Max "Bunny" Sparber

THERE MAY BE no musician more associated with New Orleans than Louis Armstrong. He was born in 1901 in the Uptown area, which was then pretty rough-and-tumble, and spent his childhood scrounging for money in the Storville district, an area that existed primarily as a long-term experiment in semi-legal prostitution. It was there that Armstrong was first exposed to the music he would eventually master, and it was a good time to learn it, as he was on hand for the birth of jazz. He sang for a while in a boy's choir, then learned the coronet, buying the instrument with money lent to him by a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants who did all but adopt the young Armstong; he wore a Star of David they gave him for the rest of his life. Armstrong spent a lot of time at the ominously named New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, primarily for firing a pistol during a parade, and there he was taken under the wing of one Mr. Professor Peter Davis, who taught the boy to read music and made him the leader of the home's band.

Armstrong left New Orleans almost the moment he became an adult, working on Riverboat bands and moving to Chicago in 1922 to play in one of the most legendary of the early jazz combos, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. And from there his star rose, and off he moved to New York, and he spent the rest his life bouncing between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Europe. He occasionally returned to New Orleans to visit, but he never lived there again for any length of time. Nonetheless, Armstrong maintained a strong connection with the city. His early act consisted of typically New Orleanian hot jazz, albeit featuring his virtuosic melodic sensibilities on the coronet and trumpet, upon which he often sailed into the highest notes the instrument could reach, which required so much pressure from his breath and his lips that he often damaged his embouchure and would have to take breaks from playing trumpet (leading to his often underrated work as a singer). The songs he chose throughout his career were populated with New Orleanian phrases and characters, including one of his most famous, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," which he first recorded in 1947.

On his return trips to New Orleans, he was often treated as returning royalty, once literally, when he was made king of the Zulu Krewe for the Mardi Gras parade in 1949. His self-identity as a New Orleanian was such that he generally signed letters with a reference to one of the signature foods of the Crescent City: "Red Beans and Ricely Yours, Louis Armstrong."

At first, there doesn't seem anything exceptionally New Orleanian about this song, "The Skeleton in the Closet," recorded in 1936 with Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra. The song was written by Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke, the songwriters of "Pennies from Heaven," and was written for a Bing Crosby film of the same title, in which Armstrong appears singing this song. Johnston and Burke were products of the 1930s swing scene, and particularly found their success in Hollywood. The song and the lyrics have a rather typical Hollywood jazz quality to them, featuring a lush arrangement with a series of sharp horn blasts and an excess of "spooky" fills, including the notorious minor motive always used to represent something creeping up int eh darkness. The lyrics tell of a party in a haunted house ("Don't you know that house is hanted?" Armstrong calls out at the song's start, his pronunciation still thick with a Crescent City accent). Armstrong sings of a skeleton that is apparently something of a wallflower who suddenly gets it in his mind to be the life of the party and leaps into a series of period dances: "All the witches were in stitches while his steps made rhythmic thumps," Armstrong sings in his trademark growl, "And they nearly dropped their broomsticks when he tried to do the bumps!"

As supernaturally themed songs go, this one is greatly entertaining, with witty lyrics that were a good match for Armstrong's voice -- he has enormous fun acting out some of the lines with feigned cries of fear. But then, right at the end of the recording, Armstrong launches into a trumpet solo, and it's pure Armstrong, and pure New Orleans, melodic and swinging. The solo manages at once to be relaxed -- it almost sounds tossed off -- and showboating, trilling through high notes as though it was no thing at all to blow a note that can split an experienced player's lip, and ending on a miraculous, clear high c. Of all the moments in this song, this is the moment that sounds the most supernatural.

His performance of the song in the film version is different, and worth watching for an equally impressive, but entirely different, solo.

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THREE YEARS AGO I found myself part of the largest mass migration of Americans since the Civil War, when as near as possible to the entirety of New Orleans was evacuated as Hurricane Katrina made it's deadly way toward the Crescent City. Now a hurricane named Gustav likewise crosses the Gulf toward New Orleans, and I don't know if the current mandatory evacuation will be larger or smaller than the last. It might be larger, as people have learned their lesson, but it might be smaller, as the city is smaller due to New Orleanians relocating elsewhere.

Whatever the case, my thoughts are with my old city just now, and with the people who flee it. When we left, we were part of a massive ant trail of cars that stretched, quite literally, from downtown New Orleans all the way to Houston, a slow-moving exodus that took us very nearly an entire day to complete. We found ourselves in a Red Cross shelter outside Houston, and we settled in for the night. We were among the first to arrive, and people poured in after us. As the night progressed, and the next day started, the new visitors seemed increasingly shell-shocked; particularly those who left during or right after the storm, which they described as terrifying beyond what they had expected. Everyone bivouacked around a television set the Red Cross had set up, watching the news hungrily. When the levees broke, a creeping sense of panic set in. One family received a desperate, helpless call from one of their own who had chosen to stay behind, and was now trapped in their house with the water levels rising. In a previous hurricane, this had been the largest single cause of death, as people had drowned in their own houses. New Orleans' mayor Nagin had advised then, as he did now, that people remaining behind keep an ax nearby, as they were going to need to hack their way through their own roof.

I never found out what happened to the person in the house; their family, in the shelter, went into a sort of hysterical fugue, rocking in place and shrieking at each other, weeping loudly, and eventually settling down into a surly temperament that made the rest of us steer clear of them. Besides, the news, coming from the television, was going from bad to utterly ghastly, with reports of new lakes filled with floating corpses surrounding the old parts of the city, the parts that hadn't flooded. We still got new arrivals at the shelter, and they were ghostly, haunted. "I did things I don't want to think about to get out of the city," one said, voice quavering. "Things I don't ever want to remember."

Other people were showing up at the shelter with new video game systems and other high-end electronics, and these people were particularly aggressive and unpleasant; we began to suspect the criminal element had finally arrived, after having picked through their neighbors' empty houses or smashed their way into New Orleans' businesses. And the news out of the city just got worse and worse. It was time to go.

We loaded our car with the few things we had brought with us and went to say goodbye to the Red Cross volunteers, who had been nothing but gracious and giving to the flood of refugees that had shown up at their door. One asked us if we minded if he pray for us. I'm not a religious man, but I couldn't refuse him this kind gesture, and so we clasped hands and he asked God to watch over us. Then they gave us food for the road and we headed west, away from New Orleans. We always said we would return one day, when the city was settled, and healthy, and safe. Now, I fear, it may be a long time before that day.

"WHEN THE WATER RISE UP" LYRICS
When the levee bow
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
Got no place to go
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
When the water rise up

I hear the storm, man
I hear it blow
Ain't no storm can move me
Got no place to go

Wind whips the windows
Storm's at my door
Hurricane don't you blow now
You ain't welcome anymore

Flood at my feet now
Ain't gonna scare me though
Ain't no storm can move me
Got no place to go

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IT'S THREE YEARS since I left New Orleans, fleeing Hurricane Katrina, and now a new hurricane rises in the Gulf and a new order to evacuate the city is sounded. I won't dwell on the fact now, except that bring back a lot of memories, and quite a few of them are memories of drinking.

When friends would visit me in the City that Care Forgot, I took them on my very own tour of the city. A drinker's tour. New Orleans is home to some very old bars, and it is home to some very old drinks, and what better way to spend an afternoon than wandering the city on foot, visiting the holy sites of one of the world's drinking Meccas? Of course, it wouldn't take long for wandering to turn to staggering, particularly once the tour reached Bourbon Street, which features some of the city's worst but most potent drinks.

I might not be in New Orleans now, and I may not be able to roam the city of New Orleans as I once did, but, god damn it, I do have a liquor cabinet, and so I plan to revisit the city, if only through its cocktails. At this time of storm and possible flood, it may be the best way to visit. Join me, won't you?

1. LET'S BEGIN AT THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE COCKTAIL, 437 Royal Street, in the French Quarter. You can still visit the site, a former pharmacy, although you can't get a cocktail here -- it's now an antique store that specializes in rare coins and Civil War-era weapons. Nonetheless, there is a little marker of the locations historic importance, an egg cup of the sort that was used to serve the first cocktail, and a notice that informs us that the French word for egg cup, cocquetier, is likely the source of the word cocktail. This is disputed, as is the location's claim to having originated the cocktail, but these things are always disputed, and the dispute isn't likely to be resolved. So this is as good a place as any for the cocktail to have started, and better than some.

The drink in question is a marvelous concoction called the sazerac, which any good bartender in New Orleans knows how to make, and no other bartender anywhere else seems to be able to manage. It was created by a Creole pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud in the 1800s, and, when he invented it, the drink was composed of cognac, absinthe, and bitters -- an excellent brand of bitters still bears Peychaud's name. The drink didn't get its name until a fellow named Sewell Taylor opened a bar called The Sazerac Coffeehouse in 1853, and made the drink with a brand of cognac called Sazerac-du-Forge et fils. Usually the drink is now made with rye whiskey, but it can still be made with cognac, if you are so inclined. The bar is still around now in the Fairmont Hotel on Baronne Street, and, if you're in New Orleans, that's just the place to get yourself a sazerac. But you're not in New Orleans at just this moment, and there's not going to be a bartender who can make one for you, so you're going to have to make one for yourself. Here's how:

THE SAZERAC

teaspoon of simple syrup (or 1 sugar cube or 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar)
3 - 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters
2 ounces rye whiskey (typically, Old Overholt)
1/4 teaspoon Herbsaint, an anise liqueur from New Orleans, although pastis will do in a pinch
Strip of lemon peel

Pour a few drops of Herbsaint in an old fashioned glass, swirling it around to coat the glass. Pour out any residue. Add ice to a cocktail shaker, add simple sugar, rye whiskey, and bitters. Stir gently until the drink is cold. Strain into glass. Twist lemon peel into drink, then add as garnish.

2. WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF ABSINTHE, which is, as any of you regular drinkers know, is finally legal and easy to obtain in the United States, we should move on to an absinthe cocktail. I generally began my drinking tour of the city with absinthe, but my reasons were suspect. Firstly, I lived close to a Pirate Alley bar that served a contemporary version of the drink called Absente, and the bartender there was a fellow named Rick, who actually dressed as a pirate and carried loaded black powder pistols with him. Once, there was a rumor going round that the Pirate's Alley bar was going to be robbed, and so Rick brought in his collection of muskets, loaded them, and readied himself to do battle with his robbers. They never showed, perhaps having glanced in and seen a pirate standing guard with a brace of antique muskets and pistols on hand. It was an impressive way to start a day of drinking, and absinthe is an impressive drink to start drinking with, as it is reported to double the effects of any drink that follows it.

Modern absinthes are quite expensive, and aren't reallt designed as a cocktail ingredient, so feel free to use Herbsaint, which started life as an absinthe, or any pastis, which have the anise flavor of absinthe without the wormwood that once made the drink illegal. The cocktail we're going to make is called the Absinthe Frappe, and it spawned a national craze in the early part of the 20th century, including its own pop song, which included these lyrics:

I will free you first from burning thirst
That is born of a night of the bowl,
Like a sun 'twill rise through the inky skies
That so heavily hang o'er your souls.
At the first cool sip on your fevered lip
You determine to live through the day,
Life's again worth while as with a dawning smile
You imbibe your absinthe frappe.

You can still order an Absinthe Frappe in New Orleans, at a Bourbon Street bar called The Old Absinthe House, appropriately enough, although they make it with Herbsaint. Here's how to make it yourself:

THE ABSINTHE FRAPPE
Fill a rocks glass with crushed ice add:
1 1/4 ounce of absinthe or Herbsaint
1/4 ounce of Anisette
top with a splash of soda water

3. MY FAVORITE RESTAURANT in the Quarter is a place called the Napoleon House, a former home to the city's mayor from 1812 to 1815, who supposedly gave the house to Napoleon Bonaparte to live when the emperor escaped his island exile on Saint Helena, which he never did, dying instead. It's now a lovely bar restaurant featuring a sort of dark, decaying elegance, a terrific menu, classical music, and a specialty drink. The drink is the Pimm's Cup.

Pimm's is one of those alcohols that you find on the liqueur shelf -- nobody ever seems to buy it -- and in any well-stocked bar, where nobody ever seems to order it. One assumes this is because nobody has any idea what it is -- the exact ingredients are a carefully guarded secret, purportedly known by only six people in the world. But folks who have tried the Pimm's Cup are often mad about it, and many of them tried it for the first time at the Napoleon House. A surprising number of bartenders pour a passable Pimm's Cup, and you'll know they know their business if they ask you whether you prefer 7-Up or ginger ale as the mixer, and you'll know they really know their stuff if they also offer lemonade as an option. The best garnish for the drink is a cucumber slice, and bars that have those on hand are worth remembering.

PIMM'S CUP
Fill a tall 12 oz glass with ice and add 1 1/4 oz. Pimm's #1 and 3 oz lemonade.
Then top off with 7up.
Garnish with cucumber.

4. THERE ARE, if you can believe it, two bars that spin within blocks of each other in New Orleans. The first is at the top of the city's World Trade Center, now called Altitude33, and is a rather tacky contemporary bar that nonetheless offers a spectacular panoramic view of the city. The better option is the Carousel Bar, nestled near the entrance to the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street. As it's name suggests, the bar is designed to look like a carousel, and it makes a slow rotation around the bartenders, who don't seem to mind it. The bar offers two specialty drinks, one a fruity beverage called The Goody, which is a rather typical beverage, and the other a superb cocktail called the Vieux Carré, which is the French named for the French Quarter.

THE VIEUX CARRE
1/2 oz rye whiskey
1/2 oz cognac
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1/2 tsp Benedictine
dash Peychaud
dash Angostura bitters

Shake and serve on the rocks with a twist of lemon.

5. JUST AS YOU CAN'T SEEM TO GET a decent Sazerac outside New Orleans, it's almost impossible to find a bartender outside The City That Care Forgot who is willing to even attempt this next drink. In fact, governor Huey P. Long adored the drink, and couldn't get it elsewhere, and so would bring a New Orleanian bartender along with him when he left town, just to make him his favorite cocktail: The Ramos Gin Fizz, invented by a bartender named Henry C. Ramos in the 1880s. One expects that bartenders have trepidations about making the drink because it includes raw egg whites. Or they may simply not have one of its constituent ingredients, orange flower water, which can really only be found nowadays at Middle Eastern markets. Then there's the fact that it's a gin drink, as gin can be a hard-sell nowadays, with modern drinkers preferring sweeter cocktails that don't taste quite so much like chewing on an evergreen. The shame of it is that the Ramos Gin Fizz is a sweet drink -- one of the sweetest I've ever tasted, unless you count the sort of cocktail that tastes like crushed up Pixie Sticks. The Ramos Gin Fizz is light and frothy, but with a subtler, more complicated flavor than the sort of sweet drinks popular nowadays, such as the Buttery Nipple or the Long Island Iced Tea. It is, however, a bear to make, but if you are willing to tackle a challenging drink recipe, you'll be rewarded with a classic, albeit nearly forgotten, concoction.

