A friend of mine recently asked me to turn him on to some tasty new music. I recommended a crash course in classic MBP, the catch-all term for Brazilian pop. And since it’s convenient, I’m using the blog as a platform, from which I imagine some of our other readers could potentially benefit.
I chose to keep it simple and focus on the uncontested kings of MPB from the ’60s through the ’80s: Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
Jorge Ben - Mas, Que Nada
and É Só Sambar
The original “Mas, Que Nada.” Fuck Sergio Mendes and all his Black Eyed Peas. This is from Mr. Ben’s first album, full of charmingly polite yet insidiously funky samba ditties.
Caetano Veloso - Alegria, Alegria
and Superbacana
These are from Caetano Veloso’s second album, the Sergeant Pepper’s of the Tropicália movement. Tropicália is a little too complex for me to feel like going into, but in short: in the late 1960s, a Brazilian offshoot of hippie culture sprang up, characterized by self-consciously psychedelic and eclectic music, art and fashion, but unlike American hippies, the Brazilians were living under a recently-founded military dictatorship and thus actually had something to be DayGlo-bitchy about. Eventually, the government kicked some of them out of the country, including Caetano Veloso. Anyway, this album straddles a delicate line between completely awesome and utterly cheesy, which is why I have to recommend it.
Gilberto Gil - Pé da Roseria
and Domingo no Parque
Gil is essentially a fellow Tropicália traveler of Caetano Veloso, but, y’know, black. He got kicked out of Brazil too.
Caetano Veloso - Mora Na Filosofia
Four years after Tropicália, Caetano had decided to stop being so damned weird.
Jorge Ben - Eu Vou Torcer
and Magnólia
Errare Humanum Est
Zagueiro
Jesualda
If it’s not apparent, I love me some Jorge Ben. Especially his mid-70s period, when the blood in his veins was apparently replaced with funk.
Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben - Nega
and Taj Mahal
Gil and Jorge are incredible on their own, but together, armed with two acoustic guitars and one percussionist, they blow their entire recording catalog out of the cachaça. Rod “Constant Decline” Stewart liked “Taj Mahal” so much that he stole it in its entirety and gave it a thorough disco gutting to create the execrable “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” over which Jorge Ben sued (and won).
Now wasn’t all that tastier than an Instant Caipirinha Party?
Last night I ate dinner, only because it was convenient, at one of those restaurants. Those restaurants. The kind where most of the waitstaff is comprised of blond girls named “Kellye.” The kind that try to conjure up an atmosphere of eclectically homespun Americana - even though they have locations in the United Arab Emirates, China and Saudi Arabia, and are thus, in a corporate sense, at odds with the very idea of America - by decking the walls with carefully aged random shit ranging from farm tools to turn of the century dry-goods-general-store handbills in splintery wood frames and lynchin’ ropes, all hearkening back to a simpler, purer time, when rugged pioneers conquered the vast prairies and settled down to traditional home-cooked meals of bacon-and-cheddar potato skins, jumbo shrimp and portobello Swiss burgers. I got to wondering if these chains’ foreign locations attempted a localized variation on the same concept, if the one in Riyadh was plastered with Saudi Arabiana such as Bedouin daggers, kaffiyehs, torched Bibles and the severed heads of minor criminal offenders and presumed-unchaste teenage girls, and that was when I decided that I needed a drink.
Despairing slightly, I picked up the drink menu and was predictably presented with a long list of garish Cointreau- and blue curacao- infused concoctions ending in “-tini,” along with the strangely ubiquitous mojito and an awful, awful lot of fruity rum drinks cutely named after devastating natural phenomena. Slight relief came when I saw that they listed, as a service to people with any taste, all the liquors they stocked. I narrowed in on the gin, martini in my heart. Bombay Sapphire? No, too faltzani to order something specifically with Bombay Sapphire, and Bombay Sapphire is best drunk chilled and straight up anyway. Vermouth distracts. Tanqueray? Too brusque. Beefeater. There we go.
Thinking that this would ensure me a proper martini mixed without vodka, I asked the waiter to bring me a Beefeater martini and sat back to contemplate the dry-goods-general-store handbills. But the waiter did not bring me a proper martini. No, I got something else entirely.
