Is Anybody Going to San Antone?

The San Antonio Cocktail Conference starts next Thursday, January 15. Here's Imbibe Magazine's list of seminars to catch.

The whole schedule is here.

I'm interested in this one:

THE RELATIVITY OF FLAVOR PAIRING 

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:

WHAT NOW? - CAREER OPPORTUNITIES FOR PROFESSIONAL BARTENDERS BEYOND THE BAR 

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).

Crow Pot Pie Christianity

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.

This is the Ballad...

...we all must sing

Another One for the Hymnal

Blind Willie Johnson's "I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole":


Pair with Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Wine":

Wine
moves the whole springtime,
joy grows like a plant,
walls crumble,
boulders,
abysses close up,
song is born.

Of Manly Tables and Girly Drinks

Two quick follow-ups to my last post on gender and drinking.

First, on the manliness of making tables:

Both Whiskey Catholic and the Woodford Reserve bourbon commercials I mentioned last week suggest that making furniture (a table for the former, a bookshelf for the latter) is a hallmark of manliness.

For the record, I love hand-made furniture. Growing up, all the activity in my house swirled around a large, rustic wooden kitchen table. That table was made by hand. By my mom. When she was pregnant with me.

Apparently, she also made a bookshelf. And a desk.

Another note:

Katy Waldman, building on this post by Lisa Wade, asks about the flipside of manly drinking: girly drinks.

Waldman makes a couple of great points that further highlight the absurdity of gendered drinking. First, in considering the notion that drinking whiskey is considered “manly” because it involves proving yourself by drinking the hard stuff, she observes, “Other types of self-punishing willpower—the feminized kinds—only attract scorn.” Whiskey is manly because it’s “hard,” but vodka is feminine because… why?

Waldman and Wade also point out that women who transgress gender norms in drink-ordering—who order whiskey at a bar—can be treated as something special. But this isn’t really challenging gender norms, just reinforcing the idea that male-associated drinks are better and more worthy. In ordering whiskey, these girls mark themselves as “cool girls,” setting themselves apart from the other, less cool women who drink, I don’t know, wine coolers.

Waldman writes:

Wade makes a smart observation, which is that while bartenders and waitstaff oftenexpect their female customers to order “juicy or sweet” beverages, those who defy convention with a whiskey neat get vaulted to cool-girl glory. “This is typical for America today,” she writes. “Women are expected to perform femininity, but when they perform masculinity, they are admired and rewarded.”

She’s right. I can still feel the heat shimmer of your judgment, reader. And the side-eye I’m likely to get, asking a waiter for something “refreshing” or “light” (or, God forbid, “bubbly”) is compounded by the approval my female friends draw just by opting for “one of your darker beers, please.” A girl who handles her liquor—and what a weird verb, handle, as if recreational drinking were some kind of beast to manage—seems “down,” chill, hot. She’s almost one of the guys, and in that wordalmost dwell all the mysteries of sex appeal us Schnapps-sucking chicks will never understand.

It seems to me that the healthiest attitude towards gender and drinking is the one expressed by a bartender Waldman quotes, who tells her “But honestly, the women bartenders I work with tend to be a lot less opinionated about this stuff than my male friends. We respect each other’s right to go order a martini and then an old fashioned.”

If you like it, drink it. Come to think about it, that was kind of my mom’s approach to crafts: she made the flamenco dress below (she was living in Spain at the time) and she made a table. I don’t think she gave much thought to what either activity said about her gender identity. If she wanted it, and could make it, why not do it?

The Catholic Church's Real Drinking Problem

Over at the New Yorker, Ian Crouch critiques the Woodford Reserve commercial that ran during the season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men. In that ad, a woman’s voice tells us:

When I see a man drinking bourbon,
I expect him to be the kind who could build me a bookshelf.
But not in the way that one builds a ready-made bookshelf.
He will already know where the lumberyard is.
He’ll get the right amount of wood without having to do math.
He’ll let me use the saw,
and not find it cute that I don’t know how to use the saw.

For Crouch, this represents “a rather old-fashioned statement about gender.” Crouch goes on:

Despite the modern, fashionable feel of its new ads, Woodford Reserve’s definitions of gender are radically narrow, and its sense of the possibilities for human sexuality even narrower. Men must appeal to women, and women to men. To attract women, men have to be rugged and capable while maintaining a perfect veneer of nonchalance. Women can spot a phony or a wimp a mile away. Women, meanwhile, have to be forever good sports, proud of their men’s rough edges and presentable in mixed company with the rowdy boys. The core message is one of stern-faced seriousness: Bourbon defines a man’s world, and women are welcome only if they play by the men’s rules.

For the record, the Woodford spot didn’t really bother me. Even Crouch concedes that “[i]n the pantheon of sexist advertising, Woodford barely merits inclusion.” But the conversation reminded me of this piece I wrote last year about the gendering of drinking, and after reading it I decided to check on Whiskey Catholic, the blog I mentioned in that post.

I want to like Whiskey Catholic. They offer great reviews, they seem supremely knowledgeable, and they write with the jolliness you find in many of the best Catholic writers.