RAMOS GIN FIZZ
2 ounces gin
3 drops orange flower water
1 egg white
1 teaspoon bar sugar
1 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce lime juice
1 ounce cream
Soda water

Shake very vigorously for at least one minute. Strain into a tall thin glass, or a very large old fashioned glass, and top with some soda water. Stir.

THERE ARE TWO REMAINING New Orleanian drinks I should mention, but I will only mention them in passing, as, in truth, they are rather dreadful. These are the drinks served on Bourbon Street to tourists who are looking to get drunk fast and without fuss, and they are named the Hurricane, which is native to a Bourbon Street institution called Pat O'Brien's, and the Hand Grenade, served by an entirely disposable company with the unfortunate name Tropical Isle, Inc. Pat O's is, in fact, a rather nice bar, and the Hurricane isn't the best drink they serve (in fact, they mix a hell of a Zombie). It's an uninspired tropical drink, and, if you want one, you can actually order a packet of mix that you can use to make your own unconvincing version. The Hand Grenade is a trade secret of Tropical Isle, but tastes like melon and vodka, and should only be drunk in an emergency. Why waste your time on declassé drinks for tourists who are desperate to either photograph exposed breasts or to produce breasts to be photographed? No, there's more and better to the city than the relentlessly tacky chaos of Bourbon Street, and, if we can't be there is body just now, we can still visit the city's extraordinary mixological senisbilities.

More Bottle Gang!

THERE ARE STILL hobos around, sort of. At least, there are still folks who dress in ragged suits, throw bindle sticks over their shoulders, and travel as best they can by stowing away on trains. Of course, there are only a few hundred of them, or maybe a few thousand, and they have the same sort of relationship with historic hobos that Civil War reenactors have with Union and Confederate soldiers. There's an element of playacting to it, and, truth be told, most of the folks who call themselves hobos would have gotten more dismissive monikers from actual hobos. Many modern hobos are just dropouts, and aren't traveling the country scrounging up work; hobos would have called them "tramps." Some don't even travel, but just lay around all day in filthy clothes begging coins. Hobos would have called these people "bums." Few of them know the traditional hobo trades, such as typesetting and dockworking. Fewer still know any of the traditional hobo crafts, such as carving elegant bas relief images into nickels. Almost none know how to make soup.

And by soup, we're talking about mulligan stew, an improvised orgy of scrounged vegetables and scraps of meats broiled into a famously sumptuous feast. There was an art to it once -- it wasn't as simple as just tossing anything on hand into a bowl and letting it bubble. In hobo jungles, those who knew how to cook a proper stew were renowned. You'd be hard-pressed to find one of these itinerant chefs now, but it is still possible to get a sense of what their meals tasted like. You see, in 1953, when the American hobo was just settling into his long decline, a newspaper man named Lem Kaercher from Ortonville, Minnesota, decided to peek into the Ortonville hobo jungles. He came away with a feature story and a recipe for hobo soup that is still available today at discriminating grocery stores nationwide.

Hobo Soup contains a salty mix of navy beans, vegetables, bacon, and tomato paste, which is then cooked and natural smoke flavor is added, creating a distinctively hearty American meal. The can is hard to miss: It's bright red, with a cartoon of a hobo chef in a striped shirt, patched coat, and battered fedora, happily sipping soup out of a wooden spoon while gesturing the sign for "okay" with the other hand. And it is okay; it's tasty enough to be positively inspiration. So be warned, a few sips of the soup and you might find yourself gathering up a few meager possessions in a handkerchief, tying them to a stick, and lighting out toward the first train whistle you hear.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

SAILOR MARTIN entertains guests. All original footage.

More Sailor Martin.

INSPIRED by the news that in the weekend before the Republican National Convention, police are already raiding the houses of suspected protesters and taking recording equipment from nonmainstream media sources.

I see buses filled with policemen,
With helmets and truncheons all,
Following buses full of senators
Driving to St. Paul.
They tell us St. Paul is peaceful;
They tell us not to fear;
They tell us of a grand celebration
With dances, applause, and beer.

There are musicians with their instruments
Setting up on Wabasha,
But if you don't dance the dance they play
Then there's trouble with the law.
It's a party that's protected;
It's a party for the few;
And those that aren't invited
Well, they want no dance with you.

Already the party's started
To the sound of smashing doors,
And party crashers have their date
With the truncheons and the floor.
There's a ruckus for the opening number
And a police line for the show --
But if I can't riot at your dance,
Well, then I don't want to go.

MORE NEWSPAPER DOGGEREL!

IT IS A BEAST. I own a 1956 Oldsmobile Super "88" convertible, a monster of a car with huge, round headlights like the eyes of some shocked animal and a front grill that yawns wide like the mouth of an enormous sea creature. My friends are amazed at the size of the car, and dubbed it "The Whale." As I drive westward on the Pacific Coast Highway, my vehicle dwarfs other cars on the road; they dart around it like frightened fish.

I spent a small fortune restoring the whale. My biggest single investment was the sound system, which consumes most of the cars' sizable trunk.

The vibrations of the massive speakers pass through the car and through my legs and groin; these vibrations curl under me and press upward, climbing up my spine and rattling my teeth. Sometimes, when I open my mouth, I can hear bass notes emerging, as though I am somehow producing them. The air around me shakes with the power of the noise that emerges from this stereo--propulsive, liquid sounds that seem as though they could shatter glass. Sometimes, I feel as though I'm not the driver of a car at all, but instead am riding some great, moaning, primitive monster. I once read something about whales. That they had once walked the earth, but sometime in the distant past had returned to the ocean. Occasionally, I imagine that I am riding one of these landlocked giants as it cries out its desire for the sea.

Today is Saturday, and I had originally planned to spend it in bed, watching cartoons on television and smoking a bowl or two. But that’s how I spend most of my Saturdays, and today I got the notion to do something else. Maybe a cruise around Hollywood. I am in the mood to show off the whale. I've just gotten new hubcaps — spinners that cost a hundred dollars for each wheel.

Technically, cruising is illegal in Hollywood, a law that had been on the books since the Sixties, when Sunset Boulevard found itself packed on Friday and Saturday nights with thousands of bored local teenagers who had nothing better to do than drive back and forth on the strip. Regardless, I often get the mood to drive around Hollywood with nowhere specific in mind, the top of the Olds down, the wind rushing through the air, the bass from his beast rattling the windows and pouring out of his car with enough volume to draw angry look from pedestrians.

Outside the window, several cars down on Citrus Avenue, is a 1958 Chevrolet Impala, a two-door behemoth painted lime green, likewise thumping with the deep bass sounds of an expensive audio system. The song isn't recognizable from this distance — instead, the noise is more like an electronic moan punctuated by metallic coughs. I consider pulling up to the Impala to wave a cheery hello to the driver. I feel a kinship with other classic car owners. I often attended car shows, which I do high, which inevitable causes me to engage in garbled conversations with sober collectors. It's my feeling that there is something primitive about these giant, ancient road masters that modern cars couldn’t duplicate. I feel that riding them is something like riding a wooly mammoth or brontosaurus. I always end up trying to explain these thoughts at car shows.

The other collectors nod, half understanding. “Yeah, there’s something about these old cars,” they say.

The Impala turns off on Melrose and I abandon his idea of pulling up to wave. I plan to continue north, to Hollywood, although there is something vaguely unsatisfying about that plan. As I pass Melrose, I see another classic car a half-block down: A bright pink 1965 Dodge Dart DT. I can hear its bass booming from down the block. There are always dozens such cars roaming around Hollywood, and I'm was always happy to see them. They makes me feel as though I am part of a secret community, furtively engaging in the forbidden activity of cruising, communicating over long distances with my fellow lawbreakers through the thumping calls of our magnificent stereo systems.

I understand why the kids went out cruising on those drab Sixties weekends. I am often bored, as I imagine must have been the case with teenagers in the Sixties. I am not of the opinion that mankind is progressing. My friends are astounded that I invest my money in an old car rather than buy a new computer. But as far as I am concerned, computers are just another kind of television, and television has only one good thing going for it: cartoons.

Sometimes, when I am in an especially pessimistic mood, and especially high, I wonder what good humanity has ever done by pulling itself out of the ocean in the first place. Each new advancement mankind has made has been accompanied by destruction. In just a few million years mankind has managed to swarm most of the globe’s dry land, obliterating the native flora and fauna, leaving behind endless miles of factories and suburbs, and for what? We regularly turn our technological genius back on ourselves, wiping out millions of people in just a few years. And when we aren't scorching the earth or committing genocide, we battle mind-numbing boredom. At least, I do.

My friends point out that technology produced my beloved Oldsmobile, and I smirk and agree. I'm just being gloomy when I talk like that. Sure there was some good that came out of humanity. Sure, there must have been some reason we came out of the ocean. But sometimes I wonder if whales didn't get it right by climbing back into the sea.

Behind me, a canary yellow 1959 Cadillac Deville pulls onto Citrus, its bass thumping. It follows for a few blocks, then pulls ahead and turns onto Highland, heading west. What the hell. I follow and pull up to the car. The driver sees me and grins.

I lean out my window out slightly, shouting: "Where you going, man?"

The Pontiac's driver calls back to me. "The COAST, man! I'm going to the COAST!"

That sounds like a good idea. Better than just cruising around Hollywood. I head west, toward Santa Monica.

* * *

The beach is lined with automobiles--hundreds of them, painted lustrous purples, blues and greens. Light reflects brightly off these primary colors, as it does off the cars' polished chrome fronts and elaborately filigreed gold hubcaps.

Each of these cars is empty but for deep bass noises, which thump through their open doors. Beneath the doors lie disordered piles of shorts, t-shirts, underwear, as though the drivers had stepped out of their cars and simply pulled their clothes off, and then they had nakedly marched … where?

I idle to a stop behind one of the abandoned cars. I stepped out just as the Pontiac pulls up next to me. The driver leaps out of his car, pulls his shirt off, and then glances at me. The driver grins again. "The ocean, man," he says. "The ocean!"

"Yes," I think to myself. "This is right."

I pull my own shirt off, and then jerk my shorts and underwear down my legs. I step out of his clothes and sandals and walk away, leaving behind a heap of leather, cotton, and denim. As I walk toward the surf, the Pontiac's driver races past me, bare-assed and whooping. The driver splashes into the ocean and begins swimming.

I pause for a moment and turn his head to the right. Along the coast, as far as I can see, are thousands of cars: Crown Imps, Rivieras, Caddy convertibles, Buick LeSabres, all moaning mournful, thudding bass sounds. The drivers, howling with glee, abandon their vehicles and run naked into the water. I look to my left. Stretching down the coast as far as I can see are more cars and more cheers of pleasure from naked men as they run to the ocean.

I let out a whoop of my own and begin running, delighting in the shock of the cold surf as I drive my feet into it. I throw myself forward into an oncoming wave, submerging myself, my mouth filling with the salty tang of brine.

"It is time," I think, delighted.

I exhale heavily, the air in my lungs emerging from my mouth in a great stream of rolling bubbles. Then I pause a moment before inhaling deeply, searing my throat as I pull salt water deep inside me. It is time to return.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

NOTE: It's been three years since I fled New Orleans, along with a good percentage of the residents of the city, as Hurricane Katrina cut its deadly path toward Louisiana. Now another Hurricane looms in the Gulf, Gustav. To mark the occasion, I give you this essay, published on August 28, 2005, the night before I left New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN, usually a laconic man with a neat mustache, shaved head, and sleepy eyes, has a panicky air about him on television tonight. He has just received a phone call from Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, and the news was not good. Katrina, a monstrous hurricane swirling in the Gulf Coast, is making a beeline directly for New Orleans. Mayfield informed Mayor Nagin that in his entire career, Mayfield has never seen a storm like this. Mayfield strongly urged Nagin to make the evacuation of New Orleans mandatory; if there's any political fallout, Mayfield said he would take full responsibility. On a local newscast, as the anchormen detail the growing storm, Nagin shouts a single word: "Leave!"

A direct hit from a hurricane the size of Katrina would level New Orleans. The city exists in a basin, bordered on the north by Lake Pontchartrain -- the second-largest salt water lake in the United States -- and crossed on the south by the Mississippi River. The city is protected from flooding by a system of levees, but a direct hit from a large hurricane would breach these protective barriers, flooding the city with water poisoned by industrial chemicals from the thousands of factories that border the lake. This is a nightmare scenario referred to as "filling the bowl," with much of the city drowned under 18-to 20-feet of water, "Body-bag time," says Walter Maestri, director of emergency management for New Orleans's Jefferson Parish in an interview with American Radioworks. "We think 40,000 people could lose their lives in the metropolitan area." Indeed, there are already rumors that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Mortuary Team (DMORT) has been activated and told to be in New Orleans by Tuesday, the day after Katrina is supposed to strike. Their function? Setting up temporary morgues, identifying bodies, and disposing of remains. No wonder Mayor Nagin looks nervous.

Almost exactly a year ago, Mayor Nagin evacuated New Orleans in preparation for Hurricane Ivan, which also inspired talk of doomsday. The daily paper ran a series of specials on the outcome if Ivan directly hit, which included such nauseating details as balls of fire ants floating on the surface of the flooded city, swarming survivors. But Ivan zigged at the last moment, leaving those who remained in the city feeling pretty smug about their devil-may-care attitude. "Leaves in the pool," one told the paper, describing the effects of the hurricane that was supposed to drown the Crescent City. But forecasts expected that Ivan would zig; evacuating the city was simply a precaution. With Katrina, there is no indication yet that the beast will turn. It is a day before it strikes land, and it is projected to rise from the sea like some Biblical plague, headed almost directly toward New Orleans with winds as high as 155 miles per hour, enough to fling an automobile like a child's toy, enough to snap trees in half, enough to tear the roof off a house and burst its windows.

In preparation, many French Quarter businesses have boarded up their windows. But this is the Vieux Carre, and life goes on, even if death approaches. Bourbon Street is filled with the usual array of drunken tourists -- less, perhaps, than usual, but these are sweltering summer days and tourism is usually low. Nonetheless, they crowd into Pat O'Briens, a Bourbon Street institution that credits itself as being the busiest bar in America. Pat O's is also home to a drink that bears the name of the disaster that may destroy the city: a legendary and fruity rum drink called the Hurricane.

Despite the fact that locals look askance at Pat O's, it's a gorgeous bar, featuring comfortable patio seating alongside a martini-glass shaped fountain that belches fire. Drinks are a little pricier in the Patio, and, despite the impending storm, its an exceptionally hot night in New Orleans, so many of the customers duck into the saloon's many smaller rooms, which includes a piano bar and an area called the "main bar," which features elaborate wrought ironwork, enormous mirrors, walls covered in historic photographs, a ceiling hung with hundreds of German steins, a large-screen television, and, just now, a recording of the Bee Gee's singing "Stayin' Alive."

