Winter

It’s winter here in northern California. And, as a Michigan boy, I always find it a bit confusing. It’s cold, sure, but it just got to be that way a week ago. There’s precipitation, alright, but it’s fat cold rain drops not fluffy flakes of snow. It’s not even the freezing rain that usually sets the stage for any of my “conquest with an automobile” stories.

The cold doesn’t bother me. My people include those built for the cold. And with more than a few ‘real’ winters behind me, I’m certainly able to weather the bay area’s version. It’s just so alien to me. We go the whole summer with out a drop of rain here and when the water does show up it never seems, to me, to be enough to last a whole year. For weeks it might come down, and after the third day you begin asking how much more the ground can hold and for how long? But it soaks it up and, by February, the hills turn all green and lush. The cold water washes the summer’s tan colored straw away, almost like, revealing the verdant flat leaf beneath.

And I stand at the end of my block. In my soaked jacket (a dirt brown Dickie’s lumber yard number better suited to dry cold) I follow the rising land with my eye, up to the ridge line. And, if I squint, it could be any story book hillock- any painters ideal of ‘the green hills’. But I usually can’t imagine that, being wet and having been wet all week. Normally I just look up and scratch my head, wonder about how green things grow and what date the calender says it is. 

Now, now! I’m not saying I miss the snow. I’m fond of saying that snow is pretty in the air but as soon as it touches something it’s just a pain in the ass. But it just feels right. The seasons go: winter, spring, summer and fall; not: SUMMER, fall and spri… I’ll admit to my right to gripe about snow, it was the only way I got through February’s in Detroit. That low grumble you build in your gut over it. A tirade or rant, at least, you could deliver at a moments notice. Your displeasure and your stubborn will to endure it again could be made to warm some part of you. You claim it makes you harder than that soft California lot. That it makes you grateful for summer, that even the decay of fall was somehow a gift for the time you spent in the prison of last February. But, in an effort to ‘work smarter not harder’, you can have my share of the white stuff. I’ll find something else to whine about, I’m sure.

 

I got your Mojito

      

The tradition of bar tending comes out of the same school as pharmacy. You could, in fact, quip that it’s the dark side of the apothecaries legacy. Or, at the very least, say that since the dawn of man there has always been someone around to mix up a few twigs and berries with a bit of hoodoo and concoct something to set you right. And it has more to do with politics and morality that we now view the two arts as separate things.

Take for instance the Mojito. Which like so many cocktails is really a tincture preparation. A tincture is a solution of ‘medicine’ in alcohol. But before you say, “Hey! I thought the alcohol was the medicine!”. Let me stop you; and remind you of who’s job it is around here to make the snide assertions. So anytime you mix something in spirits, like vegetables, fruit or herbs and spices, your making a compound of what ever it was you added with the solvency of alcohol.

So our Mojito starts with a glass. We need a nice, heavy bottomed, rocks glass (or, sometimes called, a high ball). We also need a tool that should be a dead give away that we’re in the realm of the potion maker, the muddle. Which is just what bar men call a wooden pestle. The glass becomes our mortar and we muddle (it’s it’s own verb too) a compound of mint leaves, sugar and lime juice. The acid in the lime juice will begin to break down the leaves, and in the final drink gets the bitter receptors on the tongue to wake up and experience the quieter notes in the liquor. The sugar is there both as the popular spoonful that helps the medicine go down and as an abrasive. After putting a healthy bruise on the leaves, releasing  the essential oils and increasing the surface area of the leaves to speed absorption of the booze. Which is rum in this case. But before the rum, the glass is topped off with ice, smaller ‘cubes’ being the best. After our rum vehicle is added fight the urge to shake or stir, your patron will appreciate the lack of greenery in his teeth.

Now, all the recipes will tell you to top off with club soda. And while this is important in a bar or party setting, for moderation, pour cost and palletability. I think you should use a high quality rum and the least amount of water (soda or other wise) as you can comfortably get down. Really let the tincture go to work, let it become all that it can with out fighting through the salty bite of the club soda. And for heavens sake don’t use a straw. Drink it off the top of the glass in long sips and leave the dregs for the bar back.

“But wait!”, you say. “Isn’t that really just a Caipirinha with mint!”. And I don’t really wanna get into a ‘chicken or the egg’ thing with you. But I’ll say that a Caipirinha isn’t a Caipirinha with out, the sugar cane rum, cachaca. Just drink yer medicine and shut yer yap.

