The Dilettante

Blackout for SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

Well, I can't figure out how to blackout this blog, but I will have you know that I stand in solidarity with Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Twitter, Ebay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla, a whole host of other websites and a legion of regular citizens against SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know, these are bills in Congress that go up for a vote in the coming days. They are nothing less than an all-out assault against a free and open Internet. I encourage all of you to contact your representatives today about this bill. Wikipedia will help you.

Here is what Wikipedia looked like at the time this post was published.

For a thorough but readable analysis of these two bills, see Reddit's blog.

It wasn't until I tried to contact my Representative that I discovered who my Representative is. Can you guess? It's fucking Nancy Pelosi!
UPDATE: SOPA was shelved after the overwhelming response elicited by the blackout protest. PIPA is undergoing revision. A new version of anti-piracy legislation is expected to return to the floor sometime in February. As Wikipedia states in its banner, "we're not done yet".

Maturity

2012-01-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

It started maybe a year ago, after I'd just finished my first real relationship and gotten my first real job. People started commenting about how I much had matured. They talked about how I let stupid arguments go unargued or how my writing on this blog had become more sophisticated.

I am twenty-four years old. People rely on me. I do genuinely "uncle" things like teach my niece and nephews how to build a fire, paddle a canoe and drive a vehicle. When I went to Louisiana for the summer I picked up social obligations without comment or awkwardness. I care about how much money I make. I complain about aches and pains. I'm not afraid to touch any bodily fluid. I enjoy talking about relationship issues with my friends, including the increasingly prominent topic of marriage. I drink freely at family events without embarrassment. These, I've found, are hallmarks of maturity.

The realization that I am becoming mature contains, of course, an element of terror. Embarrassing health problems, declining energy levels, the nine-to-five workday and the alarming acceleration of time's passage all weigh heavily on my soul, not to mention the loss of the peculiar brand of frenetic magic I brandished in this blog's earliest prose. The person I was in high school, the radical, has given way to the moderate and that sense of ceaseless, inspired warfare has gone with it. Or rather, it sputters rather than roars. My cutting word and desire to change the world has not diminished, but it is wielded casually now, without pretense or fervor. These are sad things on their own, but make no mistake: I am proud of the person I've become and I am happy to have become it. It took time and concerted effort to arrive where I am now and that arrival is not without its rewards.

The most important rewards, of course, are trust and respect. I've realized that prestige in adulthood is far more dependent upon being a person of character than I'd imagined in childhood. For someone without particularly stellar career prospects, this is very good news.

More intangibly than trust and respect is an increasingly persistent sense of grace. There is an ease that comes from knowing the world and what I'm capable of. I still haven't found my occupational place in the world, but I have found my personal place. I am a good friend, an affectionate lover, a critic, a thinker and a dilettante.

I know that there are much more interesting and intelligent people in this world, but I am comfortable that my talents are worthy enough to merit raising my voice. I am not satisfied by boring people or interesting people holding themselves to low standards. I am an asshole, particularly in that regard. I try not to be a hypocrite.

I will have children. They will consume much of my life and drive me crazy. They will also be awesome. I will get old and feeble and, if possible, more curmudgeony. People will silently laugh at me for things I am not aware of and audibly laugh at me for things I cannot control. I will not grow taller. I will continue to grow more hairy.

I am at peace with all of these things. That may be the most telling part of all of this. What happened to going down kicking and screaming? When did I become so irritatingly pragmatic? Clearly, I am getting old.

Not-Ends

2011-12-03T11:34:00.001-08:00

In the tradition of Rob's... except not necessarily self-contained.

I really don't want to be the one to say it and I'll keep trying it just in case my tastebuds change, but I'd rather drink whiskey and eggnog separately than drink the two mixed together.

While by now it seems to be a truism that the actions of Lt. John Pike and UC Davis Chancellor Katehi's role "tarnished the reputation of the school", the event produced more positive exposure for the movement and for UC Davis than any other action possibly could have.

In the context of a relationship, it does not count as cuddling unless there is boob contact

While many disbelieve that human existence is doomed to be an awkward compromise, three excellent illustrations of that truth exist right under our noses-- jealousy, pain at childbirth (itself the result of an awkward anatomical compromise) and the fact that men are not multiorgasmic. This gives me a much clearer understanding of what heaven is supposed to be like.

I hated and despised Plato until someone pointed out the importance of his concept of ideal forms to Christianity (particularly Good vs Evil and Heaven), at which point I quickly began to realize how ubiquitous and fundamental Platonic theory is in modern thought.

The desire for conceptual elegance is among the greatest enemies of truth, but also among the most important tools for truth's discovery and conveyance.

Hippyism's ideology owes way too much to the aggressive moralism of Christianity to ever be truly at peace with Buddhism.

Somebody asked me if I had any black friends and I was like, "I had one until I stole his girlfriend." It was such a sucker question. I'm just happy I had a sucker answer on hand to reply with.

Technically, my old roommate Mereb is also black, but he's a second-gen Eritrean hippy. I feel like what people usually mean by "black" is having an African-American accent, which Mereb definitely does not have. Mereb just has a lisp.

The ancient Greeks admirably demonstrate to us how useful deities and religion are as language conventions even in the absence of belief, but contemporary social taboos among nonbelievers prevent us from making use of the gorgeous Christian-derived language conventions that are so common in nineteenth century writing.

Now, a quote from Moby Dick:
"The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable affliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!"

Change is Happening

2011-11-30T09:35:00.001-08:00

This is an exciting time to be a citizen of the world right now, but it's also an abjectly terrifying time.If you, like me, have largely slept the slumber of apathy for most of the last decade, now is the time to awaken. Important things are happening across the world and here at home. This is the most formative moment in world and national history since the fall of Communism in 1989 or the protests of 1967. At stake is no less than the new world order. If you've ever wanted to change the world, now is your window of opportunity to do so. Change is happening faster than I ever thought possible.

In the last year, three Arab countries have overthrown their government to set up democracies. The European Union is skirting the precipice of either economic collapse or essentially making the equivalent leap that the United States made from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Six Tibetan monks have immolated themselves in protest against brutal Chinese rule. In December Hillary Clinton will be the first Secretary of State to visit Burma in over fifty years. USA-Pakistan relations have nearly completely deteriorated. The USA will be stationing military presence in Australia to counter expanding Chinese ambitions. Mexican protesters are calling for an end to the war on drugs. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been brought to their knees. Activity from Anonymous has exploded. Scores of repressive regimes are making concessions like allowing free elections and rolling back censorship. Scores of countries (including some of the same ones liberalizing) stand on the precipice of civil war. Occupy- and Indignants-inspired protests have spread to 951 cities and 82 countries.

In more local news, Congress has been locked in political gridlock for the last year, apparently completely incapable of changing the budget from a course of economic stagnation and extraordinary debt. Occupy Wall Street is fighting for a complete reevaluation of the structure of American democracy. A bill is going through Congress with evidently enthusiastic bipartisan support that will fundamentally change the relationship between government and internet, allowing the government to block entire websites and making it a felony to stream or view copyrighted material --like listening to a song or watching a clip of a TV show on YouTube. Another bill going though Congress seeks to define America as a warzone and thereby authorize the military to arrest American citizens on American soil and hold them captive indefinitely without trial, making it the natural successor to the PATRIOT Act and step two on the road to authoritarianism.

At stake is freedom, justice and the financial future of the world. Become aware. Raise your voice. Take action. Utilize the enormous mobilizing potential of the Internet. Don't forget to think. Terrible things are about to happen. Amazing things are about to happen. The world stands on the tip of a double-edged sword. Don't forget to think, but by all that is holy, participate!

Try Anything Once

2011-11-28T14:00:00.001-08:00

When my sister and I were growing up we couldn't stand to eat certain foods. Brussel sprouts, onions and tomatoes were a few of my personal enemies. Our parents would good-naturedly lecture us about how as you get older, your taste buds change and you grow to like things you once hated. While they tolerated and accommodated a certain amount of our stonewalling, at least once a year my mom or dad would say, "Just eat one bite. You can't have dessert until you at least try it." Try we would. Then we usually retched, spit it out or just made a horrible face. With parents satisfied, life would go on.

Somewhere along the line I remember my mom intoning with an unmistakable air of pride that we weren't picky eaters compared to most of our friends. We ate seafood, most vegetables and a host of gourmet and ethnic food that our parents had been gradually introducing us to. Among the mythology of my childhood was a story about me as a toddler, picking apart sushi rolls. When my parents were distracted, my two-year-old-self snatched up a ball of wasabi and swallowed it entirely. My dad still loves to describe the look on my face and how, admirably, I didn't even cry.

Dad instilled in me an enthusiasm for spicy food. I originally approached it as a macho thing. I'd sneer at my sister for complaining about spiciness and load my gumbo with as much Tabasco as I could stand. I remember, in a Chinese restaurant, bravely trying one of those Szechuan peppers after seeing my dad toss a couple back. Sometimes Bri and I would dare each other to eat one. To this day I occasionally eat a Szechuan pepper, just for kicks. The sensation is always one of terrible burning, but you never know if your taste buds have changed. A behavioral psychologist would say that in my family the social dividends of brave experimentalism outweighed the danger of an unpleasant taste.

Once our parents divorced, Bri and I's cultivated non-pickiness became tangibly useful. Our bachelor Dad would take us to Costco for a food run. He'd tell us to "get kid food" and we'd come back with boxes of fruit loops, "granola bars" made mostly of corn syrup and puffed rice and veritable tubs of jelly bellies, gummi worms, etc. Dad would buy it unquestioningly. If dinners weren't consistently a family affair of meat and vegetables, we might have ended up inches shorter than we are today. When the "kid food" ran out, as it inevitably did, we resorted to experimenting with Dad's leftovers or tolerating his offered concoctions, even violating the breakfast-must-be-sweet principle universally understood by children across America as sacrosanct.

Thus it was that open-mindedness established itself as not only a source of pride for Bri and I, but as a necessity for survival. Experimentalism became a sort of religion for us, a direct product of our father's influence. Chicken feet, pig's ear, pigeon, escargot, beef tongue, raw oysters (<3!) and all forms of sushi were things we not only ate, but actively sought out to try. By the time I was in high school, our open-minded food tastes were integral to our self-identities and our family culture.

It was about that time that my dad organized a multi-week backpacking trip to Wyoming with his longtime friend Jack Kisslinger. For that trip, we treated him as family. In restaurants, when Bri or I requested a taste of Jack's meal, we had no expectation that he might refuse. We took it for granted that everyone was entitled to a bite of each other person's meal. Agreeable Jack gracefully adapted to this after a few nights of confusion. Bri and I would also angrily squabble amongst ourselves and, in the case of Jack or Dad, diplomatically implore about what dish the other person should order. You see, we wanted to maximize the number of dishes we got to taste of the restaurant's. If two people got the same dish, we would only have three unique entrees to try rather than four. So it was that Bri and I would identify the most intriguing dishes and often fight about who got to order the most-desirable of the remaining dishes after the adults' choices (in the most memorable example, this came between meat loaf and baby back ribs, so you can understand the passion). During those next few weeks, Jack's presence and semi-voluntary inclusion into our family culture elucidated our culture's uniqueness to Bri and I, which increased our family food culture importance in our identities.

My dad loved to regale us with his adventures traveling the world. He almost never turned down bizarre local delicacies, but he did tell of one restaurant in China that he turned down. He and his friend looked into the window and watched as a spider monkey was clamped by its head to a tray, the top of its skull was popped off with a knife and its quivering brains were eaten with spoons as the monkey screamed its head off (pardon the pun) and thrashed in evident agony, trying to escape. My dad told his friend, "let's eat somewhere else". Thus did I learn the limitations of my dad's considerable zeal for adventure.

In his stories of travel adventures, I made the inevitable connection between trying food and trying things more generally. The quote, "try anything once" may have originally been made by him in reference to food, but it was a short leap to apply it to everything. "Try anything once" was the refrain running in my head as I ran out of a pool in Utah to roll in the snow, rode Supreme Scream, jumped off a sea cliff, ate a peanut worm whole, hopped a fence to go night swimming in my school's rec pool and consumed enough cyanide to flush my face and quicken my breathing. The principle cemented by that Szechuan pepper a decade earlier became the rallying cry for a broader life philosophy in my late teens. I still remember the look of betrayal my father gave me as I took a puff of his friend's offered Cuban cigar at age nineteen. Evidently, it hadn't occurred to him that "try anything once" might be taken farther than he had taken it.

This isn't to say that I had entirely missed the principles that counterbalanced my dad's experimentalism. I know perfectly well why he, unlike most of his family, didn't smoke, why he refused to join his school football team or was glad to avoid the Vietnam draft. The message that there was a difference between bravery and stupidity came through loud and clear. In college I didn't shy away from trying cigarettes, but I made certain that I would never become addicted to them. I won't ever touch heroin or meth, but it's not because my experimental drive doesn't implore me to try them, it's because they entail unacceptable risk.

Somewhere along the line, my "try anything once" philosophy was augmented by a corollary-- the fact that many tastes need to be acquired necessitates trying some things more than once. I think of this as the "Pixies principle" because it took me many times hearing the Pixies before I started to like them, but they ultimately became one of my favorite bands. It could just as easily be called the "Big Star principle", the "beer principle" or the "scary movie month principle". In all cases, demanding that something be immediately gratifying would have denied me great joy. Patience and an open mind eventually paid dividends.

This principle implies its own corollary, though. You can't appreciate many things unless you approach them with the right attitude, so this principle also necessitates an amount of self-policing. Do you genuinely want to like something? Do you possibly dislike something because you want to dislike it for outside reasons? I mean, how could any hipster honestly say that they don't like Nirvana? Every American our age has been sufficiently exposed to Nirvana, those with a taste for indie and alternative rock styles like the sound, and Nirvana is patently awesome. The best explanation for indie hipsters who claim they don't like Nirvana is that they don't like Nirvana because they don't want to like Nirvana. It's a terrible tragedy for somebody to not appreciate Nirvana, so we must fight this mind-over-matter selectivity in ourselves. Thus we have the "Nirvana principle".

Two of my best friends don't like things for transparently mental reasons. The first, a nonpracticing Jew, hates the smell and taste of pork. The second, an ex-Mormon, hates the smell and taste of coffee. These are intelligent, thoughtful people, but I have never met a single person who disliked pork free of religious or near-religious (aka vegetarian) motives. This is a depiction of the mind's potent effect on our perception of smell and flavor, akin to how a person can't stand the smell of a liquor they overindulged in the night before. When, the day after a night of lots of beer and puking, beer smelled like vomit, I said to myself, "don't be a bitch" and I finished the beer I'd opened in spite of my revulsion. By the next day I could enjoy beer again because I had refused to be slave to my own mind.

I've found that the best way to deal with the open-endedness of the Nirvana principle is to assume that deep down everyone's the same. Of course, we're not the same. To what extent is up for debate, but at the very least we know that some people have or lack specific taste receptor genes. Broccoli tastes qualitatively more heinous to some people than to other people. Some men are wired to be exclusively attracted to men instead of to women, etc. I think that's where our fundamental differences end. I think that, unlike taste receptors, our brains are complex enough that we have the capacity in us to enjoy just about anything. If somebody else can enjoy something, so can I. At the very least, common humanity is a worthy assumption.

But where do I draw the line? Am I obligated to like everything or to die trying to like everything? Well, no. It is a legitimate question, though, and one without a perfect answer. The way we should choose what to try to like lies in practicality. Because my musical enculturation was grounded in classic rock and classical music, it is easier for me to acquire a taste for, say, new wave than for reggae. Assuming that I will derive the same joy from new wave as reggae, it is simply practical to choose the easiest one to acquire. I am also more likely to find friends eager to talk about new wave music, which is again a purely practical consideration.

I'm not arguing that obstacles to appreciating things do not exist, but that such obstacles are quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, that the question isn't whether or not it is possible to overcome an obstacle, but rather how much effort and time are required to overcome something. What I disagree with is the defeatism of "this is just how I am" and "I can't change who I am". Tastes may define a person's persona, but they do not define one's personality. Personality is a far more slippery quality.

For both vanity and personal-compatibility reasons I prefer confident women unafraid to speak their minds. For natural reasons I prefer more attractive women, but nature does not specify what kind of beauty I should like. Most of my preferences for women's appearance, other than attractiveness, exist because they correlate with personal compatibility. I'm more likely to get along with a girl who typically wears little-or-no makeup than one who wears a lot. I'm more likely to enjoy the company of a girl who wears sensible, fashionable clothes than one who wears either tacky or markedly conservative garb. These sorts of judgements are ideally where my prejudice ends, however, because I have a vested interest in considering the maximum range of women for romance. I can be picky later. Sometimes the process of determining my taste involves thoughtful self-analysis. I can acquire a taste for a "type" of woman if I want to and I generally want to if I think it will increase my range of options without significantly decreasing the quality of my options in terms of likelihood for personal compatibility.

Once you realize how very much control you have over your own tastes, you can consciously broaden your tastes to suit your needs. The way to find out to what degree you can is to try. Try not just with your physical actions, but with your mind and soul. Have a little faith in me and a little faith in your common humanity. Remember, there is no specific taste receptor for pork.

It is to my abiding shame that I cannot like raw tomato, but I am proud of having shame for a shortcoming of taste. I suspect it's a result of some rogue taste receptor gene of mine, but I cannot be sure, and every year or so still, I try a bite of good, raw tomato. I haven't yet been able to enjoy it, but I lose nothing in trying it.

All of this is to say, don't be picky. Don't be a slave to your mind, because you can like whatever you set your mind to like (except maybe broccoli or tomato). As important as it is to know your own limitations, it is also important to search out and eliminate false limitations. Open yourself up to the world as much as you can stand and do your best to appreciate it in all its glory. You will be rewarded. This, I promise you.

And when you're eating at a restaurant with me and I ask for a bite of your meal, say yes. Please also ask for a taste of mine. We can discuss our food. It will make me happy.

Beer Styles: Amber Ale

2011-11-17T11:09:00.001-08:00

Amber Ales are the most center-field beer style in the world of American craft beer. They are the Goldilocks of craft beer-- malty but not heavy, hopped but not abrasively bitter. Their moderate alcohol and flavor make them the most sessionable major style of American ale. The style is extremely flexible, but because Ambers represent one of the most understated styles in the American beer pantheon, they rarely receive attention from the beer elite.

It is my not-so-humble opinion that there is a beer for every occasion and that every style can boast some great beer. While many Ambers (read: almost all brewpub versions) are made simply, thoughtlessly and according to style protocol, the best are subtle and quietly innovative. Reputable Ambers are a thinking man's session beer that pairs well with most brown-colored foods especially those with meaty, spicy, nutty or strong vegetable flavors like hummus or gumbo. Because of their flexibility and understated nature, Ambers stand as one of my three favorite beer styles, along with North German Pilsner and Strong Dark Belgian-Style Ales.

Before I get into the heart of what makes an Amber Ale, I'd like to address Red Ale, which is often treated as synonymous with Amber Ale. Red Ales have more in common with Red IPA's, Double/Imperial Reds and even American Pale Ales because they are all built on the common paradigm of clear, caramelly malt (unmuddied by roasted, biscuity or earthy malt flavors) playing off of fruity yeast esters and a strong hop flavor and bitterness. Red Ales are typically higher in alcohol than Amber Ales and, crazily enough, are copper-red rather than brownish-amber. It is true that there are examples of intermediate beers (as well as mild British-style Red Ales, which are painfully boring), but as style distinctions go, this is not a hard call. Red Ales rarely use herbal or earthy hops and never use roasted or dark crystal malts. It's very simple: Reds thrive on fruitiness and zestiness.

There are some excellent Red Ales available. Lagunitas's Censored runs to the malty end of the style, but still is prominently fruity, boozy and estery in ever-so-delicious ways. More classic examples of good Reds are North Coast's Red Seal Ale and Mad River's Jamaican Red Ale. They both run about 6% ABV, sport a fruity nose and an exquisite balance between hop bitterness and sweet malt backbone. Pyramid's Juggernaut fits perfectly within this style, but Juggernaut is uninteresting swill. Frankly, I consider the striking difference between Red Seal and Juggernaut the clearest testament to the talent and quality brewing required to make good ale.

True Amber Ales, because of their more complex malt profile, can never achieve that razor's edge sensation when it comes to balancing sweetness with hop bitterness. Breweries that have tried to do this have only ever succeeded in spite of rather than because of the attempt to hop an Amber-style malt base up to the brink.

Most Amber Ales use hops with herbal and earthy flavors that add another dimension to a complex malt profile. These hops typically play a supportive role rather than competing with the malts for the spotlight. Just like Red Ales, Ambers are built on a caramel malt backbone, but good Ambers also have small amounts of darker specialty malts that contribute dark fruit, toffee, nutty, biscuit, chocolate and roasted flavors.

Below are reviews of the most memorable Amber Ales I have tried:

Fat Tire- The flagship of New Belgium, this is one of the most widely available craft beers on the market and most peoples' introduction to Amber Ale. Fat Tire is also one of the best Ambers, but the trouble with Fat Tire is that it is not typical of American Amber Ale. Unlike most American Ambers, who trace their descent from English Amber Ale, Fat Tire is an American take on Belgian Amber Ale. Fat Tire is lighter in body and alcohol, which makes it disturbingly easy to toss back. Rather than making it weak or flavorless, the lightness allows the beer to sit back and let its considerable malt complexity rise to the fore. Toasty, earthy, warm and with a hint of raisin, no other American beer manages to simultaneously be so mesmerizingly malt-driven and light on its feet.

Boont Amber- This is the flagship of Anderson Valley Brewery and at least in Northern California it seems to be the go-to Amber Ale. Boont is a quintessential American Amber, and among the best. It has a richer malt body than Fat Tire. The malt is balanced by modest bitterness. The overall effect refreshes when it's hot and sticks to your ribs when it's cold. Two things separate Boont from the ubiquitous brewpub Amber: a cleaner alignmeent of flavor (essentially, brewing and ingredient quality) and a nutty, almost a buttery flavor in the malt that characterizes Anderson Valley's whole lineup. My friend Myranda gets credit for suggesting it as a breakfast beer at an English pub brunch. I have discovered few better beer pairings than Boont with greasy eggs, potatoes and sausage.

Full Sail Amber- Like Anderson Valley, Full Sail's Amber is characterized significantly by the Brewery's unique trademark style, which in this case means that it's built on a rich, light, ebullient malt base that's set off by a dry, roasted flavor in the malt. The hops set off that roasted flavor, making the overall effect one of balance between hearty-but-light-colored malt and the dark, dry bitterness of the hops and roasted malt. This sits on the heavier end of the Amber spectrum and would be perfect for the Christmas season.

Rogue American Amber- I have an enormous hard-on for Rogue Brewing. Like Boont, theirs is a quintessential Amber Ale that sports its brewery's trademark spin. Rogue American Amber has that air of delicacy associated with their proprietary yeast strain "Pacman". The malts subtly play off one another, the hops and that characteristic yeast nose. This is not their best beer, but it is among the best Amber Ales. Were it priced competitively with Boont and Fat Tire, it would be my Amber of choice.

Stone Levitation- As you might imagine coming from Stone, this is the most bitter Amber Ale I've yet to try. Of course, it's impeccably balanced. It manages to firmly stand as an Amber even with an inverted (hop>malt) paradigm. If you're the kind of beer-drinker who demands the teetering bitter edge, this is the Amber for you. It may even be the only Amber for you, because I know how stubborn you hop heads are.

Ballast Point's Calico Copper Amber Ale- Befitting it's San Diego origins, this is also a relatively bitter Amber. Rather than inverting the paradigm or attempting a "bleeding bitter edge" brew, Calico is simply a combination of strong hopping with a strong and diverse malt base. This sacrifices the natural give-and-take dynamism of Amber Ale for forceful flavor. I have had a few Ambers brewed in such a maximalist style from smaller breweries on the West Coast, but this is the first one to not suck.

Drake's Amber- This is more of a Brown Ale than an Amber because it has a high ABV, substantial hop bitterness, a medium-full creamy body and an abundance of rich malty flavors. Treated as an unusual Amber, it has greatest resemblance to the maximalist school of Amber Ale. This is a solid beer in terms of concept and harmony, but it wasn't especially complex. That's a criticism I could level more broadly at most Brown Ales, even respectable ones.

Red Tail Ale- This Mendocino flag ship is an even lighter Amber than Fat Tire. It is labelled as an "American Ale", but this beer's aesthetic definitely aligns it with the Amber camp and I'm pretty sure "American Ale" is made-up. Like classic Ambers it's laid back and malt-driven. There's some malt complexity, but I don't think the flavors really gel into a compelling greater whole. This is a good session beer that I'm unlikely to ever buy again because it's short of amazing in a world of amazing craft beer. I imagine some people will really like this beer and this brewery, so it's worth trying, but it's not the beer/brewery for me and I'm willing to wager that it's not the beer/brewery for most beer people.

Budweiser American Ale- Again, "American Ale" is code for lightweight Ambers. As you can imagine, coming from Budweiser, this is insipid. It serves as a pointed reminder that (with the solitary exception of Coors' Blue Moon lineup) macros should stay the hell away from craft styles.

I am aware that I have already reviewed some of these beers in previous posts, but these reviews treat them in the context of their style. Plus, my palate has matured. :P

Making the Classics

2011-09-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

When I wrote my first comprehensive cocktail post I figured I needn't post how I made those classic cocktails. I mean, they're classics, right? Two years experience being over twenty one and I know differently. I don't go to bars very frequently, but I've ordered two Martinis. First of all I had to specify and confirm that I wanted them made with gin. When I finally got my Martini, not only was vermouth almost nonexistent, but the drink was iced so thoroughly that instead of tasting like uncomplemented gin it tasted mostly like ice water. That's for both instances. One of those was from Sophia's and cost $7. Their Mojito was also off-balance (mostly mint and soda water). At a bar in Dublin (CA) I ordered an Old Fashioned and was similarly displeased.

It seems to me that bartenders accustomed to "pinky up" drinks that are incredibly hard to mess up are now ruining the last respectable cocktails on the house books. Fine cocktails are difficult to balance and I suppose bartenders have incentive to make drinks as quickly as they can, but I don't mean it lightly when I say they were nearly undrinkable. All of those drinks were travesties. I know there are good bars out there that still take cocktails seriously. I've promised myself to investigate one sometime when I have the extra arm and leg required to pay the tab. Until then, I'm going to err on the side of beer. They still haven't figured out how to mess that up.

Those of my readers who've been around the block are welcomed to weigh in here. I could be totally off-base. For those pinky-uppers and non-cocktail-drinkers among you, don't hold bar failures against a good cocktail.

The Martini was the first cocktail Brandon and I got into. It took us awhile to get the proportions right and it took us awhile to figure out how to drink them properly (small sips, guys). Though we did the vermouth by eye, we learned quickly enough what amount made a good Martini. That amount ended up remarkably close to IBA specifications: one shot gin, one quarter-shot dry vermouth. When done right, as you roll the fiery liquid around your mouth, you can bask in the divine balance of sharp juniper with the nutty/fruity/spicy flavors of vermouth.

Since our early days using Seagram's Gin for our Martinis, Brandon and I have moved to "swanky" gins, which really comes down to deciding between Bombay Sapphire and similarly-priced Tanqueray. I'm partial to the latter as it tastes more like gin. I don't think the flowery flourishes of Bombay Sapphire lend themselves to Martinis, though they work better in Gin and Tonics (one of the more foolproof cocktails, fyi).

So, my rules for Martinis are as follows:
-When left unspecified, a Martini is made with gin, not vodka.
-"Martinis", as a category, includes various vermouth-containing cocktails such as the Vodka Martini and the Dirty Martini, which is to say "Martinis" do not include most cocktails served in martini glasses or with the suffix "-tini". Too many times have I heard beer or whiskey snobs refer derisively to "Martinis", alluding to their syrupy ways, and it gives me a sad.
-Vermouth should make a 1:4 ratio with the gin unless specified "dry" or "wet", which I do not recommend and I certainly don't recommend starting off with.
-The gin should be shaken or stirred with ice straight out of the freezer and for a short period of time. The primary ingredient in a Martini should be gin, not melted ice.

Brandon and I also took the foundation for our Manhattans from the IBA via wikipedia. I've found the ratio of vermouth to liquor is a little more forgiving than with Martinis (unlike dry, sweet vermouth is pretty good on its own). We ended up eyeballing about the same amount of vermouth for both Martinis and Manhattans.

My dad serves Manhattans on the rocks without bitters rather than the IBA-recommended straight up. He's also a fan of a variant he picked up from my Wisconsinite maternal grandfather, Grandpa Pee Wee, which uses sweet white vermouth aka Bianco. Between the ice, the lack of bitters and a more liberal application of vermouth, the whole thing comes out much milder than my don't-shake-it-too-long-or-it'll-be-watery Martinis and Manhattans. Personal taste aside, my dad makes an excellent Manhattan, which I guess is a testament to the drink's flexibility.

I'd also like to mention the Sazerac, which is reputed to be the oldest cocktail and the catalyst for the first time I stocked a bar. It's how I got into rye whiskey. While there is no IBA-official recipe, I'm very happy with the Wikipedia recipe. I often simplify the process to resemble how I make Martinis/Manhattans (though the Sazerac is more complex), but I've found that it is absolutely necessary to first add the Absinthe/Herbsaint (or Pastis or any anise-flavored liquor) by coating the glass. I've also found that releasing the lemon peel's oils onto the drink is essential for the overall effect.

Other, also respectable, cocktails that lean harder on water and sugar are more forgiving to make and more approachable for those with weak palates, but there's nothing like classic straight up cocktails with that heady mix of spices, fruits, herbs and aromatics only they have to offer. Nothing else takes the taste of alcohol to such a pure, high glory.

Ghost Chicken

2011-09-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

I had the most compelling, detailed dream I've had in a long time this morning.

I was in Japan with Sarah, which was apparently her homeland. She was telling me that the bugs got worse the closer you were to the east or west coasts. I asked, "Are we near a coast?" and just as I asked, we rounded a corner and came into view of the Yellow Sea. We went into a beach cabin right up against the water with the top half of the seaward wall cut out to make a window. I looked at the sea which, just like pictures I'd seen, was as blue as the Mediterranean (in spite of the name). I commented how pretty of a blue it was and Sarah agreed. I noticed that the big swells were coming up to the bottom edge of the window. I talked with Sarah. I'd had amnesia and couldn't remember knowing her that long and I was still learning about her, but I knew that we had had a long romantic history and I could feel it in our magnetism. The ocean swells got bigger and bigger, tipping over the edge of the window and into the room, rising in glorious curves and sometimes cresting a little before rolling over the low wall into the room. The room was starting to fill up with water. I got more and more lost in the wave motion as I became increasingly concerned about our precarious situation.
....
I went into the bathroom that I knew Sarah was taking a shower in to pee. Looking up I saw a girl was in the upper bunk of the shower/bunk-bed Sarah was showering in. I know the girl because I went to primary and secondary school with her. Her actual name in real life, weirdly enough and by the way, is Sarah (Rodgers). She was pretty and brassy with curly red hair, but we'd never had any affinity or much interaction in school. She was talking with my Sarah, who she was evidently close friends with. She'd gotten cooler with time. She'd seen me naked peeing, but her facial reaction indicated that she didn't give a shit and I decided I didn't give a shit either. I saw her partly naked later and similarly didn't care.