There is little sense of impending disaster here. Instead, drunken tourists howl sports trivia at each other while a game plays on the oversized television. The elegant aspects of Pat O's are routinely offset by the bar's more craven business sensibilities: souvenir glasses, terrible music, and a smiling woman who walks up to couples with a camera and asks them if they wouldn't like their photos taken, for a fee, of course. Many drink Hurricanes, which, with its generous dollop of rum, is alcoholic enough to put even an experienced drinker off-balance. Drinking one is something of a baptism by fire for visitors, who can often be seen staggering along Bourbon Street for hours afterward, throwing money at local hustlers or staring in amazement at children tap dancing with bottlecaps nailed to the bottoms of their shoes.

The Hurricane is a pleasant enough drink, if oversweet. In many ways, it is the perfect tourist drink, which may be why locals shrug it off. Compared to such elegant New Orleans' inventions as the Sazerac and the Ramos Gin Fizz, the Hurricane is just a sweet tropical sludge of a sort increasingly common. The fruit flavoring seems intended to mask the taste of the rum, rather than compliment it, and the sheer size of the drink seems intended for binge drinkers who wish to consume alcohol quickly and with a minimum of fuss. It should be noted that, despite its official history, Pat O's evolved out of a speakeasy, and such drinks were common to the illicit gin joints of the time. After all, bootlegged alcohol was often weak and foul tasting, and speakeasies masked this with strong if inelegant recipes. Even so, there is not much about the Hurricane to distinguish it from any of the hundreds of similar fruity cocktails out there, even if the bar proudly sells a mix so you can make their signature drink at home. There are better tropical drinks out there, though, and some of them can be found on the menu at Pat O's; they mix up a pretty good zombie, for example.

But Pat O's doesn't market itself to cocktail snobs, despite certain exquisite flourishes that even the finickiest alcohol aficionado would appreciate -- for example, when you enter the bar through its side entrance, right next to Preservation Hall, the narrow ceiling is framed by 20 some-odd antique muskets. Entering this way, drinkers might feel that they were at the mouth of some ancient military garrison -- that is, until they hear the strains of "Stayin' Alive." Some French Quarter establishments despise these sorts of incongruities -- The Napoleon House plays nothing but classical music, as befits a bar that claims it was once intended as a residence for Napoleon. That Pat O's doesn't share this dedication to mood demonstrates a certain crassness, but, on Bourbon Street, crassness is the rule, and the tourists love it.

And they might as well, too. Many of them save for months, even years, to visit New Orleans, desperate for a vacation from the desperate grind of their workaday lives. At least on Bourbon Street, New Orleans is a fantasy of irresponsibility, of freedom. It's an adult playground of bad booze, bad drunks, strip clubs, and timid Midwestern girls flashing their breasts at strangers for beads. You'd have to be a terrible stick-in-the-mud not to understand the appeal of this sort of free display of vice -- people spend so much of their adult lives struggling, often unsuccessfully, to be somehow respectable and responsible, there's a marvelous release in arriving someplace where you need be neither.

Of course, it's an imperfect fantasy. Anyone who has spent any time on Bourbon Street has seen middle-aged women hunched in a corner, weeping bitterly because their husband or boyfriend was a little too enamored by the idea of sinning in the Big Easy and betrayed them. Hustlers prey on tourists who want illicit thrills not instantly available on Bourbon -- whores, for example, or drugs. They lead such adventurers out of the Quarter and then quickly and brutally relieve them of their valuables. Worst of all, Bourbon Street sells bad beer and worse mixed drinks to tourists who simply want to be as drunk as possible as fast as possible, and the whole of it starts to smell like stale beer, vomit, and urine on a hot night such as tonight.

There is a certain poignancy to tonight, though. After all, tonight Pat O's is filled with tourists who might very literally be dead in the next few days -- if the rumors are right, volunteers at DMORT are packing their body bags at this very moment. These very tourists are happily consuming a beverage that bears the name of the monster that might kill them in a bar that might be underwater within a day or so. If the unimaginable were to happen, these might be the last moments of these people in this bar in this city. Unless the most educated men in the study of weather are wrong in their best guess, a disaster named Katrina is coming to bury us all.

But, just at this moment, it is business as usual at Pat O's, the busiest saloon in America, and "Stayin' Alive" is playing throughout the bar.

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ST. PATRICK stood on a hill located near Tara in County Meath, Ireland, for almost a century before workmen took him down for renovation in 1997. Through one blunder or another, the statue was damaged beyond repair during the renovation process, and the Irish government's Office of Public Works held a contest to find a suitable design for a new statue. The winning entry, by Annette Hennessy, immediately drew complaints.

Hennessy had broken from the traditional representation of St. Patrick, which showed him in a green chasuble, wearing a bishop's miter and carrying a bishop's staff or crosier, with snakes writhing at his feet. Hennesy's design for Patrick was 8 feet tall, bald and dressed in a short kilt. He carried a cross made of antlers, an oblique reference to a legend that St. Patrick had once turned into a deer to escape persecution. Gone were the snakes, as well as other symbols ordinarily associated with the saint, such as shamrocks. Hennesy informed disturbed locals that these were all myths anyway, and that her statue paid tribute to both the pagan history of Tara and the Christianity that Patrick had brought.

The statue was never built. Locals protested, calling Hennesy's design "the homo on the hill" and complained that it was too dismissive of the traditions associated with St. Patrick. They would rather erect no statue to stand near Tara, the home of the ancient Irish kings, than the statue designed by Hennesy.

It should surprise nobody if Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, turned out to be a grizzled mountain man, dressed in animal skins and carrying bags of herbs and mouse bones. Even a bit of research into the history of the saint turns up paganism. Some examples: his name at birth was Maewyn Succat; his Confessions opens with these words "I am Patrick, a sinner, most unlearned, the least of all the faithful, and utterly despised by many. My father was Calpornius, a deacon, son of Potitus, a priest, of the village Bannavem Taburniæ;" Patrick was a Scottish slave held captive by an Irish King named Milchu, who was a Druidic high priest, and during his captivity Patrick became familiar with the details of Druidism.

Knowing all this, what complaints could anybody have about a statue that makes St. Patrick nee Maewyn Succat look like an extra from Braveheart? Indeed, we would expect that a little more digging would eventually demonstrate that Patrick was not a Christian at all, but instead a popular Druidic priest who the Christians claimed as their own in order to popularize their religion in Ireland. This is, after all, the Emerald Isles, where fairies chase leprechauns through endless fields of clover and the bodies of long-dead pagans occasionally surface in the bogs, still clutching their stone totems.

Amazingly, despite the hysterical tone of Tara's protestors ("Homo on the Hill" indeed), they were right to reject the statue. If St. Patrick can be connected to paganism in any way, it is in his fierce rejection of it. Patrick never chased a single snake out of Ireland, despite the legends; it was the serpent of paganism that he chased away, whether it was a crosier he shook at them or a cross made of antlers.

As with all saints, the chronology of the events of Patrick's life is both confused and impossible to verify. While most experts believe he was a Scot, others argue he was born in England. Some say he took on the name Patrick when he was baptized as a child; others maintain that he remained Maewyn until he was ordained a priest ("Maewyn," incidentally, means "warlike" while "Patrick" means "noble"). Neither the date of his birth (373 A.D.) nor of his death (March 17, 493) are confirmed. Scholars are not even certain if the writings attributed to Patrick (The Confessions, "Letter to Coroticus," and several prayers) were authored by him. Some claim there were two Patricks, who worked independently of each other. Finally, other scholars argue that Patrick has been given too much credit for introducing Christianity to Ireland, which he is supposed to have done in approximately six years.

Whatever the lost historical truth might be, Saint Patrick is a fascinating character. While his years of slavery seem rather mild (he herded sheep), his reported condemnation at the institution preceded the Papacy's condemnation by more than 1,700 years. During his years as a slave, Patrick apparently had visions that informed him he would be responsible for converting the Irish. As visions go, Patrick's were rather peculiar, consisting of a friend giving him a series of letters entitled "The Voice of the Irish" while a disembodied voice called out, "Holy boy, we beg you to come and walk among us once more." When Patrick escaped, he immediately set out to become a priest, studying in France before returning to Ireland.

Americanized Irish
While St. Patrick remains a potent symbol of Irish Catholicism (and, as a former slave, the Patron Saint of the Excluded), the holiday associated with him is a mostly American invention. While the Irish had small celebrations on March 17, their tiny festivals were nothing like the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the United States (they excluded drinking until the 1970s as well). The Irish-American population is nearly three times the population of Ireland itself (interestingly, Irish-Americans are primarily Protestant), mostly the product of the Great Potato Famine of 1845. At that time, millions of destitute and starving Irish poured into the United States, which did not receive them kindly. Many cities passed anti-Irish laws (some cities banned the Irish outright), and editorial cartoons in newspapers of the time often showed Irish as brutish, deformed creatures or as monkeys.

As often happens with new immigrant groups, the Irish formed their own societies, such as the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and the Hibernian Society. They marched in annual St. Patrick's Day parades, which had their start when a group of Irish soldiers who were part of the English military marched through New York on March 17, 1762. These annual parades increasingly gained political importance, as politicians realized that this despised minority sometimes wielded terrifying political clout (the so-called "Green Machine" still can swing votes in cities such as Chicago and New York).

Many of the institutions associated with St. Patrick's Day are uniquely American. Most notably, the "traditional" meal of corned beef and cabbage is a product of poverty in New York. No natives of Ireland eat corned beef; they eat bacon. But the new Irish population of New York city often could scarcely afford this expensive meat, and so substituted corned beef. Their inspiration? Their Jewish neighbors, for whom corned beef really is a traditional food.

The Saint Patrick's Day Parade is now the world’s oldest civilian parade and the largest in the United States. In New York, it attracts an audience of nearly three million people and includes about 150,000 participants. In Chicago, the city pours 40 pounds of dye into the Chicago River, coloring it green for several hours.

All of this would have surprised St. Patrick, whose Confessions are filled with pronouncements of doubt as to his position in history. "Wherefore may God never permit it to happen to me that I should lose His people which He purchased in the utmost parts of the world," Saint Patrick wrote in his Confessions. "I pray to God to give me perseverance and to deign that I be a faithful witness to Him to the end of my life for my God." How could he have known that in the utmost parts of the world, 1,900 years after his death, people are dying rivers green to honor his memory?

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YOU'VE SEEN local designer Chank Diesel's fonts, even if you don't know it. They pop up everywhere, most notoriously on boxes and bags from Taco Bell, which made extensive use of his typeface "Mister Frisky." It's easy to see why designers turn to Diesel's fonts so frequently: Unlike many contemporary computer type designers, he has a background in graphic design, and so, instead of simply taking existing fonts and making them look distressed, or creating ill-formed new typefaces that wouldn't know an x-height from a pica, he makes tidy, well-considered, and perfectly readable fonts that are notable for their variety and sense of humor. Looking to letter a poster for a horror movie? Chank Diesel's the man to turn to. Seeking the perfect typeface to paint a name of your Vespa scooter? Again, Chank's the man. Best of all, his "Parkway" fonts are inspired by the uniquely mid-20th century typeface used to spell out the name of the Parkway Theater on its marquee.

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THE MINNESOTA STATE FAIR is holding a "commercial contest," in which the ask attendees to make and submit short videos about the Great Minnesota Get-Together and submit them for a range of prizes, mostly involving free tickets.

I am a fan of the Fair, and went twice this year, so, of course, I couldn't resist. The submission is not due until January 1st, but I just went to the Fair this week, so why not make my video immediately? All camerawork and editing is by yours truly, as is the song.

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INSPIRED by the news that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain picked Sarah Palin, a former beauty queen with minimal experience in public service, as his running mate.

When John McCain is ailin'
He brings in Sarah Palin.
When the polls are trailin'
He puts his hopes in Palin.
When the rhetoric's failin'
There's always Sarah Palin.
If liberalism's prevailin'
Then trust in Sarah Palin!

When the election was over, McCain was asked why
And he sheepishly grinned and said with a sigh:
"There one thing I wanted from Sarah Palin:
I needed someone who could explain emailin'."

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THE MARTINI, Dr. Giorgio Lolli wrote in his seminal 1960 book Social Drinking, "conveys the impression of a powerful stillness …"

A mix of gin and vermouth (the less vermouth, the drier the cocktail), poured into a long-stemmed v-shaped glass and topped off with a single green olive, the martini has always appealed to purists. Although it was invented in the Old West and first popularized during the Depression, the martini remains a symbol of swank Fifties and Sixties bachelors, such as the perpetually stewed Rat Pack and international super spy James Bond. It is with the latter, Ian Fleming’s creation, that a battle really began, because, purists-be-damned, the martini would not stay still.

Of course, daring mixologists had toyed with the martini’s recipe in the past. Joseph Lanza devotes an entire chapter in The Cocktail: The Influence of Spirits on the American Psyche to what he calls "The Frankenstein martini (Mangled, not Shaken!)" Lanza, who seems ready to leap into a fistfight over the issue, describes in tones of pure horror how Franklin Delano Roosevelt added fruit juice to his drink — and "inadvertently used aquavit instead of gin on one occasion."

But it was Bond, with his peculiar Cold War combination of sophistication and internationalism, who transformed the martini by replacing gin with vodka. In a drink that had only two liquors, Bond was replacing one of them altogether! Perhaps there would not have been such an uproar had he swapped the vermouth for something else — after all, fans of dry martinis had long been weeding vermouth out of the picture. But gin is the martini's main ingredient. What had Ian Fleming been thinking? Not only was his Western hero consuming a Russian drink, but he was perverting the drink that most represented Western sophistication! Fans of the traditional cocktail could only assume by this that Fleming meant to imply James Bond was a double agent.

Double agent or not, as serialized in Playboy, James Bond became a hero to millions of young swingers who quickly adopted the vodka martini as their drink of choice. Why not? This new mixture maintains the martini's glacier coolness, its freezing stillness. Gin and vodka both originate in Eastern Europe, so Bond was simply swapping one clear-colored European liquor for another. Besides, as anyone who has read Paul Fussel's "Class" knows, vodka is the preferred drink of the wealthy élite. And to many, the vodka martini tastes better. For those without a taste for gin, Ian Fleming had created a better drink.

So why the fuss? It might be because purists realized they were a small group of Roman centurions and the barbarians were at the gates. The vodka martini might well have been a civilized barbarian, speaking Latin and dressed in silk, but lurking behind him were savages dressed in furs and wielding axes. Once the centurions allowed the vodka martini, anything at all could claim the name martini, and Rome would fall.

They were right. The Sixties and Seventies saw a wild explosion of mixed drinks claiming to be martinis but including everything from sake to soda. With the rediscovery of lounge culture in the Nineties, the bastardized martini grew even sillier. Scenesters dressed in zoot suits and jitterbugging to new swing music demonstrated their ersatz sophistication by ordering martinis with violet liqueur or crème de cacao, transforming the once noble martini into an upscale buttery nipple. And, as Fussel also points out in Class, as drinks get more sugary they descend the social ladder. The martini, although still favored by young sophisticates, is at risk of joining the “Champagne of Beers” as the drink of choice among the supremely tacky. The word "martini" has become so discombobulated that a purist, desiring the classic gin and vermouth mixture, must be very specific in placing an order at most bars or risk receiving a vodka drink — or something made of rosemary and Goldschläger that has taken to calling itself a martini.

