The Last Word, Saturday, January 17, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
Price: $45.00
A scientifically insightful approach to pairing food with drinks, focusing on beer, spirits, and cocktails. We'll cover the science of flavor perception using all the senses and relating it to the format of the paired dinners. Exploring food and drink-centric cultures beyond our borders to give a true perspective on what it takes to give meaning to a spirits/cocktail/beer dinner. We'll take your spirited dinner from an unrelated food/brand showcase to an harmonic, convergent and synergic experience.
You know. For the theological implications.
But given the state of the academic job market, I should probably also hit up this one:
St. Anthony Hotel, Saturday, January 17, 11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Price: $35.00
We live in an age where there is an unprecedented demand for highly skilled professional bartenders. With a demand like this there are scores of new career paths opening up for young men and women with the right training and correct motivation. Do you have what it takes? Panel Guests: Jason Kosmas (founder - 86 Co., co-founder - Employees Only NYC), Omar YeeFoon (Brand Ambassador - 86 Co.), Curtis Cheney (bartender turned distiller), and Bill Norris (writer/beverage director).
Even though most of my writing wrestles with Catholicism, I’m not a Roman Catholic. As I’ve made clear. As a teenager, I made it clear to the administration at my Catholic high school, too. Nonetheless, owing I guess to their saintly Francis-like ecumenism, when I was a senior they let me (a heathen!) run a lecture at the freshman retreat on the subject of music and faith.
I say I “ran” it, but I guess they didn’t trust me all the way, because they had me co-present with a youth leader from a local Catholic church. Still, it was a big event for me, my first experience standing in front of a classroom. I wrote a detailed lesson plan, anticipated questions I might get, even thought of contingency plans in case the school’s CD player malfunctioned.
The youth leader’s presentation was what you’d expect: he tried to sell Contemporary Christian music to the freshmen by convincing them that wholesome music could be cool. I took the opposite tack. My thesis was that the act of taking these bare materials (notes and words and effects) and trying to turn them into something with meaning necessarily takes a sort of faith and that, therefore, music is almost by definition religious. My point was that we can find faith all over in music. For examples, I played Lenny Kravitz and Jimi Hendrix, and I argued that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of “Little Wing” is essentially a prayer.
(Listen again if it’s been a while and tell me if you disagree)
I thought of this recently when a friend from those days sent me a link to his new band’s demo, which reminded me a little of a Denton-based band called Slobberbone.
I first saw Slobberbone at the Impala in Fort Worth after my junior prom. In fact, it was the night the Impala opened, and the show had been publicized for weeks. Jello Biafra was going to be there.
Except my date and I got there late, long after Jello had gone, when there were only about ten people left in the Impala’s back room, watching this country-punk band fall apart on stage. The band members seemed beyond drunk. At one point, the bassist, who is about six-foot-ten, just sat down on the stage, while playing, and then tipped over on his back. He kept playing from the floor.
The next day I found their CD, Crow Pot Pie, at CD Warehouse on Berry Street and listened to it almost daily for the next year or so.
I looked them up on Spotify after my friend sent me his demo to see if they sounded the way I remembered. One thing I had forgotten is just how thoroughly Christian language and themes run through their songs. I don’t mean that you can interpret them as Christian if you try—I mean that Christianity is an unmistakable obsession in their lyrics.
In “Stumblin,’ they sing, “So I picked a fight with Jesus Christ / Now I’m thinkin’ I was wrong.”
And in “No Man Among Men,”: “I know I ain’t no man among men / Jesus, I pray you’ll take me in.”
Then, in “Dunk You in the River”: “I finally found a drink to wash away all the world’s sins / And I’ll dunk you in the river once again.”
How did I miss that? I bet I didn’t really miss it, exactly. I think their religious emphasis probably just didn’t stand out. For an Episcopalian acolyte attending a Catholic school in an Evangelical city, hearing about God—even if it was hearing someone reject him—was pretty normal. There was no such thing as secular or agnostic there. The champions of the Fort Worth music scene in those days were the Toadies, who certainly fit Flannery O’Connor’s description of the South: they were God-haunted. Listen to the songs off of Rubbernecker. No word matters more in those songs than Jesus. On the other side of the metroplex, the biggest name in Dallas music was the Reverend Horton Heat, who parodied baptisms on his album covers and exorcisms at his concerts.