Work 2

Excerpt from comments made by Itzpapalotl on work  will be marked like this : [ I think crafting had a lot to do with...] find the full post on the right of this page.

[I think crafting had a lot to do with a more collective culture and identity]

  As a base for all commerce beyond subsistence farming a ‘craft’ was a communities life blood. It made a city or town…well it made it,um ,a city or town! And in the ideal sense, as long as the market for what ever they crafted held peoples lives and legacies  march on.

  It’s probably not until you introduce man’s corruption on man kind that that ideal goes hay wire. And I think that that happens fairly quickly. First the labeling followed by the oppression flavor of the era . But thats a subject for a later thread.

  The peace and harmony that’s achievable in doing a thing well, and beyond a thing a craft should be what we’re all after. As a society, that has to be the point. Once you’re up a few levels on the pyramid model, up beyond living in numbers for support, past infrastructure and about the time your dividing up work…when the bodies needs aren’t so all consuming, is when you run into problems. When idle hands produce the mind’s works. When the plow boy can put down his rein and contemplate the stars. Hopefully it leads to great things, higher math, all the sciences and most importantly art. But as often the great, the horrible, coercion, graft, and most horrid ,violence.

  But all the while we need food. We all need some place to lie our head. Even the murderer needs new boots, maybe more so. So the cobbler and the builder, their sons…the countless families involved in bringing food to the finely crafted table strive to “do their thing”, both as a point of pride and to contribute to society.

[But individual freedom and individual aspirations are now what society values most]

  Which leads, or has led at least, to a very top heavy system. Instead of the cobbler raising the next generation of shoe makers in traditional sense, the cobblers son began a technology tree to get away from the bench. Maybe my cobbler has done all he can for this train of thought. If  modern technology had grow out of a more classic beginning. If, as more of a craft and not as the out put of math and science, technology would have lead to a much different place.

   So I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I was tending bar and he stopped in to have a brew and say ,”hi”. Now, he’s a full on techno-geek but posses a poet’s mind so he’s fun to gab with, anyway. This was a few years ago and we were talking about how all the devices were getting smaller, ya know, and I asked how soon we would loose the desk concept all together. When we could expect to do all our computing in our heads or some such. He said it would still be awhile; before we as a people could let go of the need to touch something. Even, he said, if it became “ I need to go out the the garage, warm up the tower ,and burn a hard copy.” like some shop tool, something you might craft with.

  Your right, though, individual accomplishments are valued more today then the life one could reasonably believe to lead in my world of a “decided calling”. It’s all a little hollow though. Basing your success on how wide the trail is your blazing. It’s become more about doing it differently than doing it well, in some cases. And there’s less and less middle ground for those not cutting trail, people  whose calling seems to have had it’s line disconnected.

[Are we supposed to have an individual inspiration, a passion, a calling]

  I think society would be better off if we did. To the point that if you weren’t well on the way towards a chosen one at some point one would be thrust on you. When that kind of thing was common your father might take you down to some master and turn you over to them. How might that system have evolved, if allow to, in our modern age with all the social advances we’ve fought hard for. If some compromise between freedom of the individual and the needs of society had grown into a style of life we live now. How great the works of a society in which even the thumb tack union gets its due.

   And with everybody having a place  to go to and grow from would the social ills be less drastic and less lame. They’re the same over and over, those ills. And frankly I think we’re all tired of um. Shouldn’t they be new ones every once and awhile. The definition of insane is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

 

I’ll admit here to my very broad strokes and over simplification.

Work

       The subject of work, or the lack of it, has been on my mind to a great extent lately. Mostly because I don’t have any at the moment. But also the very nature of it as well. I find myself longing for the days of the master/apprentice system. When a certain amount of the search for work was taken care of for you before you were expected to have any idea of what you “wanted to be when you grew up”.

I realize that the comfort of such arrangements were forfeit  in the birth of the freedom our great nation was founded on. Or at least lost to the expanding choices that even the most average person is exposed to at an ever earlier age. The information age has enabled the farm boy to pack up and leave the farm for any other endeavor he might see on line , in print or or hear from a teacher. And the success of those sort of transplants romanticized in our culture make it a common rite of passage for most adolescents. Beyond escaping some hardship or abuse most young Americans utter such oaths as “ as soon as I can I’m out’a here” to put, what is usually, the first independent stamp on their young lives. In making their own way they see the fresh start of it to be more important than maintaining strong family and community bonds.