For most, this does not matter. After Gertrude Stein, they argue that "liquor is a liquor is a liquor," or perhaps more properly, "drunk is a drunk is a drunk," and do not care what they use to drown their daily stress. For others, however, the martini exists as much as a symbol as it does a drink. Dorothy Parker said of them, "martinis, my dear are dangerous. Have two at the very most. Have three and you’re under the table. Have four and you’re under the host." Oil tycoon John D. Rockerfeller guzzled his (extra dry, thank you) at New York's famous Knickerbocker hotel, while Nick Charles lectured bartenders about the proper mixing of the martini in the film The Thin Man. None of these cocktails had a hint of vodka, nor did they include weird admixtures. When people of days past talked about the martini, there was no confusion, no possible misinterpretation of their meaning. It was gin, vermouth and olive — and that was it.

The martini has moved through the 20th Century as much as an emblem of high culture as a drink. It may not matter if the martini recipe is changed. It should not have mattered when Coca-Cola changed its secret formula. But there is something natively American about resisting such change, perhaps because we are creatures of habit. We do not wish to go to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., tomorrow and discover it has changed its name to New York City, because we will not be able to find the Flatiron building. Likewise, we don’t wish to swallow a mixture of cherry juice and ginger ale and have somebody tell us it is a martini.

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THE TWIN CITIES may be the only place in which you'll hear the word "scenester" thrown around as often, and as disparagingly, as the word "hipster." And, in truth, "scenster" is generally more accurate. After all, we have come a long way from Norman Mailer's White Negro, who is defined by his taste in the avant garde of African-American music and culture, who reads Kerouac and listens to bop, who wears spread collar shirts, lapel-less cardigan jackets and pleated slacks. Twin Citians tend toward hoodies, sweat shirts, funny t-shirts, baggy pants, and local rock clubs, with First Avenue and the connected Seventh Street Entry dominating. They may not be hip in the classic sense, but there is a very real rock and roll scene locally, and a sizable number of scenesters.

Cartoonist Joel Orff recognized that so many people spending so much time in clubs listening to music were bound to generate some entertaining stories, and so he has spent a half-decade, or longer, compiling and illustrating these tales. Orff has bypassed the usual rock and roll stories of musicians and their music in favor of the experiences of the fan, the audience member, and other who make the scene surprising number of his cartoons don't even tell stories of music, instead finding quirky tales that take place after a show -- sometimes so long after that the show doesn't even enter into the story. Orff's drawings are loose and deeply shadowed, as befits tales that often take place in the haze of a drunken experience in a darkened theater. Despite the plainness and darkness of his drawings, Orff's stories are sometimes joyous, such as one in which an a cappella soul group led their entire audience onto the stage, enjoining them to sing along. The audience sang for quite a while before realizing that the musical group was gone, having left them on the stage to complete the show.

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SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

Men like Mike Gannon and Black John Bennett made their living off the Erie Canal, forever battling one another for control of canal shipping.

Women like Moira Kennally -- the wanton widow turned Madam -- and the Egyptian, owner of the notorious pleasure parlor, The Golden Tassel -- made their living off men like Mike and Black John, offering their passionate embraces in return for the hard-earned dollars the canalers wrested from "The Big Ditch."

Together and apart they lived and loved in a mad search for power and pleasure during one of the most turbulent eras in the mainstream of American life.

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INSPIRED by news that Serbia has erected a statue of Bob Marley, Bosnia has built a statue of Bruce Lee, and the British Museum is displaying an enormous gold statue of Kate Moss.

We never knew of their presence.
They were old ones, and were wise,
And they watched us from above
With long and dispassionate eyes.
We will never know where they came from
Or just what brought them here,
But they have watched us now for millennia
Without being tempted to interfere.

They knew we could be savage
And they knew we could be cruel
And they knew of few things deadlier
Than a monkey with a tool,
But as long as we killed each other
They watched us without concern,
But as our tools grew crueler
They feared what we might learn.

And so they build an army,
And they hid it here and there:
Metal statues of our heroes,
And we took them, unaware,
And we placed them in our cities:
In Egypt, Serbia, elsewhere,
And we continued with our business
Never knowing to beware.

One day we will make a tool
That can split the sky in two,
And those that watch will know it
And they'll know just what to do:
With a twiddle of lever
Their army will amass:
Giant women made of gold;
Deadly fighters made of brass.

That night will be a long one
Of fear, and blood, and cries,
And morning will be quiet,
And above us, in the skies,
In long and silver machines
That behold the silent day,
The watchers will stop watching
And they will turn and look away.

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AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT from a city that retains so much of the architecture of the 50s and 60s, Omaha has a tiki bar, a remainder of America's obsession with Polynesian culture. One day we at the Bottle Gang will tackle the enormous legacy of tiki culture, but it is a vast topic, and we shall limit our comments here to one point: There was almost nothing Polynesian about the way Americans expressed their interest in Polynesia. The word "tiki" is Maori. The tropical drinks served in tiki bars were generally inspired by drinks from the Caribbean. The style of music most associated with tiki culture, such as the lush exotica of Les Baxter, borrowed heavily from South American music. And tiki bars were often nestled in the back or the basement of Chinese or Japanese restaurants -- if you are looking for a well-made tropical drink nowadays, there is still a very good chance of finding one at a Chinese restaurant.

And so Omaha's tiki bar, the Mai Tai Lounge, is found in the basement of a Japanese restaurant, the Mt. Fuji Inn on Blondo street. It is a late-era tiki bar, dating back to the late 60s, and, at first, is unimpressive. The bar is a dark cavern of a place, smallish, with bamboo walls, a jukebox that plays contemporary music, a half-dozen portraits of comely Polynesian lasses painted on what looks to be velvet, and unfortunately, a television that plays sports events. Early tiki bars were enormous tropical fantasias, Disney-like monuments to faux-South Seas culture. This is not that. If it were, it might not have survived: As the popularity of tiki culture faded, most of the tiki palaces went out of business.

Unimpressive though it may seem, the Mai Tai Lounge does have two things to recommend it. Firstly, it has a terrific drink menu, which contains almost every classic, if kitschy, tropical cocktail, ranked like you would rank a movie. Their zombie, for example, is rated Triple-X, as is their Mai Tai and Fogcutter, while less alcoholic drinks, such as the Singapore Sling, get more family friendly ratings.

These are not fancy tropical cocktails. They have nowhere near the variety nor complexity of ingredients of a well-made version of the drinks, instead tending to consist of a mix of rums and one or two fruit juices. The Mai Tai's cocktails are stripped-down versions of tastier originals, but the bar uses middle-shelf alcohol and good fruit juice, and the resulting drinks are quite palatable. They also tend to be enormous.

The other thing the Mai Tai Lounge offers is Hawaiians. Not always, mind you: Sometimes the bar will be empty, and sometimes it will be filled with pasty skinned locals. But every so often, you'll walk in, and every customer will be Hawaiian. There is an unaccountably large population of Hawaiian students in Omaha, mostly at Creighton, and every so often they collectively decide to get drinks at the Mai Tai Lounge. The result is the rarest of experiences in Middle American tiki lounges: Finding a parking lot filled with cars with Hawaiian license plates, and walking into the bar to find yourself surrounded by dark skinned, brown-eyed drinkers who bandy about Hawaiian slang and chat idly about gossip from the Big Island. Out of the blue, one of America's least authentic Polynesian bars becomes absolutely, unmistakably Hawaiian.

Across town, on 13th Street just south of downtown, is another ethnic restaurant, one that has always been indisputably authentic. The Bohemian Cafe was started by a Czech family all the way back in 1924, and still features employees dressed in traditional Czech outfits. Their menu consists of Eastern European dishes such as jaeger schnitzel, or veal steaks in wine sauce and mushrooms, and the food tends to be meaty and heavy: We once ordered plum dumplings that came in a bowl filled with butter and cream, and took close to three weeks to eat.

They also have a small cocktail lounge, the Bohemian Girl, decorated, like the rest of the building, with hand-painted folk-art pictures of girls in native costumes and with little signs that read "We accept Czechs, not checks." They serve Pilsner Urquell and a Czech beer called Czechvar, which calls itself "The Czech Budweiser," and apparently was actually calling itself Budweiser long before the American beer of that name. It's a bland pilsner, tasting much like the American brand that they claim stole its name; stick with the Pilsner Urquell. Incidentally, you can also purchase bottles of these beers to take with you from the Bohemian Cafe.

Recently, they have introduced a few specialty cocktails, including one called Bohemian Shepherd Pie, made of plum brandy, Limoncello, Blue Caraco, and pineapple juice. This one frightened us, so we did not try it. We did order something called the Bohemian Sidecar, which drew gales of laughter from a rather asinine drunk at the bar, a stupid looking young man in a baseball cap and a bluetooth headset. This fellow was drinking himself into oblivion, bullying everyone nearby. When we discovered that he was the husband of one of the bartenders, a sweet-faced and recently pregnant young woman, we realized we were watching the makings of an American tragedy. Take the advice of some strangers in a bar, young bartender, should you read these words: A drunk who is belligerent to other drinkers, to bartenders, and to his own wife, is not worth the effort. Any man who must be taken aside and warned that his drinking will have to stop when the baby is born, and who responds by loudly proclaiming that he must get a new wife, and says this in a cocktail lounge in front of strangers, is a man to be avoided.

As to the drink that this young boor mocked, well, it was actually rather good. It is a sidecar, of sorts, but made with slivovitz, which is a Balkan plum brandy. It's a scorcher of a liquor, as anyone who has tried it can tell you. It's the sort of drink that grows hair on your chest, and then sets fire to those hairs. But the harshness of the brandy is undercut in this drink by Limoncello, Triple Sec, and lemon juice, and the resulting drink is actually quite satisfying. Fools may laugh at us for ordering it, and laugh harder that we like it. But fools will be fools, and, at the end of the day, as happened on this occasion, will have a second bartender, the mother of the first, threaten them with a baseball bat.

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PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER Gordon Parks didn't move to St. Paul until his mid-teens, but many of his defining experiences happened here, including playing piano in a brothel and brandishing a knife at a train conductor in a botched robbery; Parks was so ashamed that he apologized and offered to sell the knife to the conductor. But his most important early experience was the discovery of the camera, which he began with at the Minneapolis Spokesman/St. Paul Recorder before moving on to work as an exquisite fashion photographer for Vogue and a brilliant photo essayist for Life.

Parks is probably best known for directing the 1971 film Shaft, a smart little detective film set in New York's East Village and starring a leather-clad Richard Roundtree as one of film's first African-American private eyes. Parks brought both his background in fashion and documentary photography to the film. Shaft is most remembered for it's urban chic, with a hero who looked like a fashion show runway version of a militant black man and a pounding, horn driven soundtrack by Isaac Hayes that would win an Academy Award. What is less remembered is Park's meticulous sense of environment in the film, in which New York is is one of the main characters -- one scene has Shaft ducking into a gay bar and locating himself behind the bar when chased by thugs. When they enter, he pretends to be a bartender, putting a slight swish into his performance; despite his ruse, Shaft does not seem to be mocking homosexuals, and he seems to be good friends with the bartender.

Shaft is often seen as fathering the Blaxploitation genre, even though it was closer in plotting to the traditional private eye film. But Parks' real legacy is his magnificent photography, including iconic images of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers; he once rode in a car with a group of Black Panthers who had shotguns in their laps, and Parks informed them that he considered his camera to be his weapon.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

INSPIRED by the horrifying news that since America's invasion of Iraq, more that 430 gay men have been murdered, and gay men (and, to a lesser extent, women) are targeted for kidnapping and rape.

It's a great new land for freedom!
It's a better land today!
We've saved you from oppression,
Unless, of course, you're gay.

There's a greater world aborning,
Free of strife and fear!
There's better times ahead, mates,
unless, of course, you're queer.

We've saved you from your troubles!
No more weeping or complaint!
There's better times ahead, friends,
although, if you're gay, there ain't.

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I'VE GOTTEN into the strange habit of finding writing songs just before I have to go to work. I'm dressed and ready, my bus in on it's way, and, for some reason, I grab my ukulele, and suddenly there is a song that starts pouring out. Fortunately, I have flexible hours, and so I can take a half hour or so and jot something down, make a quick recording of it, and head on out to work.

Yesterday was one of those days. I just found myself playing a little arpeggio I liked, and then, all at once, this song came out. It's a country gospel song, and the idea of a "mansion on the hill" has been kicking around in country and folk-based rock for a while, although I'm not certain it has been used in music the way I use here: as a metaphor for heaven.

This was interesting to write. Although I based it on a fairly established narrative of country gospel, that of the saved sinner, I couldn't write it using many of the themes of traditional gospel, as they represent a worldview I can't claim as my own, as I am not a Christian. And so some of the major tropes of gospel, such as the act of salvation by an outside agency, and the permanence and ease of that salvation, would have been inappropriate for me to use. Instead I wrote a gospel song that represents my understanding of redemption -- that it is a decision by the redeemed, and is something that is uncertain and fragile. So, in this song, the search for heaven is the narrator's faltering search within himself for his own goodness, which is consistent with my own experience of trying, and often failing, to be a good man.

There is a collaborative aspect to this song that is unusual for me. When I left for work yesterday, I uploaded it to MetaFilter, a forum I frequent that relatively recently developed a user-generated music page. While I worked, a user calling himself flapjax at midnight , whose actual name is Samm Bennett and who lives in Japan, added close-harmony vocal. Another user, calling himself umbú (and whose personal details I know nothing more about, except that he writes some really marvelous songs), added a church organ. So this is the version you will here. If there are any additional versions of this song produced as a result of this online collaboration, I shall post them as well.

By the way, you can hear sirens in the background of this song. They passed by my window while I was recording.

"GLORIOUS MANSION ON THE HILL" LYRICS:

There's a glorious mansion on the hill, on the hill
There's a glorious mansion on the hill
There's a promise that I made once
I keep it still, I keep it still
There's a glorious mansion on the hill

There's some sinning that I done once
I sinned my fill, I sinned my fill
There's a glorious mansion on the hill
There's a good I must find in me
I will fulfill I will fulfill
There's a glorious mansion on the hill

I swore to give up roving
And so I will, and so I will
There's a glorious mansion on the hill
I'll turn from rowdy ways
Right up until, right up until
I reach that glorious mansion on the hill

LISTEN TO "GLORIOUS MANSION ON THE HILL":



DOWNLOAD "GLORIOUS MANSION ON THE HILL."

Metafilter's Cortex has also done a version of the song, this time including a bass, a third harmony part, and backup singers.

LISTEN TO THE FULL GOSPEL TREATMENT:



DOWNLOAD THE FULL GOSPEL TREATMENT.