The waiter, whom I do not blame, and whom I plan to notify, Irgun-style, before I plant the C4, brought out to my eternal horror the Abomination of Distillation - the Anathemartini. The Anathemartini came served in a tiny rocks glass over crushed ice, and was garnished with two absolutely monstrous olives skewered on a cocktail sword, the purpose of which was apparently to immobilize the olives long enough for me to finish the drink before they rolled off to attack Tokyo. I removed the garnish and the level of liquid sank nearly a third of the already puny glass; students of history and science will recall that Archimedes made his “Eureka!”-punctuated discovery of specific gravity when he realized that placing overlarge, liquid-displacing garnishes in his guests’ drinks saved him money on retsina. I took a trepid sip - it’s a shame to waste gin, even defiled gin - and thus was the full extent of the bartender’s Calvinist disregard for mixological orthodoxy revealed: the Anathemartini had no vermouth.
There is, of course, a school of thought which holds that a proper martini contains little to no vermouth, which manifests itself in behaviors that range from the ridiculous (swirling a drop of vermouth around a glass then pouring it out before adding gin) to the obscene (making statements along the lines of “To make the perfect martini, picture a passionate tryst you had with a woman who once while on vacation had a Cinzano Bianco with lemon at a sidewalk cafe in Perugia, then pour three jiggers of gin down your pants.”). These people are wrong, and if there is a just God, they’ll be cast into the seventh circle of Hell (blasphemers, sodomites and usurers) to wait, for all eternity, on a crowd of thirty-something loan officers in the midst of a perpetual “girls’ night out” who are earnestly discussing America’s Next Top Model and ordering appletinis. They tip poorly.
Sigh. So there I was, drinking a martini served in the wrong glass, missing a key ingredient, and rapidly losing flavor due to icy attrition. And I wondered: how could anybody who serves drinks for a living fail so utterly to conceive of what is arguably the classic American drink? What has gone wrong in the nation that invented the cocktail to bring us to the point where in order to get a real martini, you have to specify “with gin and vermouth, straight up”? Is the day far off when we’ll have to order a rum and Coke by saying “With rum and Coca-Cola, on the rocks, in a highball” to avoid getting served a plastic sippy cup of vodka and lukewarm Dr. Pepper? Will proper bar glassware eventually be entirely replaced by the Patron-filled navel of a sorority girl on her sixth Cosmo, “cuz that’s what Carrie drinks”? Am I only sticking my finger in the dike, vainly struggling against the inevitable drowning of cocktail culture by a Biblical deluge of Midori and “Hpnotiq”? Or am I just drunk?
Michael: In which, when we are at a bar together, we pretend to be flaming long enough to attract them, at which point we viciously rip into their flesh.
Chris: I want to try this:
Chris: So we’re in a bar, and some Fat Girl befriends us.
Chris: Let’s see how long it takes her to allow you to roughly manhandle her tits, and then say that we “lied” to her when you tell her you’re straight.
Michael: Wait! I don’t want to roughly manhandle fat girl tits!
Chris: …Why not?
Michael: I have exacting tit standards!
Chris: It’s like playing with Play-Doh, but more misogynist.
Chris: You could leave a bruise!
Michael: I can’t even walk into a crowded supermarket for fear I’ll brush against a person!
Chris: Not a person, a fag hag. You can grab one and squeeze as hard as you can.
Michael: Ewwww.
Chris: Or you could just hold down drunken frat boys.
“Are you sure I’ll get in Kappa Pi for this?”
“If you leave without speaking when I’m done.”
Michael: See, I’d rather do that.
Michael: My misogyny is such that, despite my sexuality, I’d rather manhandle a man than a woman.
Chris: And you’d aid me in a brutal homosexual rape just kind of for homeboys?
Michael: Hey, doggs is doggs.
Chris: I really hope the government reads these conversations.
Evidently there was a mix-up somewhere, and the nation’s plastic wrap wound up with a slogan designated for its jimmy hats.
Which may go a long ways toward clearing up the confusion, and conceptions, engendered by Trojan’s new campaign: “Double-sided with extra-tight cling to seal out air and prevent spoilage.”
I don’t really do Thanksgiving, but I do appreciate an opportunity to turn one of the many random dishes gracing tables across America into a cocktail, and I’m not talking about anything pumpkin-flavored. So with a nod to Brazil, and my mother, who came up with the cranberry idea, I present the Thanksgiving Batida:
Directions:
- Take an amount of your Thanksgiving cranberry compote - using real, whole cranberries, nothing from a can - and blend it with a little cold water until it turns nice and smooth.
- Shake over ice: 2 1/2 jiggers cranberry, 1 1/2 jiggers cachaça, and 1/2 jigger simple syrup.
- Strain into glass with ice using fine strainer to catch the bits of cranberry detritus. A tea strainer should work fine.
- Drink.