I went to another room to visit with some old high school friends, Nick and Dana. Like every nerd in my high school I'd had a crush on Dana (and had actually gone to prom with her), but she and Nick were genuinely close friends. Apparently they'd finally started dating in the last few months (in real life Nick recently married). When I entered the room, Dana was sitting on the bed and Nick was in the bathroom taking a shower. I attempted a stab at awkward conversation, talking about how many people have such specific and unique taste in jeans that it seems like they only own one pair of jeans, like the way cartoon characters always wear the same outfit. This was true of Dana and is also true of Sarah, Howard and a lot of other people I know. Dana was wearing her characteristic jeans in the dream. I was still trying to explain what I meant when Nick came in and gave Dana a provocative kiss. I feebly tried to finish explaining and/or relieve the awkwardness for another few seconds before I gave up and sheepishly left.

I went back to the bathroom where Sarah and her friend were talking. They mentioned a French word used in a Lady Gaga lyric. I asked about it. Sarah explained it was pronounced "Troce" and meant close affection. I asked how it was spelled and Sarah's friend patiently spelled it for me. It was spelled bizarrely (complete with three syllables and an "eaux" that wasn't even at the end of the word) and I knew I'd have to write it down, so I asked to hear the spelling again after I'd gotten pen and paper. The spelling Sarah gave was slightly different and similarly nonsensical. For the next few minutes I'd periodically interrupt their conversation to ask them to clarify how it was spelled and they would patiently spell it for me, each time more confusing than the one before it. Given my weird relationship with French, that of being the only of my close friends with strong French heritage but also being in the minority among them for not speaking it (and not even speaking another language fluently), the experience was naturally alienating and I was kind of jealous of the obviously close relationship Sarah and her friend had.
....
At this Mongolian fried chicken stand (little whole chickens on skewers), I had a brain wave to ask if the stand owner needed a new employee because Matt Wingert, despite his half-finished PhD in Mechanical Engineering, desperately needed a job to pay rent. The stand owner agreed to consider him so I brought Matt over. The guy asked if he'd be okay with killing chickens with his bare hands. Matt said "I'd love to", but the uncertainty in his voice was unmistakable. I told the chicken stand owner that though I'd masked my fear better when interviewing for jobs past, I'd always risen to whatever daunting task I was set to with aplomb and Matt would be the same way. To demonstrate, I offered to kill a chicken myself. I killed a defeathered chicken and stripped off the skin in one pull (like can be done with rabbits). The stand owner was happy with that and it sounded like he was going to hire Matt, but as we were talking the chicken skin stood up on its own and started moving around like it was alive. I was like, "Holy shit it's an actual ghost chicken!" but the owner said, "It's just epidermal nerve activity and muscle memory." The chicken started to move aggressively towards me. I tried to bat it away, but I was so unnerved, I wasn't very effective. The chicken advanced on me menacingly, preparing to attack. Then I woke up.

Cheers, All
Enjoy!

The Coca-Cola Fiend

2011-09-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

Back in the 80's, Coca-Cola tried to change their formula to so-called "New Coke", the fallout of which is why, until the last couple of years, cans of coke were labeled "Coca-Cola Classic". The rather compelling story of "New Coke" can be found on Wikipedia (of all the unlikely places to find a compellingly-written story).

I have said previously on this blog that Coca-Cola is awesome and I am here to say it again. Coca-Cola is fucking awesome. I'd like to elaborate on that starting premise.

Coca-Cola, as declared by a paper airline napkin, is "zesty and refreshing on the first sip and full and rich on the last". It has an impenetrable depth of flavor that, far from being intimidating, tastes easy and approachable even as it dares you to bury yourself in it's complexity. It complements most food and liquor remarkably well (my favorite pairing being with Chinese food). It has mild medicinal effects. In short, Coke is everything I believe a beverage should be.

My fascination with Coca-Cola led me to discover that different countries have been permitted to tweak the original formula for local tastes. Despite Andy Warhol's rather inspiring quote, not all cokes are created equal. The Apple House tasting team had one of its more epic sessions comparing cokes from the US, Mexico ("Mexicoke"), France and Spain. I must be getting spoiled by all of the options available to me as a resident of a major US city, because I think there really should be a store/soda bar somewhere in San Francisco that sells Coca-Colas from every country that coke is bottled in.

I'd also love to be able to taste older formulations of Coca-Cola, particularly the very earliest incarnations that still contained modest quantities of cocaine. In fact, crazy as it may sound, I would like to see that oldest formula reintroduced. At low concentrations, there's no reason that such a soda would be particularly dangerous or addictive. Coca-leaf tea is still consumed all over the Andes without causing problems. It is treated like coffee is treated here-- as a mild stimulant to power people through the working day. Of course, I expect that this retro coke would have considerably more kick than the current formula.

Flavor-wise, coke holds up well against craft sodas, though there is a key difference in approach. Like a good second-day gumbo (gumbo is always better the second day), Coca-Cola's flavors are married such that the individual ingredients cannot be parsed out. This is ideal for easy drinking and culinary harmony, but it plays poorly with gourmets who've been taught to pick out flavor notes, as with wine. Excellent craft sodas like Virgil's Rootbeer and Red Bull's Cola make their concoctions' individual components as clear as possible in the tasting. To sip one of these sodas is to take a tour of the ingredients proudly labeled on the back of the container: nutmeg, cinnamon, anise, clove, cardamom, cassis oil, etc. While purported ingredients for Coca-Cola's famously secret recipes are similarly complex and exotic (neroli oil, anyone?), the difference is one of taste rather than of quality. Coca-Cola produces a more harmonious soda while the best craft soda makers sacrifice harmony for a more explicit complexity. With the notable exception of Coke's choice of sweetener, there are no culinary grounds to fault or marginalize the quality of Coke as a world-class soda. Anyone who has, as I have, made a point to compare every available cola must inevitably recognize the resounding excellence of Coca-Cola.

Oh The Humanity: Regarding Foie Gras

2011-08-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

I saw this banner on Facebook:

"Humane Foie Gras?

aldf.org

If you have purchased Foie Gras, believing it was humanely raised, we want to hear from you. Contact the Animal Legal Defense Fund."

I figured it merited a reply.
Dear Animal Legal Defense Fund,
I have bought Foie Gras with the knowledge that the poultry I am eating represents some of the most humanely raised meat available for purchase in the United States. I have seen the videos of geese eagerly lining up for their feeding and the idyllic living circumstances of high dollar French foie gras geese. These birds are not suffering. To assert that they are suffering amidst a backdrop of the breathtakingly inhumane treatment of the average American chicken is so absurd as to be motivationally suspect. Does any of your funding come from the poultry industry?

Sincerely,
Max

Dear Mr. Vidrine,
Thank you for your email. I appreciate your interest in animal welfare. I would be very interested in speaking with you further about this issue. Would you be available to speak by phone in the next week, and if so, when would be a good time?

Meanwhile, I will explain briefly Animal Legal Defense Fund’s position on foie gras:

While the video featuring Mr. Bourdain suggests that the conditions in force-fed foie gras farming are humane, it appears that it shows only the early stages of the force-feeding process. Our research has shown that ducks in the mid and late stages suffer serious health consequences as a result of the high-calorie, nutritionally deficient diet they are fed. Aside from the risk of injury to the esophagus from repeated insertion of the feeding tube, ducks develop lameness, bone and skin disorders, respiratory problems, and an inability to groom properly as a result of obesity. Some ducks, unable to walk, attempt to push themselves around their pens with their wings, causing themselves injury. In some cases the excess food leads to aspiration pneumonia. Many ducks develop painful foot infections due to the combination of their increased weight and the wire-mesh flooring of their pens. Finally, the accumulation of fat in the liver interferes with liver function. Many ducks slaughtered for foie gras would otherwise die of liver failure or other conditions brought on by the force-feeding. Based on this information, we do not believe that this production is humane.

You can find more information in an EU study of foie gras production and in a report by the Humane Society of the United States.

Although it is true that some ducks naturally gorge in preparation for migration, the amount of food that is force-fed to ducks in foie gras operations is well beyond what a duck would normally ingest, even while gorging.

Finally, I assure you that Animal Legal Defense Fund does not accept funding from any industry that exploits animals. We are fully in agreement with you that the treatment of chickens in factory farms is unacceptable and inhumane. Addressing those conditions is one of our aims as an organization. The attention we give to foie gras is in no way meant to express an endorsement of other forms of factory farming.

Sincerely,
Michelle Lee

Dear Ms. Lee
After perusing the literature you linked, it seems clear that foie gras production has been subject to considerable rationalization in the last 20-30 years and that it is no longer as uniformly idyllic as my father and Anthony Bourdain would present it.

That said, most of the health consequences you mentioned refer back to the ducks/geese being made extremely fat. I'm afraid I do not find the existence of such health problems troubling. This is because of two things, the first being that fatness is the point of force feeding and the second being that these animals only live in such an extremely fat state for a relatively short period of time before they go to slaughter.

Frankly, as a foodie, being indulged to the brink of death doesn't sound so bad. Furthermore, however rationalized most foie gras production now is, the fact remains that the poultry involved are substantially better off than mainline poultry on factory farms. Also important is the fact that foie gras ducks/geese represent a tiny, delicious minority of all poultry produced and consumed.

Now apart from the humane-ness or inhumane-ness, I dislike foie gras restriction as a political issue. It sits, along with curtailing deer hunting (deer are overpopulating throughout the US without natural predation from wolves), as one of the most misguided routes attempted in the name of animal rights. Don't get me wrong, I understand why it is brought up as an issue: it is both moralist and populist without actually affecting the welfare of poultry in any significant way. It makes activists feel like they are accomplishing something without incurring the wrath of business-conscious conservatives. Imported luxury goods are always an easy political target to raise a rabble with.

Unfortunately, this does nothing to address the very real problem of inhumane living conditions for chickens and other factory-farmed poultry. It wastes political capital on eliminating one of the handful of reasonably ethical segments of the poultry industry. It discourages people like me who eat meat, but would like to see meat not produced in a living poultry hell. It is a slap in the face to gourmets (who, generally speaking, do care about how their food is treated). It discredits animal rights as a movement by giving emphasis to its bleeding heart, little picture, meat-is-murder contingent.

I'm glad your organization receives no money from the poultry industry, but I hope you understand my distaste for foie gras as an animal rights issue. Thank you for bringing me to a better understanding of how foie gras is actually produced.

Regards,
Max Vidrine

Between you and me, I lied about having bought foie gras. I've only eaten it, but now I'm super hungry for some. If only I weren't so poor...

Transmissions from Acadiana

2011-07-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hey Mom,
I'm fine. Louisiana is nice, I think. I'm mostly staying with Memeem (my grandma), which is going pretty well. I'm enduring her micromanaging and in turn she's been super sweet. Uncle Pierre is a peach. Most of the fun I've had here, I can chalk up to him. Chris (my cousin) has gotten old enough that he's interesting to talk to. I'm totally at peace with the weather, but not the mosquitoes. The food is alternately amazing and, y'know, Memeem's frozen tidbits reheated plus pickled carrots.

I've been going to church with Pierre's family, which makes me a little nostalgic for when we used to go (how much should I give at collections? $5?). The actual work of putting together the family's land records is tedious and organizationally challenging, but it's kind of fascinating to dredge up all the family history.

So that's how I've been doing,
Max

Some anecdotes from my time here:

We shot an alligator that was in our lake. It took a few tries, but the third shot was "Swamp People good" and killed it dead. Unfortunately we fumbled on the collection and the alligator sank like a stone. So, no alligator steak for us.

We cooked half a pig in what is called a "Cajun microwave" (large metal box with coals on top that cooks by radiative heating). I will never forget the image of my uncle Jacques stepping out from under the roof into light drizzle, looking skyward as he very slowly chewed some morsel of pig, an expression of perfect ecstasy written across his face.

I drive my late grandpa's Lincoln town car (executive edition). Yes, I feel like a bad ass.

I listened in on a detailed discussion of how pretty much all animals taste good.

Instead of enduring the heat and humidity, I've mostly been enduring the arctic winter of Louisiana air conditioning. There is no reason for the thermostat to be set at sixty-five, guys.

We picked up some box lunches from a gas station mart that tasted better than any "Cajun" food you can find in California. It's roughly the equivalent of going to a taqueria in SoCal. Pork, beans and (dirty) rice.

Everybody is warm and friendly and knows how to have a good time. The parties are all-ages and always a blast.

We had a discussion of how some people in a small subdivision were angry at a black guy for moving in because it would lower their property values.

The clerk of court's office charges $1 per page of legal documents you print out and I've been printing hundreds of pages at a time, but nobody is going to count the pages for you or second-guess how many pages you say you printed. It would be called the honor system if it needed a name here. Have I mentioned that Ville Platte is a small town?

Beginning of Summer Update

2011-06-27T16:17:00.001-07:00

Let me catch you up on my life:
I got fired from Monsanto in April. I agreed a month later to spend the summer in Louisiana doing property management for my family. In two days, I leave for southern California to visit (step-)family from South Carolina, then Saturday I leave for Wisconsin to visit maternal family for a week. From there I fly to Louisiana, where I will stay until the end of August (living without air conditioning or in-home internet access). When I get back I'll be moving to the Bay Area. With luck, I will have lined up a job there to start on. I've been dating Sarah for about six months now and she is presently looking for jobs in the Bay Area too. I'm unsure whether or not I will apply again to graduate school or indeed if I will remain in biology. I got fired because I essentially sucked at following molecular bio protocols.

This blog has been on my back burner for awhile and I apologize to you, my loyal readers. It's not for lack of ideas, but for preoccupation with life. Just as last September boasted a bumper crop of fresh material because I was freshly employed, had nothing to do and lots to write about, since April I have been unemployed and my future has been decidedly uncertain. I'd like to point out that this blog passed 5000 unique views and 100 posts a little while ago. This blog is not dying anytime soon, but be patient.

Oh, also, I just turned twenty four, so happy birthday to me. I definitely feel like I am in my mid-twenties at this point, which is something I couldn't say a year ago. According to my dad, I still have ten years before everything goes to shit physically.

Turning Back the Clock

2011-05-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

I had a dream that suddenly I was fourteen again, in my Dad's house. I asked Dad what had happened. He wasn't sure, but suggested that I take this opportunity to correct my life's mistakes. I thought about what I would do differently. I thought briefly that I'd have more incentive to keep my grades up. My life would be so much easier if I'd gotten a grade point higher by 0.07 (anything below a 3.0 is a tough sell for grad school). Thinking on that, I realized that no, I'd probably repeat that particular mistake. It wasn't as if I was unaware of the consequences the first time around. I'd know how to deal with a few ornery classes and professors, but it wouldn't make enough of a difference. I'd probably be more successful with dating, knowing how to deal with girls. I thought about all the roads untaken and how different of a person I could be but for a few matters of happenstance. Would I have flowered in a more competitive university like Berkeley?
I looked for the bathroom, but I'd forgotten that a little later in my original timeline my sister had discovered two secret rooms in Dad's house that had been converted into the main bathroom (the other one had become a closet, I think, by 2011). So, I re-"discovered" those secret rooms, thereby changing the course of history according to my priveledged knowledge of the future.

I'd forgotten how incredibly small Bri was when I was fourteen. Now she's roughly my size, give or take six inches, but back then she was much smaller than me. She hadn't had any kind of growth spurt and was the little, feisty kid I remember her being. As soon as I started knocking at walls she began ferreting out the painted-over outlines of hidden doors and casing the new rooms.

Pitchfork and Allmusic

2011-04-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

It all started with Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan Stevens was at the height of popularity when I was finishing high school, having just released the second album in his fifty states project. All of my hippest friends had him in heavy rotation on their iPods, right up there with Radiohead. The next year, in the dorms, I used iTunes's network to view and listen to the libraries of fellow students. It became apparent that Sufjan was among a group of bands whose popularity could be traced back to heavy promotion by Pitchfork Media. It also became apparent to me that Sufjan Stevens was a sort of fraud.

His music was all surface and no substance. That was notable enough, but my real epiphany was the realization that his music's surface catered to the sensibilities of critics and aspiring pretentious white kids everywhere. The elaborate arrangements, unusual instrumentation and hyper-empathetic vocals broke through bored critics palates and bypassed well-rehearsed cynicism. This would be all well and good if most music critics emphasized songwriting/musicianship over the progression of music's sound. Sometime before they actually wrote a review that sounded like a fourteen-year-old having a wet dream, they would have realized that the songs just weren't that great. It wasn't that Sufjan Stevens was bad, he just wasn't the musical genius he got billed as.

In the last couple of years Sufjan has admitted that the fifty states project was a publicity stunt that he never actually intended to carry out. At the end of last year he released his densest, most use-weird-noises-to-cover-a-lack-of-underlying-talent album ever, to an excellent reception by Pitchfork.

Hype is a pretty natural tendency of art criticism, especially when the critics in question are relatively young (when I was finishing high school the mean age of Pitchfork staffers was in the mid-20's). Some amount of self-policing must exist for an organization to produce a thoughtful body of criticism worthy of respect. The "Pitchfork band" phenomena indicated that shiny new, rapidly rising Pitchfork Media was (and continues to be) the most prominent, most irresponsible perpetrator of music over-hype in the industry.

Sometime during my freshman year, I started reading AllMusic. They gave the Queens of the Stone Age respectful reviews, said nice things about Sufjan without implying that he had any real talent, and panned Radiohead's alleged masterpiece Kid A. That last bit caught my attention and it earned my respect, even though I disagreed with their review right up until they backtracked and conceded to the album's greatness last year. In short, AllMusic embodied the contrary, thoughtful kind of snobbery that I saw in myself.

With the aid of dorm broadband, I was downloading music about as fast as I could keep up with. AllMusic provided comprehensive artist bios, discographies and a wealth of internal hyperlinking (genres, similar bands, bands influenced, etc). It's design was ideal for me to rapidly sift through music and investigate and expand my tastes into unknown territory.

It soon became apparent that I faced a dilemma. If I continued to blindly trust AllMusic's reviewers, my tastes would quickly become beholden to and bounded by the tastes and knowledge of a small group of individuals. I had to decide whether or not to sell my soul to AllMusic.

I mulled the decision over for a couple of weeks, but in the end it was an easy choice. I was fresh off my discovery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I was eager to develop a taste for the "classic" bands and albums of rock and roll. I never put much stock in individualism and indeed, I'm irritated by the definition and cultivation of "personal taste". Personal taste should be treated as bias that must be filtered out of any final, "true" assessment. There is such a thing as great art in absolute terms.

I sold my soul to AllMusic. And I never looked back.

On Militant Atheism

2011-03-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

The following was compiled from a debate with Rob about a post of his titled Schmutz about ridiculing a passerby for having ash on his head on Ash Wednesday. For the purposes of this post, please read "religion" as "Christianity". Also, and this should go without saying on my blog anyways, if you have hate for this post, please don't remain silent. Address me directly and thoughtfully, either by comment or email.

For what it's worth, Rob, I don't consider you militant anything either. You say that in defending religion I am "defending the indefensible"? Lines like that ensure a long return letter from me.

So you say it was your laughter after being angry, bigoted and confrontational that made it ok? I guess it depends on the kind of laughter. I laugh a hard, cruel laugh when I've made a particularly witty joke at someone's (or an implied group's) expense. That was the laughter (maybe muted, but the spirit anyways) I envisioned in your post. It is a laughter at one's own horribleness, but it's also a sort of victory lap, a twisted embrace of all that is unholy about wit and being born to, frankly, a superior mind. It has its place in my life and I expect it has its place in yours. I'm just saying that if that kind of laughter has made its way to strangers simply for having ash on their foreheads, you've gotten a little far afield.

Life is not nearly so simple, and I'm not talking about the minority of nonbelievers who will wear ash each year. I'm talking about the bivalent nature of something as enmeshed into human life and culture as religion. It can be very bad for people, but if you miss its capacity to genuinely be very good for people or indeed miss the extent to which it genuinely helps most people within its clutches, you are missing something very important.

Living in Davis taught every person of notable intellect how boring militant atheism can be and frankly, how crass it is. I've lived the dream of a majority atheist/agnostic society and I can tell you for certain that it is a place of rationalized persecution, bigotry and, this is especially important, a notable lack of philosophical thought. Can you believe we have an atheist/agnostic club in such a place? What the hell do you think they discuss at their meetings? Seriously, all I can think of is getting out "the word" and why non-non-believers suck. They certainly don't have much to discuss in terms of personal philosophy. I can't imagine a UCD organization less likely to include an individual of insight and imagination.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I was just as helpless in not believing in god as so many people are helpless in believing in him. To think otherwise is to give oneself too much credit. There is no minority of people who came to religion by choice. There is a minority of people whose environmental inputs were balanced enough that their decision was decided by native personality rather than those environmental inputs. People are simply not that freethinking. I'm not a determinist, I just recognize genuine free choice for being the intensely rare thing that it is.

I know a handful of enormously intelligent believers. That's not enough, by itself, to give me pause before deriding poster boys for a largely retarded sort of follow-the-leader mentality. It was hearing intelligent people talk about the significance of religion to them that explained to me why religion has existed as something enduring and powerful with deep relevance to the human condition rather than as some transient fad. That, is enough to give me pause before deriding even people who are obviously floatsam upon the tides of religious alignment. It's even enough to give me pause before deriding a person who so clearly is being negatively affected by their floatsamesque religious affiliation, because I cannot easily estimate the positives that religion contributes to their life.

The "is religion more good or bad?" topic is an especially poignant one for me, because my very favorite "intelligent believer" has been affected both so positively and so negatively by her religion. I've tried to imagine what kind of person she would be without her religion and I find it just too inextricably tied. The knee-jerk agnostic reaction would be a revulsion that somebody could be so consumed by a human institution, particularly under the false notion that the institution was superhuman in origin, but being affected by religion is no different from being affected by anything else and there is nothing inherently wrong with being affected so deeply by human institutions. Individuality is, after all, just another value of human construction.

Back to my point, though. My friend is affected in incredibly positive ways by her faith and in dangerous and potentially limiting ways. She lives a life with both more pain and more joy than I think she would live without religion. As to whether religion made her already-intense personality "gel" into the amazing person she is or whether it has straitjacketed her true potential or paved a road for her eventual self-destruction, I cannot say. Surely there is an example somewhere for every case. For now, I have decided it is best that I take it on faith that it does more good than bad. Whether or not that is true, though, I think her life is unquestionably the richer for having religion.

My highest hope for the world is not that people live happy lives free of the worst kinds of sorrow. My highest hope is that people live rich lives, full of both enormous happiness and enormous sorrow. My hope is that somewhere in the process that experience imparts to them tremendous insight into human nature. If religion makes the world a more painful place on the balance, that is still worth the richness and wisdom it brings to the world. Peace and happiness always sounded terribly boring, anyways. I concede that my belief as to what the balance comes to can be reduced to simple faith in my own educated guess. I also believe that if you had any kind of appreciation for its good, you'd see it "being more good than bad" for the very likely possibility that I see it. You say the hurt unleashed on the world by religion is unfathomable? The good unleashed is certainly also unfathomable. To think otherwise is hubris. Who are you to call the balance in religion's disfavor?

Militant atheists often write-off religion's appeal as grounded in fear of "meaninglessness and death". Let me open by saying people respond poorly and inconsistently to ultimatums ("Go to church or burn in hell! Donate a dollar to Red Cross or burn in hell! Wash your hands or go to hell!"). In practice, it only gets you so far in coercing action and loyalty. Cults are just religions without the staying power. Religion survives because there is wisdom inlaid in the tradition, rules and ceremony with genuine human relevance that resonates with people and their children.

To be sure, there is also the appeal of escaping "meaningless and death", but from my vantage point that appeal is rooted much deeper than such a predictable write-off would suggest. Religion is a beautiful and sophisticated allegory for dealing with death and meaninglessness. Just like old school fairy tales deal with childhood fears and traumas by conveying understanding and acceptance through allegory (ie. Little Red Riding hood is about sexual predation), so too does religion, albeit on a more sophisticated and encompassing scale. Religion, understood in my terms, does not deal with fear of death and meaningless through providing escapism, but by teaching understanding and acceptance through allegory. It is the best kind of coping mechanism.

This, perhaps, is the core of my belief system regarding religion. Religion is allegory that never breaks the fourth wall. Treated as such, it is not strident, it is not threatening, it just pushes gently and inexorably onto your skull, whispering how to live a good life, how to prepare for death, how to deal with problems both large and small. I've been working with this belief system for most of my adult life and I have yet to iron out all the wrinkles, but the beauty and reasonableness with which Christianity has opened up to me since then has assured me that I am onto something real and powerful.

Hopefully this clears up at least some of the enigma of my love for and defense of a religion I don't believe. I'm not an enigmatic person. I sometimes wish I was, which is why my first reaction to being called enigmatic is flattery. My second reaction, learned with time, is a recognition that any perception of enigma is simply a failure of mine to convey myself. I don't really want to be enigmatic anyways.

At the end of the day, these are arguments of belief and experience. There is a hard wall between us which you and I may or may not be able to bridge. Barring the success of such an appeal, I have this: Indulging in militant atheism and then posting it on your blog is cliche and contributes nothing to public discourse. Maybe in New Jersey militant atheism seems like an important voice that needs to be heard, but I assure you that your message is out there. Repeating it will only accentuate the misunderstanding and blind hostility on both sides.

Your post will provide no emotional comfort for militant atheists emotionally traumatized by the thought that their position is crazy. I've never met a militant atheist who thought their position was remotely crazy. Every one has been unwaveringly convinced that their position is the most sane position possible. Militant atheists need no comforting. What they need is a dose of reality. The crazier they think of themselves, the better. Their position is not valid. It is understandable, but it is not valid. Crazy is a label societies have traditionally utilized to cope with unconscionably destructive behavior. Militant atheism is destructive. It is hypocritical. It foments everything it seeks to combat. Its existence does no good for anybody, let alone people as a whole. What you are doing is at best, slightly bad for the world and at worst, extremely ugly. In either case it is not constructive in any artistic, philosophical or political sense I can think of. That post of yours is poison and it, my dear friend, is indefensible.

A friend of mine (a nonbeliever), after reading your post and my defending of your character, said, "well, still, you can be the nicest person and then turn around and say you hate niggers". I mean, unless that was the point, unless this was all an exercise in how slippery a slope hateful militant atheism is from a place of thoughtful agnosticism?

January Update

2011-01-20T19:21:00.001-08:00

Quite a few things in my life changed with the new year.

Howard finally moved from Davis. He's helping his parents out for awhile and then he's going to move to Santa Barbara and live with his sister.

I got a new girlfriend. Her name is Sarah. She is cool and things are going very well. We went to San Francisco last weekend and had a blast. Props to Mereb for his restaurant recommendation (Burma Superstar). I bought some random stuff in Chinatown (6.50 a pound for dried shiitakes!). We hung out with Matt and Cory and I finally got to see at least a part their brewing process.

I got a pea coat and an mp3 player for Christmas, both of which have been in near-constant use since I returned to Davis.

The mp3 player has caused kind of a music renaissance in my life. Basically, it's allowed me to listen to music of my choosing at work and in transit. I've been able to give a lot more music my undivided attention and I've started to intensively research and download music again. I've been working on developing a taste for emo and the Rolling Stones. Somewhere along the way I acquired a taste for Sunny Day Real Estate, Supergrass, the Beta Band, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, the Jayhawks and the Vapors. I also reaffirmed my relationship with the Shoes and Wilco, finally listened to John Cale's solo work and finally acquired the two fabled power pop albums by the Searchers that I had been looking for since last spring.

Amidst all the fun and turnover, the application deadlines for various graduate programs have been rolling in. Which is why I'm apologizing for not posting anything else this month. It's not that my mind is not brimming with good post ideas, it's that I can't justify making good on them when I could be doing something so urgently useful. So, wish me luck. Heaven knows I can use all the help I can get to turn in a few halfway decent applications by their deadlines.

Max's Warm Tonic for Colds

2010-12-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

My dad infected the whole family with norovirus. Just when we thought it had burned itself out and I'd made it into the clear, I came down with symptoms when I woke up on Christmas Eve (nausea, sore throat, fever, headache, sleeping a lot). I felt better that night and enjoyed a thoroughly delicious Christmas dinner with family. I woke up Christmas morning at four am to puke and continued to puke until noon.

I made it back to Davis on Sunday and the worst is over, but I apparently got a cold simultaneously (for a second my dad thought my respiratory symptoms ruled out norovirus, but I just got a twofer), so now I have a cough. I made this up a while back as a general cold remedy. Cheers to those of you who also feel like crap.

Add a dollop of honey to a mug of water
Boil in microwave
(Optional) Add some kind of black tea
Squeeze in a slice of lemon or lime
Add a drop of angostura bitters (a full dash if you skipped the tea)

This was originally devised for someone who was morally opposed to tea, but I like a little caffeine in mine. Fun Fact: I've actually used a scaled up version of this for hydration on bike trips. Beats the crap out of water.

Bri's Board and My Theory of Loss

2010-11-29T20:06:00.000-08:00

I took Bri's board surfing with Caius and a friend while visiting home for Thanksgiving. There wasn't a very good break at the beach we went to, but the waves were medium-sized and surprisingly strong. I snapped Bri's longboard in half. I didn't do anything special, just got knocked off the board and dragged under by the leash. Another wave followed and snapped the board while I was underwater. That was it.

I really loved that board, which brings me to my theory on the nature of grief and loss. I believe that the emotional fallout of loss, which is to say grieving, is the process of disentangling the lost thing from your vision of the future. I didn't realize it until now, but I really wanted to hang ten off that board.

Bri wasn't overly bummed about losing her board. She had always magnanimously taken my board when the two of us surfed. Our surf guru, my mom's exboyfriend Bob, however, adored it. The board was a full length longboard, broad winged and thin with an extra-light shell. This made it particularly fragile and a rather elegant ride. The board was quite sensitive for its length and could turn as fast as my much shorter board. The broad nose always beckoned me to try and get my toes on it, but it also caught the breeze like a sail, which was especially inconvenient because of the ease with which the board turned.

After the board broke, I gathered up the two pieces and took them home. Caius asked if we could repair it, but breaking in half is universally understood as a surf board's death sentence. Once the wood stringer's integrity is ruined, there's no way to make the board whole again. Bob wanted to make sure we'd kept the pieces, though, because he had a friend who could make a replica based on them. Bob estimated it would cost four hundred to make (the price moderately-used longboards go for in retail surfshops). Knowing Bob and his trouble with alcoholism and, even when sober, with finances, Mom predicted that he'd never get the money together for the board.

That not-quite-loss makes the whole experience more agonizing. The possibility of riding a board like that again makes it that much harder to let go. But let go we must. No good will come from wistfully looking forward to a day that will not come. Unfortunately, Bob left that cursed glimmer of hope and I'll likely have trouble shaking the image of one day riding a board like that. Instead of dealing that loss decisively, that hope will linger and gnaw on dark cold nights. Sometimes I wish that board's reincarnation was impossible.

We also must remind ourselves that, excepting the people we had at birth, loss necessarily must follow gain, and for all that we've had, our lives have been richer for it and we are still the better for it. I'm a much better surfer than I was before I started riding Bri's board.