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"THERE'S A PLACE CALLED OMAHA NEBRASKA," Groucho Marx sang once, before misplacing the town on the map: "In the foothills of Tennessee." Singers don't seem to know just where Omaha is, come to think of it. All the Counting Crows knew was that the town was "somewhere in Middle America," while Bob Seeger placed himself "on a long and lonely highway, east of Omaha," which could be just about anywhere that's not west of Omaha. Way to be specific, gents.

Well, we at the Bottle Gang have been to Omaha. And not just in a passing-through-on-the-way-to-somewhere-else sort of way. We've been to parties with The Faint and Conner Oberst (and a lesser-known act from Omaha, Mulberry Lane, who once sent us a postcard from Japan). We've crashed three of Alexander Payne's shindigs, once wishing him a happy birthday when it wasn't his birthday at all, and made many calls to the Academy Award-winning writer/director, several times by accident, which he did not appreciate. We drunkenly strolled through the halls of the Joslyn Museum with Omaha's former mayor, Hal Daub, after dining with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who has a yearly theater festival in Omaha. We made friends with an enormous, bearded astrologer and blues guitarist who is reported to have once bitten off a man's ear. Also, we've been to a lot of Omaha strip clubs, although, on the whole, we prefer those in Council Bluffs.

So trust us when we say that Omaha is a great place to drink. We've drunk our share there. The alcohol is plentiful and it's cheap -- three cocktails made with middle-shelf liquor will cost you the same as one cocktail in Minneapolis's North Loop. But be warned: Omaha bars generally are not very well stocked when it come to liquors, generally carrying a small and generic selection, and Omaha bartenders, for the most part, are only capable of making a half-dozen of the most common drinks, and will look confused if you ask for anything fancy. What Omaha lacks in cocktail sophistication, however, it makes up for in character. Sometimes the city seems like a glacier flowed over it in 1964 and just recently melted, leaving the architecture of the period perfectly preserved, and so here we have a town filled with oversized Steak Houses and gaudy signage, an eye-popping, kitschy delight.

Drinkers, should you find yourself in Omaha, here is a travelogue of our favorite watering holes.

We begin, as we always do, on Saddle Creek at the Homey Inn. This small neighborhood bar has gotten quite busy recently, since Esquire named it one of the best bars in America; it used to be quite desolate, except on weekends, when all Omaha bars spring to life.

The Homey Inn seems constructed out of the fallen remains of previous bars, some in Omaha, some elsewhere in the Midwest. The walls are hung with fading newspapers and decorated with ancient menus, beer cans from long forgotten brands, and old novelty items from liquor distributors, such as Nude Beer, upon which photos of women in Eighties hairstyles wear brassieres that can be scratched off to reveal ample bosoms. Some have been scratched.

They also have champagne on tap, both sweet and dry. Of course, it's not real champagne, but rather a fruity and inexpensive sparkling wine, but who cares, really? They don't know how to make a champagne cocktail with the stuff, but they will gamely try, tossing in a few drops of bitters and a packet of sugar. You wouldn't serve it to Humphrey Bogart, but it's passable.

Additionally, the Homey Inn serves peanuts. In dog bowls. And you can order food from across the street, from a Beatles-themed pasta restaurant called Sgt. Peffers, presumably out off fear that if they called themselves Sgt. Peppers, Apple Records would sue. Interestingly, the Homey Inn has a wider selection of Irish beers than many Eire-styled pubs. We couldn't tell you why this is. And we don't care to ask. We're happy enough sipping our sweet sparkling wine, eating our peanuts, waiting for the delivery man to bring us a plate of spaghetti, and scratching the bra off a woman on an old beer label.

Next, it's onward to The Lynx Lounge, just a few blocks away on NW Radial Hwy. The bar is rather unassuming to look at from the outside, nestled in a strip mall between an assortment of low-rent businesses that have, in the past, included an off-brand makeup store and an erotic lingerie dealer. Inside, however, the bar is pure Seventies, including a fire pit and a recessed and mirrored alcove where couples can pair off for a more intimate drinking experience. The bar is kept dark, and the alcove may be the darkest spot on earth -- it is pitch black until a bartender lights a candle, and then the only thing visible in the alcove is the candle.

The bar is mostly patronized by African-American drinkers, who have, in the past, been so surprised to see the Bottle Gang sidle up to the bar that they have greeted us warmly and bought us drinks. Omaha is a disquietingly segregated town, with most of its black community living north of the city, and white Omahans can be unaccountably nervous around their black neighbors. Actually, this isn't just true of white Omahans -- we once brought a young girl of Korean extraction to the Lynx Lounge, and, upon leaving, she asked a surprising question: "Did you notice that we were the only white people in the bar?" We briefly considered reminding her that, as an Asian, she wasn't precisely white, but then we decided the whole discussion was crass and politely let it drop.

Anyway, we've been patronizing the Lynx Lounge for years, for their good selection of brandies, their swanky ambiance, and their terrific jukebox upon which you can find a marvelous selection of soul and R&B songs. We may be too light-skinned to pretend to be Billy Dee Williams, but that doesn't mean we won't drink at a place where he would seem perfectly at home.

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IF YOU EVER watch old recordings of burlesque acts, it's sometimes surprising how amateurish many of the acts are. Women smile a lot and dance popular dances of the era, sometimes with some skill, but there is little of the vaunted teasing that contemporary burlesque fans wax nostalgic for. That is, until you see Lili St. Cyr. This Minneapolis native, born sometime near the start of the 1920s and saddled with the unfortunate name Willis Marie Van Schaack, really exploited the voyeurism inherent in disrobing before strangers. Her routines, which boasted compelling names such as "The Wolf Woman" and "In a Persian Harem," were typically built around such quotidian daily activities as taking baths or changing for a date. And Lili St. Cyr typically performed them as though blithely unaware she was on a stage, or that anyone was watching her. Her performances titillated precisely because they were constructed as though the audience were witnesses to a private moment, which may explain why St. Cyr could get away with revealing so little -- she would often such behind a screen or turn away from the audience when she actually disrobed.

Certainly it didn't hurt that she was blessed with drop-dead gorgeous looks and the training of a ballerina; however nonchalant her performances were, they were performed with the precision of a dance routine. Lili St. Cyr was a favorite of the tabloids of the era, in part due to her frequent marriages (six total) and in part due to the occasional indecency arrest (she escaped conviction once by performing her routine before judge and jury); but mostly, one expects, because her movie star looks should have paved the way for better fortune. It was not to be, however. But for a fascinating turn in 1958's The Naked and the Dead playing a stripper in Honolulu, and a decidedly voluptuous appearance as part of a harem in Son of Sinbad (which was condemned by the Legion of Decency), she had little success as a film actress. Her most memorable roles are, as a result, to be found in a pair of movies made by nudie photographer Irving Klaw: Varietease and Teaserama.

Watching her performances in these films, it's rather astonishing what passes for sexy nowadays -- heavily tattooed women hanging from poles and wobbling around onstage in preposterous heels to deafening music. There no sense of viewing the forbidden anymore, no sense of a permitted breach of privacy. Even if it was just an act in which a girl took a bubble bath, it was at a time when if a girl like that let you watch her bathe, it was pretty special.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

"WHAT'S THE PRICE?" the classic Thunderbird theme song, a rollicking, country tinged number, famously asked. The answer: "Thirty twice." Its has been almost a half a century since Ernest Gallo, paterfamilias of the legendary E.&J. Gallo Wine company, introduced this sickly sweet fortified wine, and it's still a bargain. Nowadays, 750ml of Thunderbird, the size of a standard bottle of wine, sells for under five dollars.

You won't find mention of Thunderbird at the Gallo company's Web page, or any reference to the company's roster of déclassé wines: Night Train, Ripple, Boone's Farm. Neither will you find mention of the Gallo company on the Thunderbird bottle, although you will find the helpful advice to "Serve cold." Gallo, with a portfolio that includes such premium wines as Brindlewood and Louis M. Martini, has gone upscale. Never mind Ernest Gallo's famous – and famously downscale – desire to be the "Campbell Soup Company of the wine industry," or the pleasure he took in a New Yorker cartoon in which two connoisseurs enjoyed his products, saying "Mort and I simply got tired of being snobs." E.&J. Gallo has spent a lot of time and money distinguishing themselves in the field of winemaking, and do not care to be reminded of their founder's lowbrow tastes. They want the snobs.

Well, we at The Bottle Gang won't have it. We pride ourselves on our interest in the dark underbelly of the liquor industry, and Thunderbird fits the bill very nicely. After all, it is no accident that Thunderbird is a longtime favorite of American winos. The drink was designed and marketed to be a wino wine.

In all fairness, we should point out that the Gallo company wasn't unusual in this pursuit. The American wine industry, which had enjoyed some inchoate success prior to Prohibition, was decimated in the 14 years that the United States was Constitutionally dry. In truth, this industry didn't earnestly begin to recover until the 1960s. After Prohibition, Americans had developed a taste for hard liquor, and those few remaining wine-lovers who wanted a truly fine wine looked abroad, mostly to France, for their fix. American wines, out of necessity, were fermented grape slurries or fortified ports, their only redeeming featuring being their cheap price. Their market was migrant laborers, street corner drunks, and skid row bottle gangs. Wine drinkers in America were disparagingly called winos, and were, to a great extent, poor and chronically inebriated. Fortified wine had one additional benefit for the chronically broke: It kills your appetite, which comes in handy when you have just enough for a sandwich or a drink. Fortified wines, by the way, are magnificently intoxicating, as the fortification comes from the addition of brandy. A standard bottle of wine usually clocks in at about 13 percent alcohol by volume. Thunderbird is a whopping 17.5 percent.

If all this leads you to believe that Gallo, and other American wine manufacturers, were making their profits by selling unusually potent potables to America's underclass – well, you'd be exactly right. Ellen Hawkes wrote about the marketing techniques for Thunderbird in her book Blood and Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire, claiming that Thunderbird salesmen specifically targeted inner-city and alcoholic purchasers. "According to Fenderson's account, he and his staff "arranged for street-sampling and Thunderbird parties in colored bars wherever we could,'" Hawkes wrote. "Gallo salesmen recalled that 'street-sampling' was perfected for Thunderbird in the ghetto. Bottles of Thunderbird were left on the backseats of salesmen's cars or were handed out in the neighborhood -- the idea was to give away free samples and saturate the market. Empty bottles of Thunderbird were thrown in the gutters of skid row streets to increase product awareness …"

It must be noted that Hawkes' book has received its share of criticism, and some of her claims must be taken with a grain of salt, although Hawkes is responsible for one of the more divertingly notorious tales of Ernest Gallo. She tells of him driving through the streets of the inner-city, eventually pulling up to a stranger on a street corner. According to Hawkes, Gallo called out the lyrics to one of his jingles "What's the word?" As the tale would have it, the man immediately called back the correct answer: "Thunderbird!"

Hawkes' tale is partially corroborated by at least one online source, a former Gallo salesman who recalled handing the drink out to Native Americans who were just being released from jail -- "to get the brand started." "Wino Samplings," as this former employee calls the practice of passing out free samples to hard drinkers, "used to be widespread."

We at The Bottle Gang have sampled our share of Thunderbird, and we must say, we're a little surprised the drink hasn't made a comeback. It has a few things going for it. Firstly, it's a sweet wine -- in fact, Thunderbird is more than sweet, it is citrus flavored, thanks to the addition of lime and lemon. (Gallo was reportedly inspired to create Thunderbird after having seen farm laborers add citrus fruit juice to their cheap white port wines.) The American palate is famously sugary, generally favoring sweeter wines -- and wine coolers, demonstrating that U.S. drinkers, particularly women, are predisposed toward mixing wine and fruit. Additionally, with the increase in binge drinking in this country, Thunderbird, with its high alcohol volume, is a terrific drink for anyone looking to tie one on; the drink would be a well-appreciated addition to any typical frat party. Best of all, Thunderbird is a marvelous drink for anybody wishing to affect a tough-guy, self-destructive rebel posture. It's surprising more rock stars don't cement their subterranean posing by swaggering into their favorite dive watering hole and demanding a Donnington Brainstorm, which is a potentially lethal mixture of Thunderbird and vodka.

Sure, you might end up on some street corner years from now, begging for pennies with shaking hands and sleeping under newspapers when you can raise enough money for a really good drink of fortified wine. But that's the American tradition of wine drinking, and, anyway, what could be more rock and roll?

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IN THE SAME WAY that New Orleanians treats bars with the sort of respect usually reserved for churches, Twin Citians treat their steak house restaurateurs with the honor generally accorded a returning astronaut or war hero. Case in point, when Nick Mancini, founder of Mancini's Char House, died in May of 2007, his casket was drawn down 7th Street in St. Paul in a horse-drawn, glass-enclosed caisson as thousands watched and mourned. Although it should be pointed out that Mancini's is a pretty special place, and Nick Mancini, a man known for expansive hospitality, was a St. Paul institution. "Ever wondered why downtown St. Paul is a ghost town after dark?" asked City Pages. "Because every single person in the city is here. Seriously." Stop in for surf and turf, made Italian-style, or just pop your head into the restaurant's cavernous cocktail lounge, an ultra-swank watering hole draped in sumptuous red leather. There aren't many places that look like this any more, look like the Rat Pack might have rolled in here for Jack and Cokes back in 1962, and remained until Nick Mancini politely informed them that the bar is closed. Local hipsters haven't really claimed Mancini's, preferring to play at being working class by drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon in Northeast Minneapolis dive bars. But if your taste is for old-school kitsch elegance, and your drinking palette is a bit too sophisticated for cheap beer, then Mancini's is the place. The environment is casual, but shouldn't be; do yourself a favor and throw on a sharkskin suit or a sleek cocktail dress before you go.

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NOT MANY people remember the play Dynamo. Never mind that it was written by Eugene O'Neill, one of America's first great playwrights. It was considered an artistic failure when it debuted in 1929, and isn't produced any more. I've never seen it, or read it, but I know about it because I once read a poem about it. I was flipping through an issue of the New Yorker from 1929, and, in the letters section, I came across this little scrap of verse, written by a fellow named Arthur Guiterman:

Eeny, meeny, mynamo
I have just seen "Dynamo."
All except that girl in red
It is worse'n what you said.

I read that in, oh, 2002 or thereabouts, and it has remained firmly lodged in my brain ever since, without requiring any effort on my part at all to remember it. And there it is: The power of newspaper doggerel.

I've written about the subject before, briefly, and I won't go into it much now. It's a subject that deserves a serious critical examination, though, and, as far as I can tell, has received scant attention at all from scholar of poetry.

This may be because the poetry that once regularly appeared in newspaper was often genuine doggerel. It usually ignored the niceties of well-made poetry and favored irregular meters, awkward rhymes, and inelegant turns of phrase. Worse, it was often maudlin, or hackneyed, or infantile, or broadly comic. It often addressed current news, which meant that these simple versus published in newspaper letters sections often had a very short shelf life. It never aspired to high art, and never achieved it. It was the verse of the everyman. It was proletarian, blunt, mawkish, sometimes hilarious, and immediate. It also sometimes demonstrated an awesome staying power, as with the Dynamo review. People would clip poems out of newspapers and keep them, sometimes stuffing them into diaries or scrapbooks, sometimes sending them off in letters, sometimes keeping them in their wallets, or between pages of favorite books.

