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The Inner Rose - New Cocktail
A rose is a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. They who feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. He arose at break of day to see the last dew drops upon the petals of the...
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The Grey Satin Lady
I don't know why cocktails are associated with ladies. A lot of them are named "ladies" as if an alcoholic drink could be considered an intoxicating abstraction. Perhaps it has to do with the tradition...
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Callahan
Harry Callahan [1912-1999] was an important 20th Century American photographer whose career spanned the entire post-WWII period. He began photographing seriously in the late 1930's, but his career...
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Lighter Than Air - New Cocktail
Man's earliest attempts at flight look silly to us now. Inventors and tinkerers looked at birds and insects and thought they could imitate aspects of the mechanisms which enable them to take wing, but...
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Brubeck
Brubeck on Time Magazine cover November 8, 1954For people of my generation, the memory of Brubeck's famous hit album, Time Out [1959], with its signature 5/4 time standard Take Five theme, is...
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Pollock and Abstraction
I was reading recently on another blog about a poet's frustration with the use of "abstraction" in modern and post-modern art, as he argued that all "abstraction" was in effect a kind of obfuscation or...
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Keep Trying
Literally at Kitty HawkImaginethe exhilaration what alaunchingyourself for the firsttime...
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Gould / Sibelius - in Deep Winter
I've written about Glenn Gould [1932-1982] before, and I guess it's likely I may again in the future. Today, amidst our seasonal cold snap, I was reminded of his lyrical recorded interpretations of the...
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Late Carver
I came to an appreciation of Raymond Carver's work late in his career (and life). Born in 1938, growing up in a lower middle (working-) class family in the Pacific Northwest, Carver struggled during...
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The New Push for Nuclear
It may seem untimely to raise the issue of the advisability of expanding America's investment in nuclear power generation. Indeed, with the recent memory of the Fukushima meltdown (or has it moved far...
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People Who Died: Anselm Hollo 1934-2013
Anselm Hollo as a young man - at about the time I knew himTed Berrigan wrote a poem once called "People Who Died"--which you can read in his Collected Poems, and even hear him read via the PennSound...
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The Delta Queen for Superbowl Sunday
Vintage 19th Century photograph of Mississippi riverboatsThe last time I commemorated the Super Bowl with a new cocktail was in February 2010, when the victors that year were New Orleans own Saints. In...
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A Precise Moment of History
The 49ers lost the SuperBowl 34 to 31. It was a game for the ages--dire beginning, unbelievable comeback, crucial failure at the end.In the movie Patton, the screenplay for which was co-authored by...
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Ciao, bene, one shot per favore
The first thing to know about the word espresso, is that it isn't pronounced "ex-PRESS-oh" but "es-PRESS-oh." There's nothing "express" about espresso coffee drinks. Espresso means literally to press...
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Aurora Rarotonga
Say the two words together, rather quickly, aurora rarotonga, aurora rarotonga, aurora rarotonga, and see if you don't feel the rhythm. Au-RO-ra ra-ro-TONG-ga. Somewhere in the deep memory of the race,...
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Joe Ceravolo Once and Forever
I can distinctly remember the moment when I first read Joe Ceravolo's poem "Ho Ho Ho Caribou" in The Paris Review No. 44, Fall 1968. I was a junior at UC Berkeley, and I picked up the issue in a little...
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Objectivism Begins - 1929
It's interesting to go back and browse old literary magazines from the first half of the 20th Century. 19th Century American and British literary magazines now seem impossibly remote, and alien to our...
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Mom's Apple Pie - A New Drink
It's an old adage that every good boy loves his mother, not least because he remembers her good cooking. Going on 50 years from leaving home, I can still recall my mom's cooking. It may only signify...
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Going Unshaven
Back in the 1960's, when women's liberation was just getting going, there was a minor movement for women not to groom their legs, underarms, and other places. Fashion isn't a simple subject, and I...
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Welcome to Thibaud Street - Part I
People always think they understand Wayne Thibaud's [1920- ] work. It's straightforward, realistic, familiar, vivid and seemingly passive. It's cool, balanced, poised and settled. It isn't going...
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