We should also remind ourselves of all that we still have. Though I transferred technical ownership of my board to Bri, I'll still be able to ride it whenever I get a chance. I've always really liked my board. It doesn't paddle quite as fast or have a broad, inviting nose, but it's a more durable and versatile board. I think every surfboard has something to teach the rider, so my surfing may ultimately benefit when I eventually buy a new board to replace the one I ceded to Bri. Of course, I'll have to return to living on the coast for that to happen.

Scary Movie Month, Year Four

2010-10-31T20:21:00.000-07:00

For those of you not familiar with Scary Movie Month, check the original post that I wrote last year. It explains everything. It recently occurred to me that the story of Scary Movie Month is a really good illustration of my approach to appreciation of things in general.

Now, for the movies I watched October 2010:

Bride of Frankenstein
This is one of those unusual sequels to better the original. It's more thoughtful, horrible, and has more heart than the original Frankenstein. The plot of the original was so familiar, it took something away from the movie's grandeur. I didn't know what to expect with Bride.

Ringu
It was scary, as expected. The only part of the movie that really stuck with me, though, was the fascinating relationship between the protagonist and her exhusband while they try to unravel the curse on their heads.

Carrie
My favorite scary movie of the month, this is a movie about a high school outcast. The symbolism is beautiful, thoughtful and exquisitely disturbing. The tension is built over the course of the movie until the famous breaking point, which (surprise) involves a lot of blood, in case you hadn't seen the movie's cover.

Martin
Martin is a real-life vampire. As he states emphatically, "there is no magic". He doesn't have any powers. All he needs is a syringe of tranquilizer, a razor blade and some planning. The themes worked here reminded me strongly of Carrie-- an expose of the alienated, painfully shy teen with destructive antisocial tendencies. The audience is invited to pity and identify with both main characters. However, whereas Carrie is a fundamentally good person driven to those actions by circumstance, Martin is a sociopath.

Night of the Living Dead
This is the movie that established the classic zombie. In the last decade, zombies have been getting faster and more fragile, but there's a lot to be said for a zombie that will take a shot to the heart, pause, and keep coming. Eating people adds something too, I think.

Dawn of the Dead
George Romero returned to the genre that he had popularized with Night of the Living Dead ten years later with this sequel. The bulk of the movie is set in a mall. A lot had happened since 1968, and though Romero didn't change the premise or lore, he certainly doesn't take himself as seriously this time (rather than sobering black and white, blood is now a garish orange-red). As with Living Dead, if the social commentary of the movie wasn't already painstakingly obvious, Romero hammers you with it at the credits. Movies like Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland demonstrate a considerable debt to this classic.

Suspiria
This Italian film seems to be the best-regarded horror movie about witchcraft. It's set in a ballet school in Germany and the main character is American (though she almost only speaks Italian). The movie plays as a sort of boarding school mystery. There's a strong sense of apprehension and "weirdness" through the movie. I wasn't a big fan, but the movie is obviously well-made.

Poltergeist
Poltergeist comes off as kind of the flagship for the family-fun horror genre. The amount of special effects is competitive with contemporary popcorn movies, which is saying something. It takes you on a fun, fright-filled ride, accomplishing exactly what it set out to do.

Let the Right One In
This Swedish film is about a twelve-year-old boy befriending a vampire girl. The movie's as much an old-school romance as a horror film. I thought it was great.

The Descent
This keeps getting reviewed as the best horror movie of the 00's or in the words of a friend, "a horror movie that doesn't suck". As you would expect from one about spelunking, it is incredibly dark and claustrophobic. That pretty much sums things up.

Legalizing Pot

2010-10-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

I thought this day would never come. Well, I at least thought it would take another ten or twenty years before a measure to legalize recreational marijuana would be seriously considered by an American constituency. I was wrong. California's Proposition 19, that will legalize recreational pot use, is just barely behind in the polls.

This is spectacularly cool for a number of reasons, the foremost being the realization of a truer liberty in America. I've long thought that our founding fathers must be rolling in their graves to know that an essentially harmless drug like marijuana would be made formally illegal. If Ben Franklin were alive today I'm sure he'd be a fan of pot.

I will grant that marijuana is not entirely harmless. Like caffeine, THC can stunt childrens' growth, like alcohol it lowers inhibitions and though there is no indication that extensive abuse causes brain damage the way alcohol does, residual THC (aka permastone) can dampen brain function for a month or two, though only noticeably so if epic quantities of pot are involved. I think every informed person will grant that the social risks of marijuana use are vastly overshadowed by alcohol and the health risks are overshadowed by tobacco.

I think it's fairly obvious that the decrease in price and increase in availability of pot will result in an increase in its consumption. I'd like you to pause for a moment and consider whether that's a bad thing. Prop 19 opponents will point out that many people have abuse problems with the drugs we already have legal, so why should we allow consumption of yet another drug? The answer is that while alcohol and prescription drugs do cause problems, there is an overwhelming good that comes from their being legal. I know I've enjoyed the benefits of responsible alcohol use.

THC is a non-habit forming drug, in contrast to nicotine, caffeine and, yes, alcohol. That means that consumers must repeatedly make the conscious, non-coerced choice to continue smoking pot. It is a drug consumed more voluntarily than any major legal recreational drug, to say nothing of hard drugs like meth, cocaine and heroin. Honestly, if not for the deference of American common law to consensus --that is, approaching this from a purely constitutional perspective-- marijuana use has far better grounds as a individual right than alcohol or tobacco.

There is some concern that legalizing pot would increase availability of the drug to minors. If Prohibition was any indication, though, bringing pot consumption above ground will make it easier to control who the drug is made available to. Right now minors have better access to pot than cigarettes or alcohol.

One figure I heard estimated the annual value of the Californian pot crop at twelve billion dollars. That's roughly three times the value of every other field crop in the state combined. That crop's value will diminish considerably if Proposition 19 passes. A modest chunk (1.5 billion) will go into taxes. Based on a projected 80% decrease in marijuana prices, that only leaves about one billion for the pot growing industry. Granted, these figures assume no increase in consumption, but these figures project a collapse in industry value by a factor of ten.

Of the original 12 billion, 1.5 billion will go to taxes and around a billion will go to run the industry. The remaining nine billion will be stolen back from the black market economy. Mexican drug cartels make a majority of their income from marijuana trafficking, so we can be sure that a significant amount of money will no longer be making it southward or indeed into organized crime across the state. Further, the profit margins that growers, distributors and dealers once made will disappear in the blink of an eye. Without the risk of incarceration those jobs will no longer pay unreasonably well. It is worth mentioning that Kush Magazine, everybody's "premier cannabis lifestyle magazine" had an ad in it opposing Prop 19, paid for by a medical marijuana dispensary. Middle school dope peddlers and Mexican drug lords won't be the only people suffering if Prop 19 is passed, let's not forget California's newest capitalists.

Voting for Proposition 19 is the correct choice from both a practical standpoint (improving government finance at the expense of cartels) and a civil liberties one. Legalizing a relatively harmless recreational drug like marijuana is fundamentally American and would make California a beacon of liberty. It would also probably set up a Supreme Court battle worth talking about.

Though September polls showed Prop 19 leading in September, it has slipped since then. Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing a consolation prize should the Proposition fail-- decriminalization. A fairly even vote will also get people thinking about the ins and outs of legalization. There's a decent chance that a loss now will set up a victory later. That said, don't plan on losing this quite yet. The vote is still close and a recent study showed that Prop 19 polls are subject to a strong social desirability bias.

Logistics of Drinking: Glasses

2010-10-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

There are those of you who will know me as an aficionado of jam jars. That element of my ghetto chic has persevered since Brandon and I's days of Seagram's martinis.

My jam jars comfortably hold about six ounces. That makes them ample for stiff drinks like martinis. It may have influenced my arrival on the 2:1 rule of cocktails, which is two parts mixer to one part liquor. Judging from other peoples' tastes, the 2:1 ratio is not arrived at without some guidance.

The size of my jam jars also lends itself to drinking wine. Though the glass is too thick for chilled whites, room temperature reds are perfect in my sturdy little declarations against pretension.

My jam jars are practically indestructible. In all my time in Davis, only one of them has broken (and not for lack of being dropped). They're further practical because they fit the universal mason lid, which I usually acquire by way of Classico pasta sauce. All kinds of things have been stored at some point in those trusty jam jars.

At six ounces, however, they do have some limitations. When it comes to drinking orange juice, milk or water, you need a glass with some capacity. Classico pint jars work great for water, but they're a bit hard to clean for milk and OJ. For that I've used more conventional glasses wide enough to be scrubbed out by hand.

The real journey in the world of drinking glasses has been with beer. In the beginning, I drank out of the can or the bottle, as befitted my no-nonsense "living light" attitude. Later, we occasionally drank out of glasses just for fun. At some point Brandon and I noticed the difference in flavor between pale ale out of the bottle and out of the glass. Aromatic beers need a glass to show their full flavor. I still drink non-aromatic light lager out of cans without qualms (though cans warm beer up quickly).

Quart or pint mason jars are great for drinking beer out of. I've had less luck with thick plastic cups, which tend to quickly decarbonate beers because of their many surface imperfections. I also have had the use of Brandon's legendary beer stein and a variety of typical pint glasses. Surprisingly, neither of those worked well as beer glasses. Because of the thickness of the glass, if they're not prechilled before use they'll quickly warm the beer to swill. I just don't have the kind of patience required to prechill glasses.

Everything changed a year ago when Jill brought back a couple of fluted glasses with short stems, courtesy of her study abroad class field trip to the San Miguel brewery in Burgos, Spain. The glasses were thin enough to keep the beer cool, wide enough to sniff and comfortable in the hand.

Part of these beer glasses' attraction was the sense of class. I still have no complaints about mason jars. They also are lightweight and keep beer cool, but short-stemmed beer glasses are more comfortable in the hand and way too much fun to drink out of. I've bought a few purpose-made stemmed beer glasses since then and I now have enough to host small tastings in style. I'll probably be on a constant hunt for elegantly shaped beer glasses for as long as I'm obsessed with beer.

On the Persuasion of Words

2010-10-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Rob prefaced a confessional story with a preamble about how the use of words is nearly always an attempt to persuade people to like us and love us. He explained that he did his best to use words for the greater good and ignore what light his confessional story might portray him in. This was my response, cleaned up for your reading pleasure.

Your discussion about the persuasion of words was an awesome thought, but it's hard to be convinced that your attempts at making people love you with words are anything other than more complex and self-consciously twisted than the majority of people's. Attempts to subvert the impulse to try to be loved are never true subversions. I don't think we can free ourselves of that motivation and our resulting actions to even a small degree, only try harder to cover our tracks.

I can strongly empathize with your thoughts. I think I've tried harder to subvert those impulses in myself than most I know. I've watched my smartest friends go through the same calculus, though. That's had the dual benefit of showing me what it looks like from the outside and illustrating to me that the impulse is completely normal for individuals of our intellect. It also illustrates that the impulse makes people's personas far more interesting even if they never succeed in displacing, subduing or even hiding their selfish desire to be loved.

I remember my effort at that began with Christianity. I remember being in catechism, wondering whether good deeds counted if they were based in a desire to feel better about oneself and/or be treated with the gentleness reserved for "nice people", to say nothing of being motivated by the promise of heaven. Because God knew our motivations perfectly, I concluded they did not qualify as truly good deeds.

The next step in my thought process was that the only way to do good things without the inevitable morally-compromising reward was to play my good intentions off as bad ones and convince both those around me and myself that my actions were selfish and wicked. This corresponded with an increasingly perverse altruism that I mixed freely with my most overtly evil impulses as well as an increasing obsession with compartmentalizing my mind for the purpose of insulating my conscious from the fact that I was doing things that I believed to be good.

This formed the basic tenets of my high school class persona that earned me so much hate and ultimately love. I managed to almost perfectly conceal that I was an essentially loving, conscience-driven individual haunted by insecurity and loneliness. I came across as an arrogant, self-obsessed dick who was too smart for his own good. The persona meshed smoothly with my slacker-who-loves-school thing. I refused to take notes to my teacher's chagrin and asked hard, merciless questions that sometimes went over the teachers' heads and always kept them on their toes.

Picking at flaws in logic and person became a favorite outlet for many impulses at once, including my altruism, though I would have rightly insisted then that I was venting displaced anger by pointing out my teachers' weaknesses. I did the same essential thing to fellow students for even raising their hand if they wasted class time. Not only was there such a thing as a dumb question, there was such a thing as people too dumb to be entitled to a voice.

By the time I entered college, I'd entered a new phase of activism that was more nuanced and less overtly conflicted and confrontational than my high school days, but I still have great respect for the person I was in high school. I've only built upon the moral calculus that formed my high school persona. I've given up on thinking that compartmentalization or cultivated hatred will allow me to do good without reaping the benefits. I've given up avoiding the benefits. Part of that is probably because of how high school ended. I was eventually respected and adored for my refusal to conform or parse words.

My blog is a complete embrace of the "look at me" and "love me" implicit in writing so many words in a place where so many people can see them. I make no bones about trying to persuade people that my way is the right one, but more importantly I make no bones about playing up the quirky charm of my personality. I am shameless about my efforts to persuade people into loving me via my blog. Haven't I already earned your liking?

That persuasion has always been a filtering process, though. I've never had any ambition to be loved by all or even most. When somebody thinks I'm insane, sociopathic or perverted my normal reaction is to say screw you. I work hard enough at being correctly understood that when explanation fails I have few qualms about judging people for judging me. Were I not so articulate and careful to justify my thoughts, I might be more lenient, but as it stands, fuck'em.

September Update

2010-09-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a long and interesting month. I'm just starting to feel settled into my new living arrangement.

This September was immediately preceded by moving out of my old house and moving Jill to Santa Cruz, where we broke up. After a week chilling with my sister, I returned to my new house. My three roommates were near-perfect strangers, my room was too full of boxes to fit a mattress and Jill wasn't the only person close to me to have moved on from Davis, just the most recent.

I started work again with Monsanto on the seventh. I'd gotten the job on the basis of an excellent recommendation from my old boss Staci, who I worked under during my internship. I knew I'd be facing a cut in pay, responsibility and interest of work. I'll be doing a complex assay to detect disease contamination in tomato seeds all year. I recently told Staci that my erratic thought-patterns are sub-ideal for the rather meticulous job, but that I'd get the rhythm of it soon enough. The tediousness of the job is saved by the pleasantness of the work environment. Everyone there is very cool and the nature of the job affords us some opportunity to talk.

It also turns out I won the roommate lottery. Mike is a nerdy but affable guy of understated intelligence that I think I could eventually become good friends with. Mereb and Celeste have the master bedroom. I was concerned that their hippy quirks might drive me crazy, but they're really open-minded and not even vegetarians. They turned me onto an awesome beer made by Pabst called Olympia. It's just as good as PBR, but the flavor is corn-driven instead of rice-driven. I suspect they used Cascade-style hops, which is kind of cool. Everyone is interesting to talk to and has a surprising number of things in common with me. I finally have a player for my records, I got my butt handed to me playing Axis and Allies and we might even get chickens soon.

Most of my free time this month has been spent in long conversations with old friends and writing this blog (four thousand unique hits and counting). A few you who know more than how to count will observe that it's been my most productive month of blogging thus far.

I've also been dabbling in TV shows, music and bonding with my new people. Mereb picked up a ping-pong table this weekend. I'd forgotten how much I liked that game. I went to Fry's with Mike on Sunday to check out computers. Yesterday I went to Vacaville Outlet Mall with coworkers and picked up some new shoes (green and white plaid converse, fyi).

I went to a KDVS show last week in Sac with Kern that his band was playing at. He and I both loved one of the bands there (Fall of Electricity), which embodied an intense, proggy drummer/guitarist formula that I've seen work really well a few times (other notable examples being the two-person incarnations of Afternoon Brother and Lightning Bolt). I bought Fall of Electicity's cassette, but I don't have a cassette player, so I'm going to download the mp3's it entitles me to and give away the cassette to the first person who asks, as per the guitarist's suggestion.

Howard has reclaimed an old mini-fridge and is trying to splice in a thermostat so that we can temperature-control fermentation for making sakes and lagers. The plan is to start a doppelbock this weekend and have bottles of it ready for Christmas. I've been scurrying to put together a recipe worthy of my "North Swell Bock" concept.

I've been thanking my lucky stars that Howard ended up sticking around for at least a little while longer. New friends are great and phone friends are great, but having a concrete piece of familiarity is priceless. It's interesting to chat with Howard on a one-on-one basis too. I've hardly ever had conversations with him as personal and thoughtful as they have recently been.

I've kept in contact with Jill and I think there's a decent chance the friends-afterward thing will work. She visited me last Sunday, partly to drop off the next books of a series she got me addicted to. We walked to Borders and talked. We don't talk like nothing's changed, but the familiarity is still there and it's nice. The whole visit was intensely bittersweet, though. Our hugs were the stuff of poetry. After she left I took a nap to both sort out my thoughts and disrupt their endless flow. I was off balance the whole rest of the day.

For those of you who keep asking me why we didn't stay together, please go back and read this. The reasons haven't changed and I have yet to (seriously) reconsider the decision.

For those of you who keep asking me how I'm doing, I'm doing fine. I'm doing better with each passing week. I have my moments, but mostly I feel surprisingly okay and that's getting more true with time. I think the good terms we parted on and the constant talk with friends has helped a lot.

That said, I've been dwelling a lot on the past and it is occasionally depressing. It's not just Jill, it's everything. I miss college things like watching TV and drinking beer with Brandon, bullshitting late at night and John Lazur giving me dubious advice. My being disgruntled about change should be neither surprising nor worrisome to any of you. I never pretended to like change, just to know it's good for me.

Eighty-Six Bottles of Beer on the Wall

2010-09-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

I remember. Oh how I remember.

The last few weeks and indeed the last few months have been a time for reflection upon my time in Davis. It is, as I have already said, the end of an era. When Howard and Brandon and I moved to the Apple House, we started lining up beer bottles on top of our kitchen cabinets. A year later, when my mind was also looking backwards because of my upcoming graduation, I started telling Brandon stories I associated with various bottles. I realized how good a storytelling device they were and resolved to write this post in the future.

Yet another year later, Howard was the last of us original three to leave the Apple House and I got those charmed bottles. They had a crust of grease on their shoulders from their lengthy existence in that kitchen. I lined them up (mostly) chronologically and photographed them to tell you their stories. This is a long post, full of stories both momentous and trivial whose value lies in their significance to those who played roles in them.

Stella Artois was the first beer I ever bought. I got it while in the dorms through Brandon's high school friend Tyler. Tyler ended up introducing us to craft beer while we lived in the dorms because periodically he would visit his girlfriend Erin at UC Davis and we'd all hang out in Brandon's dorm and drink Tyler's beer. I remember it took me months to acquire a taste for any beer, but I left the dorms a fan of Sierra Nevada and Fat Tire.

My first visit to Nugget Market, I bought a battery of craft sodas, my interest a relic from my days in high school. I tasted them with my roommates one by one over the course of a week, setting the pattern I would later revisit with single-bottles of beer after I graduated.

The standout was an old soda I'd wanted to try since those high school days. Moxie has become synonymous with spunk and determination in vernacular and it frankly tastes medicinal. The thing is, it tastes medicinal in a completely awesome way. I'd drink it periodically if Nugget would freaking stock it again (more than can be said of all but a handful of craft sodas), but I haven't seen it on their shelves since.

Later that sophomore year, I got Allison's roommate Emy to buy us alcohol. She recommended New Belgium's 1554 from the Coop, which was excellent.

We became fans of Gordon Biersch Marzen among other things. We started saving bottles so that we might insinuate ourselves into brewing beer of our own some day. I remember Brandon thought Stone IPA was too bitter, but I tried to approach it with an open mind. He liked Red Hook, though, and three years later we had a pitcher of it with his family in Dana Point while they were visiting for a cousin's wedding.

I also remember when Allison's mom visited (but I forgot why) with a bottle of Skyy vodka and we made lemon drops at my house.

Our junior year Adam was old enough to give us the hookup. We liked Gordon Biersch's Marzen enough that we tried out Sudwerk's. I though it was relatively boring, but Brandon liked it.

Seagram's Gin should be in the lineup somewhere, because it was that year that Brandon and I started making martinis regularly, sipping them while we watched Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond.

Howard's girlfriend Tammy turned twenty-one late in the year and I remember sipping Pyramid Apricot Ale with she and Howard at her apartment.

Soon after we'd graduated, the household turned twenty-one all at once. We stocked a bar and purchased some liquors I'd read about, including Rye Whiskey and Brazilian Cachaca. We had a cocktail party for Howard and I's birthday with our newly stocked bar. John Lazur, Adam, Greg Webb, Russell Manning and Jill were all there. Russell and Jill were dating that summer and I became friends with both of them through my involvement with DCD (the Davis College Democrats).

Brandon bought a Japanese White Ale called Hitachino's nest on some DCD escapade and I remember it tasted great.

Caius came to visit me that summer, twice. He made me a blackberry pie the first time and I documented a bike trip he and Brandon and I took up the American River. We also tried some beer and cider from the coop. Caius loved hard apple cider.

I took my new grill for it's first spin, grilling $4/lb New York Strip on the patio at Kingston Apartments. Brandon and I bought Pilsner Urquell on a whim. The steak turned out great. Though the beer was awesome, it didn't pair well at all. This inaugurated both my love of Pilsner and my long and unsuccessful search for the beer that would pair with American steak.

I also remember the love-at-first-taste I had with New Belgium's Skinny Dip.

When I visited home that summer, I bought Virgil's Cola at Farm-to-Market with my sister. The cola wasn't half as good as their root beer, but I had a great time hanging out with Bri.

Howard brought some Kirkland beer that he'd discovered at his hometown Costco.

I vividly remember shoving a wedge of key lime into a Corona on my way out the door to ride with Brian Ang and Matt Takaichi to see My Bloody Valentine in San Francisco. I remember sharing my jam jar of rye, the incredible volume of the show and the absolute hordes of kids dressed in their scene best.

Brandon and I ended up becoming big fans of Cachaca and the cocktail made from it called a Caipirinha. Before long we had to replace the old bottle we'd bought on my birthday.

At some point, John Lazur and I's boss, Richard, brought a few bottles of beer back from a visit to Jack Russell brewery. He told us that we could drink them together after closing up the chemical dispensary (John acted as manager for the closing shift). The two of us had a wonderful time discussing the beers. After that, we made a semi-regular thing out of it. John also introduced me to Dogfish Head brewery by giving me their fall seasonal.

Inspired by John, I hosted a "six-pack party", where guests where instructed to bring a six-pack of a beer they had never tried before. The hit of the night was Laura Nevins' Prohibition Lager, which I thought tasted like strawberries.

Before that fall, we made the big move from our run down apartment to a duplex that we called the Apple House. The last day of the move, Brandon went to pick up some McDonald's (having not unpacked the kitchen yet) and as such things go that time of year, a few friends dropped by and we had a housewarming party. Among those friends was Jill. We cracked open a sixer of Leffe, which Brandon claimed tasted exactly like creamed corn when he drank it in Europe with Tyler. Jill and I got to chat when the others made a trip to the store and the two of us hit it off. She'd broken up with Russell earlier that summer and I remember thinking to myself that I should go after her.

There were two impromptu get-togethers around our kitchen that September and Jill was at both. On one Jill formed her first opinion of Leffe and on the other I invented my Christmas Punch in the process of playing bartender to Jill, trying to mimic a cranberry vodka with limited ingredients.

Later in the fall I remember discovering Hefeweizen playing a drinking game with Sudwerk's at Don Gibson's house. I soon got bored with the style, though.

At the beginning of the fall my sister and Aaron Robinson visited for ORMF with Bri's friend Lauren and Aaron's then-girlfriend Jill Hardy. I cracked open one of my dad's more prized red wines (I'd taken a case to Davis with me).

The next day we went to the show and the brief romance I'd had with Lauren came back to life, Lauren's affection growing more pronounced when the the only one of the many Davis friends I invited to show up turned out to be Jill Miller.

A few weeks later, Brandon and I planned to visit our respective siblings in Santa Cruz. We hadn't found anyone interested in gas-sharing with us by that Friday, when by chance I ran into Jill between classes. I invited her and she said she'd come along. The three of us chatted enthusiastically the way there, bickering about whether Jill had good movie taste and agreeing to host a movie marathon. Lauren happened to have dropped by to visit Bri for the weekend, so the dynamic resumed. This time, though, while I put my arms around Lauren, Brandon put his arms around Jill. That night was when Jill decided she didn't actually like Leffe. The following night we picked up some "Oktoberfest" from Trader Joe's that Brandon and I agreed tasted a little like raw meat.

It wasn't until later, when Bri asked me if I liked Jill that I realized how obvious our chemistry was. Lauren certainly noticed. The similarities between the two outings are astonishing. In both cases, Jill was the only person of many invitees to show and Lauren happened to have dropped in on Bri. In both cases I was more ignorant of the dynamic than Lauren or Jill.

After we'd dropped Jill off at her house (and Jill and I had agreed to have a movie marathon the next weekend), I asked Brandon if he was interested in Jill. Brandon said definitely not and I said good, because though he had first dibs, I really wanted to go after her.

My new roommate Greg Webb had run a bruising independent campaign for ASUCD Senator. He announced that regardless of the outcome, he'd be hosting a "Moral Victory Party" and that he would drink a shot of tequila for every twenty votes he received. He got three hundred votes and was just eight votes short of winning.

We measured off the small amount of extra tequila from a fifth and Greg started to drink. Everybody drank (Brandon and I as always playing the role of bartenders extraordinaire), but Greg made it halfway through the bottle within an hour. We decided to move our small party to check out a handful of large parties we'd heard about. Greg was shouting a continuous stream of slurs and insults about the candidates that had beaten him, insisting that we go to the victory party for LEAD (the winning party) so that he could cuss them out in person. We steered Greg to my friend Kern's party. I had an involved albeit tipsy discussion with Jill about "las otras", trying desperately to convince her that she was my first pick. We danced together at Kern's party. By the time we left that party, our numbers had thinned considerably. By the time we arrived at Greg's friend's "wig party", it was just the three of us.

Drunken Greg looked like ET in a hot pink bob. We mixed and chatted, but mostly Jill and I's conversation continued. By the time we left, I was easily the most sober of our trio, Greg still weaving precariously as he continued hurling a stream of insults into the empty streets. Jill and I felt a sense of teamwork as we shepherded him home. For about half the walk I pushed Greg in a grocery cart. In the last leg of the trip Jill and I held hands. It was at that moment that I knew for sure that we had mutual interest, though later she would say it hadn't meant anything.

Jill and I had the long promised movie marathon and though it went otherwise swimmingly, Jill rebuffed my attempt to put my arm around her. We agreed to do it again the next weekend. The second time Jill's friend Lazzuly joined us and Jill snuggled up to me until I put my arm around her. We watched a couple of movies like that. Lazzuly left to get ready for a DCD party that night and I fed Jill a potato with cheese. We walked to the party holding hands.

At the party we danced only with each other. A DCDer named Shane mistook me for Colin Doyle, who'd been hitting on his girlfriend. He tipsily apologized for the mistake later, forcing not one but two bottles of Mirror Pond on me. I didn't care. By that time dancing had turned into making out and I was practically floating.

A few weeks later the Apple House hosted its Christmakah party. This was the third we'd hosted and by this time my roommates were pulling more weight in the preparation than I was (I who'd gallantly started the first one). That Jill and I were dating was made apparent to DCD that night. I busted out some of my dad's wine, making the mistake of letting a stranger open one of the bottles. The only way to salvage the resulting split cork was to push it into the bottle. I was pissed at the time, but I'm amused to see that cork half still sitting glumly in the bottle (the Chardonnay, btw). The next morning I asked Jill, (with a note of exasperation) "What are we?". She seemed surprised that I wanted to date exclusively. I was surprised that she'd allowed it to go this far without demanding some kind of commitment. I'd wanted a long term relationship all along (since that first hang-out at the Apple House) and wanted to lock her down before winter break.

That winter quarter, I took "Introduction to Beer and Brewing" with funny British professor Charles Bamforth. I was immediately excited by the sound of the bocks, starting off with the ubiquitous Shiner Bock.

That Valentine's day was my first worth celebrating and I pulled out the stops to make it special, more for me than for Jill. We went to Seasons for dinner and watched a playing of A Winter's Tale. The next day we decided to go to Napa, though it was raining. We bought a couple bottles of wine and some nice cheese, including the Chardonnay pictured.

I also remember having Adam over for a more modest incarnation of the "six-pack party". He brought Henry Weinhard and I got some Red Seal. Talk was good and the Red Seal was great.

That winter, my sister came to visit. I'd promised to bake her cookies if she visited me (and actually stayed with me, instead of spending all her time with Allison), a promise which she was quick to remind me of. I fondly remember sipping Red Tail while baking cookies (another terrible pairing) while it softly rained outside. I think probably the other time she came and stayed with Allison we drank the Kriek Boon, kriek being another beer style I'd been introduced to through my class.

At some point I hosted a beer tasting of various bocks. Allison, Jack, Brandon, Howard and Jill were all in attendance. I do love getting all my favorite people in one place. Add that to a wealth of delicious new beer and I'd have to call my state one of bliss.

After I graduated, Jill went to study abroad in Spain. I knew her being gone would be hard on me. She actually left the morning of my birthday. That afternoon I called John Lazur to come over and hang out. I made him try my newly invented Black Bayou with my purpose-purchased bottle of Maker's Mark, which isn't in the lineup because I still have some left in it.

We were having a great time chatting. One thing led to another and we cracked open a forty of Old English while Howard and Greg prepared a feast of different dishes all made with zucchini (you know how it is with zucchini). John left at eight or so and I passed out on my bed around ten. I woke up at four AM feeling like I'd been hit by a cement truck. Since I couldn't get to sleep I screwed around online and feverishly read the pulp fiction Jill had left me to read. In the next couple days I burned through her sizable stack of books, sleeping erratically and feeling like shit the whole time.

While Jill was gone I drove with my mom and sister to Wisconsin. Driving in shifts, we did it in thirty-two hours. It was the first time I'd been to Wisconsin since I'd turned twenty-one. I drank a local beer by New Glarus with my cousin Eddie, which felt like some kind of rite of passage.

I'd heard that Coca-Cola's formulation varied from country to country. I'd told Jill to bring back a coke from every country she passed through. She brought back a Spanish coke and a French one. I added in a bottle of Mexican coke and a can of Americana and we had an old-fashioned Apple House taste test. We couldn't really tell the difference between the Spanish and French cokes. For that matter, except the obvious difference of sucrose vs high fructose corn syrup, I couldn't detect a difference in the formula between the European cokes and our American one. The Mexican coke was definitely different. It drew the most polarized response, but we all agreed that it was "weird". It tasted warmer, like a fiesta (more cinnamon?). Whatever it was, I think Mexican coke was my favorite of the tasting.

Jill also returned from Spain with a taste for Spanish Tempranillo. We were always trying to drink it with pork. I'm not sure if we ever actually did.

On the edge of the picture is a bottle of Stone Pale Ale. Caius and I picked up a six pack of the stuff on our way to a backyard folk show. This must have been the summer before, because the occasion provided the inspiration for I BUI.