I bring you today the second entry in the newly-minted “Michael Drinks Mildly Exotic Liquors and Reports” series on Kosher Eucharist, since we at KE feel it’s important that our readership be presented with strictly unbiased accounts of various alcohols by someone who hates nearly everything. Last time I covered cachaça, a Brazilian firewater teetering on the cusp of sudden and insufferable popularity, and now the moment has come to contend with mezcal, that notorious proletarian cousin of tequila, that Mexican agave distillate whose preeminent feature, besides its incendiary aroma, is the inclusion of the gusano or worm, a generously-sized moth or weevil larva floating reproachfully in a Davy Jones’ locker of sinister amber brew.
I was at the supermarket on a routine gin run, and I saw that its liquor store had just started stocking a single brand of mezcal, Monte Alban, a supposedly 100% agave Oaxacan product containing a fat white worm. Feeling adventurous, and also slight pangs of withdrawal, I decided that the supermarket’s open-minded liquor stocking policy should be rewarded, and I put the mezcal in my basket. The checkout girl, apparently unaware that such a zoologically-enhanced potation existed, asked me what it was. “It’s basically tequila,” I said, “but even more likely to make you go blind.”
Around the Monte Alban bottle’s neck was a small brochure which purported to recount the history and traditions of mezcal, which I quote below (with my comments in bold):
You are holding in your hands one of the most legendary drinks in the world. (Just like absinthe, except favored by raging, pumice-livered drunks instead of sad-eyed, fin-de-siècle-nostalgic youths with Toulouse-Lautrec prints on their walls.) Its mystique, created over hundreds of years, follows it to this day. What is it about Mezcal that has given it such an avid following? (The foolishness of man perverteth his way.) What makes it so unique? (The rustic charm of paint stripper wedded to the price of mid-level tequila.)
Mezcal dates from the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Spanish conquistadores had conquered the New World. When they ran out of their traditional rum, the battle-scarred fighters (or more accurately, the spread-highly-contagious-foreign-diseases-then-sit-back-relax-and-worry-about-what-to-distill-scarred fighters) looked for something else to celebrate with. (The native women were understandably reluctant at that point). The (surviving) Aztecs near the mountaintop settlement of Monte Alban in Oaxaca had cultivated a certain species of agave cactus for juice which they would ferment into what they called pulque. The Spaniards, wanting something much more potent than pulque, began to experiment with the agave. First, they chopped it up to be cooked. The juice was then pressed out, fermented for several days, and finally distilled. The result was Mezcal.
Traditionally, every bottle of true Mezcal made in Oaxaca Province contains an agave worm (since 1940, anyway). Since the agave worm inhabits only the species of cactus that Mezcal is made from the agave worm signifies genuine Mezcal, made the traditional way. The worm isn’t there for looks. (It’s fortunate that this was clarified, since most people agree that a dead grub floating in embalming liquor is the very pinnacle of aesthetic splendor.) It is meant to be eaten. Because it is believed by many (note the subtle, lawsuit-skirting qualification of that statement) that within the worm lies the key. Some say it unlocks the door to a world of wondrous experiences (such as a night in county lockup on charges of urinating in public while screaming “I JUST ATE A FUCKING WORM! FUCK YOU!). Others say it sets free a spirit of celebration (such as urinating in public while screaming “I JUST ATE A FUCKING WORM! FUCK YOU!). Still others say that eating the worm locks in the enchantment and excitement of Mezcal. (”I JUST DRANK A SHITLOAD OF LIQUOR THAT HAS A FUCKING WORM IN IT! FUCK YOU!”) The worm then holds different keys for different people (like your high school janitor, except the mezcal-preserved worm has, on average, a lower BAC). And there’s only one way to see what yours will open. (If I drink enough mezcal in one evening to make it all the way down to the worm, I’m betting the black-market price of my corroded liver that all that’s going to be opened is my digestive tract.) Try it.
That I was dealing with a mezcal distillery apparently unaware that agave is not a cactus should have alerted me that something sinister was afoot.
Stapled to the brochure was a little spice packet along with instructions stating: “Mezcal is traditionally drunk like Tequila: that is, with a lick of salt and a bite of lime. For true tradition, use the mixture of sea-salt and spices attached to this brochure.” Of course, the salt ‘n’ citrus tequila cruda is actually not the traditional way to drink tequila - it is, by and large, an invention for tourists - but I decided that anything that would temper the sledgehammer in the teeth that is a shot of mezcal was probably advisable. I filled my faithful Route 66 shotglass, I readied a slice of lime, I took a lick of salt, and I sent the whole shot of mezcal hurtling with violent intent towards my esophagus. Now, I am a man who can consume and hold his liquor with aplomb, a man who can down a stiff martini like so much water if so inclined, so please understand the significance of the fact that I gagged. Oh, I kept it in and I swallowed it, but I gagged. And I reeled. The lime slice lay forgotten as my stomach microbes began to die a million tiny, screaming deaths. I have, in my early-college salad days, taken a shot of 151 rum, and I promise you, a gut slug of unadulterated mezcal is worse.