But back to Slobberbone. Understand, this is a band I remember as an absolute human train wreck (that I loved!). Their songs are politically incorrect, often violent, occasionally leaning towards a (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek misogyny. In no way am I endorsing them as moral exemplars, anymore than I would endorse Billy Joe Shaver or someone like that. Still, while songwriter Brent Best doesn’t seem to take much seriously, I don’t detect a lot of irony when he’s singing about religion.
And I have no idea what Best’s faith (or lack of faith) is like. I don’t know what Cormac McCarthy believes, either, or what Fyodor Dostoevsky did (I mean, officially he was Orthodox, but c’mon. Don’t you wonder?). When Best sings “He said trust in me I’m the King of Kings, and you my friend are in a rut / But what I was looking for was the King of Beers, so I said won’t you be my Bud” I don’t know if he wants me to cheer or shake my head. But I know that if I’m going to learn anything about religion it’s probably going to come from someone like that: someone who sometimes feels like blowing off Jesus for a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Or let me rephrase that: if you can’t sing about that twelve-pack like maybe it’s the better choice, then I’m afraid we might not be wrestling with the same questions.
Cybercafés. Do they still exist? Now that we all carry the internet around with us? I found a reference
to one in Enrique Vila-Matas’ París no se
acaba nunca, from 2003 (Never Any End to Paris, 2011, translated by Anne McLean). If they’ve disappeared, it wouldn’t be too sad—there’s
something disordered about them in the first place, something so antithetical to the
spirit of a bar. A waitress comes and takes your order, you mumble something
without turning away from the computer screen in front of you. The closest
comparison I can think of to them is a bar I know in Fredericksburg where they have video poker, and where one afternoon I watched a woman, a regular, get transfixed by the game. She was there
without being part of the group; any time she participated in the conversation at the bar it was in the same disdainful way a teenager responds to her parents
from the couch without looking up from her iPhone.
Still, I have to feel some personal sadness since I went to
Spain during the height of the cybercafé’s relevance, in the summer of 2000.
That was how I talked to H while she was back in the States: most days, at an
appointed hour, adjusted to account for the time difference and her summer work schedule, I
would be hunched over a screen at a cibercafé in the Huertas neighborhood in Madrid. Chatting. On Yahoo.
[Note: sometimes she went to a cybercafé, too, the only one
in the US I ever heard of. It was in Georgetown, Texas,
and it was a “Christian” establishment—which meant that they were vigilant
about not allowing anything unseemly on their computers. Which meant there was very little
privacy there. Which was ironic, because she only went there when she was staying at her
parents’ house in Georgetown and, therefore, needed to get away to get
privacy.]
My cybercafé had a decent menu. I usually ordered gazpacho, but I also remember having patatas bravas, and croquetas, and a
tortilla sandwich. I think I drank beer there, too, but maybe not. I went to a few other cybercafés when I was out in different
parts of the city, too. My second night there, my exchange program met downtown for
a get-together night out, a small walking tour followed by drinks. And I remember
that the penultimate bar we visited that night was a cybercafé.
Isn’t that funny? It was a night like so many out of books
or whatever, a bunch of Americans out in a European capital, drinking too much
and then staggering home on the metro. But in the middle of it, we all agreed
to pause the merriness and spend a few minutes checking our email,
absorbed in the blue glow of the computer screens which (for some reason I
remember) were embedded in the tables of this bar. Then, finishing
one-by-one, we each patiently waited for the others to complete their business. We
came back together at the bar’s vestibule, a mass of young people heading
rosily back out in the summer night.
Anyway, the reference from Enrique Vila-Matas comes early in the novel: the protagonist and his wife are trying to find the Dingo Bar, where Hemingway supposedly met Fitzgerald, on the Rue Delambre in Paris. The wife says, "You know what, I'm going to look up the Dingo on the internet, I'll go to that internet café on the corner..." The bar is gone, but the fact that they find it on the internet is I guess a commentary on how we've moved our lives online. Still, it already feels like a pretty dated detail to me.