That summer, Jill's mom kind of turned on me without my realizing it. Jill wanted me to make my delicious grilled steak for her mom, so I made steaks for Jill, her mom and her friend Myranda Hunter (who happens to be my kind of people). I picked one of my dad's Bordeaux's for the steak (Jill's mom likes Merlot). Out of the gates I was criticized for burning the steaks. The night went downhill from there as Jill's mom became more drunk, more belligerent and more appalled by my nonchalance (any chance at diplomacy on my part being similarly buried in wine).

The night ended with Jill's mom telling Jill to break up with me and insisting that she was ok to drive home. Jill would hardly look at me until she got a text the next afternoon saying, "I was only kidding. Don't break up with the boy."

A few weeks later Matt Gribble visited me along his way from Stanford to grad school in Baltimore. I took him to a KDVS house show. He was pretty critical of the music, but he loved the lambic he'd bought (I did too, enough to ask to keep the bottle for my wall) and had a great time unsuccessfully chasing this scene kid who "wasn't out of the closet yet".

Matt Wingert finally visited me as he'd been promising for years. We chilled out with Brandon's brother Spencer and watched the first two seasons of the Venture Brothers. The last night we picked up a variety of mostly German lagers from the coop and he, Brandon, Jill and I had a tasting. The equation is simple: good beer plus good friends equals awesome. Works every time.

After a summer's growing anxiety about my continuing unemployment, I ran smack into the most unlikely of jobs. DCD had decided to encourage it's members to work for a housing measure on the ballot called Measure P. The project was sustainable and the campaign very well funded. I think somebody in DCD's leadership mistakenly hoped the club might get some portion of the $15/hour that the campaign was paying its workers.

Working the campaign was great. It got me out of the house and also off Jill's nerves (it was a hot summer). Flyering was a beautiful excuse to walk around Davis's idyllic neighborhoods. "Walking" and phone banking got me chatting with the town's residents. In addition to paying us well, the campaign was generous about taking us out to lunch. I acquired great respect for two of the three eateries we had accounts with: Steve's Pizza and Zia's Deli (the latter superb). Somehow, they even let us order beer for lunch, so I got a taste for Boont Amber Ale along the way.

I liked the hours, the people and the job itself. Because I was one of the few nonstudent campaigners, I eventually took a greater level of responsibility within the campaign. I organized walks, discussed strategy and even wrote campaign literature. I remember getting home completely windswept after acting as a bike messenger (eat your hearts out, fixie kids!) and immediately loving Sam Adams' Octoberfest, which fit the season and moment so perfectly. Did I mention October is my favorite month?

Towards the end of the campaign, the more regular among us went out to Little Prague for beers after a long day. On David Urhausen's suggestion, we got all three of the Chimay brews they offered. It was all very bittersweet, so I took home the most expensive bottle to memorialize the parting. Because Little Prague had recently decided to stop stocking Chimay, the bartender let us have a Chimay glass each for a couple dollars.

I gained an appreciation for the vast beauty of Davis those two months. I also gained an appreciation for the intelligent and ornery citizens of Davis, who voted our Measure down by a landslide. Things had to come to an end sooner or later. The campaign managers had slowly let on how unlikely it was that we'd win, but even they were unprepared for the decisiveness of the rebuke. It didn't sting as bad as the fact that the campaign ended. David hosted an end of campaign party with a keg of Sudwerk Pilsner, which was about the most jaw-droppingly awesome party provision I'd ever heard of.

Soon after I joined Jill and DCD for their Tahoe retreat, where young democrats from across the state rubbed shoulders. I don't think we brought it along, but I remember buying that bottle of Grolsch with Brandon around the same time. The beer itself was terribly skunked. The story of note from the retreat was my increasingly hostile disposition towards Andrew Peake. I'll just say that I guardedly liked him for a long time and that changed dramatically.

In December I finally retook the GRE (after bombing because I'd gone in cold). A weekend's prep and I increased my math score by 130 points. All told it was a raging victory for me. I cracked open Anchor's Christmas Ale with Brandon and Jill. It was quite good.

I decided to scale down last year's lavish Valentine's day celebration and work on a budget. Jill and I went to dinner with a coupon to one of our favorite Indian restaurants. The Indian lager tasted divine alongside the curry and the lamb special we ordered was quite delectable.

I remember buying and drinking the Red Bull Cola while still living at the Apple House, but I'm pretty sure I was already making arrangements to move out. The cola was really good. Pity it was too expensive to buy again.

Probably around the same time I remember drinking another Dogfish Head brew at Jill's house, this one inspired by ancient Mesopotamian beers. I'd started buying single bottles since Jill moved so close to the Coop and I discovered the cheap single bottles at Save-Mart. That trend would increase considerably once I'd moved away from my beer buddy Brandon.

My replacement at the Apple House was named Alberto. He took Brandon's living room and Brandon took my room, which Brandon was stoked about. Alberto brought with him a single bottle of Amaretto. I always coveted a taste, but never asked in my subsequent visits to the Apple House. Eventually it was added to the wall in my absence, and I find that somehow fitting.

Logistics of Drinking: Container Size and Material

2010-09-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

I've counted drinks carefully since I started drinking in college and it has served me well since then, provided I didn't overwhelm my reasoning by drinking too quickly. However, while vodka may not go bad after it's been opened, most nondistilled spirits do, and this places constraints on the control you have over your own consumption, because even after four years of college there are still sober kids in Africa.

I can tell you from experience that it took a lot of organization and a little pain to empty my two brewing vessels, which I bought from the store filled with four liters of wine apiece. While there's no perishable alcohol in as big a container as jug wine, almost all wine and some beers pose similar logistical challenges.

As romantic as a picnic basket for two with a bottle of wine poking out the top may be, I've never really enjoyed drinking half a bottle of wine on such occasions for reasons both obvious and subtle. A bottle makes much more sense for a European-minded family, a double date or an intimate dinner with friends. Wine is still dictated by tradition and I have no expectation for unit sizes to change. On the plus side, I have high hopes for the emergence of screw caps as the industry standard. Synthetic corks are cool and all but once we've admitted that real cork is outdated, I think the leap to screw caps is a short one.

Beer, once again, is that exemplary form dominated by reasonableness. The classic unit-sizes of beer are either single-serving, keg or the forty, the former being perfect for friends or a rager of one. Much of beer is packaged in the most economical and innocuous of containers-- stainless metal. All of this is worth applauding. Aluminum cans reduce the impact on both the environment and the consumer. Single servings allow us to drink like the gentlemen we are.

Craft brewers are still worthy of critique, however. I understand the calculus that goes into choosing glass bottles-- they are still a symbol of quality and respect ingrained deeply in every American consumer's psyche. That's a hurdle worthy of sympathy. It's also a hurdle worth hurdling. Nobody is better positioned to break that psychological association in beverage packaging than the American craft brewer. A few brave breweries have gone to cans, primarily motivated by facilitating beer consumption in the great outdoors. I recommend looking for a 12-pack of cans the next time you're thirsty for New Belgium's Fat Tire. Anderson Valley is another notable brewery that's dabbling with the crinkly stuff.

I've also been fascinated by the role of the bottle size that's alternatively called a bomber, a growler or simply a double-- the 22 oz bottle. For the purposes of discussion I'm going to lump in 750mL bottles too. It turns out to be the bottle of choice for specialty productions by craft brewers. Rogue and Stone practically subsist off the format.

The association with small batches is partly for historical reasons. Bigger bottles mean fewer crown caps, less cleaning and less chance of contamination, which is great for the home or small-scale brewer. Furthermore, the size comes with the liberty of nonstandard pricing. Because the beer contained in doubles is often more expensive to make and distribute, the price ranges from $3-15. That's a far cry from the relative uniformity of $7-10 per six-pack. Releasing 22-only beers is also a perfect way for a brewer to force cheapskates like me who'd buy a single 12 oz into paying the full price of admission (and distribution), a business model which I grudgingly respect. My roommates can thank enterprising business models for their intermittent supply of free beer.

Finally, the bottle style comes with the cache and genuine charm of being similar in size to a wine bottle. While it's not uncommon for these specialty runs' abv to run into wine territory, there are plenty of 5-7% abv bottles that make a perfect treat for two. That fact endears them to me above all else. The format practically forces social drinking. Though I'd prefer the stronger specialty beers be packaged in more modest pint bottles, I think the format is generally awesome.

The Aimee Mann Journey

2010-09-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

I played an album on low volume while going to sleep from freshman year until I started sharing my bed. I have returned to that tradition since moving to my new room. Last night I forgot to search the album to exclude the rest of my library, so I woke at one in the morning to the crooning of Aimee Mann, remembering a dream that involved her.

I was trying to get across San Clemente to an Aimee Mann house show. I remember images of different parts of the city that I passed through. I remember kids playing at a park/beach and climbing up the slide to get to the street. I remember trying to get my bearings from the remarkably mountainous coastal hills. I remember the frustration of being lost, of being late and wondering whether I'd ever get there.

Then I was there. I was talking with Aimee Mann about some promotional chocolate she'd given out at her last show. It had been really good and I wanted to know where I could get more. I wanted a pound-- no, maybe more. It was, after all, really good. I remember deciding I'd be willing to buy a hundred dollars worth of chocolate, whatever the rate, so that I could distribute it to friends. That's when I woke up and realized my itunes was still playing.

I've been unsuccessfully trying to get myself to go to some KDVS house shows recently. Jill seemed to like the few shows I took her to, but I suspect she unconsciously let house shows die. I could never get my roommates to go with me before Jill, so most of my memories of house shows are going on my own, chatting sporadically with acquaintances but mostly feeling alone in a crowd. The music was always interesting and usually worth it. It seems like an appropriate thing to pick back up now that I'm on my own again. I'm going to make a point of at least attending the upcoming ORMF.

Practical Intimacy

2010-09-16T19:42:00.000-07:00

I have been having some very long conversations with some very good friends, partly because I'm bored/lonely and partly because I have something worth talking about. Going out with and living with Jill was an amazing experience. I think I matured a lot and learned even more. Because of our personalities it managed to be both intense (who on earth can handle THAT much time together?) and sober. Last week I managed to surprise even Howard with a few examples that demonstrated the degree to which we'd meshed our lives together.

One of my favorite things about moving in with Jill was the communality that far surpassed what I'd shared with my roommates. The prototypical example was washing our laundry together, because it allowed me to complete my partial loads of whites and reds (yes, bleeding opposite colors will dull each other so it makes sense to segregate them. my mom with the degree in painting says so, so there) and pretty much almost always have a full load of blues/darks on hand in need of washing. It also allowed me to wash laundry while she was in school or her to wash laundry while I was working.

Obviously the meshing went a lot farther. While we always split rent evenly along with every other major expense, we did away with keeping track of what was who's expenditure. The effect of this was to force us to compromise on what we spent money on. Considering that when I met her she spent her financial aid money freely on convenience food, generously on alcohol for other people's parties and gas to give people rides, this was actually quite a feat. We had sharp differences on how our parents had taught us to spend money. Compromise turns out to be surprisingly gratifying when it's grounded in goodwill and honesty. By the end of this past summer, our values (and not just spending habits) had moved a long way towards common ground.

Frankly, Jill and I had gotten much closer to embodying the "unmarried partners" tag we checked for a lark on the census form than I think either of us could have anticipated. Closer even than two of my best friends' relationships that have lasted over five years (this is opinion and not fact, but hey, Howard was impressed). Jill and I half-seriously joked that our relationship was stronger and more stable than one unnamed pair of newlyweds.

I feel like I got a window into what marriage must be. You console each other when the other's bummed, prod them to send in their graduate applications and they in turn make sure you're civil enough at social occasions not to make unnecessary enemies (go elitism!). I must confess the experience has left me eager for when I finally do get married. I'm pretty sure I'll love it.

Logistics of Drinking: Buzzes and Hangovers

2010-09-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

People are quick to associate different kinds of alcoholic drinks with different kinds of nights. Much of this comes from how people approach drinking each beverage. A night of shots will classically leave you passed out on the floor because, according to culture, shots are consumed in quick succession, which is the best way to bypass any sort of consumption limits you may place on yourself. Wine gives many people a headache because they drink it so damned delicately that they get the effects of a hangover without their blood alcohol ever passing threshold.

That said, a lot of these effects are also tied into the beverages' water content. Shots, with hardly any water of their own, will hit you fast and leave you completely dehydrated if you forget to drink water. Hence the association of tequila shots with wild nights and regretful mornings. While sulfites are the foremost reason to associate wine with headaches, their high alcohol/water ratio is also to blame. Ever since watering wine went the way of the Romans, wine has been far too alcoholic to be drunk on its own.

Beer, on the other hand, is traditionally much lower in alcohol. There's enough water in beer to mollify hydration problems. Also, the carbonation ensures the alcohol still hits your system quickly so you can get your buzz on. Basically, beer is the best way to consume alcohol for its positive effects, or at least the most foolproof against hangovers. Frankly, the fact that keystone light is the lubricant of choice at frat parties is incredibly logical. It's cheap and has a relatively low alcohol content.

That said, there are some important rules that are worth observing with all alcoholic drinks. First of all, don't nurse your drink. No matter how precious that scotch may be or how important it is to be able to drive home, below a certain rate of sipping, most of us can get a mild headache from alcohol without even feeling buzzed. If you're a designated driver, just have your drink early and at a normal pace. You'll probably engage your smooth ER at capacity either way. Secondly, it's always a good idea to drink water at the end of the night. There's nothing like waking up with a two-drink hangover. The good news is that mild-offense hangovers will disappear soon after drinking water. Lastly, I know there's a time and a place for drinking to lose. Just make sure it's actually the time and place. I've only regretted about half of my worst hangovers...

Born to Drive

2010-09-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

I missed my bus home today by a couple of minutes (after biking like a madman into a gusty headwind). I ducked into Woodland Mall to use their facilities and I returned to find the "Davis Express" idling at the bus stop. I'd never run across this line before in my few months riding Yolobus. I shrugged my shoulders-- a lot of fates were better than waiting an hour for my next bus.

I asked the driver if he could take me to Davis. He wasn't sure if he was allowed to take passengers on his way to his first official stop, but he'd call in to ask. I thought that was friendly of him. Dispatch assented and the bus driver warned the other guy who wanted to go and I that he had to go through "downtown". I didn't think there was a way this could be a less pleasant route home than sitting around waiting for my bus.

Once underway it became quickly apparent that "downtown" meant Sac and my bus driver was a bona fide character. He talked about how his most valuable possession was his driving record and that while he wasn't very athletic or otherwise talented, he was born to drive. He rapped off how he made it his business to drive well and safely, and that he had faith that Jesus would not disappoint him. Reciting bible verses in his rolling black voice and speaking enthusiastically about how there's a right way and a wrong way to take a turn, he reminded me of my uncle Pierre, who's a Catholic apologist.

The man had energy. Every eccentric's starting point is inborn energy. He told us how he loved this (coach-style) bus because it "turned like a car". He told us that we were coming up on his "favorite turn in the world", which was a left at a streetlight, the outer arc of the turn marked with reflective bumps. He prepared us to appreciate its magnificence with a "wait for it, wait for it" and then we rolled around the turn. We turned gracefully and smoothly at a fairly moderate speed without hitting a single reflective bump. He then enthusiastically exclaimed, "Did you hear me hit one of those bumps? Did you? That's right! I was born to drive!" I suspect the feat was more impressive if you drive buses for a living.

He stressed out about running behind schedule (because he took us on) and talked about ways to get more speed out of his bus. He criticized drivers on the freeway for not signaling and cutting in front of him and detailed the subtleties to driving well. Quite a few subtleties, in fact. He also reminisced about his younger days as a truck driver. He'd traveled through forty-six of the forty-eight continental states (only missing Washington and Oregon, we learned). He wistfully said that he'd have kept driving trucks if he had stayed single and suggested that it may have been a better decision.

Besides energy, he shared with my uncle and I a faith in purpose and grace. I always respect a person who lives with so much of themselves on the surface for all to see and comes across so whole and beautiful. That's another thing I think he shared with Pierre and I. There are a lot of times when I wish my persona held more mystique, but occasionally I remember to ask myself "What use is mystique if you're plain awesome?"

In the end, I guess I'm not really surprised so many people play life close to their chests. I'm more curious why so few people believe in purpose and grace.

The Chime of Silver

2010-09-02T14:38:00.000-07:00

There's no easy way to get through a breakup, but every cloud has its lining. The silver lining of breakups is that they make music sound fantastic.

Did you leave those mopey, angst-ridden bands of your youth behind? Does that magnum opus no longer sparkle with the immediacy you remember? I'm here to tell you to take them for another spin in the midst of a breakup.

Talk about power. It's like there's a twisted monster crawling through those once-too-familiar chords making them seethe with new and dangerous life.

And if, after awhile, the music recedes into normality as you slip into the comfort of denial, just think about the person you've lost and all the things you'll miss about them and how you'll never have them again until your eyes begin to prick with tears.

The music will perk right back up. It will sing to you symphonies of life and love and pain. It will tell you stories of anguish like caverns and thorn bushes, of loss like the ocean and you, the boat on its storm-harried surface, flying through space with the deftness of the waves that chase you. And when those waves catch you, as they inevitably and repeatedly will, it will feel so good and right and the sky will open up and every star will burn so brightly that heaven will buzz with electricity and sparkle like the sea.

While a good sad-song mix cd has its charms, there's nothing like a depressing or just thoroughly perturbed album to set a mood and carry you through it in beauty. Here is the list of albums that have done right by me:

Radiohead - OK Computer
Radiohead - Kid A
Radiohead - Amnesiac
The Beta Band - The Three EP's
Sparklehorse - Good Morning Spider
REM - Automatic for the People
Wire - Chairs Missing
His Name is Alive - Mouth By Mouth
Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers
Catherine Wheel - Ferment
Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Weezer - Pinkerton
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

Ever since the breakup I've had an appreciation for love songs that I've never really had, happy and sad ones both. I've long been a fan of songs about "new love", but the ones about old love finally speak to me. Also, I think I've been paying more attention to lyrics.

The Hey After

2010-08-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

After nearly two years since our first date and having lived together since March, Jill and I broke up on the 28th after I moved her into her Santa Cruz apartment. It was an amiable breakup, as I mentioned previously. This is an edited version of my first correspondence with her since that fateful Saturday.

Hey Jill,
I want to talk to you SO badly, but like I promised I won't call you until the denial has passed more completely. Tell me if this is cheating too much. I graduated to using the correct tense in reference to our relationship, but I know it's still only partially sunk in.

I've talked about you a lot, such that I feel like I understand you and what we were better, but it was really just putting words to things I'd known deep down. I talked about all your flaws and all your good qualities and all the things I love about you. The tragic irony is that we broke up when the good things outweighed the bad by far (as they always did), something I've long said was true and something I've always been terrified you didn't truly believe. Bri says that amiable breakups heal cleaner and faster.

I think about you at least every few minutes. At the same time talking has confirmed to me that the things I liked about you far outweighed anything I didn't like, it also confirmed to me that breaking up was the right decision. My increased confidence in the wisdom of that decision has come hand in hand with doubt so severe I frequently feel like a ship without a rudder near shoals. I doubt the decision every few minutes. I'm constantly afraid that I'll betray myself and what I know is right to chase those things that I miss so much. Of the stages of grief, I think I've moved past outright denial through anger (which flashed in the last few seconds before you walked out the door) to bargaining. I keep trying to think of ways that I can have you again.

Bri's done a better job taking care of me than even you could have hoped, I think. That girl has wisdom beyond her years. She shamed me out of writing this letter (while tipsy) Sunday night. Now I'm taking advantage of having woken up before her, but I think her main point was that one day was too soon, even though the thought of you unpacking your room alone after your mom left was tearing me up.

We saw Avatar in 3D yesterday. It was everything you or anybody else said it would be. Twice in the movie theater, I forgot that Bri wasn't you next to me and did a double take. We made intricate plans to backpack to Santa Cruz from Monterey and plans to go home to SoCal. Both fell through, so now we're just going to chill for the remainder of the week. It's probably just as well. I don't think seeing my parents would be helpful.

As much as I look forward to the day when I can look upon these times with a knowing smile, I want to remember you and our relationship in all the beauty and color you and it deserve, and I will do you and it justice by embracing the pain of loss with curious wonder and a desperate thirst (anguisette that I am).

Please tell me how you're doing and call me if it'll help even a little. I'm sure you know I'm secretly hoping you will.

Love,
Max

Brewing: California Sunshine Ale #1 and #2

2010-08-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

The results are in. Howard and I's first outing with brewing was a modest success. We cracked open our first beers with Matt Smith and Cory Logan, whose considerable brewing expertise informed a lot of my beer-making decisions.

California Sunshine Ale recipe #2 was the Amarillo-only version of the recipe. The fermentation had stalled according to the gravity when we were preparing to bottle it. Since we'd already added the priming sugar, we added boiled water to keep the gravity from blowing up the bottles (though a few blew up anyways). The final product didn't end up tasting as watered-down as I'd worried it would, but there was a slight odor of foot instead that I suspect came from brettanomyces contamination. Matt and Cory kind of liked the foot thing. The Amarillo hops imparted a open, bittersweet flavor that I have come to identify as the taste of the color blue. While they didn't taste exactly like grapefruit as they are reputed to, there was enough resemblance to make it the obvious descriptor.

California Sunshine Ale recipe #1 was the basic scale down of the posted recipe. We accidentally doubled the priming sugar for this one, but otherwise things went without a hitch. The Cascade-Amarillo blend came out fruity. Fruity enough to compete with the sober end of the hefeweizen scale. Matt and Cory, who are obsessed with the impact of yeast strain on beer flavor, thought a lot of the fruitiness had to do with the less-than-clean yeast we used, Dan Star's Windsor Brewing Yeast. The beer also came around the darkness of a brown ale, which was a little darker than we were shooting for. The body was a tad too light, but I'd expected body to be tricky. The recipe is supposed to push the edge of acceptable body for a pale ale.

All told, I think recipe #3 of California Sunshine Ale should have half the chocolate malt and an additional part biscuit malt equal to the crystal malt. I'll definitely keep the Cascade-Amarillo pairing, but I think I'll scale back the finishing and bittering hops overall and push the Perle hops forward in the mix and later in the hop schedule. I think we'll also add a secondary fermentation to clarify the beer before bottling.

End of the Davis Era

2010-08-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

There's suddenly a chill to the dawn air again. To be sure, there are still hundred degree days ahead of us in Davis, but the worst of the summer is over. As with every year, I face summer's end with the melancholy of anticipated change.

This year I have particular cause for melancholy. Jill starts a PhD program at UC Santa Cruz this September. Brandon left for Washington DC in June and Howard will be leaving for home when his lease finishes at the end of the month. My job with Monsanto finishes this Friday the 13th and after that I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not going to Santa Cruz. I'm not staying at my house in Davis either. My lease finishes the same time as Howard's. I plan to help move Jill into Santa Cruz and then take the month of September off, backpacking with my sister and maybe surfing a little back home.

After that is anybody's guess. I've started applying to Monsanto full time positions, microbreweries and tech jobs. I'm at a stage at my life where I can take a job anywhere in the country. We'll see what comes of it. Cross your fingers. Whatever happens, even if I get a Monsanto job in Davis for the year, the end of this summer marks the end of an era. There's no longer anything left for me in Davis in terms of people.

Jill and I are parting ways when she moves to Santa Cruz. It was something we'd known was coming since we started going out, but it's been a year longer than originally envisioned. As you can imagine, too, it's something we've made an effort to blot out. It's coming quickly and soon enough denial won't be sufficient to insulate us.

My sister wisely pointed out that mutual breakups are hardly ever mutual. I think Jill would very happily do the long distance thing. I however, besides hating the idea of a long distance relationship, need more diversity of experience before I can contentedly commit. The idea of marrying my first girlfriend is many times more terrifying to me than a return to loneliness. Between you and me, that is saying something.

So I can look forward to either moving back in with my parents to a town I love but with only a handful of friends remaining or a year of gainful employment in a place completely without friends. Gosh, guys, post-college is a blast from start to finish. Tell me when it's over.

The Love Revolution

2010-08-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

It seems an age ago that I was sitting with Marisa on our high school bleachers during lunch period, discussing love. It was a conversation that had been waiting to happen for a few months. She kept telling me, "I love you, Max." I never knew how to respond. I didn't feel like I understood what love was well enough to profess my love for someone.

So there we were, five years ago, Marisa finally asking me why I wouldn't say I loved her. I explained that I wasn't sure I loved anyone and that I didn't want to say so until I was sure it was true. She pressed on, "What about your family? Don't you love them?" She asked with the incredulity of a Mormon and ultrafriend. I thought for a minute, mulling things over, and decided, "I guess I love my sister. If I love anyone in the world it is my sister." "Don't you love your parents?"

So often love appears like water. Clear and invisible when we're standing still in the midst of it. I told her that I wasn't sure. I told her that I supposed I must, but if love was there I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking for. This was how I assuaged one of my best friends about refusing to say I loved her back.

I think at the time I thought she might use the word love too liberally. I was also wary because just a few months before my friend Caius had broken her heart by telling her he didn't love her anymore, concluding their brief, intense relationship. I didn't think love should be the sort of thing that could be recanted, so I gave the word extra caution, sometimes even hostility.

It wasn't until midway through college that I began to respond "I love you too" on the phone to my parents. By then there'd been enough motion and distance between us for me to witness the invisible bonds of love I had for my parents. It wasn't until a few months ago, between Marisa's return from her mission in Czech and my trip to the Lost Coast with Caius, that I finally admitted I loved my close friends. At the beginning of the summer I broached the subject of love with Jill and over the course of the conversation decided I loved her and told her so. That adds another first to the long list of firsts that Jill has on me.

Recently, I've been paying attention to older-fashioned uses of the word love. People used to use the word so much more freely. They talked about love of friends, cousins and their favorite possessions. Love is now used in romantic comedies as something earth shattering and singular. It may be irrevocable, but love is not singular. I think I've been shielded from the nature of love by hyperbole. I've been divorced enough from the source of the word that I've had trouble recognizing it in my own life. Love happens every day.

To some extent I guess I love everybody. That's not to take anything away from the people I first declared love for. They were first for good reason. I love you guys. I just think we should approach love in that old fashioned way. Not the way hippies treat love as if it's some supernatural, omnipresent, omnipotent force and not the way romantic comedies elevate romantic love to the point of alienating all other forms and degrees of it. I want to reclaim the word from poets, panderers and theorists back to the simple meaning it began with. I want it to refer to the affection we feel for the people around us.

Brewing and Retroactive Idea Theft

2010-07-24T14:56:00.001-07:00

Howard and I finally did it. We finally brewed some beer. We bottled it yesterday, so we've just got a few weeks until it's carbonated and ready to drink.

We made two one-gallon batches of my California Sunshine Ale. The first was a simple scale-down of the recipe I posted earlier. The second was a variant that completely dropped Cascade hops for Amarillo.

It's pretty uncommon to brew in one-gallon batches. Practically every recipe online is written for five gallons. Brewing at all is a lot of work, so people try and make it worth their while. Larger batches are also more stable and, according to the owner of our local brew store, a difference of scale changes extraction rates and thereby the recipe requirements.

I decided to brew in small batches knowing full well the reasons it was uncommon. I didn't get into homebrewing to save money. The ingredients for making beer cost roughly half the retail price for buying craft beer from the store. That may sound pretty good, but when I take into account the work and risk involved in the process and the superior quality and variety of beer available at the store, it's barely breaking even. Five gallons makes fifty beers and that is a heck of a lot of any single kind of beer for a person who's accustomed to buying single bottles. The fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing my beer was made with my own hands only gets me so far. I decided to start homebrewing to learn more about beer and to kick around my own recipe ideas. We may have had to borrow Howard's lab scale to measure hops in hundreths of an ounce, but I'm a scientist, after all.

So after one and a half hours of driving and one and a half days' work, Howard and I have twenty-three bottles of beer to show for it and that's fine by me.

Above: Our cooling system to keep the beer around 70 degrees in the middle of the Davis summer (my idea)
Below: Our chicken wire drying rack (Howard's idea)

On a separate note, it has come to my attention that American brewers have been time traveling from years past into our present future and viciously stealing my beer ideas from this blog. It turns out that Cascadian Dark Ale aka Black IPA is an established northwestern variant on the IPA style that uses dark malts to conjure an intimidating color. While it sounds like a lot of breweries are using debittered black malt to give the maximum color without affecting flavor that much, some have actually embraced the pairing of hop bitterness and roasted maltiness.

Also, on the day before we bottled our California Sunshine Ale, I happened across the spitting image of my concept for the beer. Deschutes Brewery's Twilight Summer Ale is an APA that lightens up on the crystal malt, adds something toasty to pair with grilled food and relies on a combination of four hops with emphasis on Amarillo.

To counterbalance said losses from my creative stable, I'd like to present a new beer concept. I was idly reading the ingredient list on Barq's Root Beer and noticed that the last ingredient was acacia. For those of you who don't know, acacia is planted as a shrub all over orange county hillsides for erosion control. It has oval grey leaves and little fuzzy yellow flowers that get pollen all over the place. It has a very distinctive smell, like a dirty, grainy version of some platonic true herb. As soon as I'd read it I started to either imagine or taste it in the Barq's (to my satisfaction).

Acacia would be great in a light summer porter. You heard it from me first, somebody should brew a summer porter with acacia leaves.

On Dana Point

2010-07-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

I lived in Dana Point from the age of 11 until I left for college. My mom still lives there and my dad still lives in the neighboring town of San Clemente. The pictures were taken my senior year of high school.

Dana Point is a coastal town in Southern California, located almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Dana Point sits at the southern tip of the greater LA/Orange County metro area along with neighboring San Clemente. To the south of these two beach cities lies a wilderness area dominated by Camp Pendleton. Dana Point gets its name from a mention in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, where he described throwing cowhides off the bluffs of a cove that served as port for Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Dad, Donna and Bri in the foreground, Dana Point bluffs and harbor in the midground and Catalina Island in the background, January

San Clemente brags that it has the best climate in the world. Both cities have an average 342 days of sunshine and typical highs in the high seventies/low eighties in the summer and low sixties in winter, respectively. Like all of California, the bulk of annual precipitation falls in winter months. However, among the cloudiest months is June, a phenomenon known locally as "June Gloom" and caused by warming ocean temperatures.

Matt Wingert in my front yard, December

Trees commonly planted in Dana Point include palms, eucalyptus and coastal pines. Subtropical and Mediterranean plants are easily grown. Some classic continental plants that require chill or extreme heat are difficult to grow, like cherries and watermelons (though that didn't stop me from growing a 94lb pumpkin). Undeveloped headlands and canyons are mostly coastal sage scrub, a chaparral-type mixture of californian sage, sagebrush, lemonade berry and coyote broom.

Demographics in Dana Point are mixed, not possessing the wealth of northern neighbor Laguna Beach. A significant number of Mexican immigrants and lower-middle class whites live in apartments, while professional class people commute to central Orange County and live in hillside houses with ocean views. The local economy is driven primarily by tourism and the aforementioned commuters. The worst traffic jams in our area happen on sunny Saturday afternoons.

