, of course. To be sympathetic. Human. It’s what they do in times of trouble, the caring ones, at least, and I love them for it. Ironically, in so doing, they were pointing out exactly how bleak things really were. This, too, usually comes of trying to say something helpful in times of trouble. And it all brought home to me the fact that people, myself included, are just really unused to the idea of loss. No one knows what to say when confronted with it. The truest response came from my friend Mark, and it was a question, all of one word long. It went like this: “Gone!?”

Gone. Yes. That’s exactly it. And that’s exactly what I kept trying to wrap my head around, although I couldn’t quite. Our insurance-based society has whisked the idea of true loss away from sight. It has been stashed behind the couch, and with it, the true meaning of theft. Someone stole your car? Big deal! Here’s some money. Buy a new one. Lost a kidney? No problem! Here’s a surgeon! This fellow in Jakarta, it seems, doesn’t need two. And you don’t even need to shake his hand! A card would be nice, though.

In fact, all of our official business on the subject of our evaporated vehicle seemed to hinge on the kind of insurance we didn’t have. Going into the police report, we had no illusions they’d be piling detectives onto the case, following up leads, or working in shifts. What I learned from our truly sympathetic officer, however, was much more disencouraging: our report was little more than the legwork for an insurance claim we couldn’t file. “Make sure and call your insurance company, and let them know your vehicle’s been stolen,” she said. At the time, I thought she meant AAA would want to know, just in case the distinguished car thieves got into a collision, and tried to hang some Bentley’s fender on our deductible. When I called, the kind representative was confused to learn we had no comprehensive insurance. “So … why are you calling? I mean … is there anything I can do for you?” No, as it turns out. Thanks, though.

"Friends like these, eh Gary?" - Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a., "the Dude"


Still more: the very afternoon of our discovery, while still blissfully ignorant, I’d found myself summarizing the story of Job for my friends. It’s a fascinating and thought provoking tale, but it always makes me laugh, too. The tension of these effects, in fact, is what I had wanted to share with my friends. The funniest part, I told them, was that after Job loses everything (his house, his possessions, and his kids — not his wife, who hangs on solely for the purpose of tormenting him, it seems — loss so total, it’s practically Vaudeville), he gets it all back. Or something like. He gets a bigger house. More cattle. More money. And another set of kids. Not the same ones, mind you. But we have to imagine that these are kids of equal or greater value. And that’s hilarious.

Job's celebratory wingspan here seems to me an incongruously dignified version of endzone antics. And why not giggle at art?

Beyond funny, this story demonstrates, by negative example, that loss can’t be explained. It can’t be undone, and it can’t even truly be compensated for. As we all know, children aren’t interchangeable. Perhaps nothing else is, either. (Or, as Charles Bernstein put it in a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “If everything is translatable, nothing is. And verse vica.”) So I have to think that there’s something deliberately, darkly comic in the formal parallelism of the story.

And it all got me to thinking: what we’re left with to wash down the moral of the story, the silver lining to those bombastically dark clouds, is more or less the same thing insurance offers: your own life, guaranteed to continue merrily (or at least steadily) down the stream, un-rumpled, un-mussed — and failing that, a life of equal or greater value. You buy your way free from the fear of harm with ritual payments to the temples of State Farm, of Nationwide, the temples of Kaiser, of Aetna, of Blue Shield.

But my, was it something. A fine set-up. Returning from a leisurely lunch, from a calm, dispassionate chat on the formal devices of the story of Job, to an empty driveway. It was rich. Had it been fiction, I would have called it a bit on the nose. One almost expected to hear musical laughter from behind the hedges, or from wherever God might have been looking on, peering over the horizon, or nestled comfortably between two quarks and a tachyon. And if He was laughing, it wasn’t as if I could be angry about it. After all, I was laughing too.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
Places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems

Enjoying my farcical tale of woe? If so, please do come back for part 4 in a week or so, wherein we discuss Mitrishka dolls, thumbing one’s nose at adversity, and the theft that keeps on stealing.