I reasoned to myself then that perhaps by-the-gulp was not the best method of downing larva-infused agave juice, Monte Alban’s strangely non-traditional take on tradition be damned. I poured another shot and resolved that I would get through this one like a man - with polite, wincing sips. And that, surprisingly, turned out to be somewhat less corrosive, placing the mezcal just on the Ciudad Juárez side of the Rio Grande of palatability (the key to getting it down smoothly, I think, is to not smell it). It is surprisingly sweet, and I couldn’t begin to describe its flavor - so I went looking for someone who could. And thus I discovered that even mezcal, a liquor that could reasonably be sold in the same aisle as 409 and Clorox, has not escaped the condescendingly refined palates of the Liquor Cognoscenti:
Consider this review of a Oaxacan variety from the Beverage Tasting Institute, a publisher of buyers’ guides for wine, beer and spirits. It wrote of the mezcal: “A granular attack leads to a slightly sweet, light-to-medium-bodied palate with a bright, tart, berry, herb and chipotle pepper notes, with a true, floral agave character.”
Excessive, use of, commas blooms coquettishly to reveal a puckish, yet invidious, incomprehensibility which gives a dutiful-yet-faintly-reluctant handjob characterized by notes of industrial solvent, preserved invertebrate, salsa verde and oenophilic pretense.
I don’t know how a liquid could ever be considered “granular,” although the word “attack” is a not entirely inaccurate depiction of what mezcal does when it hits your lips, to say nothing of your higher cognitive functions. And of course “chipotle pepper notes” were only mentioned because the chipotle is a Food That Is Mexican, and “bean and cheese burrito notes” seems faintly racist.
But drinks are meant to be savored, not grimaced through, so I thought I’d make an honest attempt to class up and render drinkable mezcal by giving it the same treatment its cousin gets in bars and Mexican restaurants the world over. I mixed a Mezcal Sunrise.
Now, a Tequila Sunrise is about the most reliable method I’m aware of for masking the flavor of the rotgut tequila served in your average Mexican joint, other than simply forgoing tequila-based drinks altogether in favor of Negra Modelo (this is a good idea). And since all tequila is is un-larvafied mezcal made in Jalisco using only blue agave, I figured what’s good for the goose is good for the Oaxacan engine degreaser.
Well, I was wrong.
Perhaps Monte Alban is just a lousy mezcal - it does run for $20 in the kind of liquor store that sells five flavors of Pucker and only one kind of rye - but, much like cloud cover or chatty company, it goes a long way towards ruining a Sunrise. The peculiar sweetness, the “enbalmy” character that Roast Beef remarks on in the above-linked Achewood, manages to completely overpower a full glass of orange juice and a shot of grenadine, two liquids never noted for lacking distinct flavors.
So what have we learned?
a) If you’re going to buy liquors with a high capacity for inspiring terror - mezcal, arak, coconut rum - don’t scrimp. More money means less ocular degeneration. Except in the case of coconut rum, which you should simply never buy because it is distilled Ortho Tri-Cyclen.
b) Don’t shoot it, sip it. Shots are tacky anyway.
c) Mezcal seems to make about as poor a mixer as single malt scotch, although for a different reason. If a liquor can’t play nicely with orange juice and artificial pomegranate syrup, it probably shouldn’t be let outside.
d) Stick with gin.
Aren’t you glad I’m here, finding these things out so you don’t have to?
Happy Accession Day, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Ireland, and France! I’d trade every so-called “man” in Congress today for you at your worst.
My loving people,
We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.
I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
- The Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, 1588
I’d a damn sight rather have that than a fucking “State of the Union” any Goddamn day of the week. Compare that to:
“We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.”
- James Earl Carter, peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia’s inaugural address.
I think we found where the heart and stomach of a weak and feeble woman wound up.
Oh, Lizzie. We’ll always have work for you if you decide to come back.
All I wanted to do was look up how long sparkling white wine stays sparkling once it’s been opened. So I began typing something to that effect in the Google search bar in Firefox, which attempts to save you time by displaying a list of popular searches that begin with what you’ve typed. I got as far as “how long does” when it presented me with this list of options:
- how long does marijuana stay in your system
(Depends.)
- how long does cocaine stay in your system
(Not long enough, considering how much it costs.)