Many neighborhoods in Dana Point were developed slowly enough to evidence an eclectic mix of social classes. The oldest houses are beach cottages, built in the 50's with low square-footage and flat roofs. Many of Dana Point's N-S streets are named various colors of lanterns (ie Blue Lantern, Golden Lantern, Amber Lantern). The town's decor is mariner themed, and houses are frequently painted marine blue-grey. The town has approximately reached build-out, though adjacent landlocked cities demonstrate textbook McMansion sprawl, particularly Laguna Niguel, a place that handily manages to be both much wealthier and much uglier than Dana Point (I have a lot of high school friends from Niguel and that is fact, not opinion).

The local public education system is excellent. Dana Hills High is both a Blue Ribbon and California Distinguished School. It offers a large number of Advanced Placement courses and produces high standardized test scores. The school football team has always sucked. The school surf team is pretty good, but never beats neighboring rivals San Clemente, who frequently contend for the State Championship title.

Prom photo, taken at one of the half dozen locations commonly used for weddings within walking distance of my house, May

The two cities collectively lay claim to a handful of excellent surf beaches that host annual surf contests including Salt Creek, Doheny, T-Street, Trestles and San Onofre. Dana Cove was famous for a surf break called Killer Dana until the harbor was built. Surf culture is everywhere, most visible in the many local board shops, board-laden cars and the popularity of the word "surf" in mostly taqueria restaurant names (one Dana Point restaurant, in fact, succinctly named "Taco Surf"). In addition to both Mexican-owned and white-owned taquerias, the region has a lot of local burger joints that recall the glory days of Southern California car culture, as well as a mix of 20$ entrée restaurants with an emphasis on California cuisine and sushi.

The overall culture is laid back. Politics are mildly conservative. In spite of those politics, hostility towards immigrants is remarkably low. Upper-middle class people either appreciate the Mexican immigrant population for services rendered (though I don't know anyone with an in-house maid, as pop culture might have you believe of OC, even in Laguna) or respect them for their strong work ethic. The stereotype of the lazy Mexican has always struck me as a foreign idea, product of Los Angeles demographics.

View of my neighborhood from my front yard, February

I live in a beach cottage in a mixed-income part of town. The yard is fronted by a couple of Canary Island Date Palms. It takes me 20 minutes to walk to Doheny with my surfboard underarm. I love the diversity of houses here. I love the weather, especially the foggy and cloudy days. I love the smell of sagebrush. I love getting burritos after a day at the beach with friends. I love walking downtown to pick up avocados from little Mexican markets. I love that my prom photos have a backdrop most wedding photos would be in envy of (in fact, Brandon's cousin flew from the east coast to get married in Dana Point this weekend). I love hearing Bandas on the neighbor's radios. I love Dana Point.

On Macrobrews

2010-07-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

In the vocabulary of beer snobs, "macrobrew" is a dirty word. It's shorthand for beers brewed on a massive industrial scale, made with adjuncts (corn and rice) to reduce costs and lighten flavor. Well, mostly just to lighten flavor, but wouldn't cost-cutting make a better story? The style is an American invention that came about between the post-prohibition era and WWII, and befitting its American origins, practically every country in the world's national bestselling beer is made in the style.

The style I'm referring to is also called American Adjunct Lager or American Light Lager. A lot is made of the style's "refreshing light flavor" or, alternatively, it's complete lack of flavor. I'm in the former camp. Not without reservations, mind you, but there's a lot to be said for macrobrews. They're the most flexible food beer I know (anything from curry to fried chicken), crisp and quenching on a hot day and extremely sessionable, which is to say that you can drink a lot of beers without getting sick of them (or too drunk).

Now before you rush off to buy a thirty pack of the first macrobrew you find, I'll give you a rundown on the available brands:

Keystone Light and Natural Ice - These beers fall into a subclass of the American Light Lager family denoted "subpremium" (aka frat beer). This is the beer you shotgunned or beer-bonged or keg-stood in college. While the nature of the brewing business means that ingredients cost little enough that "premium" macrobrews don't really skimp on quality, subpremium macrobrews cut every corner available, including taste. Thumbs-Down.

The rest of the beers reviewed qualify as either premium or superpremium beers. None of them have noticeable off-flavors, which is not to be discounted when brewing a beer with such slight flavor. In the words of my beer professor, you could hide an elephant in the flavor profile of most Stouts or IPA's.

Budweiser - The best-selling beer in the world, Budweiser is the poster boy for the macrobrewed American Adjunct Lager. Budweiser is the biggest buyer of rice in the US, but you can't really taste rice in the flavor profile. In fact, the most distinct thing about Budweiser is that you can't grab onto any particular flavor at all, except maybe a soft sweetness and high carbonation relative to its peers. I can't say I'm a fan of Bud. I find it overcarbonated, uninteresting and I have no affection for the relative sweetness. Thumbs-Down.

Miller High Life - High Life turned out to be the closest thing I've found to what I was expecting Budweiser beer to be-- a light, rice-driven macro with a perfectly clean taste. By "clean taste" I mean that like Bud, there are no specific flavors to latch onto. Unlike Bud, however, it lacks noticeable sweetness or excessive carbonation. I can't say this is a beer I drink a lot of, but purely on the merit of fully realizing the clean, light and balanced archetype, I give this beer a thumbs-up.

Miller Genuine Draft - Miller's Genuine Draft stands in opposition to High Life. This is a relatively strong-tasting macrobrew with notes of rice and especially corn on top of an overall barley flavor. This is among the most engaging and least clean of the macrobrews and among my most-drunk beers. Thumbs-up.

Coors - While an advertising campaign based on their beer's "coldness" hasn't done anything to curry my favor, Coors is a solid beer with a light, clean corn taste. I'm afraid, however, that it doesn't fill a niche that I have much use for. This gets a thumbs-sideways.

Pabst Blue Ribbon - This is another rice-driven macro, but in contrast to High Life and Bud, there's a pronounced rice flavor to this beer. It's clean-tasting, but has subtleties lurking in the corners. I've said before on this blog that I thought there was a note of apples and potentially metal in this beer. I think it's rather fitting that this became the beer of "the scene". Strangely enough, it was also the beer of choice of our working class neighbors at the Kingston Apartments. I almost always buy it when the 12-packs go on sale. Thumbs-Up.

Michelob Ultra - Very clean and very light. High Life is a little asymmetric and overcarbonated by comparison, which is drawing a pretty fine line because High Life is pretty darn balanced. I'll give this a thumbs-up and let you decide whether or not you're willing to foot the rather high price.

Rolling Rock - Tastes like peanuts. Otherwise pretty boring and overpriced. Thumbs-down in general, but thumbs-sideways if you want a beer that tastes like peanuts (Thai food, anyone?).

Moosehead - Usually skunked. Otherwise boring and overpriced. Thumbs-Down.

Tecate - Tastes remarkably like MGD. It too is full of corniness and grain flavor. My preference for this over MGD could easily be psychosomatic. For all the fuss they make over this being imported, the fact doesn't seem to interfere with the pricing or the taste, which fits in easily with the American cadre of macros. Thumbs-Up.

Heineken and Becks - I haven't drunk a lot of these beers, but what I've had has left me unimpressed. There's nothing about these beers that makes them better than their domestic cousins, nor anything that justifies their inflated cost. In fact, because of the green glass bottles and extended shipping time, these beers are more likely to be skunked. If it weren't for the skunking or extraordinary price, I'd consider these beers more carefully, but as it is, they get a definite thumbs-down.

The following two beers don't quite fit the Adjunct Lager category, but this is probably the best place to talk about them.

Corona - This is a clean, astringent beer with a slight zestiness (from the hops?). Frankly, I don't think it's worth drinking without lime, particularly in light of its decidedly "imported" price range. It makes a great canvas for a study of lime flavor, though. The astringency, which is a borderline off-taste on its own, melds beautifully with the citrus. Naturally, key limes are even better in it. Thumbs-up as long as there's a lime wedge involved.

Pacifico - Has a similar clean-astringent profile to Corona, but with a more filled-out malt background. This is a beer that's great on its own and very flexible. It would also be great with lime, but its even better with food. This is my favorite Mexican beer. Thumbs-Up.

Rambling About Economics

2010-06-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

The following exchange refers to an engaging article entitled "Full Employment" which can be found at:
http://nplusonemag.com/full-employment

Hi uncle Jacques,

Did you ever read that article? I promise I'm not trying to ambush you with a liberal tirade. Excepting the rather abrupt thesis at the end (which I disown), it's not propaganda at all, just a thoughtful dissection of economics and economic theory.

Dear Max,

Yes, I did read Mr. Kunkel's interesting but meandering article concerning the concept of 'full employment'.

I thought that his overall knowledge of various economic theories and his ability to interrelate widely variant postulations were quite impressive.

As I am sure you noticed, however, he completely disregards the deleterious effects of governmental interference into what many people still believe is a 'free' enterprise system. That's like attempting to calculate E=mc2 while assigning "c" a value of zero!

I will grant that Mr. Kunkel did briefly complain about the recent pitiful attempts by Congress to encourage hiring via tax credits to business, and he certainly was not impressed with ARRA, the preposterous so-called "Stimulus Bill" that achieved absolutely nothing but to pay off many of Obama's political cronies and fawning unions. But that doesn't deter him from his unwavering belief that the ultimate solution to the employment problem still lies in governmental action, . . . . he just believes that it should be handled "correctly", i.e., in the manner that he believes it should be implemented. (This is evidenced by his admiration for the WPA's public projects in the late 1930's.) Obviously he completely disregards the deleterious net effect that this outrageous outlay of public funds had on this country's economy, and how current economists almost unanimously agree that about all that those programs accomplished was to unnaturally prolong the Great Depression.

Apparently the idea never occurs to Mr. Kunkel that interference by the government and its ham-handed fetters on the free enterprise capitalistic system could possibly always have a detrimental effect. Wow! Now that's a novel concept!

So, yes, I agree with you . . . the article was quite interesting and very thought provoking. I also agree with you that Mr. Kunkel's proposed remedy is dead wrong. He concludes with a pipedream, a crevasse into which many an idealistic ultra-liberal almost inevitably falls.

Dear Uncle Jacques,

I'm glad you found it interesting. What I took away from the article was an explanation of the world economy and its likely direction. His ideas fit in with some wordless thoughts of my own, which is maybe why I got so excited about it (the transient nature of our grasp on power, the fact that economic equilibrium will come with the rising of boats across the world rather than the downfall of the American standard of living barring peak oil, etc.).

I repeat that I did not mean to goad you about politics. However, it appears that willingly or not you were goaded just a bit. Frankly, I'm a little amused by your complaint which I mentally reduced to (I hope you don't mind) "this article all looks very interesting but the author conspicuously didn't shill for the foundational doctrine of my political ideology!"

If he could have said something interesting about a topic which has been so beaten to death, I would have been eager to hear it. The fact that he couldn't, however, is completely unsurprising. Like a typical theorist, it seems that when he encountered a subject so entirely dull he decided to ignore it completely, invoking the almighty implicit black box.

I say dull because it is so incredibly hard to quantify the benefits or costs of the inefficiency of bureaucracy, particularly when so many people (in error, I think) are so quick to cite as a benefit the fact that it "creates jobs". Frankly, the ambiguity of the proposed "answers" to that query has been a major factor in my gradual drift towards the right of American politics, or at least the middle.

The problem with the left is that they assume programs come with a tolerable level of inefficiency. The right, in turn, assumes zero benefits, such that any calculation of the inefficiency yields the conclusion that it is at an unacceptable level. I'll explain why I believe that there is in fact an optimal level of government regulation and spending, not that I propose to know what that level is.

The derivation is similar to that of the Laffer Curve (a theory which I've since grown fond of like a pet zombie). Zero government regulation and spending on social programs doesn't make sense. Massive control and spending on social programs (a la USSR) doesn't make sense either. Never mind the human rights implications, government cannot possibly be efficiently applied to managing the details of people's lives, nor is it possible that the unique position of government cannot be applied effectively to certain circumstances where a "blunt instrument" works, like the post office until the advent of email, food labeling, interstate freeways and public education.

Ultimately, I've settled on a case-by-case basis, which is problematic for different reasons. How can you know whether or not a given program will be effective without extraordinary knowledge of policy-making or extraordinary trust in someone with extraordinary knowledge of policy-making and so forth? Unfortunately, that is where my line of reasoning has come to rest.

You and my dad seem to think that even a layperson can gain extraordinary knowledge of policy-making, but I'm not so convinced. I prefer the latter solution, the one built on trust, because I have no illusions about my limitations for becoming an expert in everything (and this coming from someone who is considerably closer to achieving that than the average person).

And yes, his conclusion was a pipedream. I'm afraid that doesn't excite me the way it does you.

Cheers
Max

Waiting for the Bus

2010-06-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

It's getting hot around here. Like approaching the 100's hot. I wait for the bus in the afternoon after work. When I can't find space on the only bench with shade, I sit on the sidewalk behind the structure in the shade. I'm the only person I've seen doing this, so far. It strikes me as a "me" thing to do, though it's even more characteristic of my sister Bri than me.

In contrast to Davis, Woodland has a lot of Mexicans. I've been listening to the world cup in Spanish on the radio while at work. Boy I've missed hearing Mexican-Spanish.

The Basil Borbeto

2010-06-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

I was making mojitos after harvesting Jill's garden with her. I'd used up all my white sugar making a blackberry pie and I was taking advantage of the basil we'd just harvested for the mojitos. I decided to kill the last drops in a handle of bourbon by making a whiskey version for myself. Jack tasted it, exclaimed his love of it "and I don't even like alcohol". He came up with the name you see as the title. So there you go, the Basil Borbeto:

1 Slice of Lime
1 Tbsp Brown Sugar
A few leaves Basil
Ice Cubes
1 Shot Bourbon

Muddle the lime, sugar and basil, then throw the ice and bourbon in and mix. It's kind of like a Mint Julep.

If I Were to Start a Microbrewery

2010-05-31T08:35:00.000-07:00

This is one of my dilettantish whims that faces incredible odds of ever seeing fruition. I'm realistic, though, so I decided that if I were to ever seriously talk about starting a microbrewery I'd have to have perfected a couple of homebrew recipes and won a few awards for them. We'll see how far I get, but until then it's way too fun to daydream.

If I were to start a microbrewery I'd call it Beach Cities Brewing. I'd need to find a bar or restaurant to ally myself with and I'd want to round out a selection of thoughtful, innovative beer offerings. To kick around beer ideas and as the natural next step to being as obsessed with beer as I am, I've started researching recipes for typical beers.

Pale Ale (California Sunshine Ale)
I've noticed the classic American Pale Ale is a little too heavy to drink on a hot summer day, but the briskness of the hops always makes me think that it should be more refreshing. I think there's a gaping niche in the American craft beer market for a lighter-bodied pale.

Mad River Brewing makes an Extra Pale Ale, but frankly it's too light, too bready and too innocuous for my taste. What I want in a summer beer is one that's light enough to be quaffable like a macrobrew lager but that pairs well with (especially grilled) food the way amber ales do.

I think the best way to do it would be to combine the significant Cascade dry hopping of pales with small quantities of the darker malts that give that toasted flavor to New Belgium's Fat Tire or Flying Dog's Pale Ale. The loser in the equation would be the crystal (or caramel) malt that gives both amber and pale ale styles their foundational sweetness.

Prototype Pale Ale

Ingredients:
5 lbs Light Malt Extract
2 lbs Sugar (standing in for flaked rice)
1/4 lb Crystal Malt 50L
1/4 lb Carapils
1/4 lb Chocolate Malt

0.25 oz Magnum Hops (60 min)
0.5 oz Perle Hops (30 min)
0.5 oz Cascade Hops (10 min)
0.5 oz Amarillo Hops (10 min)
0.5 oz Cascade Hops (0 min)
1.0 oz Amarillo Hops (0 min)

Optional dry hop of another 1.0 oz Amarillo

Wyeast American Ale Yeast 1056
3/4 cup priming suger

Directions
Put the crushed malt in grain bag and steep for 30 minutes in 1.5 to 2 gallons of water. Heat to approximately 170F (not exceeding 180F), remove grain bag, bring water to boil, add extract and boil one hour adding hops at appropriate times.

Ferment in primary one to two weeks. Watch your ferment temperatures, try to keep them in the 63F to 68F range. (Optional) Dry hop in secondary for one to two weeks. Add priming sugar and bottle
Servings
5 Gallons

Expected stats based on online calculators:
5.3% ABV
36 IBU

This is definitely the first recipe I'm going to try out when I get my hands on some brewing equipment. Firstly because it's the concept I've thought the farthest through and secondly, because ales are usually easier to make and harder to drink large quantities of. It makes sense to brew an especially drinkable ale if you're making 5 gallons at a time.

This prototype represents about three simultaneous experiments: Can a pale ale be essentially watered down and remain compelling? Will chocolate malt mesh with the hard-edged hops that constitute the basis of the classic American pale ale? Do Amarillo hops really taste like grapefruit and do I like them?

Amber Ale
I'd also want to have an Amber in the lineup because it's an awesome food beer and the style I've been most interested in lately. It's also got a lot of flexibility. I've had Ambers that range from toasted and refreshing (New Belgium, Rogue) to borderline creamy (Alaska, Anderson Valley, Full Sail) and I've loved them all. In short, I need something to fill the mid-body, mid-color position in the line-up, but I have no idea how I'll craft something as original and refined as many beers in the style..

Bock (North Swell Bock)
*Pictured: Full-suit clad surfer heading up and over a thick, steely-gray wave*
I'd want to shoot for the gravity of a regular bock, which is considerably heavier than Shiner Bock. Some combination of honey malt, wheat and especially ginger would give it the warmth required to celebrate winter surf.

American India Dark Ale
Once my adoring fanbase develops, there will be an understandable demand for a Beach Cities IPA. I will both sate and confound the hopheads by instead releasing this. Instead of pushing hop complexity, I'd push malt complexity while retaining the generally nuclear malt/hop balance of an IPA. It would mess with IPA doctrine the way Dogfish Head's 90-Minute IPA did, but instead of crisp malt sweetness, I'd go for a rich toasted malt flavor.

The Summer of Tomatoes Inaugerates

2010-05-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

After months of unemployment, I finally have a job. I started a paid internship for the summer with Monsanto this week. Yes, that Monsanto. No, I don't care. I'm too in love with the idea of improving crops.

What am I doing? Well, if I told you I'd have to kill you. Seriously, I don't want to get dooced, so don't expect me to write any essays about my job any time soon. That said, here's what I can tell you:

I was hired to breed pathogen-resistant tomatoes this summer. Btw, long term projects are a longtime nemesis of mine and I'm looking forward to the face-off.

I've decided I'm going to pour my heart and soul into this job. I've got the capacity to do not just a good job, but an outstanding one, and now's the time to show it.

The job is in the neighboring town of Woodland, so I'm taking the Yolobus from Davis to Woodland and then biking the remaining four miles. I just got back from my first round trip that way. The good news is that it's definitely doable and I'll be getting good exercise this summer. The bad news is that it was raining on my way back, so I'm drying off as I write this.

The "site", as it's called, is the size of a small college campus. People actually use communal, floating bikes to get from place to place. I do too, because while riding a cruiser on loose gravel may be like walking on ice, riding a road bike on loose gravel is like walking on ice with stilts.

For the first time in my life I'm being paid by salary rather than by the hour and I am rather stoked. Not only am I being paid rather well, but if, including transit time, I happen to work two eleven-hour days in a row, nobody minds (except maybe Jill). Speaking in hypotheticals, of course...

Berkeley and The Lost Coast

2010-05-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

I visited Caius for his graduation ceremony and to go on a backpacking trip in the Lost Coast.

I finally got to meet his friend Claire, who's about as cool as I could have imagined. Caius's parents took us out to a delicious dinner and then we went home to Caius's coop and watched Carl Sagan, which was a campy trip. Saturday I had more interesting, thoughtful conversations in one day than I typically have in a month. I could probably write a handful of posts from what I discussed that day alone.

Caius's commencement that morning would have been pretty boring if not for his friend David, who I sat with. We chatted with his family afterwards at the reception. His graduation was extra special for the fact that Caius had dropped out of school for a year with no plans to return. Evidently his dad had promised to quit smoking if Caius ever graduated. Here's wishing him good luck.

That afternoon Caius and I took a nap and did yoga on his coop's roof. We checked out the "free pile" in the basement. We played dress-up for awhile, Caius picked out a shirt and I found a messenger bag in new condition. We also ate greek yogurt with honey in a broken, tilted couch hung outdoors on a rope that was reminiscent of a Dali painting. Caius and Claire and I had indian food for dinner accompanied by an intense discussion about the philosophical contrast between Pilsner and IPA. That night I chatted with Claire for a while and was *gasp* impressed by Stone IPA, which I guess has been due for another chance (John Lazur has called it his favorite beer). I got to meet another longtime friend of Caius's while we packed for our trip.

We left the next morning for the Lost Coast. We stopped along the way at a secret hot spring that's only accessible at low tide. About 500 feet down an incredibly steep bluff later we arrived to find about 35 mostly naked people crammed into the area of two VW bugs. I teetered a little, but I couldn't really imagine letting the opportunity slide, so I squeezed myself in. The spring had been dug out by hand and every day after high tide someone would siphon the cold seawater out. The temperature was perfect and everyone was friendly (you have to be when you're packed bare cheek to bare cheek). To top it off, an old guy passed out chocolate and strawberries to everyone.

The Lost Coast is breathtakingly beautiful. Most of the pictures I've found online were taken when it's sunny, but when we arrived at Shelter Cove, the mountains were wreathed in marine layer. The black sand in the cliffs and on the beach contrasted sharply with the deep green of the mountains. The pictures are courtesy of Caius's friend Kaija and you can find the rest of her photos from our trip here.

The vegetation ranged from fennel and cow parsley in the canyon openings to pine trees, ceanothus and manzanita up into the mountains. I've also never seen so much poison oak in one place. Poison oak was the one common denominator between all of the plant communities we passed through, from ridge-line chaparral to sand dunes. I got pretty good at dancing between branches with my frame-pack.

We were thirteen people, mostly from Caius's coop, Loth. All the food would be vegetarian, and the trip organizers had brought such luxuries as soy milk, broccoli and kale. I should note that every meal we had was incredibly delicious, partly because of the nature of backpacking, but partly because the food was excellent. No matter how crazy it was to bring something like kale or to forgo nutritious meat, our diet ended up being a lot closer to my at-home diet than my dad's summer sausage, nuts and dehydrated mashed potatoes. Also, despite my fears about all of the water and non-calories we were taking up, my pack weight was never enough to bother me much. I had much more trouble with the rocks and sand on the beach.

We camped the first night in Shelter Cove, not too far from our cars. We woke up to the sound of raindrops on our tents. That kind of set the tone for the day. We packed up and started walking down the beach. We found washed-up dead sea animals of enormous size, including an almost-fresh sting ray, two octupus, two chitons, a bunch of starfish and what looked like the remains of a grouper. The ten miles of beach that we planned on crossing that day were impassable at high tides, so we shivered for a couple of hours at a canyon opening for lunch while the wind did it's best to blow rain under our tarp and the tarp into the sky.

Lesson learned #1: It rains a lot in the Lost Coast.
Lesson learned #2: Waterproofed nylon isn't waterproof.

By the time we rolled into camp that night, everything I owned had been soaked through with rain. Actually, one thing was dry. A pair of socks I'd stuffed into my upside down camp cup was the only dry fabric I owned. Words cannot express my joy at finding those socks, which possibly illustrates how thoroughly demoralized we were by the end of that day. We huddled under our tarp, cooked and changed our clothes for any marginally drier ones we might have. Soon we shivered off to our tents and into our damp sleeping bags.

The next morning was cloudy and dewy, but the rain had finally stopped. We hung our clothes on trees that morning in hopes that they might dry, to little effect. Once we got walking, the dew on the grass quickly soaked my already wet sneakers to the point of squelching. We hiked up the canyon and forded the stream a couple of times. Thanks to my coop companions' liberal attitude towards nudity I managed to cross both fords without getting my clothes any wetter than they already were.

The next three miles were about the steepest switchbacks I've ever seen. You had to go slowly so your feet wouldn't slide back. I passed the time with a conversation about agribusiness and human rights (my answer was no, neither food nor technologically advanced seeds are or should be basic human rights).

That night the sky was clear and we crowded around the fire to dry our clothes by. It was pretty cool watching sleeping bags, shoes, socks and shirts all steaming away. A few of us decided to sleep on the ridgeline under the stars (who's perfect glory was only marred by my lack of glasses).

When I woke up, the sky had turned the faintest gray. I wondered if oncoming dawn had already obscured the stars or if those were clouds I was looking up at. A raindrop on the face answered my question. I yelled, "Wake up, guys, it's raining!". We hurried to pack our sleeping bags and scurried down the hill as the drops quickened and thickened. Soon we were in tents and fast asleep again.

By the time we woke up, things had progressed into a steady downpour. The hollow we'd camped in was slowly turning into a pond. We divided up our food for two groups: the one that would continue across the mountains to where we'd parked our cars (including Caius) and the group that had to turn back to get home for things (including myself and three others). Two long Caius-hugs later and the four of us were marching down the ridgeline against driving rain and gales that threatened to throw us off the ridge. Once again I felt the familiar sensation of my rain-jacket hemorrhaging water into my clothes beneath. The four of us tore down that hill at a near-run (quite a feat considering the precipitous angle).

We arrived at our first camp in the early afternoon. By that time, the rain had stopped and our clothes were just starting to dry, though both I and another had slipped in the increased river flow at the fords. Our goal was to camp in a canyon about four miles from where our cars were parked, but we were making such good time we'd started daring to hope we might make it to our beds by late that night. The tide forced us to break for dinner, but the sun came out while we were cooking, for the first time since our trip had started. It was amazing how quickly clothes dried under actual sunlight. The latitude pushed nightfall back almost an hour, but we still had nine miles of cobblestone and sand to cross.

The canyon opening we'd planned on camping in looked like something from a fantasy book in the twilight of sunset. We sat there awhile while the other Eagle Scout on the trip filtered fresh water. The trees arched over the stream to create a tunnel into the increasing darkness of the canyon, while the mist from the waves gave everything a hazy sort of aura about it.

As I think you might already suspect, we ultimately agreed to make our bid for home that night. I was pretty eager considering that my right ankle had settled into constant pain from all the abuse I'd heaped on it through the trip. I passed the time and pain of the final stretch again in discussion with postmodern socialists. By the time it was properly dark we'd finished with cobblestones and the moon had come out, so we never needed flashlights. The last couple of streams were too dark and too wide to completely jump, but we didn't really care because we knew we'd be able to take off our shoes soon enough.

A whirlwind of a car ride later and I was in Davis just before dawn broke. I took a long shower and curled into the warm bed I'd dreamed about all week.

In Search of Mandelbrot

2010-05-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

On Friday I went to see the Davis Whole Earth Festival, an all-weekend event that's likened to the hippie equivalent of Picnic Day. I credit WEF with my epiphany that drum circles can sound incredible, but this year's revelation is of a different sort. Every year the quad is lined with stalls selling art, homemade soaps, hemp clothing, jewelry, henna tattoos and, of course, tie-dye. I should preface this by saying that the vendors are a bunch of hippie carnies with enough artistic talent and environmental awareness to fill a modestly-sized thimble. I'm sure their hearts are in the right place, I'm just disappointed that they find customers for their incredibly expensive wares.

That said, the soap smells awesome and you would not believe the patterns that can be made with tie-dye. I saw shirts with crisply illustrated guitars and peace signs wreathed with seeming fractal complexity. It occurred to me that while tie-dye is passe even by hippie standards, a shirt with a tie-dyed Mandelbrot series would be patently awesome. I asked each and every vendor if they had one, and I was met with universally blank stares.

"A what series?"
Once I explained what a Mandelbrot fractal is, the first guy replied that he only tie-dyed natural shapes, not something "generated by computer programs". I'm sure he'd seen the peace sign and guitar in one of his "natural" visions inspired by natural substances and misplaced one too many brain cells along the way. Don't worry, though, being clever is unnatural.

Sazerac Lemonade

2010-04-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Life has recently thrown me a lot of lemons-- literally. When I went home for spring break I did a bunch of yardwork for my dad and he's been using his tree's Meyer lemons to make lemonade. He wasn't doing anything special, he was just mashing a Meyer into his crystal light to give it some sparkle.

I ended up taking a bunch of lemons home to Davis. Howard brought some regular but ginormous lemons back too and we conducted a bit of a trade. Thus, a couple of nights ago I decided to make some lemonade of my own. I'd been thinking about the flavors for awhile and here's the recipe I came up with.

1 Regular Lemon (sliced across the segments)
Sugar to taste
Water
1 capful Pastis (or other anise-based liquor)
3 dashes Angostura Bitters

Muddle the lemon with the sugar in a measuring cup, adding sugar until the balance is about right. Strain out resulting juice into your iced glass, add water to the measuring cup and repeat until the strained lemonade is the right concentration. Balancing sugar, lemon and water can be tricky. I added some commercial lemonade to even things out. If you're going to be drinking this while doing heavy physical labor, add a pinch of salt. Once you've added the Pastis and bitters it is ready to drink.

I love the Meyer lemon, but its warmth and richness doesn't lend itself to the quenching nature of lemonade. Pastis is watered down and sweetened in France as a refreshing summer drink of its own, but I think Pastis is better suited to a supporting role in drinks. That anise comes across pretty strong. Adding bitters to lemonade is nothing new, but I think it provides the accent needed to make the anise work.

You can tell this recipe owes more to my mixology background than a Betty Crocker cookbook. The ingredient list actually bears considerable resemblance to the Sazerac Cocktail. I'm counting this among my drink posts, but the alcohol content is negligible. For those of you who may be disappointed by that, I recommend dolloping in some whiskey. Bourbon would be classic and Rye wouldn't do badly either.

Ice Cream Flavors

2010-02-28T22:52:00.000-08:00

I've fallen behind on my posting (my excuse is that February is so short) and I have a couple of stopgaps for you guys.

The following is a transcription of Chapter 9 from Sideways Stories From Wayside School by Louis Sachar. This particular story stuck with me through my college years, over a decade since I'd last read it. I searched wikipedia and tracked down the chapter, but I couldn't find an etext or any kind of transcription of the book or chapter. So for your viewing pleasure I found the book and did it myself. Enjoy!

Chapter 9: Maurecia

Maurecia liked ice cream. She was sweet and pretty and could beat up any boy in Mrs. Jewls's class. Everybody like Maurecia--except Kathy, but then she didn't like anybody. Maurecia only liked ice cream.

Every day Maurecia brought an ice cream cone to school and kept it in her desk until lunch time. At first she brought chocolate ice cream every day. But she soon tired of chocolate ice cream. So she started bringing vanilla. But she got tired of vanilla, too. Then she got tired of strawberry, fudge ripple, butter pecan, pistachio, and burgundy cherry, in that order. And then a terrible thing happened. Maurecia got tired of ice cream. By that time her desk was a mess, and everything in it was sticky.

Everybody liked Maurecia. But Maurecia didn't like anything.

Mrs. Jewls hated to see Maurecia unhappy.

"I don't understand it, Mrs. Jewls," cried Maurecia. "There just aren't any good flavors anymore."

So Mrs. Jewls worked all night. The next day she brought in a new flavor of ice cream for Maurecia. It was Maurecia-flavored ice cream. "Everybody will like it," thought Mrs. Jewels, "because everybody likes Maurecia."