I don't know what to say about the world of contemporary poetry. I have never really been part of it, although I have known and been friends with some people who were quite invested in making great poetry. I respected their craft, but did not know who their audience was. If you've ever attended a poetry reading, you know that most of the audience is made up of other poets. Poets self-publish chapbooks that sell a hundred or so copies, mostly to friends and, again, other poets. They give each other awards that nobody has ever heard of, and publish neat little journals that nobody reads. I learned recently of a very established poet whose most recent collection was printed in an edition of about 600. That's less people than read my blog per week.

This is not meant as a criticism, not really. There's no shame in having a small audience of like-minded people. When I write a play, I can reasonably expect that my audience for the complete run of the play won't be much larger than a few thousand. The zine scene, which I always held in high regard, consisted of hundreds of people self-publishing a few dozen photocopied pages, which they would then trade with other zine publishers. Quality has never been determined by popularity.

I do, however, think it is a pity that poetry has almost entirely been abandoned by everybody except a tiny community of active poets. I don't know whether newspapers decided to stop publishing the doggerel that readers sent in, or if people just stopped sending it in on their own, but I think we are poorer for it. It means that an entire literary art has almost completely been abandoned by the general population. And it's a pity, because poetry is a poor man's art; it costs nothing to write a poem, and there was a time when you could just mail it into a newspaper and potentially find thousands of readers. That's a publishing opportunity that even a pauper could afford.

So I decided to start writing my own. I don't expect to revive the art, but I appreciate it, and whenever I find myself lamenting the loss of something I think is worthwhile, it strikes me that there is no point lamenting when you can just start doing. Newspaper doggerel is meant to be written quickly, and a bit sloppily, and I can afford the slight investment of my time and energy. Why not?

I participate on a few Web forums, and comment there constantly. And I got to thinking, why don't I toss out some poems rather than comments? And so I have, and will continue to do so, when the mood strikes me.

MORE NEWSPAPER DOGGEREL!

INSPIRED by news that the story of gallant men giving up their chance for safety in favor of women and children is something of a myth, and that, to a great extent, survival during tragedy has to do with wealth and class.

I'm as rugged at they come
And consider myself a true man
But when the boat starts sinking
Well, ain't I a woman?

It was 20 years ago
When my draft notice was filed
But when the water starts to rise
Well, ain't I also a child?

If the ship starts to go down
And water threatens to fill my lungs
Well, I'm rich and high class enough
To be both female and young.

MORE NEWSPAPER DOGGEREL!

ARE THERE WINOS ANYMORE? There must be, as most American big cities have one section of town that still serves as a skid row. Even if you were to miss the gangs of drunks, often seen shirtless and sipping from brown paper bags, it would be impossible to miss the broken glass. The sidewalks and gutters are filled with shattered bottles. Among the empty vodka and malt liquor bottle shards, the careful observer will notice a distinctive label: that of MD 20/20, commonly referred to as Mad Dog, a sickly sweet wine fortified with various fruit flavors, including “Pink Grapefruit” and “Hawaiian Blue.” Alcoholics still take to Mad Dog for the same reason they have for decades, and for the same reason they favor other sweet wines. It is inexpensive and it kills your appetite, which is an important consideration when choosing between a meal and a drink.

What most winos don’t realize is that while they’re working on enlarging their livers, they are also obeying strict Jewish dietary law. Mad Dog, you see, is produced by Mogen David, and is manufactured under careful rabbinic supervision. Winos, it seems, have a taste for kosher drinks.

In general, most Americans don’t have a very clear understanding of Jewish dietary laws. A Jewish Studies professor at the University of Minnesota used to tell a story about his frequent experiences aboard airplanes, as the flight attendants would inevitably discover that they had neglected to pack a kosher meal for him. According to the professor, who, as a graduate of Yeshiva University, also held the title of rabbi, could always look forward to the flustered flight attendants bringing a regular meal and offering to find a rabbi to bless it.

He would patiently attempt to explain that the Jewish laws regarding foods do not involve a rabbinic blessing. According to the Five Books of Moses, there are simply some foods Jews can’t eat, such as pork, and no amount of blessings by nearby rabbis will make them acceptable. Even those foods that are allowed in the Pentateuch, such as chicken, must be slaughtered in a particular way, called shechita, by a trained butcher; failing this, the animal is inedible. In order to insure that food is produced in a manner that is consistent with Jewish law, a supervisory committee examines the manner in which the food is produced. Once they are satisfied, they authorize the food to be marketed with a hescher, a trademarked logo that identifies the food as kosher. Some of the more common symbols are that of The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which is a circle with a U in its center, and that of The Organized Kashrus Laboratories, which is also an encircled letter, in this case a K. Although rabbis participate in this supervisory process, they do not bless the food to make it kosher. Jews do bless their food, but it serves pretty much the same function as the Christian practice of grace before meals.

In theory, all wine is kosher. After all, there are no prohibitions against fruits or vegetables in the Jewish dietary law. If you’re walking along and you see a grape hanging from a vine, no matter how strictly observant you might be, there’s nothing preventing you from popping those grapes into your mouth, unless, of course, you happen to be stealing them, in which case you might want to revisit the Ten Commandments. But the grapes require no rabbinic supervision and no trademarked logo to be kosher. And, yet, were you to ferment those grapes and throw them in a bottle, there is not an Orthodox Jew on earth who would drink it without an okay from the rabbis. (There are other Jews who might guzzle away without question, as different branches of Judaism have different levels of observance; many members of the Reform movement, as an example, would have no compunctions about drinking your wine, even if you were to serve it with a side of bacon, which they would probably also enjoy.)

So what’s the deal? Well, firstly, we should explain that the Five Books of Moses were occasionally vague about dietary laws. For example, Deuteronomy 14:21 advises against boiling a lamb in its mother’s milk, and what does that mean? The rabbis interpreted it as meaning that Jews simply should not mix milk and meat in general, but even that raises a thicket of tricky questions. A puzzled Jew, faced with this restriction, would naturally wonder how long they would have to wait between eating a hamburger and enjoying a chocolate shake. And what about birds and fish? They don’t produce milk, so is it allowable to have a turkey and cheese sandwich?

The answers were left in the hands of the rabbis, who themselves could sometimes be a little quarrelsome. Some rabbis argue that you must wait three hours between eating meat and drinking milk. For others, you must wait six. Most agree that milk can be drunk with fish, and most agree that milk should not be drunk with fowl, but you’ll find some rabbis who take the opposite viewpoint on both. Most observant Jews just go with whatever tradition they grew up in, although we presume that some simply skip the issue altogether by becoming vegetarian.

On the subject of wine, the rabbis have a general consensus. The beverage is just too important to Judaism to be left unsupervised. Jews have been making wine since Biblical days, and wine plays an important part in many Jewish rituals — let us look at the feast of Passover as an example. Not only are four cups of wine drunk by each of the participants (and, at many Seders, these are enormous cups of wine), but a special cup is set aside for the prophet Elijah. He is supposed to go from door to door on some Passover evening, giving word of the coming of the Jewish messiah; seeing as there are about 14 million Jews in the world, one presumes that the prophet will be quite snookered at the end of the evening.

As wine is of great ritual importance to Jews, they take great pains to make certain that kosher wine is not tainted. During the production of the wine, it may not be mixed with any additional chemicals, coloring agents, gelatins, or any of the many other additives often found in wine. Additionally, the tools used to make the wines — the presses, tanks, and crushers — must all be cleaned with scalding water, to insure that they are free of contaminants.

As cautious as Jews are about making certain their wine is not adulterated with strange ingredients, they are even more concerned with making certain that the wine is not tainted by something far worse: idolatry. Many European vineyards were owned and operated by monasteries, and the wines they produced had certainly been earmarked for Jesus. Such wine simply wouldn’t do for a Jewish ceremony. And if the winemakers were not Christian, well, who knows what strange gods they dedicated their wines to? For this reason, kosher wine can only be handled, from the vine to the glass, by Jews. Sabbath-observant Jews, mind you. A Jew who flips on his television on Saturday, or spends money, or engages in any of the hundreds of prohibited behaviors on the Jewish day of rest, could spoil a perfectly good bottle of wine simply by pouring it.

That is, unless the wine is mevushal. This type of wine is created by taking normal kosher wine and heating it to 186 degrees Fahrenheit. Boiled wine was forbidden for ritual purposes at the Temple in Israel, and so contemporary rabbis treat it as though it were a different substance altogether. Therefore, wine that has been heated is subject to fewer rules than its unheated version, and can be handled by non-Jews without losing its kosher status. This type of wine wasn’t especially popular until recently, though, as boiled wine can lose much of its flavor. Techniques for flash-boiling the wine are now common, which keeps the wine’s flavor, and mevushal wines have started to develop quite a following.

By the way, there are considerable more restrictions regarding kosher wine. Grapes cannot be used to make wine until the vines that produce them are four years old. Vegetables or other fruits may not be grown between these vines. When the wine is completed, one percent of it must be dumped out, to represent the ten percent tithing that once went to the Temple in Israel. It is no surprise that the production of kosher food, especially wine, requires rabbinic supervision. There are so many rules, it would be easy to accidentally miss a few, and it doesn’t matter if you get a rabbi to bless it — the resulting wine is never going to be kosher.

All of these rules can get to be a bit frustrating, especially when dealing with people who are ignorant of them — such as flight attendants. Take our Jewish Studies professor as an example. After an endless number of hungry flights and an endless number of helpful stewardesses offering to have a regular meal blessed by a rabbi, he finally gave in to his hunger. “I’m a rabbi,” he told them. “I’ll bless the food.”

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AGAIN WE GO TO THE STATE FAIR for inspiration, and we shall certainly return to the Great Minnesota Get-Together a few more times, as the Fair sometimes seems like nothing more than a celebration of regional eccentricity. The experience of attending the Fair is often just an extended bout of jamais vous, in which the ordinary suddenly becomes quite alien. Take milk, for example.

We Midwesterners have a reputation for loving milk, to the extent that the phrase "milk-fed" is used almost exclusively for those of us in the Middle West. Michael Ritchie populated an entire film with milk-fed stereotypes: In the 1972 Lee Marvin vehicle Prime Cut, the entirety of rural Missouri is presented as consisting of huge, overly muscled, blonde farmboys wearing coveralls and bearing shotguns. Sure, the film is set near Kansas City, but any one of these boys might be named Dauber Dybinski and might wind up coaching football in Northern Minnesota, as Bill Fagerbakke's character did in the ABC sitcom Coach. Literally every rural male character in the film looks like Dauber.

Prime Cut's murderous blond Midwesterners head to the county fair to hunt Lee Marvin, and, lo and behold, there is a milk stand. Shaped like a cow and dispensing fresh milk from udder-shaped spigots, it's a cinematic oddity worthy of contemplation. And so director Ritchie lets Marvin puzzle over the thing as two cheerfully dense women dispense cup after cup of milk, demanding to know his opinion. Marvin, a Chicago mobster, is at a loss. He swishes a cup as though it were wine, sniffs, and then takes a sip. "It's full-bodied," he finally declares. A few minutes later, he participates in shooting the cow-shaped milk stand with a shotgun.

The Minnesota State Fair has its own milk stand, and while it isn't cow shaped and lacks the udder-spigots in Michael Ritchie's film, it's got its own curious qualities. The Minnesota State Fair milk stand, shaped like a cattle barn, offers just the thing for milk-fed Midwestern appetites: All the Milk You Can Drink. The price has slowly crept up over the years -- as the above photo shows, the cost was just 10¢ in 1965, when Hubert Humphrey and his wife Muriel posed with a cup with Princess Kay Mary Ann Titrud. It held steady at 25¢ for quite a few years, and jumped to 50¢ recently. This year the price looks like it might be as high as a dollar, or higher, which seems spendy.

After all, as much as we Midwesterners might like milk, how much can we actually drink? It's a question of simple chemistry, as the body only produces so much lactase, the enzyme required to digest milk. Too much milk, and the drinker is likely to regurgitate the contents of his stomach -- forcefully. There was a spate of campus pranking in the past few years involving betting an unwitting victim that they cannot drink a gallon of milk in a hour; the inevitable result was projectile vomiting.

Despite this, the booth remains, year after year, surrounded with eager Minnesotans gulping cup after cup and demanding refills, satisfied that, if they can just finish another cup or two, they'll have gotten their money's worth. At 25¢, that was true, but at a dollar, well, the booth starts seeming like one of those fixed midway games of chance, where balls are tossed at bottles that never fall and darts are flung at balloons that never pop. Except, at this game, the close you come to getting your dollar's worth, the more likely you are to spend the rest of the day doubled over, fighting the urge to empty the contents of your stomach.

But, then, it really doesn't matter. We might not be able to drink a dollar's worth of milk, but we'll be there at the All the Milk You Can Drink stand anyway, downing cup after cup. We're Midwesterners, after all. How can we resist?

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

A POEM inspired by the news that when organs are harvested from the dead, they may not be as dead as we think.

Doctors must be exacting
About the organ they're extracting:
With whispers and with gentle slices,
And baffles on medical devices,
No noisy pumps or electric pings;
Not a sound from anything.
Incisions made with muffled dread --
As a single noise could wake the dead.

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AMERICANS NEVER SEEM TO BE entirely satisfied with sinning unless they can regret it afterward. “I used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo,” LaVern Baker sang in one of her best songs, and bully for her, as it sounds like she must have had a grand old time. But just when the listener is thinking that Miss Baker sounds like a great sort of gal, she roars out, “but now I’m SAVED.” She has, like so many before her, traded in her entertaining previous life for a stern-faced current one, standing on a street corner, banging a bass drum, and railing against wickedness.

Tim Spencer, the gangly, strong-featured cofounder of The Sons of the Pioneers, used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo as well, it seems. He authored a song about the subject, released by his singing cowboy group (whose members included Roy Rogers) in 1947 and called, magnificently, “Cigareetes, Whusky, and Wild, Wild Women.” Over a background of a heavily plunked double bass and a chattering mandolin, the Sons of the Pioneers don’t bother with LaVern Baker’s reproachful tone. Instead, they affect an attitude of mock contrition, setting their voices warbling as though they were on the verge of an embarrassing fit of weeping as they recount their tale of woe.

And what is their tale? “Once I was happy and had a good wife,” they tell us, but then, tragically, another woman entered the picture: “She started me smokin’ and drinking whusky.”

And that’s it. The Sons of the Pioneers don’t even bother explaining what happened next. They didn’t need to. In the 1930s, such confessions were so common and so public that the degradation that followed exposure to sin needn’t be spelled out. Evangelists such as former baseball player Billy Sunday toured the United States in tents, dragging remorseful sinners, many of them alcoholics, onto the stage and demanding that they confess. And they did, in the thousands, in tearful, extended expositions.