- how long does it take to get a passport
- how long does weed stay in your system
- how long does alcohol stay in your system
(Long enough to make the next morning pretty unpleasant.)
- how long does it take to get pregnant
(Anywhere from 3 seconds for low-income teenagers up to 3 years for financially successful couples in their mid-40s who “waited until they were secure.”)
- how long does implantation bleeding last
(Who cares about a little hemorrhaging? Check out how fantastic your tits look now!)
- how long does pot stay in your system - how long does marijuana stay in system
- how long does thc stay in your system
Ladies and gentlemen, Kosher Eucharist in conjunction with Google presents to you America’s most pressing concerns: getting stoned, getting high, getting out of the country, getting stoned, getting drunk, getting knocked up, getting new tits, getting stoned, getting stoned and getting stoned.
It also turns out that sparkling wine loses its sparkle pretty fast, so this should be an interesting evening.
He is so universally reviled that I can’t say anything about it. The man’s approval rating recently dipped below that of Jimmy Carter (who should have remained a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia) to tie with the hilariously abysmal Watergate numbers of Nixon - bottoming out with the loud screech of a muffler scraping asphalt. Only Truman, who actually Pushed The Button, has gotten a lower approval rating since the Gallup poll was initiated during King Franklin’s reign.
Okay. So? Comfortably over half the people in the country hate the man. The most positive impression anyone in my sphere has of him is a kind of slothful disgust. So? I can’t add to this. What else is there to say? I’m increasingly fascinated by the endless ability of hippies and Europeans to keep talking about him. They don’t get tired of it! It’s like a woman talking about female trouble, except while women are constrained, marginally, by believability (”Her ovary got so swollen it eventually burst out of her body”), the hippies and Europeans will say anything about George Bush and believe each other.
“Dude, did you know he has a familiar in the form of a white toad with a child’s face? He makes Condoleezza hold it up during press conferences.”
“Zis does not surprise me. Ve have heard she gives it suck from a poppet during the Armistice Day black mass.”
What… how could I compete with this? Anything I said would just be too obscure (you know, with familiars and poppets and all that). The other card in play in my “I can’t really talk bad about him despite how I feel” hand is peer pressure. I’m so used to having “extreme” opinions (”Bring back the pillory! Nuke Beirut! A martini does not contain vodka!”) that I cannot make myself express mainstream sentiments. The minute I open my mouth to say “I hate the son-of-a-frigid-cunt,” my childhood self rears up and demands that I continue to be the weird kid and refuse to conform. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and can only be unlocked by the phrase “I want to drown Ayelet Waldman in a bucket of Midori Sour.”
Finally, I can’t badmouth him because I hate the puerile, and the people for whom anti-Bush is their anti-drug wallow in it. Have you seen the “Good bush, bad Bush” t-shirts, with the president’s face next to a snatch? How do I even attack that? You like cunt hair more than a dynastic presidency, fine. Don’t tell me. I can tell that you loved Scary Movie 4 just by looking at your shirt. Go somewhere and get stoned and do something stupid in the misguided hope that it’ll get you pussy. And even this imbecility pales in comparison with the “bushitler” campaign. George Bush mishandled a natural disaster, deceived a nation, botched what should have been an easy war, and has enriched the powers of his office at the expense of the constitution, judiciary, and Congress, and for these he should be damned. However, Hitler started a war that lead to the death of, at a conservative estimate, 62 million people, looted or destroyed the cultural heritage of a continent, tried to exterminate several ancient peoples, and brought the wrath and opprobrium of the world on his country. There is no comparison except in the minds of fools.
So, in conclusion, he’s an asshole, but we’re not talking about it. Happy Armistice Day, and happy birthday, Mom.
I was watching the Godfather tonight, and something struck me. During the scene immediately preceding his ill-fated meeting with Sollozzo and Tattaglia, Luca Brasi walks purposefully through the hallways and into the bar of a building whose subtly-lit interior oozes Art Deco from every panel and molding. And I almost cried because they don’t make buildings, or anything else, like that anymore. We’ll never have another Chrysler Building or American International Building, never another beat Hot Meals-Sandwiches-Pastries-Pies automat (except for this pink piece of kawaii novelty Village shit), never another Chrysler Airflow, never another Ronson Banjo lighter.
Chris and I want enough money to build a De Stijl house and an Art Deco bar in which we can cloister ourselves so we never have to suffer a postwar aesthetic again. Goddammit.
You know what I hate? Of course you do, if you read this blog. But you know what I’m gonna articulate my hatred of?
Facebook.