"Here you are, Maurecia," said Mrs. Jewls, "Maurecia-flavored ice cream."

Everybody gathered around as Maurecia tasted it. They hoped she'd like it.

Maurecia took a lick.

"Well?" said Mrs. Jewls.

Maurecia took another lick.

"Well?" asked the class.

"This ice cream has no taste," said Maurecia. "It doesn't taste bad, but it doesn't taste good. It doesn't taste like anything at all!"

Mrs. Jewls was heartbroken.

"Here, let me try it," said Todd. He tasted it. "You're crazy, Maurecia!" he said. "This is the best-tasting ice cream I've ever eaten! Try some, Deedee."

"Ummmmmmmmm, it's delicious," said Deedee. "It's so sweet and creamy." She passed it around the room.

"Oh, it is so good," said Leslie.

"I think it tastes terrible," said Kathy.

"I don't understand it," said Maurecia. "I don't taste a thing."

Mrs. Jewls slapped herself in the face. "Oh, I've made a big mistake, Maurecia. Of course you can't taste anything. It's Maurecia-flavored ice cream. It's the same taste you always taste when you're not tasting anything at all."

So the next day Mrs. Jewls brought in Joe-flavored ice cream. Maurecia liked it. So did everybody else. Joe thought it had no taste.

Everybody liked Maurecia. Maurecia only liked Joe.

The following day Mrs. Jewls brought in Ron-flavored ice cream. Ron thought it had no taste, but everybody else loved it.

Everybody liked Maurecia. Maurecia only liked Joe and Ron.

By the end of the month, Mrs. Jewls had brought in twenty-seven new flavors of ice cream, one for each member of the class.

Everybody liked Maurecia, and Maurecia liked everybody. They all tasted so good. All except Kathy, that is. Kathy-flavored ice cream tasted a little bit like old bologna.

Everyone still agreed that Maurecia-flavored ice cream was the best, except Maurecia. She liked Todd ice cream the best.

This turned out to be a problem. Every once in a while Maurecia would try to take a bite out of Todd's arm in order to get that very special flavor.

Albums in Need of Listening

2010-01-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

I've come across a lot of albums in my years at Davis. This post is devoted to albums that have received less listenership and/or acclaim than I think they deserve. This premise makes the post inherently KDVS. Also, in the course of making this I proved to myself that the 70's are my favorite decade of music.

There are three ways albums made it onto this list:
-albums that I wished I could have put on my Top 15 Albums
-albums that admirably characterize a favorite underground genre of mine
-albums that are total diamonds in the rough

This explains why many albums are well-established underground masterpieces and others are near completely unknown, even by KDVS standards. The common thread that unites all of them is that their potential listenership is much greater than their actual listenership. The ones with asterisks have a particularly large deficit.

Some of these are very difficult albums and others should be able to be appreciated by practically all of you. I try to make it clear which are which in the blurbs I provide. I own all of these and actively want to give them to you, so ask for them or about them.

Many of these albums fall into subgenres that the uninitiated will be unfamiliar with. So you know...

Shoegaze is a British branch of indie pop from around the turn of the 90's for which artists buried their melodies in a swath of swooning, distorted guitar. The guitar, vocals and bass frequently blend together such that it's often difficult to pick out individual instruments. Shoegaze songs are frequently about the ocean, flying, dreaming and depressant drugs.
Stoner Rock fuses slow heavy metal riffs with a psychedelic postgrunge production. Lyrics are often about things like bongs, deodorizers and sandals. Queens of the Stone Age started out as a stoner rock band.
Jangle Pop is a post-punk/alternative style from the 80's. It uses chimy, undistorted guitars to produce a pretty shimmery sound like Big Star or the Byrds. REM and the title song for "Friends" are pretty good examples of the genre.
Paisley Underground was a subset of jangle pop that was more psychedelic and more obviously influenced by 60's bands. It was centered in Los Angeles, but many of the bands originated in Davis.
Power Pop started in the early 70's and blew up as part of the new wave movement in the late 70's and early 80's. Songs like "My Sharona", "867-5309" and "I Want You to Want Me" define the genre. The sound is characterized by sweet popcraft counterbalanced by crunch and attitude.
Protopunk is retroactively defined as all the bands that influenced early punk rock. The music is usually some combination of primal stupidity, creative experimentation, attitude and high energy.

00's
*Rogue Wave - Out of the Shadow 2004
This is a gem of an indie pop album that slipped through the cracks. It's melodic, catchy and quirky.

Times New Viking - Dig Yourself 2005
This is some of the best songwriting to come out of the Columbus, OH "shitgaze" scene. It's catchy, rebellious pop in such terrible fidelity as to become mostly noise... in a good way?

Death From Above 1979 - You're A Woman, I'm a Machine 2004
With just a bass, synth and drums, these minimalists sound like a fucked up, overdriven party version of Queens of the Stone Age. They never made it past their first album, so this is all they have to offer.

90's
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released 1993)
Most people interested in brilliant electronica have heard of Aphex Twin, but this album is his masterpiece.

Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville 1993
Before she was a plastic pop diva, Liz Phair made her name with this muted lofi album with intensely clever, biting lyrics.

*Rollerskate Skinny - Horsedrawn Wishes 1996
Rollerskate Skinny crosses shoegaze with a bizarreness akin to the Flaming Lips. It has been repeatedly placed in the top 100 Irish albums of all time, though who keeps tabs on something like that?

The Ecstasy of St. Theresa - Susurrate 1992
This Czech band was a little late to the game for Shoegaze, not to mention in the wrong country. The fact that they captured the sound of classic shoegaze better than even the classic shoegaze bands doomed the album to poor reviews (including my beloved Allmusic), but being derivative doesn't keep this from being one of the most perfectly-executed albums ever made in the style.

Ash - 1977 (released 1996)
This is a messy punk/pop album with bittersweet melodic hooks and some Cheap Trick crunch.

Kyuss - Blues for the Red Sun 1992
This is a landmark stoner rock album. The musicianship is superb and the production is somehow both meaty and effervescent.

Monster Magnet - Spine of God 1991
Also a landmark for stoner rock and also with a brilliant production, the difference is that this one's odes to metal heads are a tongue-in-cheek indictment.

*Rites of Spring - End on End 1991
You can't claim to know emo until you've heard the original emotional hardcore band. This is totally hardcore punk, albeit with an intensely personal and emotional approach. It's a textbook catharsis album that will blow your mind with its speed and fervor.

80's
Dinosaur Jr - You're Living All Over Me 1987
This album squalls with some of the best alternative lead guitar work ever recorded. The songs are awesome in that indie this-chord-sounds-so-wrong-but-so-right way.

Stone Roses - Stone Roses 1989
This is danceable and psychedelic rock.

The Replacements - Let it Be 1984
This is an angsty, rocking record by my uncle's favorite band.

Feelies - Crazy Rhythms 1980
This album is exactly what it says, all done with beautifully chimy guitars and a new wave lilt.

*Gun Club - Fire of Love 1981
As far as I can tell this is the greatest psychobilly album ever recorded. It's rootsy and paranoid and you can tell the Pixies took a ton of their sound from it.

Let's Active - Cypress/Afoot 1984/83
Jangly and punchy, this record has a superb production and bittersweet melodies.

*The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine and Roses 1982
Channeling the Velvet Underground, the Doors and Neil Young into a kind of throwback postpunk, this album rocks and shimmers. Add to that that the band's front man Steve Wynn is a former KDVS DJ and UC Davis graduate and how awesome and under-appreciated do you expect this to be?

The Long Ryders - Native Sons 1984
Again, to be described by artists like the Byrds and Neil Young and with terms like "jangly", this time on the country end of the spectrum.

The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight 1980
A five-star jangle album in the style of the previous four albums.

70's
*Eggs Over Easy - Good 'n' Cheap 1972
This band's heartfelt, laid back blend of country-rock, folk-rock and Motown spawned a genre called pub rock. Their only recorded album was more or less lost to time until this 2004 rerelease and I think it shows they deserve to sit atop their highly regarded followers as kings.

Faces - A Nod Is as Good as a Wink...to a Blind Horse 1971
This is Rod Stewart's band that never made it on its own for whatever reason. The rootsy rock here has a lot more meat to it than Stewart's solo stuff.

Cockney Rebel - The Human Menagerie 1973
This is slinky, preening glam rock filled out with beautiful orchestral support. Don't try to make sense of the lyrics because they're just rhyming nonsense.

T. Rex - Electric Warrior 1971
This definitive document of British glam rock never really made it across the pond. It's a shame, because it's actually great party music.

New York Dolls - New York Dolls 1972
The production takes a little getting used to, but this is a great hard rock album that should sit between the Stones and Aerosmith on your shelf. Also, check out their getups, because I've seen few things so badass.

Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers 1978
This is a horribly broken album that took me many plays to acquire any sort of taste for, but gradually I realized that many of these songs are some of the most delicate, beautiful, heart-wrenching recordings I've ever heard.

Nick Drake - Pink Moon 1972
This quiet, brooding acoustic singer/songwriter album is immediately pretty.

Joni Mitchell - Blue 1971
This is a melancholy album whose vocals overflow with feeling and finesse like sparkling water. It's melodies are difficult, but rewarding.

XTC - Drums and Wires 1979
This is angular, arty fun new wave.

Television - Marquee Moon 1977
This is one of the most arty '77 punk albums made and it's played with excellent musicianship, so it doesn't sound like your first impression of punk.

Wire - Chairs Missing 1978
Another incredibly arty punk album. It's intensely clever and energetic, even when it waxes complex and ambient. Their first album gets more credit for its concept, but this is the more ingenious record.

*Richard Hell and the Voidoids - Blank Generation 1977
This is superfast, superangular, creative punk done with remarkable panache. Way too many people into punk haven't heard this gem.

Simply Saucer - Cyborgs Revisited 1994
This is the most obscure "classic" protopunk album I've ever come across and that, between you and me, is saying something.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica 1972
I decided the phrase "clever noise" describes this album perfectly. This is a well-known masterpiece, but it's not for the faint of heart. It spills over with abstract lyrics, rhythms that aren't quite right and keep changing, lots of frenetic atonal noodling, the occasional instantly captivating guitar run and glimmers of abject brilliance everywhere.

*Faust - Faust So Far 1972
As a representative of the style called Krautrock, So Far is frequently spacy, repetitive, grating and beautiful, sometimes all at once, but not usually. Like Trout Mask Replica, it is always fascinating if you listen closely.

Dwight Twilley - Sincerely 1976
This is just a great power pop album that leans towards the Elvis side of things.

The Nerves - Nerves EP 1976
These four songs of Beatlesque power pop are essentially this band's entire recorded output, but it's quite the legacy.

The Scruffs - Wanna Meet the Scruffs? 1977
This lost gem of power pop "bursts with off harmonies, left hooks, and jolts of random energy."

60's
*Paul Butterfield Blues Band - East/West 1966
Anyone interested in long rock jams, blues-rock or eastern influences in rock needs to hear this record, because this band was the first to do all of those things and they did them very, very well.

Gram Parsons - GP/Greivous Angel 1972
While his work with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers is better known, nowhere does "the father of country-rock" sound more beautiful than on his duets with Emmylou Harris here. These might be my favorite vocal duets, period.

John Fahey - The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death 1965
This is an incredible instrumental record of meditative, folksy and ultimately haunting melodies. It's more restrained and bizarrely creative than fellow guitar-picker Leo Kottke's work.

Moby Grape - Moby Grape 1967
One of the classic "lost albums" of the best year rock and roll ever had.

*The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle 1968
This is a record of great 60's pop that way more people need to listen to.

Pink Floyd - Piper at the Gates of Dawn 1967
The only album by Pink Floyd that I really listen to, this was made before Syd Barrett left the band and before Pink Floyd became what it is remembered as. This is a great psychedelic album and the only thing Barrett produced before breaking under the copious amounts of acid he was dropping.

*Alexander "Skip" Spence - Oar 1969
This sounds as acid-damaged and brilliant as Syd Barrett's subsequent solo work, but with more variety of sound. "War and Peace" sounds like Radiohead.

MC5 - Kick Out the Jams - 1969
This some seriously powerful, angry, soulful rock and roll.

Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum 1968
Among the loudest-sounding albums I've ever heard and certainly the loudest from the 60's, it stomps like an elephant and roars like a lion.

Silver Apples - Contact 1969
The Silver Apples are an obscure bridge from 60's rock to the electronica that Krautrock bands like Kraftwerk would develop. Fellow DJ The Colonel (aka Kern) loves that this album can segue between hip hop, electronica, rock and experimental music without missing a beat.

What's Wrong With IPA's?

2010-01-03T18:06:00.000-08:00

As a fledgling beer snob with a vendetta against the most popular style of microbrew, I get the question a lot: What's wrong with IPA's? The short answer is that they're pretentious and undrinkable. Now, if you're an IPA fan, you've heard that before. A non-beer drinker could say that.

IPA's are the product of a "logical extreme" paradigm that is uniquely American. You've heard Texans boast that "everything's big in Texas". Well, Texans are just Americans with less class than the rest of the country. The conceit is shared by us all. We want everything to be more intense, more "real".

Have you ever compared British candy to American candy? British candy is weak. It hardly even fries your taste buds. Eating British candy could put me to sleep. Who ever heard of milk chocolate that actually tastes like milk? The British, that's who. Try skipping soda and candy for a month and then having a Coke. It's like you've never tasted anything properly your whole life. It's like a nuclear explosion in your mouth. Without conditioning your taste buds will burn from the intensity of Coca-Cola. And that's just Coke. That's the saleable aspect of American culture.

The story of American food is a story of one-upmanship. You think fried chicken is unhealthy? Try fried cornbread (aka hushpuppies). And if you think soaking something porous in grease and then cooking it in batter just isn't enough, try fried twinkies.

We've applied this "bigger, better, more extreme" philosophy to everything. Not the least of these is our alcoholic beverages. Because when we're pretentious, we like to be really pretentious. And the fact that we only half know how to be pretentious won't stop us (though I'd propose it's secretly one of our strengths).

When Sierra Nevada came out with its pale ale, it was one of the bitterest beers on the market. It has an IBU of 37. It was revelatory that a brewery could successfully market an overtly bitter beer. It was a slap in the face to mass scale breweries that kept hopping low to make their beers as innocuous and "drinkable" as possible. Bitterness, gravity and high alcohol became the standards borne by the American microbrew movement. Samuel Adams keeps breaking its own record for the world's most alcoholic beer (their Utopia has 27 ABV).

But any boorish lout can appreciate a beverage that will fuck him up. Ultimately, it was bitterness that became the ideological rallying cry of craft brewing. Just read any diatribe on the back of a Stone Brewery bottle. Bow down and worship at the feet of almighty Bitterness! It's true that hops have complex flavors that sparkle in interesting ways at high concentrations. Bitterness is both daunting and artistically redeeming. The drinker must be willing to suspend expectations of instant likeability and instead struggle with a flavor that confronts and baffles, ultimately to reward.

Of course, the equation Pain=Artistic Merit is so tired and postmodern as to make me sick, but it's not like there aren't legitimate precedents. John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is a rubbed-raw bender of an album. I myself prefer Nirvana's dark and twisted In Utero to their more pleasant Nevermind and the Velvet Underground's raucous anti-beauty White Light/White Heat to the radio-ready Loaded. Burn-out albums are a wonderful thing. However, they have a very defined and limited place in art. They aren't the sort of albums you'd listen to every day.

But the sense of self-righteous warfare against complacency, aspiring pretension and the mindless pursuit of logical extremes has elevated a beer as boneheaded and specialized as India Pale Ale to the top of craft brewing. Typical American IPA's (India Pale Ales) frequently have IBU's of 60 to 100 (100 is roughly the human taste threshold) and an ABV between 7 and 10. They are crushingly bitter and dangerously alcoholic. Make no mistake, this is a critics' beer. But this is about the most boneheaded critics' beer imaginable. Lots of flavor, lots of alcohol (but not enough to mess up the foam) and lots of malt. IPA's are absolutely interesting, but they ruin the palate and are almost impossible to drink.

This brings us to a cardinal rule of cuisine. Good food and drink ought to be appetizing and complementary. Expensive wine is imminently drinkable, because it tastes delicious and delicate. It is flexible enough to go well with many foods and while it doesn't shy from asserting its beauty, it can also play a beautiful supporting role. This is not the case with IPA's.

Anyone knowledgeable about beer pairings will tell you that IPA's go well with Indian food. That's because Indian cuisine is one of the few foods strong enough to not be overwhelmed by an IPA. However, the best beer to drink with Indian food is not an India Pale Ale (the word India actually has nothing to do with IPA being made for Indian food, btw), because IPA's march to their own tune and don't bother to try and complement anything. That Indian food had damn well better play along.

The best beers to drink with Indian food, I've discovered, are Indian lagers like Taj Mahal. This was my first and most powerful practical lesson to drink a country's beer with its cuisine. Indian lagers are dark, sweet, and vaguely floral. Rather than competing with curry to be the strongest taste, they play a support role, adding another, interacting layer of nuances and subtleties to an already complex curry.

So IPA's aren't food beers (because they're willful) and they aren't session beers (because they're difficult to drink). They are tasting beers, and nothing more. They fill a minor niche well and with panache, but their eminence in the world of American beer-snobbery is as unjustified as it is predictable.

As a sidenote, the two occasions I drank primarily IPA turned out very badly. Some people might think it's a good idea to order a keg of Racer 5 or consecutive pitchers of Arrogant Bastard. It's not. It's really, really not.

Dandyism, Slobbism and Manliness

2009-12-19T18:53:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a coffee table book called The Art of Manliness for a Christmas gift exchange coming up. The book argues for a return to the ideals of manliness as embodied by Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin. The book isn't trying to ignore or counter feminism, it is simply throwing its weight into a comeback of old-school masculinity updated for the modern era.

It advocates chivalry, hats and the man hug while proffering advice on how to braid your daughter's hair, start a fire with sticks and practice good etiquette on Facebook. While I differ on many things in the book there is no doubt that the median American male is woefully deluded with regards to what it means to be a man.

Manliness is not about being dirty, stupid, crude or wearing earth tones. There was a time when all significant intellectual contributions were produced by men, when male friends professed love for one another, when they spent just as much on their clothes as women and knew how to dance. While I applaud womens' increasing level of education, status and pay, I believe firmly in reversing trends towards men becoming less civilized.

The first threat to manliness is homophobia. Only 35 years ago "flamboyant" shirts were the height of men's fashion. Years ago, gay subculture wisely appropriated components of 19th century Dandyism. Heterosexual guys are too concerned about not "looking gay", "talking gay" or "acting gay". An entire wing of English vocabulary has been red-taped as "gay", including the word gay itself. Sometimes even including vocabulary itself. Everybody needs to chill the fuck out. I refuse to allow my self-expression to be hemmed in by subcultures I don't identify with, particularly ones with such good taste.

Being confused for being gay has a simple fix. Fears of such confusion are never primarily motivated by practical considerations. Furthermore, there is no necessary conflict between being (or seeming) gay and being manly. As the Greeks understood, homoeroticism reeks of manliness. That and the simplicity of interacting with men make homosexuality attractive to me, such that I occasionally find myself regretting my orientation. Though Jill finds me frustratingly heterosexual, I normally find my admittedly unidirectional sexuality rather enlightened.

I like things that are pretty. I'd like to look pretty, not to mention ostentatious and self-assured. I find myself buying the most radical clothing offered to men. Fuck earth tones. I got a pair of tight-fitting bright red pants over Thanksgiving. My mom thought they looked gay, but red pants are rock star pants in my book. Truth be told they're more scene than gay anyways, but I shouldn't care because that's missing the point. Wearing bright colors is fucking badass, whether it's pink or lime green or purple or fire engine red. "Paisley Dress Shirt" has been on my Christmas wish list for three years in a row, but good ones are damn hard to find.

Having a large vocabulary and physically touching men are also things hampered by homophobia. I've found it interesting how little physical touch is required to inspire paranoia in friends of mine; a brush of the shoulder, touching someone's hair or physically guiding someone's body or hand are all socially innocuous when done to girls of proper familiarity. Also, I've gotten my fair share of raised eyebrows for my vocabulary from strangers with whom I'm conversing. Men and women, gay and straight, should all feel entitled to the full range of the English language.

The second threat to manliness is the feminist movement. Make note that just as with homosexuality this is in no way a disparagement nor a complaint against feminism. Much of masculinity and femininity are necessarily defined by sexual dimorphism. That is, by natural opposition. Masculinity consequently includes being big, strong, emotionally stable, analytical and aggressive. However, this opposition extends into the more arbitrary aspects of sexual distinction. The aspect I am most concerned with is studiousness.

It used to be assumed that men were the most intelligent, artistic and studious sex. Science has since contradicted most of this and society has demonstrated womens' equal capacities. Unfortunately the culture of masculinity, once so gloriously self-celebrating and productive, has begun to stigmatize learning, creativity, demonstration of intellect and other formerly manly academic endeavors. This is reflected in statistics showing boys earning lower average grades and having lower admission rates to college despite studies showing that they are still just as smart as girls.

The fact that boys are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, that getting good grades is neither cool nor manly is an inadmissible sin both for its effect on men and on society as a whole. We must work to change culture to celebrate true men as being academically driven and fashionable, not boorish slobs.

Craft Breweries: Style and Iconoclasm

2009-12-12T20:55:00.000-08:00

Inevitably, as I continue my exploration of craft beers, patterns begin to emerge in the flavor profiles of American craft beers. I've got a feel for some of the most popular styles. However, with the possible exception of IPA's, American's innovation and resistance to convention has kept the craft brew world in a constant state of flux. In fact, the strongest patterns in craft beer that I've found are breweries' identity. Many breweries, particularly the ones who got their start with a winning formula, have a distinctive style that is distinguishable throughout their beer lineup.

The first brewery that deserves mention of this is Sierra Nevada. They earned their name on the strength and influence of their Pale Ale. Its sharp bitterness set it apart from Pale Ale's British forbears and inaugurated an industry-wide trend towards heavy hopping. That the floral hops were belied by an unsung malty sweetness, I think, was the key towards its enduring status as one of the most respected craft beers in the business.

I got my hands on a few other styles by Sierra Nevada in recent months. Unfortunately, they're shamelessly derivative of their flagship Pale Ale. Their Stout is pretty good, it just tastes like a Stout version of their Pale Ale. Less can be said of their Anniversary and Celebration Ales, which taste is as if the Pale Ale was just amped up into an IPA. More gravity, more hops, until the original balance that made the Pale Ale so beautiful is flagrantly destroyed.

Samuel Adams, on the other hand, manages the tricky feat of finding new ways to present a winning formula. This may have to do with the fact that their trademark style is malt-driven rather than hop-driven. By varying malt composition and gravity, the two seasonals I've tried have been even more impressive than their famed Boston Lager. Their Octoberfest has a higher gravity, greater charred character and a more substantial hop backbone than their classic brew. Their Winter Lager calls itself "a Dark Wheat Lager". It has a thick buttery richness that warms the soul.

New Belgium seems to revel in a charred undertone that characterizes their beer. The most prominent example of this is their near-black 1554, but see if you don't find the same dark note in sunnier beers like Fat Tire and summer seasonal Skinny Dip. I'm all for it though, because it's that subtle char that really sets their amber ales off. All three of these beers come highly recommended, particularly if you're serving them with food that's got some of its own char.

Anchor is a San Francisco brewery that I've found I just don't like very much. Something about the creamy-toasted quality that underpins their generally light-tasting beer rubs me wrong. The creaminess isn't justified by the light hops and malt, and the toasted quality just seems out of place. I found that of their flagship Anchor Steam and I had the exact same criticism when I tasted their Bock. It was the striking similarity in Anchor's treatment of these two ostensibly different styles that inspired this investigation into the internal stylistic conformity of so many craft breweries.

For some breweries, their trademark style works well and imparts a continuity to their broad range of beer styles. For others, this identifying stamp acts as a straightjacket that prevents their other offerings from ever escaping the shadow of the breweries' flagship beer.

I'd also like to talk about some new leads I've found in the craft beer world. I have only cursory knowledge of the following breweries, but one of their beers came out and spoke to me. These are American originals that I look forward to following up on.

Dogfish Head is a name synonymous with American beer's iconoclasm. Dogfish Head stands in proud opposition to the stylistic uniformity evident in the aforementioned breweries. Talk about bizarre, yet exquisitely crafted beer. This endorsement was mostly inspired by their 90-Minute IPA. I am sick of American IPA's, but this didn't taste like any IPA I'd ever had. Sure it was hoppy and alcoholic, but the standout quality of the 90-Minute IPA was that it was creamy, estery and sweet. I'm not sure I want more, but they obviously had an off-the-wall idea in mind and they hit the nail on the head. Incidentally, I've never felt wealthy enough to purchase any Dogfish Head with my own money; their experiments are expensive.

North Coast's Red Seal Ale follows in the footsteps of Sierra Nevada by pairing striking bitterness with understated fruity sweetness. Red Seal is in fact even more aggressively bitter than that iconic Pale Ale. I'm a sucker for a good red and these guys really struck the perfect, bleeding-edge balance.

Anderson Valley's Boont Amber Ale has a buttery-sweet quality to it similar to Samuel Adam's Winter Lager that is practically chewy like a cookie. This quality underlies the Amber Ale rather than forming the foundation of its flavor the way it does the Winter Lager. It was the distinctive, appetizing flavor and the light touch that made the beer stand out to me. I've sworn to get my hands on some more beer from Anderson Valley ever since.

Sudwerk is a Davis brewery with pretty decent distribution in the Central Valley. Excepting the Czech Pilsener Urquell, they make my hands-down favorite Pilsener. The brewmaster came to speak to my Beer and Brewing class (as well as Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada, Dan Gordon of Gordon Biersch and the brewmaster of the Fairfield Anheuser-Busch brewery). He said that he was really into the flavor of the grains in beer, and it shows. The Sudwerk Pilsener tastes of grain in all its exalted glory; the bitter-sweetness, the earth, the dry grass. Yet, in Pilsener fashion, this is also an imminently drinkable beer whose subtlety and originality can be just as easily overlooked.

Unlike most American Amber Ales, Alaska's Alt Style Amber has the sweet, smooth, malty quality of a German beer. I have an affinity for American takes on Central European styles, because Central European aesthetics are so understated and American craft brews so boldly creative. For this, Samuel Adams, Sudwerk's Pilsener and Alaska's Amber earn extra accolades.

Buckbean's Schwarzbier also falls into this category. Few American breweries attempt the black lager style. I encountered it in the middle of an Apple House beer tasting of Bocks and Dark Lagers, and this Nevadan beer certainly stood out from the German Schwarzbier offering. The German one was a smooth and mellow meditation on dark malt, whereas the American was characterized by the distinctive, nutty flavor of mesquite, with the darkness only a backdrop.

You can find an earlier post about craft beer here.

Negative Energy and Thick Skin

2009-12-08T22:42:00.000-08:00

The following is an excerpt from a letter to a friend and makes reference to my recently posted Articles of Faith.

In September I had a close college friend attempt to rip a hole in my entire approach to life and dump me as a friend. The reason he said he wanted to divorce himself from me was that my negativity brought him down. I still respect him, I believe he had my interests at heart, and I tried hard to internalize his criticisms (and I think I succeeded). However, he was looking to produce some sort of breakdown or epiphany in me and he was ultimately disappointed.

More and more, I'm starting to enjoy thinking of myself as a person with "negative energy". After all, the world needs its yins and yangs. One of the articles of faith I did not include that I expect most people might is faith in the search for happiness. I've never thought of happiness as a philosophical end-goal. Sure I chase it, but it's almost reflexive. I don't encourage myself to chase it. Partly, I'm probably unrestrained enough in requesting/grabbing what I want that I have never needed to encourage myself to embrace happiness. I seize it unrepentantly, even at the expense of others. Self-love is a bitch.

I'm a critical if not a negative person. I've received my fair share of criticism, because I've asked for it (usually not explicitly, but in the way I carry myself), but it rolls off me like water off a duck. I also dish it out like a mofo. I feel guilty for some instances, but not most. I maintain my intellectual honesty (possibly another article of faith?) and don't do it out of spite or malice to friends or strangers (the rare enemy beware, though). But in my head people can separate objective opinion from malicious intent. That's not always the case, and even where it is, a concerted assault on someone's assumptions and manifestations of person usually produces a negative reaction.

This is not the first friendship I have lost because of my critical nature and I doubt it will be my last, so I'd like to gently warn you that I not only have the capacity, but the inclination to be ruthlessly critical of people, particularly those closest to me. The terseness I sometimes evidence is the product of being raised by a scientist. I have acquired tact through the years, but evidently not enough, so if I ever come across too strong, tell me.

Articles of Faith

2009-11-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

I tried to compile a short list of principles that underlie my actions and thoughts. It requires a good deal of "internal vigilance" to keep from using cliches and really get at one's core, because one has to strip every impulse down to its origin. I found that things like selfishness, love, peace, the greatest good or indeed, goodness itself, broke down upon extended analysis.

Faith itself, and as is implied by that, Risk.
Self-Love.
Human Cleverness, Individual and especially Collective.
Inwardly, Vigilance and Outwardly, Sincerity.
Common Humanity.

I assume that Faith would be found in anybody's complete list. The act of assumption is the basis for thought itself. Its corollary, Risk, is the basis for action.

Self-Love provides for a number of things including self-interest, the basis for human striving, and ego-centrism, which is an essential assumption for worldly understanding. Also self-confidence, which is the basis for intellectual assertion, power and leadership. Leadership is essential for people to organize into groups and institutions while intellectual assertion is essential for the expansion of human knowledge, so indirectly, Self-Love is instrumental in the creation of civilization.

This brings us to Collective Human Cleverness. My faith in religion, culture, media, science and vicarious wisdom of all kinds is grounded in a respect for the ability of humans to recognize the greatness of others' ideas. These ideas go through a process of dissemination and selective breeding that requires the conscious and unconscious participation of a huge number of individuals. Because of the imperfections, biases and stupidity of so many people this process doesn't seem perfect; yet it has a twisted sort of perfection analagous to the beauty of evolution. This blog plays a small role in contributing to that beautifully twisted mass consciousness.

Obviously, Individual Human Cleverness exists and can be considerable. However, I also have faith in a subtler, less explicit aspect of the human intellect: intuition. Let us not forget that for all our flaws, the simplest human mind puts even the largest supercomputers to shame in terms of both design and sheer processing power.

I believe in Inward Vigilance, which is to say I believe in skepticism, curiosity and clarity. About what and for what don't really matter as much, just do what's in front of you and try to limit the number of excuses you can make for yourself. It was inward vigilance that wrote this post.

Outward Sincerity is not something everybody adheres to. For many people sincerity is too much in conflict with the stronger principle of self-interest or even altruism. My sincerity is certainly compromised, but I am an earnest person, and where I am not sincere I strive to find ways that I can be so without too much damage to my other ideals.

I guess I kind of book-ended my list with gimmes. Common Humanity sounds as cliche as love or peace, but I can't think of a way around including it. Disagreements are either products of differing assumptions or of poor communication. That is to say, given the correct circumstances, I could be a terrorist, a member of PETA (as if there's a difference) or a fundamendalist Christian theocrat. This article of faith explains my keen interest in equivocating about Obama or Proposition 8.