Funny coincidence: the day I checked in, Whiskey Catholic’s most recent post was “Man Skills: Making a Table.” The first line reads: “There’s nothing more romantic than making something for a woman using your own two hands, especially if that something ends up looking better than what you could buy at a department store.”

(I’ve got something to say about the manliness of table-making, but I’ll save that for a follow-up post.)

Anyway, as I flipped through Whiskey Catholic’s posts, I started to think that Robert Christian might be right to say that the Catholic Church has a drinking problem. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t agree that the problem is the one Christian diagnoses. “While engaging in interfaith dialogue,” Christian complains, “the vast majority of thoughtful, virtuous young people I have met from other faiths have been teetotalers (those who abstain from alcohol entirely), while I have witnessed many of my fellow devout Catholics, who are otherwise morally serious, acting foolishly due to their consumption of alcohol.”

I flatly disagree with Christian that the Church should encourage teetotaling. Obviously.

No, for me, the real problem comes when the Church’s insistence on strict complementarianism gets all mashed-up with its love of drinking. What Crouch identifies in the Woodford ads is just a lazy failure to see beyond the gender binary. But in the hands of the writers at Whiskey Catholic, gendered drinking becomes something much worse: dogma.

In other words, for these writers, drinking, which should be liberating, is about reinforcing order. Where drinking could be seen as a way of breaking down divisions and building community, instead it becomes a means of building divisions and excluding others.

Take the “Whiskey Men” designation that Whiskey Catholic bestows on “men who lived fascinating and fruitful lives.” The honor, I guess, is meant as a sort of “Most-Interesting-Man-in-the-World” award, and Whiskey Catholic does write up some amazing stories, like this oneabout the priest who was recently awarded the medal of honor. But the last group of menthey gave the award to was (ahem) the U.S. Bishops, including Charlotte Bishop Peter Jugis who (ahem) “defended the Catechism” after a talk by Sister Jane Laurel that (ahem) “included evidence drawn from scientific studies.” And also Bishop Paprocki for  refusing communion to pro-choice senator Dick Durbin.

This was Bishop Paprocki’s second “Whiskey Man” award; the first time, Whiskey Catholic cheered him for defending (ahem) traditional marriage in a talk in which he apparently told those who disagree with him to become Protestants. Seems to me like only a lousy shepherd would tell his sheep to jump the fence for another pasture, but what do I know?

Or take their series on “The Catholic Gentleman,” in which posts on things like how to tie a bow-tie are interspersed with calls to confront relativism and to persevere in the face of the Supreme Court “giving its tacit endorsement to sodomy and the redefinition of union.”

Essentially, whenever they delve into human sexuality, the writers at Whiskey Catholic are no different from any Catholic Right writers or websites: they build on the same gender essentialism, peddle the same myth of moral decline, make the same self-protective claims that their opponents are irrational, or selfish, or just haven’t given their arguments enough thought.

For them, whiskey just serves this ideology. As Crouch writes about the Woodford ads, “Whiskey is about enacting particular rites of manhood, alone with other men and the ghosts of the manlier men of the past.” That’s almost word-for-word what Taylor Marshall said in his interview with Whiskey Catholic.

Which is disappointing because a proper (ahem) theology of the bottle would actuallychallenge the accepted Catholic dogma regarding human sexuality. As I’ve written before, that dogma is most often expressed in terms of an analogy with eating:

The idea is this: eating and sex both give us pleasure, but both have a vital purpose—nourishment, in the case of eating, and reproduction, in the case of sex.  [Folks on the Catholic Right] argue that when we have deliberately non-procreative sex (sodomy, masturbation, contraceptive sex) we’re separating the pleasure of sex from its vital purpose.  And this is as unnatural as separating the pleasure of eating from its nourishment—which, [they] say, would be like eating a great meal only to intentionally throw it up.

But drinking has a vital purpose, too—hydration—and drinking alcohol works against that. When we ingest liquor we harm ourselves in lots of ways, and open ourselves to all sorts of unnecessary and potentially catastrophic risks. 

That makes no sense under the rubric used to condemn non-procreative sexual activities. It only makes sense if we think about Rowan Williams’ question in “The Body’s Grace”: “But if God made us for joy?”

In other words, it’s impossible to reconcile the puritan, instrumentalist sexual ethic of the Catholic Right with a hearty embrace of alcohol. The best Catholic writers know this, and that tension animates all of their writing on booze. That’s why Chesterton’s “Wine When it is Red” conflicts with the oversimplified Thomist reasoning that undergirds the current Catholic thinking on sex, and it’s why Percy’s “Bourbon, Neat” has more in common with “The Body’s Grace” than the “Theology of the Body.”

Misguided as he is, Robert Christian is absolutely right to question where drinking fits in the current Catholic cosmovision, and he’s right to oppose “GK Chesterton’s pugnacious writings” on alcohol to the teachings of the Church. He gets what the writers at Whiskey Catholic don’t: you have to choose your drinking or your dogmatism, your bottles or your certitude, your whiskey or your self-righteousness.

One More for the Hymnal: Linda Ronstadt y Mariachi Vargas, "Y ándale"