 

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What’s in a coupe?

Posted on February 22, 2012 by cwatson

Best of Q&A

Dear Cocktail Guru:

In your travels through the mixological geekery and the hipsterdom of the cocktail revival of the last few years, you have no doubt come across the practice of the moment of serving cocktails in a coupe. And while I readily agree that a traditional champagne coupe does share most, if not all, of its properties with the cocktail glass, some of the more recent models created specifically for the luxury cocktail trade, and aptly illustrated by the sketch at the above link, do have sides that curve in noticeably, causing the glass to have some of the properties of its wine counterpart. Do you care to comment on this evolution of cocktail glassware?

Sincerely,
Amateur Mixologist and Professional Skeptic

Dear Skeptical Mixologist,

I wish I could speak with more authority as to the coupe’s merits and liabilities, but I’ve had all of one cocktail served in it, to date. (Incidentally, it was the Prohibition Era Martini from the Raven’s Club in Ann Arbor, which is exactly the sort of place you’d expect to see a coupe revival in full swing). The cocktail was delicious, and didn’t seem at all hindered by the mildly focusing shape of the coupe. Having said that, the glass didn’t seem to bring any advantage to the experience either, other than its stylistic conformity to the overall 1920′s nostalgia of the place.

In fact, lacking further experience, I’d venture to state that nostalgia is the only thing the glass has to offer when set beside the cocktail glass — although this may be more than enough for most. I found it telling that, in the Q Mix-a-Lot coupe write-up you shared, no merits were listed beyond its venerable pedigree, its current fashionable status, and its “sexiness,” “timelessness,” and “sophistication.”

Despite the coupe’s slightly tapered lip, it does nothing to safeguard its contents, as the tiny dimensions of the bell require that it be filled more or less to the brim, assuming we aren’t making halved or quartered recipes — yet another of Marie Antoinette’s many shortcomings, we’re to believe. What’s more, and I realize that this is entirely a matter of taste, I find the coupe far less aesthetically pleasing than the cocktail glass. Where the latter is arboresque and expansive, the former is somewhat squat and evocative of nothing much more than itself. On the one hand, it lacks the clean lines and elegance of the cocktail glass. On the other, it lacks the soft, finished roundness of a burgundy glass or a snifter, which loosely enclose their contents in an airy rotunda.

My conclusion, which remains half-formed (though the same thing might be said about the coupe), is that here is a glass best used by actors in period pieces. This is precisely what most of the best-known bars, those trend-setters and watchtowers of the cocktail renaissance, are currently in the process of transforming themselves into, however, so I expect that the coupe may well become and stay de rigeuer for quite some time.

All this notwithstanding, my experience with the glass remains very limited. So please, if you (or any of our other kind readers) have either experiences or reasoned arguments to share in defense of the coupe and its current bijou status, I’d be grateful to receive them.

Yours in alchemy,
Clive Watson


Where to Begin?

Dear Clive:

I wish I was more knowledgeable about cocktails. Whenever I look into nice cocktails to try, I realize I have to either buy entire bottles of things to mix with or pay for overpriced cocktails at the bar. How does one get started?

overwhelmed by options,
forwardslash of hubski.com


Dear forwardslash,

Your catch 22 is a tough one. If I hadn’t been introduced to delicious cocktails by friends, I doubt I’d ever have tested the waters, let alone gotten far. There is a way forward though, and it’s a good deal easier to find on account of all the ongoing cocktail hoopla.

In case it helps, I’d like to weigh in on your dilemma: pay for overpriced cocktails at the bar. I know the dollar per ounce economy screams against it, but the value of know-how is triply important here. Early on in my own backward self-education, I sat down with a friend who knew nearly as little as I did, and we tasted our way through ten or twelve different important spirits. We had no idea what we were doing, though, and as a result, everything tasted awful. I’d guess it took me the better part of a decade to undo the stigmas formed in that ill-advised tasting.