So that's my list. I challenge you readers to try and distill your own articles of faith and post them as a comment. Don't tell me you are free of faith, because that's a boldfaced lie, and if you seriously write something as banal as "love" or "peace" without a thoughtful rationalization I promise you a swift kick in the rear.

On Vegetarianism

2009-11-06T14:45:00.000-08:00

I should warn you that I am a cold-hearted bastard and I would like to remove sentiment from all but my most personal interactions. The following was originally written as a response to Rob's post Tony the Tofurkey.

I am among those who asks each vegetarian I meet why they are vegetarian. There are many reasons, and some are more justifiable than others. It allows insight into the minds of people in addition to being fun to discuss.

It's true that most people couldn't kill a chicken set before them. I could do it, but I'd have a hard time. After all, I've never done it before and I've had chickens as pets. I interpret this reluctance as weakness, as disconnection from our roots. In times when food was less abundant, people had no moral quandaries about killing for food. Evolution and culture discouraged cannibalism but they couldn't deny the practicality of a nutrition-rich food source like animal flesh. I can't either and I have the additional concerns of cuisine. Chicken is delicious.

The apparent hypocrisy of a woman eating a hamburger with her precious dog in her lap troubled me for a time, but I've realized that the worth of anything is determined by our emotional attachment. I don't care much about far off murders or grandmas dying of cancer. I care about my grandma and my people. That other grandma is a statistic to me, as are far off murders. Those deaths represent tremendous loss to someone, but when diluted by perspective, how could I care? That's not my job. I will deal with my tragedies as they come and I will help those I know or meet with their tragedies.

That is to say the dog in her lap is worth more than enough to her to justify her protectiveness. Neither human life nor animal life has any intrinsic worth. It should be unsurprising that from a singular perspective different lives should merit different worth. The chicken on the farm is worth more dead than alive and thus we kill it, or pay for it to be killed.

I know I and everyone else is perfectly capable of slaughtering a nameless animal. Our grandparents were certainly capable, and I can find no fault in their actions. We just don't have opportunity or incentive to. I don't mind other people doing my dirty work for me, because I don't think it's "dirty work" in the pejorative sense. I will jump at the opportunity to kill an animal for food, with the greater motivation being intellectual curiosity and the second motivation being a desire to overcome my own resistance to what I am already comfortable with in theory.

Regarding the trophic level issue, first of all, chickens require 3 pounds of grain for one pound of meat or egg. That can be lower grade grain that we would not eat, which explains the fact that grain at the store can cost as much as chicken per pound. Furthermore, man can not subsist on bread alone, as we well know. Do you sincerely think that the hoops vegans jump through to meet their nutritional requirements are free? Do you still think it inefficient to eat some chicken with your rice? Furthermore, I thought it was widely known that human starvation is a problem of distribution and overpopulation, not supply. The food you don't eat will not magically find it's way to that starving child's hands.

Scary Movie Month

2009-10-20T01:02:00.000-07:00

October has a lot going for it. Among those things is my third annual tradition of Scary Movie Month. Like many of you out there, I never really liked horror films. I didn't really get why people watched them. So, I decided that just like I'd done with so many kinds of music, I'd teach myself to like scary movies. I looked up the most critically acclaimed films, downloaded them, and approached each with an open mind.

That was October of 2007, and by the end of the month I'd hated some and been quite impressed by others. I didn't yet love horror movies, but the next year I was compelled to continue what I had begun and was left a bit more intrigued than the year before, which brings us to the third annual Scary Movie Month.

I think I'm starting to genuinely enjoy horror and the thrill that it endeavors to produce. I still don't anticipate becoming a fan of the Saw saga, Hostel or the recent House of Wax (bits of each I've seen). The gore-as-terror equation never really made much sense to me. Gore is an enhancer of terror rather than it's generator. It's the fear of harm that drives the scariest movies rather than the actual harm. Don't think I don't relish the satisfying crunch of bones, squelch of flesh or spurt of blood as much as the next moviegoer. I do. It's just supposed to be the ominous warning to the hero/heroine that if they don't run like crazy they'll be next, and it's this epiphany and the ensuing flight that make for the white knuckled ride we look for in modern horror.

Keep in mind that Scary Movie Month is intended as a fulfillment of October rather than a straight out scream-fest. I included movies that have little to do with Halloween and little to do with horror. Even the definition of horror has changed (from King Kong to said gore-fests), and I've endeavored to keep my operating definition as broad as possible.

These are the movies that I've watched these past few years.

October 2007:

Shaun of the Dead

Zombies are my favorite horror movie monster. They don't feel pain, they increase logarithmically and they fucking eat brains. Brains, man, brains. Also all that crap about social commentary is pretty cool. Shaun of the Dead was an obvious choice for its preeminence within that genre and its relative modernity. It's hilarious, sincerely scary and all that, but I'm not sure it lived up to the considerable hype. It's a classic, no doubt, but it probably won't ever make my facebook list.

28 Days Later

An obvious followup to watching Shaun of the Dead because its also about zombies, also British, also from the mid 00's and also critically acclaimed. This movie rocked my socks. It has a good blend of humor, commentary, terror and emotional heft. If there's one movie that I recommend you watch from this post, this is it.

Donnie Darko

While gripping and occasionally scary, this is no horror movie. This is a psychological thriller. What struck me most about Donnie Darko was its serenity and its perfect absorption of that magic month, October.

Ginger Snaps

A Canadian indie film made in 2000. This is a well-rounded horror film that builds from a comparison between werewolfism and girls at puberty. Don't mind the 80's effects, this is a solid movie.

The Lost Boys

This vampire film draws the comparison between vampirism and teen angst. It's a fun 80's movie that you have to watch if you have any interest in Santa Cruz, where it was filmed.

Freaks

This is a 1930's cult classic. It was made before regulations prevented filmmakers from exploiting people's deformities for gain, or whatever, so it's on one level a literal freak show. Overlook the bad acting and you'll find a horror movie with heart.

October 2008:

Hocus Pocus
This has to be in contention for the ultimate Halloween movie. It manages the tricky feat of being simultaneously light, creepy and thrilling. All hail Bette Midler and Disney. How could a movie this good not earn accolades?

Evil Dead
Obviously I had to watch this with my interest in zombies and cult films. Bruce Campbell is a pip, but I'm not sure I was prepared to appreciate the movie's outlandish sense of scare and style.

Nosferatu
I suppose this is the first silent movie I've watched. This is the original vampire movie and it gets a lot of kudos for pioneering the genre. I found it amazing how much of the movie's montages and imagery had been appropriated to Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein, since spoofs are bellwethers for influence. The movie is good, if a little slow. Unlike Dracula (which was based off the same book), vampires are compared to plague-bearing rodents rather than suave seducers.

Frankenstein
This classic turned out to be everything I'd hoped. It's both scary and heart wrenching in that old horror way.

Near Dark
Rotten Tomatoes gave this rave reviews for its straddling of genres (vampire/western/family), but I didn't see what made it a classic. It's a solid movie, just not spectacular.

Halloween
Apparently the original Halloween was an indie movie and it started the slasher style that defined horror for the next two decades. This movie is all about building suspense rather than violent gore and it does it very well. Brandon thought it was too slow. I think that's mostly a quibble with the genre rather than the execution, though.

October 2009:

Alien
Matt Wingert was trying to tell me about Alien and Aliens and how they differed. Mid-explanation, he just gave up and said, "You need to watch both of them." So that's exactly what I did when Scary Movie Month rolled in. I watched one after another. Alien is a suspenseful slasher with a similar cadence to Halloween.

Aliens
Where Alien was suspenseful, Aliens is riproaringly intense. The movie is a repeated pattern of action, terror, suspense, that spirals higher and higher. What can I say? I found it intensely gratifying. At the beginning I noted feeling genuinely scared and that fear kept snowballing into the kind of claustrophobic horror that is as traumatizing as it is satisfying.

Slither
This movie is lauded for it's worthy tribute to various classic horror movie styles. Nathan Fillion (from Firefly) stars in this genre romp. By the end of the movie, I was thoroughly disgusted and scared. In a good way, of course, but this isn't for the faint of heart.

Rosemary's Baby
After watching this I must have noticed like five cultural references to the movie. This is Roman Polanski's classic about a woman who believes she's been impregnated with the spawn of Satan. There's no terror, really, just a lot of unsettling horror.

Young Frankenstein
In Mel Brooks's low-brow fashion, this is a parody of Frankenstein and indeed all things horror. I told Jill that after watching this she hardly needed to see the original.

Nightmare Before Christmas
Season-appropriate and by Tim Burton, this was a must-see. Obviously I'd watched it before, but this was the first time I recognized this movie for its full greatness. This isn't just a great Halloween movie, it's a great Christmas movie, a great animated movie and a great musical.

Satan's Little Helper
This independent film is about a boy obsessed with a video game called "Satan's Little Helper". He dresses up as Satan's Little Helper for Halloween and goes out "to find Satan". He finds a serial killer in a Satan costume, befriends him, and takes him home. What ensues can be left to your imagination, but I assure you it's worth your while. Surely this is a testament to power of the Halloween mask.

Rules of the Road: Davis

2009-09-25T15:19:00.001-07:00

Davis prides itself for being the only city in the nation with a platinum rating (though that sentiment is actually a bit out of date) from the League of American Bicyclists. Among the qualifications for this distinction is the degree of lawfulness displayed by the city's bicyclists; obeying traffic signs, not riding on the sidewalk, etc.

However, the preponderance of bicycles has beaten automobiles and pedestrians into submission. There are so many bikes on the road that other forms of transit become habituated to deferring right of way to bikes. By nationwide standards Davis bicyclists get away with murder. Even normally uptight townies generally ignore many traffic laws that apply to bicyclists, like stop signs. I've compiled the de facto Rules of the Road for Davis bikers for your viewing pleasure.

There's a saying around here that according to bikers, traffic signals are stop signs, stop signs are yield signs and yield signs are decorative. That might not give the uninitiated an accurate picture of how things work here, though.

Bicycles have right of way over cars because cyclists are fragile and over pedestrians because getting hit by a bike hurts like a bitch. This is the crux of the double standard that produced Davis traffic rules. This first rule forms the logical basis for much of the following.

Bicyclists can at will change from using pedestrian priveledges (like riding on sidewalks) to vehicle ones (like riding in regular car lanes when the bike lane is inconvenient). As per the aforementioned right of way rule, this means that pedestrians will stop and make space for you to pass if you, technically illegally, ride on the sidewalk.

The second fundamental rule of Davis biking is that bicycles need only obey laws when enforcement is imminent, in contrast to cars. This includes Bicycling Under the Influence, as previously discussed. However, bikes, just like cars, assume all blame should their liberties with law cause a crash.

This comes up most frequently on the issue of riding the wrong direction in bike lanes. I performed this maneuver routinely when I lived at Kingston Apartments, because my formal path involved a left turn at an intersection followed by crossing left over the street and I figured that was bullshit and I'd just cross early to the left bike lane and turn left into the sidewalk. This worked out fine for me, but I almost got creamed by someone doing it recently. As my eyes began to cloud over with rage at the near miss, I heard the offending bicyclist yell, "Shit, sorry!". This I deemed to be adequate appeasement, but if we'd collided and the impact had bent my front rim I would have asked him to cough up the $60 replacement.

Back to intersections:
Traffic signs are treated as traffic signs when there's enough traffic to mandate adherence, but bikes are permitted whatever liberties they can safely get away with, which includes flexing their de facto right of way.

Four way stops, which are the bread and butter of the Davis downtown, again need only be paid attention to if there are physically cars in your way. During heavy traffic bicyclists slow down and stop to wait for their opening, but if a car is going your direction you are perfectly entitled to ride in its shadow without so much as a touch of your brakes. Because cars defer right of way to bikes to such an extreme, an aggressive bike can easily forgo waiting its rightful turn if it finds a small opening. Cars will stop in the middle of the intersection just to let that overeager cyclist through without harm.

That's the skinny on Davis bike traffic. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility, so don't forget to treat the little people in cars and on foot with their due respect. In our privileged position we should strive to make traffic flow as smoothly and efficiently as possible to the extent that it doesn't interfere with our own self-interest.

End of Summer Melancholy

2009-09-16T12:22:00.001-07:00

There's always a certain melancholy associated with the break between school and summer. Part of it was mixed feelings about school, but more of it, I'm now realizing, was the loneliness from most friends being on vacation. At the same time, it's also a time for unprecedented partying if you're still in Davis. There's nothing like a half-blacked-out night followed by a long day with nothing to do and no personal contact for some sobering self-reflection. Also, a lot of emotion comes from the hunger from forgetting to eat, which happens when you spend an entire day doing nothing.

It's the kind of melancholy that makes you squirm. Like you want/need something so desperately but you don't even know what it is that you want. That makes you want to do anything to slow the flood of thought. It's the kind of melancholy that makes you feel physically sick, and by the way I might be coming down with something. Sleep is always the most obvious solution, but part of having nothing to do is being irritatingly well-rested. Other solutions are television, talking with friends in person or via telecommunication, and drinking yourself silly.

Sometimes I want to lash out and hurt people around me. It's not an emotional desire so much as a cognitive one. I feel like people take my self-possession for granted and that their lack of control is attributable to laziness on their parts. And maybe, maybe, if you took the same liberties as they do they would respond and treat you with all the attention that you don't get but feel you deserve. But I've found that you cannot get away with the actions of others if you aren't in the same headspace as they are. If you do something malicious on intellectual whim that other people do in passion, you will be held accountable in ways that the passionate person won't be. In short, the world expects of us what we can give. Furthermore, and this should be obvious to everyone: everyone sometimes thinks they deserve more attention than they do, and to base short term actions with long-term consequences on angst and whim is rarely a sound course of action.

Why Having a Girlfriend is Awesome

2009-08-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Someone to go to the farmers market with

Physical contact

I'm allowed to stare.

Another kind of shampoo in my rotation

Lazy Saturdays

Help on Restaurant City

Cooking from recipes

Summer's Nights

2009-08-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

There's no common time so romantic as a summer's night. This is even more true in Davis, where night is the only comfortable time of the day. You may think I'm being dramatic, you may think I'm not being fair, but it's been true to me for years. Ignoring human-made holidays and momentary variances in weather, when you're really talking about the time and not anything else, there is nothing so persistently magical as when the land is cool and dark. The possibilities for mischief and holy moments stretch out like fingers across a wide, rounded back.

My obsession with music has passed. It came to me in the morning, ravaged me all day, and went along its way in the evening. Now that it's night, I'm not sure I'm sad it has gone nor am I convinced that it won't return, but I'm glad it came and left me full of color and taste. I'm haunted by its echos. Not the myriad minor bands that I strove to categorize and appreciate, but by the great bands, the bands that formed the only recognizable soundtrack to my college experience.

I'm finally riding my new bike Smoky again. He's inky black like night and dirty like me in summer. Road bikes are such a pleasure to ride. The other bikes get you from place to place, but without the exhilaration of Mercury's speed.

There's something creepy about the progression of summer nights from late spring to early fall. It likely has to do with the apprehension I've viewed the end of all things with, particularly things so open and beautiful as summer. Even now, I'm sensing the approach of September in the dark air. A sweeter smell, maybe? Not like spring's heady pollen, but a deeper, melancholy, more earnest kind of sweetness that has replaced high summer's smell of baking dry tan grass.

On Media

2009-08-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

This post is not inspired by the death of Walter Cronkite. In fact, he can be only viewed as the catalyst of this post in the most roundabout of ways. I've been planning on writing this for a long while, and the last person I planned on mentioning was the iconic anchorman of someone else's generation. I am, after all, generationally-minded, and this is a commentary on the media of my generation, not my parents'. However, it would not have been without Walter Cronkite's death that Jon Stewart would be named America's Most Trusted Newscaster, and if that isn't a headline worthy to catalyze this post, I don't know what is.

When I started high school, I started to read the Los Angeles Times. I read the front page and the funnies practically every day for those four years. I'd delve deeper into the paper as time permitted and every week I read the Food section. The Times was one of my great high school loves.

With a firm understanding of political events gleaned from the paper, I started to watch the Daily Show my senior year. It inspired me to pay attention to mainstream TV News when my parents watched it. I finally had an explanation for why public discourse was so stilted and myopic. I realized that the events told in the Times were only half of the story, how events were extruded through televisions into people's brains was an incredibly important component to understanding public opinion. You see, most people's only source of news comes from the major TV News networks.

Never mind the "rich people control the world through media" bullshit, TV News is just not very informative. I never really watched it because it was boring. It took five or ten minutes for the TV to tell me what I could have gleaned in thirty seconds from skimming a news article. During "breaking news", a similar quantity of information is conveyed over the course of a few hours. Worst of all, the feedback between giving the people what they want and people wanting what they know produces what's known as the news cycle. And of course like a sorority house, all the networks' cycles sync up so that every channel provides a practically identical set of stories.

This willingness to follow results in a hulking mass of media might that answers to the whims of chance or whoever is smart enough to lead it around, and this kind of media tends to amplify the public's natural fickleness and retard their critical thinking. The truth is that mainstream media does not appreciably help the left nor the right. Rather, it changes the rules by which they play. If a trumped up scandal can be dropped on one's opponent at the opportune time, such that that is all anybody's talking about on election day, plus ten points for you!

Thus, it came to pass that I blamed the media more than the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq. I watched coverage of Hurricane Katrina with disgust. I found the overplayed empathy obnoxious. Anderson Cooper should try harder to be an anchorman, not a saint.

When it comes down to it, it's the show that once followed profane puppets that tells it like it is and challenges both the people they report on and the populace they serve to think. It's not surprising that the Daily Show's preeminence is not obvious to everyone. The show's reliance on the world to provide material means that it is inconsistent and there's always plenty of low brow humor, but damn, when John Stewart went on Crossfire, I was starry-eyed with admiration. The man single-handedly had a show cancelled, but it wasn't his power that impressed me, it was his unabashed intellegence and his willingness to call a spade a spade on the rare occasion it's necessary. It was the same qualities that make him a such an amazing interviewer. I won't pretend like all of his interviews are riveting, but at their best they are the most intelligent conversations on television.

On a more somber note, my first media love is dying. The LA Times is smaller every time I go back home. I hear the quality has suffered too. When I left for school, I planned to read the Christian Science Monitor online in lieu of the Times. It's a well-written, relatively unbiased (certainly more neutral than the Times) and most importantly free online newspaper for those of you raising eyebrows at the name. Unfortunately, school was distracting and reading online just wasn't the same. I mean it's great if you want to google current events for something specific, but to get a good, reputable overview is a little trickier. Maybe I'm being picky or maybe the CS Monitor just isn't as good, but I think I'd read the news more if the Los Angeles Times was delivered to my door, skinny or not.

I think what will really happen is that smaller papers will stop printing altogether and having the paper delivered to your doorstep will become a luxury. I don't think the fee vs advertising business model question has been settled, but I and my age bracket certainly prefer advertising, so I hope time will see that win out.

Amateur blogs like this aren't a good source of news, but they're a nice digestion point, and some blogs like the Davis Vanguard are going professional and competing with established newspapers for quality reporting. I think a little turnover will be beneficial to everyone except some mediocre newspapers.

Birthday Time!

2009-07-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

It's been a year now since I started the Dilettante. A lot has changed. I kinda expected my Senior year to be the best year of college the way it was the best year of high school. I mean, my last year of high school was really awesome, like if there were four beans and three were dark and one was shiny white, that would be my senior year of high school. So I went into this year with an expectation for it to be the best of college, but conscientious of the probability that this senior year wouldn't shine on the same order of magnitude as the last one.

And of course, that's exactly what happened. It was a good year, and this blog certainly played a role in making it good. What do you call it when the act of detection alters what you're trying to detect? Last summer I had every reason to be relaxed, happy, and optimistic. I had a research job that was pleasant and engaging, I'd just turned twenty-one and was exploring the world of alcoholic beverages with Brandon and I had plenty of free time to write blogs and do stuff to write blogs about.

This summer is different. In some ways it is better, but it certainly isn't as unremittingly pleasant as the last. I've got more free time, but it feels like less. I've got a girlfriend that I adore, but she spent the first month of summer in Spain and I missed her like crazy. And of course, there's the whole no-longer-being-a-student thing. I'm looking for a job this summer. I need something to support myself with and something to fill out my research experience for grad apps. That need has cast something of a pall on the rest of this summer.

Obviously my post rate hasn't returned to last summer's steady clip, but you're reading this, so obviously I've managed to keep this blog alive and limping along. Coincidentally, the Dilettante reached two thousand unique hits almost simultaneous with its birthday, so I think all in all I have something to be proud of here. I hope you're still enjoying my writing. I certainly am, when I get around to it. Remember to comment when you feel inspired. Feedback is essential to improvement, and it doesn't hurt my ego either.

Eulogy for the Ash Maiden

2009-06-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

The Ash Maiden was stolen in May. I'd forgotten where I'd parked her, so by the time I'd checked all of the possible places she could have been, realizing that she had been stolen was a little anticlimactic. She was locked, but that's never seemed to stop professional bike thieves before, so I didn't have any illusions.

Bike theft statistics tell us that the average Davis student will have their bicycle stolen once in the four years they attend university, so my experience is in perfect keeping with the norm. I hear about stolen bikes on a periodic basis on Facebook. People always seem so angry, finding the most horrible words they can think of to describe the faceless thief. I haven't been so disposed. My reaction to finding the Ash Maiden was not anger, just sadness.

My lock was flimsy, but I wasn't going to get a new one. When I got her I figured she was either too shabby to steal or I'd suck it up. I have no regrets.

I can't imagine what the thief must have looked like or been thinking when they took her. They must have had good taste. When I tell people of my loss I have either been met with "I'm so, so sorry. I know how much that bike meant to you" or "They took that piece of junk?" Actually, the Maiden was probably worth a hundred and fifty dollars. That value was stoked by the popularity of converting old road bikes to fixies. Anyways, I hope she ends up in a good home.

No object has ever so eloquently embodied my four years at Davis. Biking has been my simplest pleasure and substitute for wave riding. Both Howard and Brandon eventually switched to road bikes after seeing my passion for riding the Maiden long and hard every day. Incidentally this is also the conclusion of the longest-running inside joke we had. The Maiden embodied our household's dumpster-chic aesthetic with her pervasive rust, grinding gears, hand-made bullhorns and junky extra reflectors.

Early in my freshman year I rode with Caius from Daly City to Santa Cruz, an amazing adventure that deserves retelling on this forum. In my four years riding her, I crashed four times. In no instance did I collide with another bicyclist or car-- every one was completely on me. Two were from taking turns too aggressively, the other two for occupying my hands with things and then trying to brake one-handed. I never got to compete in an organized race on her. I never biked the entire length of the American River Parkway, or to Berkeley on her. I hardly ever rode her with a proper bike light.

I bought a new bike on Craigslist, a black road bike for $180. I dropped another $80 on some basic accessories-- bike light, a decent seat, a new inner tube, a lock. We're provisionally calling him Smoky, because he totally reeks of cigarettes. I didn't even know bicycles could carry smells. The change of gender was conscious, btw.

Max's Black Bayou

2009-06-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Black Bayou is a drink inspired by swamp water. Dark, fecund and mysterious, I imagine drinking this with the sunrise after a long night. It tastes dirty in all the right ways. To make, you'll need:

dark roast coffee at room temperature (stale/burnt coffee is fine, just make it strong)
bourbon
pastis or other anise-flavored liquor
peychaud's bitters
preserved fig in syrup

Fill a mug half full of old coffee, toss in a shot of bourbon, a dash of peychaud's, a dollop of pastis (a quarter shot or so) and a preserved fig. Sweeten to taste with fig preserve syrup. Make sure to use strong coffee, otherwise it'll taste a little dilute.

The coffee is earthy, the bourbon is woody, and the anise and bitters are herbal. Don't knock it till you try it. It's really kind of a soothing drink. My thanks to my dad and, as always, the Apple House tasting team for their help.

My UC Davis Graduation

2009-06-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

I graduated friday from UC Davis with a Bachelor of Sciences in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. This Fall, I apply for graduate school, but right now I enter the troubled American workforce. I'm applying for lab-oriented jobs for the coming year in Davis to support myself and bolster my grad application.

However my fortunes turn out, I'm going to have a lot more time. Juggling heavy coursework, friends, worms, and romance has taken its toll on this blog. In the next few weeks I intend to post a series of college retrospectives.

Food Pairings: A Pauper's Pretension

2009-05-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

I recently went morel hunting with the Davis Mycological Society in the low Sierra. After arriving home with my quarter pound take, I searched recipes to make with morels looking for an easy food pairing to create a meal for friends. To my disappointment, the reams of morel recipes that I found were uniformly built around college-unfriendly ingredients like foie gras, veal and caviar. The very idea that morels might fall into the hands of a pauper like myself seems to have escaped the folks at the Food Network and other recipe sites.

My haul:

The gourmet revels in the delicacy of outlandishly priced ingredient paired with still more outlandishly priced ingredient, but I was taught a different sort of gourmet; a gourmet more in keeping with American ideals. Brilliant food pairings are not limited to gourmet ingredients and establishments. Ratatouille is a peasant dish highly regarded by the culinary elite (notably in the movie of the same name), built around the synergy of bell peppers, squash and eggplant. So too with the Cajun "holy trinity" of peppers, parsley/celery and onions. That world-class food can only be had at world-class prices is a myth of gigantic proportions perpetrated by ignorance and pretension.

Great cuisine is simply about food combinations that sing. They are frequently as simple and ordinary as peanut butter and jelly or Santa's favorite midnight snack, milk and cookies. Too often do people forget that they need not look far to find grace and delight in food. I'd like to share with you some of my culinary discoveries that have brought me cheer through my college career.

While the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is already an American classic in its own right, there's nothing like washing it down with tea to add another dimension to your next noon banquet, as I discovered last summer. I particularly enjoyed "natural" peanut butter, apricot preserves and whole wheat bread with earl grey tea. I like that "natural" peanut butter doesn't have any sugar added and that whole wheat isn't overtly sweet in conjunction with the extra-sweetness found in preserves, because it emphasizes flavor separation. The apricot is brightened by the citrus oils in earl grey, and the tea complements the nuttiness and dryness of the peanuts and bread. If you normally freeze your bread, you'll find that toasting it also adds to the ensemble's flavor.

The single most important dish in my college diet has been potatoes with cheese. I take one large or two small russet potatoes, poke fork holes in them every inch, and nuke them 4-4.5 minutes one side and 2-2.5 on the reverse. I slice about 3 slots into them and insert slices of medium cheddar cheese (pregrated cheese won't smell as good or layer heavily enough). I add cheese until its about 2/3 the volume of the potato. I nuke it again until the cheese is gooey (about one minute). The dish goes great with beer. But beware, the combination has proven to be a powerful narcotic. This sort of lunch almost invariably ends with deciding to take a nap.

A classic meal passed down from my Wisconsin heritage is beer and bratwurst with rice and sauerkraut. I get my bratwurst from the Davis Meat Lab when I can, because it's great value. I brown the sausage in a pan for a couple of minutes, then add a can of beer. I check back to replace water and turn the sausage every fifteen minutes or so until they're cooked through. Ideally, I let the beer cook boil down to a thick goo and use it on the sausage and rice. That stuff is delicious. Serve it all with another beer. I've found light lagers to work best.

A snack I've enjoyed since I discovered prunes has been eating them with superdark chocolate. You can buy canisters of store brand prunes for cheap, and they have better flavor than the expensive ones you find at the farmer's market. You can find cheap superdark chocolate at Trader Joe's in packages called "Pound Plus". Seventy percent cocoa solids is the way to go. Just take a nibble of each and let the magic unfold.

I've also found that coke goes phenomenally with coffee. Pepsi Kona and Coca-Cola Blak are testaments to industry's awareness of the synergy, but both products failed to catch on in the US. I like to alternate sips of coffee with coke. Hot quenched by cold, bitter by sweet and vice versa. Their dark flavors meld beautifully.

Most recently, I discovered the wonder of anchovies on pizza. No frozen brands sell anchovy pizza, so I keep my cupboard stocked. The true wonder of anchovies is their interaction with pepperoni. The similar flavors expand on each other and set off the pizza at large.

The Beginning of Summer, The End of Spring

2009-05-26T17:52:00.000-07:00

I caught a couple of deals on fruit this weekend at the grocery store that had the distinct whiff of summer.

Ever since my time at Albertsons, I've eagerly awaited the few weeks of early summer that raspberries are sold for under three dollars a pint. This was the first of those weeks and once more I reveled in the delicacy of my favorite of all fruits. I also bought some mangos on the cheap and made a mental note that strawberries have hit their bottom-out price of a dollar per pound.

Lastly and perhaps most significantly, cherries all over Davis have acquired the red hue that signals the conclusion of Spring Quarter. I took as many cherries as I could carry back from my Gardening, Orchards and Land field trip today, stuffing my belly, my pockets, my camera case, and my pant cuffs with the rosy jewels.

I associate this time with my homeland's May Gray/June Gloom, about a month of overcast weather that once signaled the end of school and the coming of summer. The end of school season has always had a grim psychological potency to it, but that's true now more than ever.

I graduate June 12th and a million pop culture sentiments about the mixed emotions that come with graduation swirl around in my mind (The Graduate cheif among them). I missed the application deadline for graduate school, so I've decided to find a lab tech job in Davis to support myself for the year and apply to grad schools this fall. I just resigned my lease on Saturday with my roommates. I picked up tickets for my family to attend commencement last Wednesday. I make a final presentation of my lab research next Friday. I wrote up my Curriculum Vitae on Tuesday.

Damn, graduation's scary. I need some cherries.

The Thirtieth Hour

2009-05-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

I pulled an all-nighter not for my essay, not for a stupid game I'm newly addicted to, but for the inspiration to write you this. Feel blessed. Actually don't. I was kidding.

I love the loopy feeling of being fucked up by fatigue. It might be my drug of choice if it weren't for the vague notion of my head slowly imploding that assures me with a whispering voice of the certitude that I will come crashing down tomorrow.

Candy tastes amazing and I'm hardly concerned about anything. Perhaps tellingly, my most pressing concern right now is the progress of the aforementioned pernicious game. I have the craziest ideas and then I notice they aren't that crazy. Everything's at once magnificent and dull. Like, one of these jelly beans tastes like carrots and it's wonderful.

My NPB professor is talking about the horizontal vs vertical tradeoff in sound localization and all I can think is, "Why doesn't the owl have three ears?"

On Partisan Differences

2009-04-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

This is an edited version of a comment I made regarding my friend Kern's blog post comparing liberal and conservative ideologies.

Both parties/philosophies appeal to a range of socioeconomic classes and intellectual levels. It's a common fallacy of both sides to only notice the lowest level of the opposition's appeal. Rush Limbaugh continuously explains to his listenership why liberalism has a more basic, superficial appeal. I think most of my readers will find that Rush appeals to, in turn, an intellectual level beneath us. That's not to say his criticisms of liberalism are invalid. They are valid. He's just selecting the dumbest, most extreme targets within the liberal camp.

Taken too far, it might sound like there aren't differences between Democrats and Republicans or Liberalism and Conservatism--and there are. The media structure is a case in point. However, we mustn't forget that both parties must necessarily appeal to the lowest common denominator (and the highest) to stay afloat, albeit through different but equally reprehensible means.