There is nothing good about it. For example:
- For a long time, I had a fake name on my facebook profile: Ferdinand Maximillian Branganza-Hohenzollern. At least three times, a stranger either tried to befriend me to ask if that was my real name, or accuse me of having made it up. These people thought it was their business.
- Because the Hohenzollerns ruled Prussia and later the German Empire, and the Branganzas ruled Portugal, two extremely minor royals friended me, “because we were family.” So I got see a lot of drunk college pictures of Leka II, Crown Prince (in pretence) of Albania, and some random anglicized Habsburg cadet who lives in Miami and is a TV commercial actor. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
- You know how sometimes, you’ll be making out with a guy at a party, and some girl we went to high schol with several years ago will interrupt you to talk about something boring? And you know how she’ll later figure out, somehow, your fake facebook name and friend you, twice, based on the fact that she annoyed you briefly at a party some months ago? What kind of mind thinks that “relationship” should be preserved?
- “Here is the top music in the Tulane network:
1. Jack Johnson
2. James Blunt
3. Pussycat Dolls
4. High School Musical 2 Soundtrack
5. A broken white noise machine that emits a piercing whistle”
Why should I want to know this? Information like this depresses me.
- There are people dumb enough to give Facebook their credit card details, so that they can pay Facebook to put a small picture of a Pina Colada on someone else’s page.
- “You have been invited to become a unicorn mermaid ballerina princess ninja zombie vampire pirate mummy football hooligan eel!” If I wanted to pretend to be a mythical creature, I’d change my name to MistWolf NightRunner and hang out in my mom’s houing project playing D&D with the developmentally disabled. But I don’t, so I won’t, okay?
- Even I think it’s sketchy when people try to get laid from Facebook. However, I find it much more disturbing when people try to make friend on Facebook. And I find it incredibly disturbing when a stranger friends you, “pokes” you a lot, and then drunkenly declares love. Also alarming is the idea that Facebook interaction constitutes a valid relationship, to wit: This guy pulled the “I’ll call you, really, but I’m not gonna” thing, which is fine. It happens. I have done it. But then let’s leave it at that. Let’s not pull a snub in real life but then “poke” someone on Facebook and invite him to lame-ass groups about how you wish you were a viscount.
- Just because we went to the same high school doesn’t mean I care if you live or die. People I never once hung out with in high school would friend me, and I didn’t understand that. There was nothing to preserve or maintain, but because they remembered me, kind of, we were friends?
- No one should be allowed to say what their politics or religious views are in an open space, because they will say dumb shit.
In short, Facebook eventually became a near occasion of sin. I knew, if I looked at it, that it would just turn into a Two Minutes’ Hate, so I got rid of it. What pissed me off is that I couldn’t just do it; there were people I actually liked that I only had touch with through facebook, so I had to nag them to give me their real emails before I could erase it. And erase it I did, to bask in the glow of never, ever again having to read that “Jessalyn Katzenberg is EEEEE!!!! soexxxited 2 b going home.”
me: Oh, are you going to write the “we hate Facebook” post or am I?
Jew: Maybe I should. I don’t have much else going on.
me: You’re a better satirist. (Marginally.) But I probably had more harrowing experiences on it.
Jew: Aww, gosh, thanks.
It’s probably true.
The harrowing experiences.
me: I told you the story about the girl who interrupted me trying to take a guy home facebooked me TWICE.
LIKE SHE HUNTED ME DOWN, HAVING DISCOVERED MY FAKE NAME
Oh also the royalty were pretty funny.
Jew: Maybe you should then.
me: You want to write about the Nobel Peace prize?
One of us should. It is so absurd.
Jew: You tend to do better straight out rants.
me: I do shine when hysterical.
Jew: The Calvin to my Hobbes.
me: It’s true.
LET’S GET MATCHING TATTOOS ON OUR COCKS
I kind of want to post this exchange.
Jew: “Chris and Michael: They stroke each other’s egos.”
Fat, white, Western capitalists bought and wore the Che shirt (and other, less-ubiquitous bobs of Kommunist Chic), either ignorant or uncaring of what Che would have done to them. (Killed them, and then bombed their country with a Russian nuke.) They were cool, hip, pink, one with the revolution, and the fact that the Che shirt may well have been made in a Guatemalan sweatshop made them no nevermind. They were fighting the man, one day of bland, mindless consumerism at a time.
Then, it was the kaffiyeh.