Imagine our bodies, healthy or sick or momentarily struggling, as the light of God.
Imagine we might need affliction to illuminate our souls. (know, in this imagining, the unfairness of such a reality on some, truly sick people)
Imagine we could not have a soul without a body.
Imagine the necessity of Jesus’ human body.
Then the body cannot be a shade of shame or a thing to denounce. Then the body cannot be a cage, and drinking, dear Oscar Wilde, might be more for marrying our bodies to our souls than separating them. Then the body has no use for a language of signs and signals and acronyms.
The flesh is the word, the word is the flesh.
Even, and especially, when the flesh is broken.
Thewhole thingis gorgeous. And it includes readings from Christian Wiman and Mark Doty, two poets with deep connections to Texas.
GS: Right. All Russian rites are suffused with the idea that you will get drunk after you’re finished. I think there is vodka at the end of everything that happens in Russia. My favorite ceremony to do is to go to gravesites of famous artists in Russia. You bring a bottle of vodka andzakuski.
MDM:Zakuski?
GS: If you go to a Russian restaurant, the first thing you see on every menu is zakuski. Which literally means “the thing you follow it with.” “It” being vodka. Appetizers are built around vodka. The mystery of Russia centers on what will happen at the end of the day, or the middle of the day. That being the drinking of the 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of vodka. When I go back there, and I go back every year, I have to acclimate like you would in Denver. Everyone, especially the men, brings their own bottle of vodka. Each finishes their bottle and they enter that land of no return. I’m not a religious person by any means, but you feel this kind of strange communion. With people who, if you had met them on the street, you’d think, “My goodness, look at this strange specimen.”
And here he is on writers drinking:
GS: True. There are so few people to drink with. The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone. There’s a couple of guys who are strong, but that’s it. It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.
On how Georgians drink:
MDM: My Russian brother-in-law tells me some Russians like to spike their vodka with a good jolt of hair spray. Is this true? GS: Ah, yes, the old hairspray maneuver. You know who drinks like crazy? My favorite people, the Georgians. They drink from these big ram horns and each person has to toast every other person at the table. There’s the tamada, the toastmaker, he’s like the air traffic controller. A toast comes in, and he stops it and makes sure everyone is okay with it, then another comes in — it’s a fascinating job. A good tamada is like an MC, he gets hired to work parties and weddings. Their wine is like Thunderbird, really strong. It’s not for a connoisseur, it wouldn’t pass muster. When I was in the nation of Georgia, I met some guys in the government. Some mid-level ministers. We went to their dacha, this gigantic compound. They wanted me to get involved in a scheme to steal $600 million dollars from American charities.
And Italians:
GS: Italy is a dramatic country. I was living in this square, where all these orgies were going on. MDM: Actual orgies? GS: Yeah. It was the rich children of the Italian intelligentsia, famous Marxists, people like that. And they all had these huge apartments. It was just these wild parties. And all based on wine. People would bring their own wine, from whatever region they were from. There were a lot of arrivistes from southern Italy, so there was a lot wines from Abruzzo, Campana, and Calabria, the really violent province. The only time I got semi-violent in a bar, someone came up and said, “You must be Calabrian.” MDM: It’s considered an insult? GS: It is, but I thought it was quite a compliment. The whole scene was wild youth, women, wine and a dearth of clothing. There was this one Italian. An incredible Russophile.
Brazilians:
GS: It’s not the bars, it’s hanging on the beach. The people are so beautiful. They drink, then the dancing starts. I don’t have an ass. I don’t own one. But they do. It’s so sad to leave it. You think, where the hell am I going? It’s not an intellectualized drinking culture. No one gives a damn about that stuff. You can’t bring up Schopenhauer after a couple drinks. I had the most expensive sake I ever had in Rio. A hundred dollars for a little flask.
He even has something to say about Austin:
GS: I was just in Austin. I could live there. It seemed pretty cheap.