But The Sons of the Pioneers weren’t simply creating a musical version of these exhausting atonements. With their choked, weepy presentation of the song's lyrics and the genuinely lust in their voice as they sing the chorus, they sounds as though they were slyly mocking such repentance narratives. To its credit, “Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women” sounds more like a song that you would sing while drinking — and while drunk — than while rejecting alcohol. These things might drive you insane, as the song warns, but you get the genuine sense from the singers that it might be a very pleasant madness.

LISTEN TO "CIGAREETES, WHUSKY AND WILD, WILD WOMEN":



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RIGHT OFF THE BAT, let's dispense with your typical claims to bowling greatness, because Minnesota doesn't have them. Ten pin wasn't born in the Gopher State; no, that honor goes to somewhere New England, where an additional pin was added when nine-pin bowling was outlawed. Minnesota can't claim history's greatest bowler; that would be Dick Weber, who hailed from St. Louis. Minnesota doesn't even have the largest number of bowlers statewide; according to the American Bowling Congress, we are easily outnumbered by bowlers in Michigan.

But what Minnesota lacks in accomplishment, we more than make up for in weirdness. Although natives of our fair state do their fair share of tossing balls, sometimes it seems we are more interested in riffing on the idea of bowling than in the sport itself. What follows is a list of Minnesota's six greatest bowling accomplishments -- some are comical, some are metaphysical, some aspire to high art. Few actually involve throwing a ball down a lane.

Stardust Lanes: Stepping into Stardust Lanes, located at 2520 26th Avenue South, is like jumping into some magnificent time warp. The building is a superlative example of mid-20th century kitsch, from its pastel green exterior to its starburst spangled interior. We could wax poetic about Stardust Lanes all night, but needn't bother, as James Lileks has already done the work for us.

The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League: This group of spirited leftists formed in Minneapolis in 1987 and left behind only two bowling-related accomplishments. The first was their exceptionally witty name: the acronym was RABL. The second, and more notorious, accomplishment occurred during a 1988 protest against US Troop deployment in Honduras and Nicaragua. RABL smashed the window of an military recruiting office -- with a bowling ball.

Baby Split Bowling News: This zine debuted in November of 1989, ran for an astounding five years, and was, in the words of creator Julian Davis, "a look at life through the eyes of deviant bowlers." Every issue boasted its own decidedly unpsortsmanlike theme, including "Science Fiction" and "Fungus," but whatever Davis and his small coterie of dedicated contributors wrote about, somehow they always managed to bring it back to bowling.

Bryant-Lake Bowl: Although this venerable Lyn-Lake institution actually has eight gloriously retro lanes, there's just too much going on to limit discussions of BLB to bowling. They sport a bar blessed with a superabundance of microbrewery beers, a restaurant, and a cabaret space that consistently offers some of the Twin City's most eccentric performances.

The Big Lebowski: Although locally born filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen set their haywire hippie crime melodrama in Los Angeles, there are little Minnesota flourishes throughout, from the opening theme (Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me") to Bunny Lebowski's farming community hometown (Moorehead, MN). Following the misadventures of an aging campus-radical-turned-league-bowler, The Big Lebowski might as well be the work of a ten-pin fetishist. With gloriously day-glo opening credits set in the Googie-styled Hollywood Star Lanes, a sex offender clad in a purple polyester bowling costume, and the recurring refrain of "Fuck it, Dude, let's go bowling," this is a film that views ten-pin in a typically Minnesotan way: as a source of endless, sardonic amusement.

Let's Bowl: Built around the inexplicable talents of St. Louis Park native Rich Kronfeld and satirizing such drab regional game shows as Bowling for Dollars, Let's Bowl flourished briefly on a St. Cloud UHF station and then on a Minnesota NBC affiliate, and transferred to Comedy Central in 2001, where it promptly vanished. Kronfeld was previously best known for appearing in local parades in a self-made enclosed wheelchair styled after Captain Pike's from the Star Trek episode "The Menagerie." He also had developed some notoriety for appearing on public access television as a grey-suit clad, repressed, sweaty character named Dr. Sphincter. As Let's Bowl's announcer Wally Hotvedt, Kronfeld played a character who was fundamentally incompetent. As bowlers battled each other for unimpressive prizes, Kronfeld misused common bowling expressions, babbled tales about traveling with the band Flock of Seagulls, and glanced around with a wild, perpetually bewildered stare. At times, Let's Bowl seemed like it could have been a real game show -- albeit one in which the producer had given announcing tasks to his developmentally disabled nephew. At other times -- such as when Kronfeld actually showed the video for the Flock of seagulls' singing "I Ran," into which he had inserted footage of himself singing along -- it was absurdist heaven.

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INSPIRED BY the true story of Devin Funck, an 11-year-old boy who battled a giant alligator and lost an arm in Slidell, Louisiana.

I ain't never known of a lad of such spunk
As the alligator fighter, young Devin Funck
Who battled a beast way down in Slidell
And Devin lost his arm, but Devin lived to tell
That in the water of Crystal Lake, lurking below
Was a half ton monster by the name of Big Joe.
He was a 12-foot lizard from his teeth to his tail
And he was spoken of in whispers down in Slidell.
But Devin had no fear and Devin he did go
Into Crystal Lake, and he faced down Big Joe.
Then the alligator lunged and the alligator bit
Into Devin's arm from his shoulder to his mitt
And he pulled at the boy and he tried to pull him down
Into Crystal Lake, where Devin he would drown
But Devin he was scrappy and Devin knew to fight
And he struck at Big Joe as Big Joe took a bite:
Devin struck him in the eye and the beast he did go
But took the boy's arm as he swam down below.
Devin called for revenge from his hospital bed
And the police told Devin that Big Joe was dead.
Devin thought a while, and then Devin said:
"It takes my arm, I take its head."
Devin looked at the stump left by the alligator
And said, "I want a robot arm like the terminator."
Lizards, if you're listening; beasts, if you can hear:
There's a killer out there that should make you slink in fear.
He's half machine and he's half Slidell punk:
He's the alligator fighter, young Devin Funck.

LISTEN TO BUNNY SPARBER READ "THE LEGEND OF DEVIN FUNCK":



DOWNLOAD "THE LEGEND OF DEVIN FUNCK."

This poem inspired Josh Millard, also known as Cortex on the Web forum MetaFilter, to put my rhymed couplets to music.

LISTEN TO JOSH MILLARD'S VERSION:



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DIE, BABY, DIE

Deke Fagin, known to all members of the Syndicate and the police as the 'Investigator' was assigned the task of finding the murderer, of one of Annie's girls and a trick who turned out to be the only son and heir of wealthy, influential Wilma Van Dyke.

The assignment should have been an easy one, but Deke ran into a series of complications ... like dope, missing persons, more murder and a new mob doing their best to muscle in on the Syndicates operation.

In fitting together the pieces of the jigsaw of violence and death Deke is constantly in grave danger himself and ends up on a cold, lonely beach, begging some cop to give him aid.

More Dirty Books!

10 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BUTTER SCULPTURE OF MY HEAD THAT I KEEP IN MY REFRIGERATOR

Sorry. I just need to get past you to get some ice. Hey -- still looking good! Maybe I'll bring some of the guests over to see you later tonight. People always get a kick out of seeing you. Yeah, if the party winds down, I'll introduce you. Ha! It's not a party until someone brings out the butter sculpture! Maybe it will just come up naturally. Somebody will see my photos from the Minnesota State Fair and say, hey, were you Princess Kay of the Milky Way one year? And I'll say, yes, yes, five years ago. I still have my butter sculpture in the freezer. And we'll come in and we'll all look at you. Won't that be fun! Anyway, got to make cocktails! See you later!

* * *

Hey. Heyooooo. Hey you! This is Katie. She's going to be spending the night. Shhh. Shhh. I know it's late, butter-sculpture, but I thought you two might want to get acquainted. You know what? You know what, butter sculpture? I'm a teeny weeny bit drunk. You don't mind, do you? I'm a gonna give you a little kiss, my butter sculpture. Mmm -kiss! Hey, Katie, you want to kiss the butter sculpture? That's right. Don't be afraid of it. It's just butter. It's just butter sculpted to look like my head. Fuck. Now that I think about it, that's sort of creepy, isn't it? Ha! Well, kiss it. KISS IT! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

* * *

Jesus. Haven't seen you for a while. You gave me a little scare there. Forgot you were in here, for some reason. How the fuck did I forget that? For a second, I thought I was seeing my own severed head in the freezer. That shit freaked me out. Wow. I'll tell you, last thing you want to see at two am, when you're as high as I am, is your own severed head in the freezer. Note to self: Don't do that again. No freezer at two a.m. after smoking so much weed. Shit. I'm going to sit down.

* * *

Okay, butter sculpture, I'm going to stash this baggie behind you. Don't look at it. You don't want to know what's in it, trust me.

* * *

Aw, god, man. You shot my butter sculpture! I told you not to play with that shit in my house. Look at it! Fucking LOOK AT IT. There's a hole right through its forehead! And the refrigerator is going to be leaking, I don't know, freon or whatever all over the place. Stop fucking laughing, man, this isn't a joke. I've had this butter sculpture for a decade now, and you put a hole in it. God DAMN it, man, you're always doing shit like this. God. I am sorry, butter sculpture. I'm sorry my friend is such an idiot. Jesus, look at you. You've been shot in the head.

* * *

All right. You okay in there? I know it's a little more crowded. Sorry about that. I had to sort of, uh, downgrade my cost of living. Sorry to have to stuff you into such a small space with all my frozen dinners and whatnot. It's temporary, I promise. I just have to get my shit back together, and we'll move you back to a real quality freezer. Shit. I'll get you a freezer all your own! Or better! I'll get a refrigerator show case, and I'll get the woman who originally carved you to fix that hole above your eye, and we'll put you on display! I just got to figure some shit out. I just got to stop drinking, you know, and quit the drugs, and stop hanging out with the fucking losers who are my friends, and get my old job back. I got some work ahead of me. God damn it. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

* * *

I'm just going to put this baggie back here. Don't mind me. What are you looking at? Don't look at me.

* * *

I'm sorry about that. I should never have invited that guy over. He said he'd sell me something. I knew he was sketchy when I met him. But they're all sketchy. I don't mind that he took my money. And I think he broke my finger, but, what the fuck, it's my own fault. But there was no reason for him to do that to you. Well, there's probably a way to get the ear back on. I don't know what we're going to do about the nose. The guy fucking ate it. He ate in on a cracker. Jesus. He. Ate. It. On. A Cracker. What the fuck? Who does that? Who goes to someone's freezer, sees a butter sculpture, and, and, and, and fucking ... mutilates it like that? That was crazy! Anyway, I don't know what to say. I let a psychopath into the apartment and he fucked you up. It's all on me. I know it. It's all on me.

* * *

Man, we're not looking so good, are we? Well, I've been talking to the company, and I think I can get the electricity back on in a couple of days, or maybe a week. Anyway, I bought some more ice down at the store, so here you go. We'll keep you from melting any more. Ha! Hey, bro, you look like I feel right about now.

* * *

Hey. Sorry the kid freaked out like that. Maybe he'll learn a lesson about paying attention when his father tells him something. I keep this freezer locked for a reason. I don't know. Maybe he thought there were Christmas presents in here, or candy, or something. Well, he got the key, and it serves him right, seeing a thing like you. He'll probably have bad dreams for a week. One day I'll have to explain you to him. He's too young now. But when he's old enough, I'll open the freezer again and let him really look at you, and I tell him some stories about his father that's he's just not going to believe.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

IN 1962, when pastor David Wilkerson wrote The Cross and the Switchblade, the United States Department of Hygiene and Morality determined the ten main causes of kids going wrong. They were:

1. Diets too low in bran;
2. Communism;
3. The reefer;
4. That awful jungle music with the loud drums and those terrible electric guitars and the singers who you can't even understand what they're saying;
5. Nudism;
6. Romance novels about nurses;
7. Slouching;
8. Undiagnosed pancreatic disorders;
9. Never having learned to mind and not sass back; and:
10. Poverty

More Vinyl Oddities.

A poem from the news that an error in touch-screen voting machines used in half of Ohio's counties may cause some votes to be "dropped" in recent elections.

I voted and I voted,
And then I voted more:
I pulled the polling lever
Until my voting hand was sore.
So where did all my votes go?
They ain't counted anymore.
It ain't them what does the voting;
It's them what keeps the score.

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THERE IS A RECURRING JOKE in James Garner’s amiable 1969 western Support Your Local Sheriff! In the film, Garner plays Jason McCullough, a laconic if irritable gunslinger who ends up in Colorado in the midst of the Gold Rush. Even as he gets roped into acting as the town’s lawman, he has his sights set on the real frontier, where things are really wild. “I’m only here to get a stake,” he’ll tell anyone who will listen. “For Australia.”

We can thank a country singer named Slim Dusty for some of this sense of Australia’s wildness. Dusty, born David Gordon Kirkpatrick in New South Wales in 1927, was the first Australian performer to enjoy success on the American pop charts — with a drinking song, no less! In 1957, Dusty released a song titled “The Pub With No Beer” as the b-side to a song titled “Saddle Boy.” But it was “Pub With No Beer” that caught on, because the first Australian song to chart in American and earning Dusty the first Gold Record issued to an Australian.

The song was originally written by outback poet Dan Sheahan in 1943, telling of American soldiers that had emptied the Day Dawn Hotel of suds after one evening of carousing. A songwriter named Gordon Parsons eventually added a melody to the song, a rollicking folk melody borrowed from Stephen Foster’s“Beautiful Dreamer.”

The song tells, with a combination of wry humor and impenetrable Australian dialect, of the disappointment of a bar’s locals when they discover their watering hole has run dry. “Then the swaggy comes in smothered in dust and flies,” Dusty sings cheerfully above a plainly strummed guitar, and he’s talking about a swagman, approximately the Australian equivalent of the American hobo, who is nonplussed to discover that he cannot get a drink. “I’ve trudged 50 flamin’ miles to a town with no beer,” he complains.

The song is an inventory of outback characters, none of whom are prepared for a beerless night, There’s a blacksmith who greets his wife sober for the first time and burst into tears before her, as well as stockmen, publicans, maids, and a dog expecting a beating from his frustrated master, all of them in a foul mood thanks to an empty pub. The song’s descriptions of each of these characters are arch and brief, a cartoon of melancholy drinkers.

Since the song’s release, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the small New South wales’ township of Taylor’s Arms has claimed itself as the original Pub With No Beer, and, in fairness, it has some rights to that claim — it was, after all, frequented by songwriter Gordon Parsons, and did frequently run out of beer. The Cosmopolitan has since renamed itself The Pub With No Beer and positioned itself as a tourist destination, with a microbrewery, a fine restaurant, live musical performances, and walls lines with memorabilia from the Australian outback, as well as a Pub With No Beer Festival every Easter.

And, if you’re a weary jackaroo looking for a cold refreshment, you’re going to have to go to the former Cosmopolitan. Were you to attempt to get a drink at the original Pub With No Beer at the Day Dawn Hotel, you’d walk away as frustrated as any of the characters in Slim Dusty’s song. The Day Dawn Hotel, it turns out, was demolished in 1960. One could, presumably, purchase a can of Fosters, stand on the site of the old hotel, and toast its memory; one might as well celebrate its disappearance by enjoying a beer with no pub.

