Welcome to the First Annual December Borscht-In

01. December 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: 日本語

IT’S A BORSCHT-IN!

Welcome to the First Annual December Borscht-In, i.e. “Guest Blogger Month” at Iced Borscht & Other Delights. This is my first legitimate attempt at luring other writers into my little corner of Hell. I am humbled by the presence of these gifted scribes. I hope they will contribute more in the future, as they are Champions of All Things Fantastic! I thank them for their kindness, their time and their super-cool cha cha cha.

Up first is Erica’s Impulse, written by Jacob Grier. It’s the story of how a fetching British lass inspired the creation of a fine Cognac beverage, right here in our majestic Land of Port. National food and beverage magazines would do well to link to this humdinger of a cocktail recipe instead of phoning in another puff piece on Portland’s food carts!

BIOGRAPHY: Jacob, in his own words “is the bar manager at Carlyle in NW Portland. Before that he worked in the media department at the Cato Institute while running a weekly speakeasy out of his apartment. Before that he made coffee and before that he showed lots of potential for things other than making drinks. He blogs at www.jacobgrier.com.”

______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________

Next, all the way from Orange County, California is Conrad Heiney and a tale called Accessories After the Fact.

BIOGRAPHY: Conrad has dynamic literary bloodlines and I believe he used to take dictation from David Lynch for the Angriest Dog in the World comic strip, which ran in the L.A. Reader. (“I’ve got a dog for ya,” Lynch would bark.)

Accessories After the Fact explores the seedy underbelly of the men’s casualwear scene in the O.C.  (Consider your ass scooped, Orange County Register!) Conrad blogs at Substitute.

______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________

Third, we have the unmitigated foxiness and prodigious intellectual prowess of Ruth Waytz. Her initial post – in what promises to be a set of contributions throughout the month of December — describes the cunning audacity of an effective pick-up artist.

BIOGRAPHY: Ruth’s main site is located at www.ruthwaytz.com, and you can see her regularly on The Filter. I’ve also been championing her as the next great contributor on FOX News’ Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. (I know some of the RED EYE gang is friendly to this site due to the greatest RED EYE review ever; I implore them to add new blood in the form of Ruth.)

UPDATE: **** Ruth gives a lesson in cell phone etiquette, details 2009: the Year That Eats People and brings abortion to the Borscht-In. Also, check out her new blog!****

______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________

I believe there’s still some stragglers yet to come in Guest-Blogging Month, which is why I’m leaving this post sticky for all of December.

Share

Erica’s Impulse

01. December 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Amorous Ephemera, Gurgitate to Emancipate, Unmitigated Ass-Whistles of Vivacity, 日本語 · Tags: , , , , , , ,

A few months ago a group of attractive young people walked into my bar looking for drinks. Since my bar is an expensive, well-appointed sort of place that mostly appeals to older couples and businessmen out with their mistresses, this alone would have the made the evening a night to remember.

Mixmaster Grier

One of the ladies, Erica, wanted a drink that our previous bartender, Neil, had made her some time before. Neil’s a great bartender; his Queen Bee is still our best-selling cocktail, the token vodka drink on my menu of rye and aquavit concoctions. He left me most of his recipes, but he didn’t leave me all of them. This apparently was one of the ones I missed.

All she knew was that the drink was made with Cognac and allspice. On another night I might have convinced her to try something else, but the drink sounded delicious and I was a sucker for her British accent so instead I decided to improvise something. That’s how the Erica’s Impulse was born:

  • 2 oz brandy
  • .5 oz allspice dram
  • .5 oz lemon juice
  • .25 oz rich simple syrup (2:1 sugar:water)
  • 1 dash Regan’s orange bitters

Shake over ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. I like it. More importantly, Erica liked it. She liked it even more when she returned and found it on our menu. Make one for yourself or come into Carlyle during these fall and winter months and you may like it too.

Erica's Impulse

Notes and a bonus cocktail: Allspice dram can be hard to find but is no longer totally unobtainable. It used to be known unappetizingly as pimento dram, which might be one reason that it fell out of use (allspice berries grow on the pimento tree). It’s once again available in the US branded as St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram, and it’s an incredibly aromatic and delicious liqueur.

The cocktail above is inspired by an old and tasty drink called the Lion’s Tail, originally published in the Cafe Royal Cocktail Book and reprinted in the excellent Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Here’s the recipe I use:

  • 2 oz bourbon
  • .5 oz allspice dram
  • .5 oz lime
  • .25 oz rich simple syrup
  • 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake over ice and strain. It’s a refreshing cocktail with unusual flavors that are sure to catch a drinker’s attention, definitely worth trying if you pick up a bottle of allspice dram.

A BORSCHT-IN 2009

Share

Accessories After the Fact

01. December 2009 · 5 comments · Categories: Sprayed Remains, The Wind Cries Suburbia, Unmitigated Ass-Whistles of Vivacity, Whiteout, 日本語 · Tags: , , , ,

The American Dream, revised, is simple: sell out.

Startup businesses lust for acquisition. Researchers and inventors hope some giant will license their patents. Indie film directors dream of shlocky four-picture deals based on video games. Popular musicians count up street cred to trade in for TV ads. The idea of rising to the top and building something huge feels obsolete to many people. Forget being Carnegie and Vanderbilt, Buffett or Bono, Oprah or Tiger. Instead, let’s sell the company to Microsoft, the invention to Lockheed, the barre chords and hairstyle to Saatchi. The new dominant male strategy is to find the alpha dog and grovel, profitably.

This raises a question. If we’re not going to be superstars and tycoons, why are we working so hard in the first place? Selling out should be easier. The entitled American middle-class kid does not work hard, but the money must flow. When you need to sell out and there’s nothing to sell, what do you do? Work is for chumps and art is hard.