Despite surface appearances, bar economics work in your favor, at least when you’re finding your footing. sure, you’ll pay anywhere from 2 to 8 times the amount per ounce for liquids consumed, but you won’t need to buy a full bar’s worth of high quality ingredients, which is in fact what it takes to ensure a pleasant first trip on the cocktail trolley.

What will be your first drink of choice, the first one that really makes you say, “Aha! So this is what everyone’s going on about!” It’s impossible to say, really. It could be a vodka tonic, for all we know. Or it could be a Sazerac, a mai-tai, or a top-shelf margarita. Take yourself out to a properly-stocked bar, and you’ll have all of these options at your disposal. Once you know what you like, you’ll have a much shorter list of ingredients to collect in order to assemble a personally tailored home bar. In the long run, you’ll save loads of money by not buying costly bottles you’ll never use.

The important thing, right off the bat, is to make sure you end up at the right kind of bar. And what’s the right kind of bar, you may ask? Well, it’s a place that carries a wide variety of high-quality spirits, of course. And again, i know this generally means higher cost. But if that cost is justified by quality ingredients and know-how, each additional dollar is likely to return value at an exponential rate.

More importantly, the right kind of bar is the one sporting good staff. Any bartender who knows his/her craft should be able to mix a good drink, but that goes without saying. More importantly, a bartender should be able to talk you through your options, and should be eager to do so. I, for one, have always enjoyed consulting guests that haven’t gotten to try much. The potential to delight in this situation is really grand. I start by asking what types of food they like. What flavors do they enjoy, and what sensations would they rather avoid? Within the span of a 10 second interview, I generally know exactly where to start them out.

So, if you find yourself in a deafening mob of thirsty clubbers, struggling to flag down a sneering barstaff of too-cool-for-school twenty-somethings who can barely hear you and don’t seem to care, it’s probably best to shove off and head down the way. You should be getting value for your business, and part of that value is professional advice.

As a general rule, don’t trust bars that use pre-made mixes or bottled citrus juice. If they tell you their whiskey sour contains whiskey and sour mix, the door will probably turn out to be your best friend in the room.

Of course, the ready availability of fine establishments will depend entirely on where you live, and what center of urban culture is nearest you. The cocktail boom is working in your favor though, and decent watering holes are beginning to crop up in the tiniest of towns, in the unlikeliest of places. Anyone who tries to tell you, “you just can’t get a good cocktail outside of NYC or San Fran,” is just flashing their “I’m pretentious, ask me how” badge, right along side of their “I have no idea what I’m talking about” badge.

If you’re bent on sussing it all out on your own though, the best way to proceed is to decide which base spirit to tackle first. To keep it simple, I’d limit the crowd to vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and whiskey for starters. Each of these base spirits offers a noble family of libations to be explored, but you’ll want to audition them in simpler drinks at first. Here are a few good test recipes, ordered according to base spirit: vodka tonic/vodka gimlet, gin and tonic/gin gimlet, Margarita, mojito/daiquiri (the classic recipe, that is — watch out for frozen smoothie versions, which have very little to do with the original), whiskey sour/Manhattan. Most of these are very basic drinks, and I’ve chosen them because they each showcase the qualities of their base spirit. But once you’ve picked a favorite starting point, the world will be yours to explore.

Looking for a quick and easy recipe guide? I’ve always been impressed by the intuitive arrangement and thorough scope of the Internet Cocktail Database. They may not have all the hip, new-fangled, and elaborate recipes and techniques you’ll find employed in the most cutting edge cocktail labs and retro-speakeasies of the day, but you probably won’t be wanting to use liquid nitrogen right off the bat anyhow — and they’ve got the basics well covered. Their approach is straightforward and their recipes are clear. Also, you can search for recipes by ingredient, as well as by name.

Sorry for the long reply, but I hope that some of this will prove helpful.

Cheers!
Clive Watson

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