I watch a lot of television on the subject of arts and crafts. From traditional painters, sculptors and film makers to skilled trades people like potters, metal workers and fabricators. And it’s appealing to me to think of the time when a young person was introduced to the master craftsman to begin a life of study and work in a field he or she had little or no knowledge of before hand. The early years of operating some bellows, spit or kiln in between laps with the broom might have been painfully dull. But the trade off of grunt work ( what we might term a ‘job’ now) for the training that went with it  enables a cycle of rebirth in the trade. As the student he learns and as the master he instructs. All the while commerce drives the craft and culls the weak from the herd. If you learned your trade from someone who’s product was a poor one, and failed to raise the quality, it was sure that your school wouldn’t last.

Today, I think, a large percent of people with huge potential spend there professional life working at ‘jobs’ with out ever finding their passion. Or if the do find it, too many realize that it’s too late in their life to really master a calling. And don’t we all suffer, speculatively of coarse, with out the master works such people could have created? 

In that idea, I believe, is part of the reason advances in technology have lapped cultural ones- at least as it applies to work and commerce. The eastern philosophies talk about knowing a thing through a life of it’s simple repetition. If we were all focused on a single endeavor, a craft that we were pursuing towards excellence through tradition, who would have time to telemarket? It would mean the end of all the pursuits we term “get rich quick”. Because what is the point of that other than to remove oneself from work. I fear that that maybe the American dream now. To get rich quick, and spend your life not pursuing anything other than consumption. All the while feeling justified because you can still provide for you and yours. 

And as I spend most of the day crafting a pot of beans I’m hoping to live off of for several days, I’ll admit the life of the lottery winner or one hit wonder is a day dream of  comfort and relief .

On the Martini

     One of my favorite subjects is liquor. And, with a few in me, I’ll run on and on about it at amazing length. Sometimes to the point of sending my audience running, politely, to the other end of the bar or party. But from time to time I’ll find a willing listener or I’ll be posed an actual question.

     Often it’s a form of this one: “What’s the toughest drink to make?”. Or, and only slightly less complicated to answer: “What is your favorite drink?”

     As a bar tender for the better part of ten years I’ve thought about this at great length and have decided that the cocktail should be viewed more as an artistic endeavour and less like a recipe. Which means that the process is as important as the end result or that there should be artistry in it’s creation. Beyond the pomp of the classically trained bar man’s flare and flourish, the steps and components should be chosen with an eye to both form and function.

     So lets look at the Martini, the undisputed king of the American cocktail. With a glut of material on the subject I’d be a fool to think that anything I could add here hasn’t already been covered. So we’ll be using it as an example and a patch of common ground. I live about two miles from the bronze and field stone marker that proclaims Martinez California the birth place of the “Martinez Special”. It claims that in 1874, Julio Richelieu made the first in his saloon for a miner with “a fistful of (gold) nuggets” and that it contained 2/3 gin, 1/3 vermouth and a dash of orange bitters, was served over crushed ice and garnished with an olive. Which, in my opinion, makes it closer to a high ball than what we think of now as a Martini. And since that time the great debate has continued to raged over how to make a “proper” Martini.

     It’s W. Churchill that gets credit for the old saw ” give me a glass of ice cold gin and show it to a bottle of vermouth “. And the subject of the amount of actual Vermouth in the drink is also the point of  Hemingway’s calling for “Montgomery(s)”, which is a version that’s 15:1 gin to vermouth. So named because those were the odds Field Marshal Montgomery wanted before committing to a battle. I’ve adopted, to much compliment, a version that’s traceable to a recipe from the 1955 play Auntie Mame, where a drop of vermouth is swirled in the serving glass and then thrown out. Sometimes a chilled martini glass is no where to be found so I usually put the drop into the glass with ice and water, let it chill while I shake the gin vigorously and then toss the ice water before straining the gin and serving. This “glass flavoring” looks sloppy and redundant when making the drink “over (ice)” so I try to steer the drinker away from such a choice.

     The point is, the hardest drink to make is the one so mired in version and opinion that every one you set on the bar will be compared to every other one set there yesterday, today and tomorrow. The hard part is having the experience to understand this and the confidence not to care. With cocktails like this it’s much more important to serve it consistently every time with the only changes being adjustments made by the patron.  Sometimes it’s just easier to have a beer. Just tip like it came in stem ware and by the grease of the bar tender’s elbow.