In coastal Orange County, where I live, the problem is acute. There’s an oversupply of young men with great ambitions and little energy. If you’re not an athletic star or a hot DJ or loaded with cash from Dad’s mortgage business, what the hell are you going to do to be #1?

The answer for a lot of these guys is bizarre: start your own clothing line.

This would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Fashion design was for homosexuals and women, full stop. But something odd happened in those years. Surfers and skaters were the first to trade cred for activewear. It made sense for the board shorts and t-shirts to get a personal brand, and the MTV era had just arrived. Stars like future murderer Gator and Tony Hawk did very well, and others noticed. Skate and surf manufacturers all rolled out their clothing and accessories lines. Everyone else followed. If you had a bit of cool to trade, you could sell hats and shirts and all the other junk, and give away your stickers so your customers were ads for an ad.

This phenomenon percolated down through sports to music, dragging along DJs and performers, until just about everyone who could be described as “cool” was associated with a clothing line.

But as noted above, not everyone had cool to trade.

It turns out that’s not a problem. If you’re a partying dude with a wide social circle of other dudes who fistbump you and vomit at the same bars, you’re already gold. Run off a few thousand stickers and give away a hundred t-shirts, toss hats at friends, slap the stickers on fast food drive throughs and junction boxes, and keep dumping money into it. If you’re constantly annoying and willing to spend a lot of money on it, there’s a good chance you’ll succeed. The blackletter type and swirly designs of companies like Affliction are everywhere. I personally know three engaging sociopaths who created their own lines of clothing and did well. If there are enough stickers and flyers and drunk friendly dudes wearing your stuff, you can become a minor mogul of Men’s Casual.

The sell-out dream is now perfect. It’s no longer necessary to build any credibility in order to trash it for money. You can get the same effect by throwing your own money into stickers and shirts and promoting them constantly, which is the kind of behavior the typical O.C. bro dude already finds natural. If you don’t have money yourself, another cheerful drunk does. And the weirdest part of the whole cycle is this: they sometimes do sell out to a big company and do very well. For every 100 red-faced stickered idiots there’s one Paul Frank.

I’m not attached to traditional ideals of masculinity. That whole business is too stupid for anything but humorous use. But there is something jarring about the wealthy and privileged young men in my town and their Jagermeister-fuelled pursuit of fame and fortune in Men’s Ready-to-Wear. But you have to admit: a straight trade of party popularity for business success is a better deal than years of actual effort. All the enterprising bro dude needs is money and a screenprint design, and the rest is done by competent graphics specialists and unfortunate Mexican laborers.

The progression is from those who do, to those who sell to those who do, to those who make t-shirts to sell to each other in hopes that those who sell to those who do will buy these and sell them to those who do, who will sell them to Wal-Mart.

The whole thing smells of empires in decline. Which, I think, will be the name of my new clothing line.

Conrad Heiney

A BORSCHT-IN 2009

Share

REGURGITATED TWEETS, November 2009: Quit Posting That Annoying William S. Burroughs Poem; the World Misses Ray Kroc and Food Carts: WTF?

01. December 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: 日本語

My November Tweets

  • A message I just found from a Web ring I applied to ages ago (denying me): “Your foul language is atrocious.”
  • Why, as an atheist, do I find other atheists so repugnant? They all seem to enjoy Important Americans Michael Moore and Bill Maher.
  • <biting, hateful sarcasm>People are awesome! Up with people!</biting, hateful sarcasm>
  • Dead People the World Misses Most Achingly: Sinatra; Sagan; Cousteau; Ray Kroc; the laff-maker Chris Farley. Kings, now gone.

the_ray_kroc_family_relaxing

  • Still waiting for that harlot Gwyneth Paltrow to e-mail me her GOOP newsletter.
  • Magic balls to make your bottom coo. LINK
  • My Korean grocer engages in predatory pricing. He knows I’m the only one who buys sugar-free energy drinks. And he will mark the price up.
  • I’m interested in seeing Levi Johnston bludgeoned by genetically engineered mutant cyclops creatures.
  • The employees at the Portland Expo Center are cross-eyed, snagle-toothed ghouls; unfriendly and unhelpful to the point of idiocy.
  • Oprah‘s announcement to leave the airwaves has brought me to the threshold of uncontrollable sobbing.
  • I don’t get why national publications love writing about Portland food carts. Last time I checked, other big cities had food carts too.
  • Funniest image of the night: fat-faced parrot man Perez Hilton bobbing his head to Jay Z and Alicia Keys at the American Music Awards.
  • Feel like I’ve been a shitty human being lately. Writing LinkedIn.com recommendations to assuage the guilt. The guilt! It chafes me.
  • Mocha Coma Man, please start a coffee stand with me. We can make mad cash if we set up next to Portland’s QUIRKY FOOD CARTS!
  • This Thanksgiving, I will be thankful to anyone who refrains from posting William S. Burroughs‘ transgressive Thanksgiving prayer. Thanks!
  • Thinking about writing a love story about a Mexican Bear and a Gringo Bear.burroughs_bed
  • Why doesn’t SOUTH PARK film “on-location” ala COPS? They’ve got a target-rich environment here in Portland.
  • I misread a “How to Avoid Black Friday” news headline as “How to Avoid Blacks on Friday.” My dyslexic tendencies are racist, damn them.
  • I can say with great certainty that I will never attend an event as anti-climactic as the lighting of the downtown Portland X-Mas tree.
  • Is there any greater torture device in this world than a sterile, adult contemporary smoothjazz band? LIVE, at that?
  • I got to test-drive the new microbead, exfoliating soap that I purchased at Walmart today.
  • I hate the term “epic fail” or the over-used blog phrase “The stupid! It burns!” Ha-ha! How droll and full of wit!
Share