Dames, faggots, Krauts, the educated, people who like to vote, Christians, people who like to survive bus rides - they bought the kaffiyeh. Vitriolage, civilian bombings, honor killings, acid vats, political killings, Islamic fundamentalism as a governing force, and of course, Europe’s favorite motif, dead Jews, all wrapped up in a neat little incredibly unflattering headscraf/neckscarf/dishrag/”it” accessory, complete with inconvenient tassels.
Well, of course, I had to get on the bandwagon. If appalling violence is to be the new fashion statement, I want to be in on it. So, in the spirit of allegedly-political-but-really-just-for-grins-bloodshed, I give you:
The brown shirt. It’s simple, it’s economical, it’s about Nazis, and (best of all!) it’s made from organic free-trade fabric.
Remember, remember the fifth of November:
Gunpowder, treason, and plot!
The king and his train were like to be slain;
I hope this day will ne’er be forgot.
Yes, I’m back. We’ll see if it lasts, we’ll see if I don’t get distracted again by the vagaries of life or saxophone music, but for now, I’m back.
My return to the written word, predictably, was inspired by liquor, that distilled and veteran motivator and destroyer of the ambition, creativity and liver function of countless prose enthusiasts. Circumstances took me away from Kosher Eucharist, and it was cachaça, a stiff Brazilian cane juice liquor with a distinctive nose of giving head to a still, that brought me back to it. Haven’t tried cachaça? Put down a glass or three of white rum while listening to João Gilberto’s studiously laconic, ganja-hazy bossa nova…
I came into possession of the telltale hooch because I had to go practice some financial obeah at the bank, which isn’t as fair a trade as it sounds. My aim, since most of my aims revolve around the mingling of spirits, mixers, ice and poor decisions, was to offer as many sacrifices to the avaricious gods of banking as they deemed necessary for the performance of their arcane duties, and then to recover from the proceedings with something suitably alcoholic. If you could appreciate how little comprehension I have of Mammon and the primly smiling Next-Window-Pleases who seem to exercise ultimate control over its ebb and flow, you would probably understand this bank-and-drink ritual.
I had in mind a frosty caipirinha, a popular Brazilian cocktail and much personally-beloved tipple whose name means, roughly, “little hillbilly girl,” which in the annals of inexplicable yet fulfilling drink names ranks right up there with “Harvey Wallbanger.” So after twirling through the half-hour fandango that is arranging an international bank transfer, I found myself down the street at the liquor store, zeroing in on the cachaça hidden between the rums and schnapps, whereupon my eyes settled upon a particularly colorful bottle. Embracing the bottle’s neck with a sultry insouciance was a bright red tag reading:
CAIPIRINHA INSTANT PARTY KIT Includes:
* Caipirinha Drink Mix Pack
* Brazilian Music CD
* Drink Recipes Booklet
Intrigued by the concept of liquor fortified not only with the increased tolerance for existence imparted by distillation, but with a CD of music from my third-favorite country and a powdered mix for a cocktail containing only three ingredients, none of which normally come in powdered mix form, I dropped a little extra money (the only other brand of cachaça at the store, while garish, made no assurances of Instant Parties) and, after a stop at the supermarket for a bag of limes, returned home with my bounty.
I quickly discovered that the Brazilians have their own definition of “party.” Shattering my prior assumption that the average Brazilian celebration includes, over the course of any three hours, one kidnapping, two deaths by gunfire, three deaths by samba, four deaths by inexpressible saudade, five births and sixty-seven conceptions, it seems a true festa brasileira, at least as Cachaça 51 would have it, lasts 18 minutes (the length of the Brazilian Music CD) and is attended by no more than one person, since the powdered caipirinha mix makes it abundantly clear that it only prepara uma caipirinha.
Needless to say, eighteen minutes and one guest basically describes my ideal party, and I’ll be making aliyah to Brazil as soon as possible.
The powdered mix, for its part, did not inspire a great deal of confidence. It trumpeted its sabor natural, but a cursory readthrough of the ingredients revealed such sabores as “acidulante INS 330″ and “estabilizante INS 331,” which may be consecutive in the INS scale but, much like the Instant Party Kit did with the word “party,” seemed to imply a variation in the Portuguese and English understandings of the word “natural.” The mixture instructions were scarcely more encouraging. Instead of the delicate layering of muddled lime and sugar, crushed ice and cachaça in a traditional caipirinha, the powdered mix exhorted Lusophone lushes to “coloque um dose de cachaça no copo,” “adicione o conteúdo do envelope” and “misture bem e complete o copo com gelo picado,” a backwards recipe which may produce inebriant Brazilian Kool-Aid (a libation doubtless possessing its own charm), but certainly does not a caipirinha make.