Part of my generation's confusion is caused by the fact that the parties act differently depending on whether they're in or out of power. The parties are generally more hypocritical and aggressive when they're in power.

Remember that at the ideologies' cores lie different foundational assumptions about the world. Liberals assume that glitches of the free market are efficiently repaired by bureaucratic intervention. They assume people will do things whether they're illegal or not. They assume people need help to survive hardship and to rise to the top. They assume that laws reflect realities.

Conservatives assume that bureaucracy is less efficient than free market. They assume laws proceed from morals. They assume laws are effective. They assume that enabling is the greater danger to not helping. They assume people will survive hardship and that cream rises to the top.

All of those assumptions are flawed, but grounded in seeds of truth. Frequently, liberals and conservatives battle over the position of an optimization curve (ie the Laffer curve) that is poorly defined. In the absence of solid statistics pointing out the obvious answer to a dilemma, people resort to their assumptions, and this is where most political disagreements originate--from the gray areas. If it was black and white, we'd be in agreement.

Picnic Day

2009-04-25T23:52:00.000-07:00

So last week was Picnic Day, the greatest annual event in Davis. Every year a hundred thousand people or so flock to the university's (and city's) open house. Live music blasts from five stages at any given moment, all of the departments put on events and every imaginable animal show finds a place here. Undergraduates wander drunkenly through crowds of visiting families. This year my family came; that is, my sister, mom and the Norrises, family friends whose daughter is a freshman here. Everybody slept in my living room and everybody was delightful.

I joined KDVS for the Picnic Day Parade. The weather was a perfect, cloudless low 80 degrees (the last one I was in was a sodden death march).

I thanked Allison for babysitting my family and began to show them around. The sheepdog trials are the most awesome event at Picnic Day, which is saying something.

We lounged in the grass and watched the incredible spectacle. The dogs work like their lives depend on it.

I slipped off to chat with to Jill and her mom, who were by then pleasantly tipsy. We lounged in the grass some more and her mom, Ra, snapped a couple of pictures of the two of us. This one was a keeper.

I met back up with my unit for some more grass-lounging as we listened to the Battle of the Bands, where school marching bands take turns playing songs until they succumb to exhaustion.

I later showed the Norrises my radio station, capping off my favorite Picnic Day yet.

On Values

2009-04-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

People unconsciously cultivate their sense of self-worth through their assignment of value. They tend to value the traits they possess. Thus, the meter they judge the world by shows them in the most favorable light.

I value cleverness, curiosity and rationality because I perceive myself to possess those traits. When I judge others, I usually find myself superior in the qualities I value. I don't value organization, athletic prowess or piety very much because while I can see the usefulness of such traits, I do not have them.

I see this tendency in everyone: successful entrepreneurs value business savvy, stylish people value fashion sense and pilots value good flying. While such worldviews are not objectively correct, they serve a vital purpose in individuals' psyches.

It works both ways, of course. Striving for a quality tends to enhance it and that fixation tends to positively distort the quality's worth. This is useful, because it has a tendency to encourage people to develop their unique talents. The artist works to become more creative and the scientist to become more observant.

There is a crucial exception to this tendency. Whenever individuals strive to be something they're not, they act out the axillary to the self-worth principle. This axillary is less influential, but it is also vital in regulating human life. Poor people aspiring to wealth, cubicle-bound employees writing the great American novel and introverts desiring charisma all provide for motion and adaptation in themselves and society.

The balance between these two tendencies mostly leaves people with a net sense of self-worth, but not everyone. I won't pretend like I understand depression, but I will clarify that these are tendencies, not rules impervious to circumstance.

A Slice of Good Friday Mania

2009-04-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Today is Good Friday and I feel good. Really good. One cup of coffee and I feel like a demigod: potent, wise and I can practically see Fortune's broad grin beaming down at me. If this is what cocaine feels like, I ought never to try it.

I'm surprised it took me this long to find coffee. My first tentative steps towards the drink left me jittery. Somehow, its effect changed once I drank it with frequency. My hat is off to the people who predicted that. A coffee addiction sounds like fun. I haven't acquired one yet, but I hear it takes a little time.

My neurobiology professor is talking about sodium channels and action potentials and all I can do is silently laugh at the the phrase "refractory period". I wonder if I'm the only one in class who finds that uproarious. I guess information transmission is a beautiful thing...

If I was born to be anything, it was a critic. I love to make fun of people. Of course, it's a sign of familiarity and affection, but that's always been a tough sell for people who didn't grow up in a family like mine. Maybe one of the hangups is the ambivalence implicit in my critiques-- I'm as likely to say something flattering without prompting as harsh. I impose objectivity on unusual circumstances and it throws people off.

Sensualist Dream

2009-04-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

My fellow blogger Rob challenged some friends to write a paragraph with the title "Sensualist Dream", whatever we thought it should be. Here's my submission.

Curled up in my bed, comforter wrapped around me, I gradually become conscious of the world. I can hear rain on the roof and sense the light of the muted sky. I am curled up, wrapped around my blanket and my blanket is wrapped around me. The walls are insubstantial, they are only half there. Now only a third, now a quarter. Soon I will forget there were walls at all. I am a cloud, floating on the sea, drifting away. I notice delicate conformational changes in my cloud. Finely tuned responses to invisible forces around me, my form moves in perfect concert with my environment. A passing bird wouldn't suspect my cloud as anything but ordinary. My cloud begins to take interpretive liberties with its reciprocation, flowing more and more freely, assuming wilder and wilder forms. Maybe a giraffe, now a ballerina, now a simple, beautiful girl. Her very curves caress and embrace me wholly. I linger on that moment. The pattering rain reminds me of the preciousness of every moment. I think of the dew-cool land stretching out in all directions. I think of the hills near the bay, green with rain, rolling endlessly, hiding oaks in their seams, and the blessed inhabitants of that Eden, the fluffy sheep. The fluffy sheep don't believe in time. I don't either. The fluffy sheep bah in unison, at first very quietly, but with increasing volume until it feels as if the entire world has joined in. The fluffy sheep have crowned me king. King of the dew-cool grass, king of the sky, king of the hills and of the oaks hidden in their seams. King of all things conceived, king of all the worlds pulsing, exhuding, emanating from my cloud. My clouds' wisps are fractals. Worlds within worlds, thoughts within thoughts, my realm is bounded cozily by infinity. I take to tracing the outline of my realm. The vast expanse yawns ahead of my walking figure. My pace quickens. Faster and faster, until I am rushing with my thoughts sprawling rampant alongside me, like a stampede of animals fleeing wildfire, the desperate glint of animal fear in all their eyes. Squirrels, rabbits, deer and bears alongside each other, fur flying, trampling each other, the desperate agony of flight overshadowed only by the threat of fiery death. Outlines of some animals blur into phantom streaks of outreaching terror, others burst into flame, flying like torches through the night. I can hear the torchlight like a million needles, like grim laughter. Hopelessness grips me and my will falters. I allow the wildfire to overtake me. Like a wave, it overtakes me all at once. Yet, it does not burn. The flames licking my flesh are pleasantly warm. I lean back into the feeling. The flames lick over all my body. I close my eyes and withdraw into my mind, searching for patterns in the sensation. The heat intensifies gradually, almost imperceptibly, to a pleasant burn, then hotter. Pleasure begins to flicker back and forth with pain, but still the heat grows. I fight to keep my attention on the good in the feeling, but the intensity makes my task increasingly difficult. I can only perceive the heat as pain. Barely tolerable, my skin begins to sear. Every nerve ending in my body screams with pain. My mind's order begins to break down and writhe. My mind joins in screaming chorus with my skin. My muscles capitulate soon after, thrashing against the unbearable scorch. Then, just as suddenly as that wave of wildfire had overtaken me, the inferno vanishes, leaving all but the vestigial glow of heat on skin. Like a sunburn, I feel all my skin radiate heat off, to my blanket, and reflect back onto my skin. I bask in my oven of afterglow, pondering life's caprice.

Max's Old-Fashioned Cocktail

2009-03-17T22:28:00.001-07:00

Given its name, the Old-Fashioned is unsurprisingly among the most venerated of cocktails. I was initially discouraged by my spectacular failure at making them early last summer (using an abridged form of the IBA recipe). It wasn't until I went home for Christmas break and my Dad made some for the family that it felt like I had even the remotest understanding of the drink.

There are intense debates concerning what constitutes a "real" Old-Fashioned and recipes vary wildly. Some call for many citrus fruits, some call for just a lemon twist for garnish. Some specify that you muddle those garnishes, most not. Some include sweet vermouth, but most only have Maraschino for color. Some demand adding soda water while others damn to hell those infidels who would do so. Bitters are used for most recipes and the whiskey choice varies considerably from Canadian to American Sour Mash to Bourbon to Rye.

My father's recipe included a juiced slice each of lime, lemon and orange, with liberal application of maraschino juice, Jim Beam, and diet 7up. The result was rather confused and watery for my taste, but it did impress on my mind the importance of citrus fruit, the lack of which had doomed my first attempt at the drink. I surveyed the various online recipes and came to understand the ins and outs of making this classic cocktail. The defining principle is the balance of liquor, sour, sweet and bitter within the drink. The resulting drink is too well-rounded to be edgy, but too beautiful to ever truly go out of style.

I put together my own recipe using Meyer Lemons, a citrus fruit that I adore in general and that is particularly suited to Old-Fashions. I found that Rye works better with Meyers' floral aromas and I decided that muddling is deliciously Californian because of the emphasis on fruit. As always, my regards to the Apple House Taste-Testing Team (aka my roommates).

1 large slice Meyer lemon
1 teaspoon granulated white sugar
1 Maraschino cherry
1 teaspoon Maraschino cherry juice (you can substitute the sugar with a couple more teaspoons)
2 dashes bitters
ice
1 shot Old Overholt Rye Whiskey

Add lemon, sugar, cherry, juice and bitters, then muddle ingredients, juicing and crushing the lemon and dissolving the sugar. Mostly fill the glass with ice, then pour whiskey over the concoction and stir till ingredients are mixed and ice equilibriates. Enjoy!

The California Aggie

2009-03-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

UC Davis is not a school with a reputation for journalism. It shouldn't be expected to have a stellar student periodical. Yet it is slightly embarrassing that I myself am a better writer than most of the California Aggie's staff. And it's not just me. Guest editorials and letters to the editor consistently outshine the general staff's contributions.

Two Aggie columnists have something interesting to say and are more-or-less capable of articulating it. Michelle Rick works the sassy/clever approach for her column. Though the approach is deeply cliché and sometimes interferes with the actual content of her articles, she otherwise executes it well and, let's face it, it's a medium whose principle objective is to entertain rather than to inform. While I appreciate her talent, her flippancy and posed coolness have earned her one of my friends' undying hatred. Lior Gotesman on the other hand is a solid, if stereotypical, advocate of philosophy. He's hostile to thoughtless consumerism and passionate about the meaning of life. It would put me to sleep if it wasn't interestingly written.

The columnists have improved since last year to the point of consistent mediocrity (except columnist/editor-in-chief Richard Procter who is an excellent writer). There is no low hanging fruit for me to pounce on. The same cannot be said of the Aggie's editorial section.

Zach Han is the worst writer I have ever seen published. He generally chooses topics immediately after they have been beaten to death by mainstream media. He then manages to demonstrate misunderstanding of even TV news' terribly oversimplified explanations of current events. It's as if he took a fractured understanding of a Fox news report, applied some ill-conceived restructuring and then imposed some asinine moral summation he'd heard from a passerby. To add insult to injury, he goes out of his way to use big words and complex sentence structures beyond his apparent reach. The result is a series of syntactical and logical errors that confound the flow of his insipid conclusions. I am appalled by Zach Han's writing on so many levels that just thinking about it makes me see red.

In diametric opposition to Han is the finest Aggie writer I have come across, one James Noonan. There is no minority perspective so persecuted or valuable at a liberal university as the intelligent conservative's and James Noonan is living proof. He writes articulately and fearlessly, exposing hypocrisy and waste in our university and country. Noonan is no partisan hack, though. One of my favorite articles was his caustic assault on Bill O'Reilly.

Unfortunately, Noonan and Procter are in the stark minority at our campus paper. Most Aggie readers pick it up for the Sudoku rather than its bumbling calendar section, comic strips, articles, columns or commentary on world events. I find myself reading it more to mentally shred the writing than for information. Instead, I've taken to scrounging the faculty and staff's weekly periodical, Dateline UC Davis.

In contrast to the Aggie, Dateline UC Davis is interesting, competent, informative, coherently structured and unobtrusively written. It is especially good for finding seminars, guest lectures and Mondavi Center events. It also finds fascinating campus research to report and thoughtfully probes into campus trends and occurrences. By trying for less, Dateline is ultimately more useful to students than the paper the students directly fund.

Dateline is produced by the full-time UC Davis News Service, so its professionalism shouldn't be surprising. I just have trouble legitimizing the university staff having access to higher quality campus information than students. Furthermore, I have trouble understanding why the Aggie can't tap into the student potential that letters to the editor assure me exists.

Davis Rain

2009-02-28T23:24:00.000-08:00

My freshman year at college I wasn't sure that it was possible to get sick of rain. It probably isn't in Southern California. That winter it rained for a month straight and in a brief moment of weakness I yearned for the sun's glare.

It's been raining for about three weeks now without indication of letting up. I'm still enjoying it. My favorite place in the house has become our bathroom because it's the only room with a skylight. You can hear each raindrop hit the glass and gaze up at the mottled grey sky. Never has pondering on the throne been so prime.

I photographed a drippy faucet at work in the Chem Dispensary. Davis water is so hard that most faucets on campus have an impressive encrustation around their taps. This one was particularly spectacular.

The soil in Davis is completely waterlogged. Every pore seems to be oozing moisture and green has been sprouting in unusual places. The weather's starting to warm in spite of the relentless rain, some trees are blooming and in between rainstorms I'm noticing some telltale signs of the Davis spring.

We're not there yet, but the hints have gotten me thinking wistfully of the coming season's heady atmosphere and raucous enthusiasm. It's the time when we revolt against winter's heavy cares and stop giving a shit about school. It's the time when possibilities stretch out. Indeed, spring is the season of Picnic Day.

I won't, as is fashion, be getting wasted this Picnic Day. My mother's visiting. Surely we can appreciate Picnic Day as a multifaceted event that can be enjoyed in many ways? I'm crossing my fingers for sunny weather, though. That KDVS parade I participated in a couple of years ago turned out to be a death march.

On Waste and Creativity

2009-02-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

Happy One Thousand Views to my remaining loyal readers out there. I wish the Dilettante had arrived at this auspicious occasion in better shape. I wish my posting wasn't so infrequent as of late, but I assure you that my priorities are honorable and well-considered.

Today John Lazur and I sparred over the concepts of wasted time and uncaptured creativity. I will confess, the conversation struck a nerve in me.

It came to a head because I was in a bad mood. We humans are essentially empirical beings. Our actions generally follow trial and error rather than active thought. Moods are consequently essential for dislodging our path from false minimums. So though John had been harping on me for awhile, it wasn't until today that I brought the issue to a head.

One of the most haunting aspects of my college experience has been the dogged feeling that I have neither grown nor improved upon the flawed person I arrived at Davis with. This is partly a product of the wholesale romanticization of the college experience perpetrated by our elders. Many people recall their college years being formative ones that combined crazy adventures with dizzying intellectual growth.

There was nothing so depressing my freshman year as reflecting on how much I must have been missing. It was consequently with considerable joy that I discovered and embraced KDVS and music the next year. Having an organization to identify with and access to amazing resources, I felt that KDVS was the first thing in college that I was doing right.

The crash in my grades precipitated by this newfound outlet seems in retrospect to have been inevitable. The boundless possibilities that I was so keenly aware of suddenly came crashing around my head as I was forced to recognize my own limitations. This was exacerbated by my realization that Davis was short of interesting, intelligent people. Apparently those with the big ideas, those that could get themselves past the bullshit and hang-ups of pseudointellectualism, had been handily whisked away to better colleges. I knew such people existed because I had known them in high school, but I found that Davis students were overwhelmingly either depressingly stupid or depressingly tunnel-visioned.

I found exceptions, though. One by one I cobbled together a collection of outliers that transcended the Davis norm. These people were about as smart as me and nearly as unique. Leo Protas was witty and affable, though we never completely connected. Adam Kendall and John Lazur were hung up on their brand of militant atheism, but were otherwise fascinating individuals. Allison was of course perfectly stimulating, if inaccessible. The two girls I've dated in the last couple of years, Kylise and Jill, also were dynamic discoveries of mine as well as a few other individuals that I never capitalized on. These exceptions ended up being impossible to congeal into a group, but my essential needs for thoughtful conversation had been fulfilled through patience and a keen eye.

That said, it has been remarkable how few hijinks my roommates and I have gotten up to considering that we have no shortage of ideas. We never formed a band. We never got anything to grow but a bit of sad garlic in our double-size plot at the Experimental College Gardens. We never started a bike repair shop out of our apartment. We never syndicated a "modern art" chain museum with forged art by fictional artists. We never hosted a clandestine bike race. We never used the library computers to fake ad hits for revenue on Howard's blog. We never fixed the stable of abandoned bikes that we "reclaimed" from campus. We never dressed up as each of our favorite Starcraft units for Halloween. We never killed and ate a duck from the Arboretum. Verily, our active minds have been sorely wasted through our years at college.

I started this blog as an outlet for my creativity, but for every post on here there are two unused post ideas. The truth is that a terrifically low percentage of my creative ideas are ever brought to fruition. The process of creation is a painful, abortive one. Partly, it forces me to only try the most worthwhile among them, but there is also no process that reeks so desperately of waste as creation. Every nougat of inspiration that fails to connect, every plan too oversized for real life and every idea that doesn't receive due time weighs heavily on my mind.

I suppose that we must in hindsight content ourselves with the best we can do rather than the best we think we can do. However, I will be the first to advocate setting one's aim continuously above one's capabilities. Discontentment is the price we pay for productivity and it seems a minor one-- usually. When discontentment overwhelms us we must remind ourselves of the calculus we once made so carefully in plotting our life approach. We must remind ourselves that some variation in fortunes and morale are to be expected along the way, and that if we only trust to our former selves we will ride them out successfully. If we did our calculus correctly, there will be no bright sunlight on the other side, simply a manageable cloudiness. We will continue to take what solaces we may and we will march on into the future, bearing our continuing frustration as our continuing pride. Satisfaction is for the weak.

Craft Beer

2009-02-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

I have a new hero and his name is Ken Grossman. He just finished giving a guest lecture at my Introduction to Beer and Brewing class and he is the cofounder and owner of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. He's handsome too, a true American Hero. He sits on the right with Sierra's since-retired cofounder Paul Camusi.

This instigated the following recounting of my beer discoveries:

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale- With it's consummately American "Cascade" hops and striking bitterness, this beer played a major role in forging the style known as American Pale Ale. Though there are many close contenders for the best beer of this category, my house's taste-testing has firmly set this classic at the top of the heap.

Pilsner Urquell- I'm as much of a fan of drinking local as the next person, but you can't ignore the rest of the world and you certainly can't boycott a drink so self-assured and likeable as this. It's sweet yet balanced and perfectly approachable.

New Belgium's Skinny Dip- As is the tendency with New Belgium, the makers of Fat Tire, the malt has a fair bit of caramel, even bordering on subtle charring. It was that element in this summer ale that blew my mind with it's grilled vegetable undertones.

Gordon Biersch's Marzen- Another California beer institution, Gordon Biersch's Marzen is more accessible than Sierra's Pale Ale. It's sweet and fruity and malty. Recommended for those of you not yet entirely won over by beer.

Leffe- This Belgian beer completely baffled me at the get-go. It embodied everything I disliked about beer. It's corn syrupy and has a back-of-the-mouth bitterness that seems plain sneaky. Over the course of drinking it my assumptions underwent a paradigm shift. It's so bad it's good and it's so deliberately carried out that I can't help but admire it. That said, it's not the sort of thing I expect to buy much of.

Jill, who is no beer enthusiast, was elated at the beer and bought an entire six pack. Then she realized she didn't love Leffe as much as her memory had built it up. Take this as you will.

Shiner Bock- A lecture about various types of beer left me most excited about the existence of dark lagers, particularly Bocks. I went to the store and bought the only Bock on the shelf and it was glorious. I can't say anything about the merits of the brand due to my limited experience, but what a great style of beer.

Kirkland Beer- Howard came home from winter break with a selection of Kirkland beers. What will they think of next? Howard reported paying seventy five cents per bottle. As you might imagine the product was quite good but not definitive in any way. It's a great way to drink distinctive beer a greater proportion of the time.

As it is, our household vascillates between craft beer and mainstream lagers. I have nothing bad to say about domestic lagers, except that they taste much better if you haven't had them for a while (PBR in particular). My professor, Charles Bamforth, is always talking about how they are extremely finely made beers, though they have very little flavor. He explains that companies have little incentive to skimp on ingredients because ingredients compose a minor component of a beer's wholesale value and that the beers lack flavor because demand favors inoffensive beer. You silly, silly people.

25 Facts About Max

2009-02-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

Like so many things, my first reaction to the "25 Things" meme was haughty but after a few weeks continued exposure to people's various lists I came around. Without an obvious route to entertaining the audience I think writing about oneself is poor form. That may come as surprise considering my particularly intense self-love and the very fact that I write a blog. However, I feel that, properly done, blogs manage to entertain while simultaneously wallow in self-absorption. It's become apparent that "25 Things" share that quality. Thus, I present 25 Facts About Max:

1. I am didactic. I'm always explaining things to people whether or not they're curious, because if they aren't curious, they ought to be. I'm enriching their lives!

2. I am a critic. Like a movie critic, except of everything.

3. I love to argue. Or at least I have a hard time not instigating arguments and a hard time extricating myself from them. I enjoy the exchange of ideas and the friendly competition.

4. I love getting schooled in an argument. Of course I'm disconcerted at first, because that rarely happens, but it's nice to be reminded that I still have things to learn. Props to Aaron Robinson for schooling me in history this past October.

5. If I thought I had the talent my ideal job would be writing.

6. I'm so sick of hearing about and seeing Obama everywhere. Stop beating him to death! Nobody can hold up to these obscene expectations. He is not Jesus.

7. I bicycle everywhere and almost always take the stairs. This is motivated by impatience rather than by health or environmental considerations.

8. Apparently I have a bit of a lisp. I had no idea until this past summer when I was listening to a recording of my radio show and I mentioned to Brandon that it almost sounded like I had a lisp, and he was like, "Yeah, you do a little."

9. I'm an Eagle Scout. Everyone seems surprised to hear that one. Go figure...

10. I was taught to try anything once. I think my parents meant food, not everything. My dad was pretty disconcerted when I took a puff of his friend's cigar when offered, like I'd transgressed some bond of trust. I'm just extending the rule he taught me so well.

11. That said, addictive substances scare the crap out of me. It has only recently occurred to me that a coffee addiction might be a net positive.

12. I approach my life very analytically. I approach my politics very analytically. People tell me it comes off cold when I approach lifesaving legislation as a numbers game, who knew?

13. That said, I believe logic to be a flawed system. Socrates is a douche.

14. I am a moral relativist and do not believe that any principle is absolute.

15. I consider creativity to be a major component of intellect and I consider intellect to be the most important quality in a person.

16. I grew up in a household culture where we constantly made fun of eachother's quirks and flaws. I love people who can take that sort of abuse and I love still more those who can also dish it out.

17. In the early stages of my music obsession I sold my soul to allmusic.com for it's wisdom. Even now, you'll find my opinions of albums and artists to suspiciously mirror star ratings found on the site.

18. I'm fascinated by the androgyny of glam rock. I think it'd be totally badass to dress like the New York Dolls.

19. Four staples compose the majority of my calorie intake: frozen pizza, potatoes with cheese, chili with rice, and beer.

20. Freshman year I was named "honorary asian" by a group of asian kids on my floor, cause I was better with chopsticks and ate weirder stuff than they did. Later they revoked it, but it was for personal reasons. They just didn't like me anymore. Or maybe I sucked too much at Smash Bros...

21. I grew up helping my dad make wine, yet I prefer beer. Oh the shame. But wine is such a heavy drunk.

22. I own 31 vinyl LPs because it's trendy, but I don't even have a record player.

23. I think we are in the midst of the greatest golden age the world has ever seen.

24. The justification for every financial corner I cut (and I rarely buy required textbooks) is that I am saving up to travel.

25. My first kiss was within the last six months.

New Year's Update

2009-01-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've got a girlfriend. I've been dating Jillian Miller for a couple of months now and things are going very, very well. Those counting will realize that that makes Jill my first girlfriend, so on top of absolutely adoring her I am also flushed with the elation that comes when everything is brand new.

I'll be doing a lot of reading this quarter due to my humanities heavy course load. Good literature always makes me want to start writing. Not blogging, mind you, I've always wanted to write the next great American novel. I will too. I've already got the plot outline so now I'm just fleshing it out. It occurred to me that the basic outline is a straight rip from the Star Wars saga, but no worries, most literature is anyways.

After two months of riding Brandon's bike while I procrastinated fixing a simple flat, I'm finally back on the Ash Maiden. After Brandon's beautiful monstrosity, the Maiden feels like a toy in my hands. I forgot what it feels like to fly.

The Gift

2008-12-27T23:32:00.000-08:00

Christmas is about giving, among other things, and let me tell you, I totally get the whole "joy of giving" thing. I love to pick presents for people I know and love. I even vaguely like giving gifts to people I don't actually care about.

My favorite person to buy for is my sister and I give her props for the best gift I received this year: a garden gnome. Gifts like that remind me Christmas can be untainted by commercialism. Gifts don't have to be valuable to be personal and yet they don't have to be handmade to avoid the ominous specter of commercialism. While it is important to exchange gifts of comparable value with peers, the absolute monetary value of gift giving is fairly arbitrary. My sister and I have yet to spend twenty dollars on a gift for one another.

I also love receiving gifts, but not without reservations. I hate improperly chosen gifts ("white elephants") and I hate gift cards. Oh, how I hate gift cards. Gift cards manage to be both impersonal and impractical. Surely nobody really believes that a gift card to Starbucks is more personal than handing me cash? At least cash doesn't take up extra space in my wallet. Using gift cards is a chore, even in the lucky circumstance that I actually shop at the specified retailer.

As the joy of giving is double that of receiving, the horror of poor gift giving is double that of receiving bad gifts, so I hate being expected to choose something personal when I don't know my audience. In fact, the bane of my Christmas existence is the gift exchange for our large, extended family in Louisiana. In it I usually give terrible gifts and receive terrible gifts. It's not like we don't love each other, I just happen to live far away and see them infrequently. Additionally, there are massive age barriers to contend with. My cousins range from 13 to 31 and many of my aunts and uncles don't have children my age. The task is always a worthy challenge, though. I'm starting to think of finding appropriate, interesting semi-specific gifts as quite the art form.

One way or another, I hope you will reflect on the gifts you have given and received this Christmas season. Periodically we all forget to fully embrace the joy of giving and receiving, especially when we neglect to immerse ourselves in holiday movies.

Mammoth

2008-12-24T01:21:00.000-08:00

This weekend we went up to Mammoth. We came in with a storm forecast and hopes for some fresh powder.

Our first day on the slopes we witnessed as Mammoth Mountain was first wreathed and then consumed by a snow storm. You can see mom on the right and a rainbow (snowbow?) over the Mammoth lakes.

The second day Bri and I braved a full blown blizzard. I noticed during this trip that it is much easier to capture genuine smiles when people are genuinely having the time of their lives.

The white out conditions meant we could hardly see the snow we were skiing on and the crest winds nearly blew us over, but the conditions also meant some fantastic powder.

The next day we made our way home through the high desert, passing storm after storm.

Ten Favorite Movies

2008-12-09T18:25:00.000-08:00

These are my favorite movies, not the movies I deem to be "the greatest". That considered, the distinction is fairly trivial. They are ordered from top to bottom, first to tenth. On this list two are cliches of any favorite movie list, three more are undisputed classics and five were made since the millennium. Time will tell which of those will achieve immortality and to what degree the classics will endure, but before that happens, I will tell you why these movies are patently awesome.

There Will Be Blood- At the risk of jumping the gun, seeing how this movie came out less than a year ago, I think that this is the single greatest movie of the decade. Chugging, dark and horrifyingly vivid, this movie is a study of a man driven, like Citizen Kane before it.The film follows Daniel Plainview's ruthless rise to wealth as an oil baron in the California oil fields. It is clear that he will stop at nothing to fulfill his ambition and yet, the most terrifying moments of the movie are the glimmers of humanity, hastily concealed, that his character betrays. That we all have a little Daniel Plainview in us becomes simultaneously disturbing and perversely satisfying.

Star Wars IV, V, VI- You may quip about elements of the acting or script, but these three movies are ultimately unassailable for their wild imagination, excellent sequences, pacing, story, characters and... Harrison Ford.

Donnie Darko- If you cease trying to make sense of the logical paradoxes that structure the movie's plot, this movie is even better than the generally excellent reviews it received might suggest. Donnie Darko is a highschooler with psychological issues who is saved from a falling airplane engine by a talking bunny named Frank. The movie continues through October until the day Frank has told Donnie the world will end. The social commentary is spot on, the mood is pitch-perfect and the mind-fuck coefficient is outrageous, but more than anything this is a movie that excels at capturing moments subtle and vastly profound. Even without the backbone of a cohesive thesis, this stands comfortably between cinema classics.

Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail- Occasionally I see glimpses of insight in the collection of skits that compose King Arthur's absurd travels, but mostly what I see is pure, brilliant humor that doesn't need meaning to keep me laughing like a maniac the whole way through.

Superbad- I love high school movies and I love Rogen/Apatow, so it should be no surprise that Superbad ranks highly here. While Superbad is savagely funny and intensely profane, it is no American Pie. Its jokes carry the sting of truth and the movie packs the emotional weight that characterizes the best of high school movies. The only other that competes on these terms is Ferris Buehler.

The Seventh Seal- I first heard of this reading Ingmar Bergman's obituary last summer. It follows a knight returning from the crusades to his home in Sweden amidst the height of the Black Plague. Along the way home he plays chess against Death for his life. Like Hamlet before it, it's a meditation on mortality. It also shares with Hamlet its surreal horror and leavening humor. If you want a trippier Bergman that's on the same echelon, watch Wild Strawberries, but if you want your movie fun as well as deep, I recommend The Seventh Seal.

The Bourne Identity- This is the finest action movie I have ever seen. Driven by a magnetic plot and shot with hand-held cameras, this movie is pure visceral thrill. I particularly love the scene where Bourne hunts down the sniper outside the British expat's house.

Pulp Fiction- This is Quentin Tarantino in all of his fucked up glory. It's fun. It's sick. It's a great ride. I don't know that Dick Dale or gratuitous violence were ever so cool as in this film.

The Searchers- This is a John Ford western starring John Wayne. It's a brilliant drama piece set against the wide open west, swept along by the epic travels made in search of John Wayne's abducted niece.

28 Days Later- This is an incredible apocalyptic zombie movie. For those of you apprehensive of either designation, I assure you that it has crossover appeal. You'll laugh, cry, scream and ponder deep philosophical questions. I don't know what it is with British zombie flicks this decade, but they're on fire over there.