So I set aside the mix, to save as a conversation starter or to pour into Chris’s mouth someday while he sleeps, and endeavored to make a proper caipirinha, a simple process I’ll explain to you so you too can throw an Instant Caipirinha Party in your own office, school, automobile or other appropriate location.
You will need these things.
- Cut half a lime into four wedges
- Drop the wedges into a rocks/old fashioned glass
- Sprinkle two teaspoons of cane sugar over the limes
- Muddle this up real good, until the juice is freed from the lime and has had a few drinks with the sugar and is working up the nerve to ask it if it wants to go back to his place to hear his Massive Attack LPs. You will need a muddler for this. You should have a muddler in your home, because a home without caipirinhas, mojitos and Mint Juleps is just four walls with a mortgage and a shrill, inexorably aging person who wants to know why your “lovemaking” has become so “distant.”
- Fill the glass up like 2/3 or so of the way with crushed ice. If you don’t have one of those fancy fridge door devices or don’t want to run the blender, just put a few ice cubes into a plastic bag and smash the hell out of them with something sturdy. This is what I do, and I’ll continue to John Henry my crushed ice until the day it kills me.
- Pour in the neighborhood of a jigger and a half of cachaça over the crushed ice and muddled lime/sugar mixture.
- Stir it all up to evenly distribute the sweet’n’sour-ness. Drink leisurely, taking care not to spill on the floor should the urge to samba strike.
Quero a vida sempre assim, com você perto de mim
You may, particularly if you live in the sort of large, East Coastish metropolis rife with bars specializing in appalling transgressions against the art of the cocktail and operating under the assumption that all clear liquors are, like, basically the same, encounter something called a “caipiroska,” which is a terrible idea in liquid form that substitutes vodka for cachaça. If you see a caipiroska on a menu, order it so that you may dash it to the floor, aghast. These nouveau, craftless, anything-goes bartenders are the people who brought you the vodka martini - people who would mix Smirnoff, simple syrup and Angostura bitters and call it a “Old Fashionov” - and they should not be encouraged. If your local firewater repository doesn’t sell cachaça, they almost assuredly sell Seagram’s 7 and 7-UP, which you can buy and still manage to make a time of it.
But I digress. What about that Instant Caipirinha Party Brazilian Music CD with its nameless songs, nameless musicians and inability to maintain stylistic cohesion even for eight tracks and eighteen minutes?
TRACK 1
It starts off promisingly enough with a languorous jazz guitar bossa, which, if it were longer than two minutes and twenty-two seconds in length, would be pretty good music for letting your eyes get a little misty and out of focus and indulging in some saudade. However, this is not generally considered acceptable behavior at a party.
TRACK 2
Somehow, what must be the background music for a Brazilian Tourism Board commercial targeting American tourists with copious images of fruity rum drinks and dynamite Carioca junk spilling out of scantily-clad Carioca trunk sneaked onto this CD. “Brazil: Come Check Out the Ass On That.”
TRACK 4
This appears to be “When Doves Cry” done as a samba. I imagine that in being so recast, it has also been retitled something appropriately Brazilian, such as “When Doves Engage in a Manic Tropical Bacchanal Tempered Only By An Ineffable Sense of Sadness and Loss.”
TRACK 6
It is a packed and smoky nightclub on a summer night in São Paulo. The dancefloor is slick with sweat. In a back room, many lines of cocaine are being snorted. Someone is shot amidst the revelry. The people react by dancing with increased fervor, for to dance, yes, it is all they know.
TRACK 7
I can’t speak with certainty about the provenance of any of the songs on the CD, but if I had to hazard a guess about this one, it would be that circa 1986, the swirling Lurianic Technicolor angels who govern the actions of Carlos Santana exhorted him to fly down to Rio and record with the first nondescript fusion group he came across. This song is what resulted.
And so I must give Cachaça 51 its due. While both the powdered mix and Brazilian Music CD were little more than lies, they (in collusion with the cachaça) bestowed upon me the requisite fodder, and heady cane-drunk, to return to Kosher Eucharist, which I love so well. I promise to consider never leaving it again.
And to restore your faith in Brazilian music, here is the lovely Astrud Gilberto singing one of my favorite Antonio Carlos Jobim compositions, “Agua de Beber”:
Abraços e beijinhos e carinhos sem ter fim,
Michael
A friend of mine recently asked me to turn him on to some tasty new music. I recommended a crash course in classic MBP, the catch-all term for Brazilian pop. And since it’s convenient, I’m using the blog as a platform, from which I imagine some of our other readers could potentially benefit.
Happy Accession Day, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Ireland, and France! I’d trade every so-called “man” in Congress today for you at your worst.