LISTEN TO "PUB WITH NO BEER":



More Bottle Gang!

MINNEAPOLIS AND ST. PAUL are littered with the Peanuts gang. Starting in 2000, local artists took 101 statues of Snoopy, decorated them with mirrors or splashes of paint, and propped them up throughout town. They were then auctioned off, and the winning bidders, often as not, placed their Snoopys outside, so the public could continue to enjoy them -- or be offended by them, depending on their aesthetic. Somebody -- presumably of rarefied and delicate tastes, and yet with the impulses of a street tough -- beheaded one of the Snoopys in August of that year.

Undaunted, St. Paulites have continued to mass-produce and decorate Peanuts characters, including Charlie Brown and his perpetual nemesis Lucy Van Pelt. And why not? Charles Schultz is one of the Twin Cities' most successful natives. Never mind that he lived in Santa Rosa, Cal., for most of his professional career -- Peanuts borrows from Schultz's Midwest autobiography. Charlie Brown, after all, was named after a Minnesota classmate; Brown's father was a barber, like Schultz's; Brown's ongoing unrequited love, the little red-haired girl, was based on one of Schultz's coworkers at Art Instruction, Inc., a correspondence art course in Minneapolis.

So we end up with Sparky Schultz's neurotic ankle-biters everywhere. Yet, somehow, it is a different statue that feels somehow truly Minnesotan. A statue of the Hamm's Bear stands in the 7th Street Mall in St. Paul and it's the result of quite a struggle. The Rake reported in 2004 of the red tape a citizen's committee was experiencing in their attempts to put up a statue of the Hamm's cheerful, sport-loving mascot. At the time, a committee member blamed "political correctness," The Rake reported. "Last year, their effort to put the bear statue in Como Park was shot down by the St. Paul City Council, with Council Member Jay Benanav comparing the Hamm's Bear to the Marlboro Man and colleague Chris Coleman labeling the character 'schmaltz art.'"

Schmaltz art it may be, but the unnamed Bear is one of the Midwest's most beloved characters. Hamm's itself repeatedly put the Bear into mothballs, as reported in Moira F. Harris's book The Paws of Refreshment: The Story of Hamm's Beer Advertising. Without the Bear, the product suffered -- every time. When Pabst bought the Hamm's label in the Eighties, they were determined the keep the Bear as public as possible. "We always show the bear," a Pabst official said. "People remember us because of the bear and expect to see him."

But why? Well, there were a few things the Bear had going for him. First of all, he benefited from a charming design. He's a classic example of the sort of boldly drawn spokes-character that came into prominence in American advertising design in the mid-Twentieth century; he keeps company with such instantly recognizable visuals as the Michelin Man, Mr. Peanut, and fellow Minnesotan The Jolly Green Giant. Depending on who you ask, the Bear was either created by former Disney animator Howard Smith or by a Chicago advertising art director named Cleo Hovel. Both men worked on the Bear's television commercials, and, whoever was responsible for the Bear's design, they got it right. Friendly, paunchy, and eventually sporting a shock of tousled hair, the Bear proved to be an enormously expressive animated character.

The Bear was a sportsman -- he was occasionally even shown logrolling, a lumberjack's sport and one common to Minnesota's early history. But, as sportmen go, the Bear wasn't a very good one. His cartoons would frequently end with the Bear humiliated, either by his own incompetence or by duplicity on the part of the various animals who he played opposite in some sort of intramural forest league. The Bear took defeat graciously; it was part of his appeal, and Hamm's knew it. When Hamm's sponsored a Winnipeg to St. Paul snowmobile race, the company provided a very Bear-like prize for "True Grit." The winner of the prize was the contestant who overcame the most adversity to reach the finish line. One year's winner, as The Paws of Refreshment reports, "broke one of his machine's skis, crashed into another snowmobile coming around a blind corner, blew three clutches (and replaced them), and drove the last 50 miles without chaincase oil after the case cracked."

Additionally, Hamm's had a terrific theme song that they played behind the Bear in his commercials. (No, not the "Young Adults" theme to be found on the 365 Days Project Web page, although we must confess to a fondness for that one.) Borrowing its melody from Rudolf Friml's "Natoma" and boasting a propulsive tom-tom beat, the theme sang cheerfully of Hamm's place of origin. In rhymed couplets parodying Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," the jingle went as follows: "From the land of sky-blue waters, from the land of pines, lofty balsams, comes the beer refreshing, Hamm's the beer refreshing." Once heard, the theme could not be forgotten. Interestingly, although the drum beat behind the melody sounds native American, its source of origin is further south than that: Advertiser Ray Mithun based it on recordings of Haitian Voodoo drumming, and the rhythm was actually beaten out on an empty carton of Star-Kist tuna cans.

So there you have it. All it takes to make a memorable animated product mascot is a St. Paul beer, a Disney animator, a Chicago advertiser, a Hawthorne poem, and Voodoo drumming. Charlie Brown might have had emotional complexity, but, good grief, he was nowhere near as culturally complex.

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WHEN ISAAC HAYES died on August 10 of 2008, the world lost more than one of the defining voices of Memphis Soul; it also lost a dynamic screen presence whose hangdog features and wry persona made him a welcome presence in such varied projects as The Rockford Files, Escape from New York, and Hustle & Flow. As an actor, he is probably best know for providing the baritone voice of Chef on South Park, but his first screen performance as an actor came in the 1974 American International Picture's film Truck Turner. In it, Hayes plays a modern day bounty hunter who kills a pimp while trying to apprehend him, and earns the vengeance of Nichelle Nichols, best known as Uhura from Star Trek, but here playing a trash-talking brothel madame. Nichols sics another pimp on him, played by character actor Yaphet Kotto, and the remainder of the film consists of scenes of brutal violence as the pimp and the bounty hunter take aim at each other.

me: Am I crazy, or did Isaac Hayes wear a denim suit all the way through the movie that it was clearly established his cat had pissed on?
Brandi: I really don't remember. I only paid attention to the bad guys' clothing
me: I remember there was a lot of pink in the movie.
Brandi: Yes.
It wasn't limited to clothes either
there was a pink car
me: Yep.
I think it was only in the movie long enough to get smashed.
There was a lot of pink and a lot of smashed cars.
Brandi: Yeah.
me: Let's explain why.
Isaac Hayes is a skip chaser, and he's been hired to track down a killer pimp.
The pimp takes off in his car, but can't drive more than six feet without hitting another car.
Brandi: Like I've seen grand theft auto rampages end with less damage.
me: It seemed like he was deliberately driving into things.
Brandi: He does.
me: I can't see how that would help you in a chase.
Brandi: There were times where it felt like a rally car race
and then on top of that the car would fall apart in the strangest ways
me: Yes. At one point its door just fell off.
Brandi: You hit a fire hydrant head on, why did your back door fall off?
me: So, apparently the film actually was made in Los Angeles.
We were trying to figure it out as we watched.
It didn't look like any LA I've ever seen.
Brandi: Really. Huh, I was banking on it being in San Diego
me: It was a pretty bleak vision of the city.
Really industrial. And BROKE.
Nobody looked like they had any money.
Brandi: Yeah but on the upside, they saved a lot of production costs by casting real hobos
me: True! The film opens with a real hobo fight!
Brandi: although, those hobos wouldn't have been very useful for other things like Bum Fight videos
me: No. They weren't very skilled fighters.
Brandi: I don't think swinging your arms side to side and smacking people is a very effective combat technique.
me: There was a lot of shoving people and then falling over on top of them.
Truck Turner wasn't a bum, but he was obviously broke.
His apartment was, like, 300 square feet.
A bed and trash on the floor. That's all he had.
And a REALLY BIG GUN.
I like when he gets angry at his partner and says "Don't call me a slob."
YOU ARE A SLOB.
You're wearing clothes that smell like cat piss and there is junk all over the floor.
Brandi: Can we talk about that cat
me: Yes.
Brandi: It didn't have any boundaries.
Like Truck Turner and his girlfriend were having special time and the cat just gets all up in their bidness and starts marking its territory.
Although, even though it was up in their bidness, it didn't deserve to die the way it did.
me: No. That was cold. This is a movie where people die horribly ever twelve seconds, but a cat dies and Isaac Hayes looks like he's going to have a nervous breakdown.
THEY KILLED THE CAT?
NOW THEY'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Uh, dude?
They killed your partner too.
Remember?
Shot him with so many shotguns that he flew 100 feet, carthweeling the whole way.
Killed by Yaphet Kotto.
So let's talk Yaphet Kotto.
Yaphet was a pimp.
His name?
Harvard Blue.
Brandi: Actually, according to Freakonomics most of the kids named Harvard in the US are black.
Like all of them
Same for Princetons
But not Yales.
Those are all white
me: Here's the thing, though. Yaphet Kotto is a Jew.
Brandi: Really?
Huh.
me: Yep.
Brandi: I didn't know that.
me: And his father?
The Crown Prince of Cameroon
Brandi: No way!
me: How many Jewish black boys who are Cameroonian royalty are named Harvard?
Brandi: Eddie Murphy was basing his role in Coming To America on Yaphet Kotto's dad?
me: I guess he may have.
Brandi: I'm going to go with "he did"
me: Apparently a lot of the royal family from Cameroon are black Jews.
Brandi: I learned that Israel is cracking down on letting African Jews in
because a lot of people supposedly are converting to Judiasm to get in and then converting back once they get there
probably because bacon is so tasty.
me: You can be Jewish and eat bacon.
Reform Jews eat bacon.
THEY LOVE IT.
Brandi: Yeah, I know you can but Ur Doin' It Rong.
Really, I know a ton of reform Jews and they do not eat the bacon.
We should go hang out at Temple Israel one day and survey people.
me: I ate bacon before I became a vegetarian.
With my rabbi from Temple Israel.
On the High Holy Days.
While worshiping Jesus.
Brandi: I knew you were one of those Jews for Jesus!
me: Nope.
We just got a little crazy.
Brandi: Anyway, let's talk about that emerald thing around Harvard Blue's neck?
Me: I presume the thing around his neck was some sort of Cameroonian royal seal.
Brandi: I'm glad that toward the end of the movie the jewel around his neck actually matched his outfit
Because he'd have these well put together outfits and then the jewel would clash
me: Yes. That's important.
Brandi: especially with his pink outfit.
me: Yep.
Brandi: Let's talk about when we first met Yaphet Kotto.
and the funeral of the killer pimp.
me: Yes.
Brandi: Where they were sprinkling cocaine on the deceased.
I guess that's why you can't spell funeral without F-U-N.
me: The killer pimp is dead. All the other pimps are putting cocaine on his body.
But Yaphet Kotto?
Oh, hell no.
HE SPITS ON THE BODY.
Never even explains why.
Brandi: And ruins good coke in the process.
me: Well, I don't think anybody was going to be snorting off the body of the killer pimp.
I think the film had three great elements. First, Isaac Hayes.
Second, Yaphet Kotto.
And third, Uhura from Star Trek.
WHAT THE FUCK, UHURA!
You just don't expect to see Nichelle Nichols in streetwalker gear screaming at a room full of prostitutes.
Brandi: I thought that brothel was quite integrated.
let's talk about when we first met Uhura.
In the craziest beauty shop ever
me: Yes. It looked like an MC Escer painting.
Brandi: It was like one giant black and white optical illusion.
Me: I kept expecting to see beauticians walking on the ceiling in the background.
So she sends professional killers after Truck Turner for killing her killer pimp boyfriend.
One of the killers shoots at Truck Turner at his apartment. What does he hit?
A bowl of milk.
Someone else tries to shoot Truck Turner in the street, and what does he hit?
A bottle of milk.
Apparently, milk is like a magnet for bullets.
Brandi: Let's talk about Truck Turner's partner
me: Jerry.
Played by Allan Weeks.
Brandi: Yes, Jerry.
He had an aversion to car doors
or an addiction to sun roofs
I'm not sure which it was
me: Yes. He never used his car door. He just jumped in through the sun roof.
Sometimes, he'd ride along sticking out of the top of the sun roof.
Brandi: Or he'd just stand there when the car wasn't moving.
He loved him some sunroof
me: He probably paid extra for it and wanted to get the most out of it he could.
Brandi: I'm disappointed he died
because I think the two of them could have done several sequels that would have been better than Pineapple Express
me: Jerry and Truck Turner got along really well together.
Brandi: They did.
me: Always joking and giving each other five.
Brandi: They brightened up my day
me: Jerry was great.
I miss Jerry.
And his pink shirt.
But I'll tell you who they needed more of.
Scatman Crothers.
Brandi: What?
me: SCATMAN CROTHERS.
I can't believe you don't know who Scatman Crothers is.
He was in the Shining!
He was in the Kick the Can episode of the Twilight Zone movie!
He was Hong Kong Phhoey!
Brandi: I'm sorry.
I've never seen the Shining!
me: He was the voice of Jazz in the animated Transformers movie!
Brandi: He had a lot of that Creme de Menthe in this movie.
me: Yes. He apparently lived in a huge mansion, drank bottles full of Creme de Menthe, had a big fat woman who loved him, had a crazy black wig, and gave Truck Turner information about criminals.
I want to be Sctaman Crothers.
I don't understand how you turn into someone who lives in a mansion, drinks Creme de Menthe, and knows all about crime, but I envied him.
Brandi: I did not like his hair
it was weirder than Trumps!
Speaking of drinks.
Truck loved Coors.
Me: Truck drank A LOT of Coors.
Brandi: Made me wonder if there was some product placement deal
me: I bet there was. Coors shows up in a lot of movies from the 70s and 80s.
Maybe they gave the product free to movies knowing that it would be good for them.
It's Coors that Smokey is hauling in Smokey and the Bandit.
I'll tell you what Smokey and the Bandit needed.
Truck Turned hanging out in the back of the truck, drinking beer.
And Scatman Crothers as Hong kong Fooey.
That would be the perfect 70s film.
Anyway, let;s talk about Truck Turner's girlfriend.
Apparently a bit of a felon.
Brandi: Yes. I like how he gets pseudo-conjugal visits.
Although, I'm surprised she wasn't made someone's bitch in that prison.
me: We don't know she wasn't.
Although, when Truck Turner tongue kisses her through the bars, you'd think if she was a bitch some female prison would have started shivving them both.
Brandi: Yes.
Maybe that's why she had her own cell.
I'm sure truck arranged for that.
me: He did seem to have an in with the warden.
Brandi: Which makes me wonder why he didn't find a better way to protect her.
He doesn't want her to get hurt.
So he takes her to a thrift store, throws some things in her purse, and has her arrested for shoplifting.
He seems like he could have pulled some strings to get her toss in the slammer
me: Truck's not very good at improvising.
Like, when his partner's car gets stolen, their solution is to hop in a passing truck and put their guns up to the head of the truck driver.
I don't care how many friends you have in law enforcement, that's grand theft and kidnapping.
Brandi: Yeah, if he'd thought a bit more, he could have avoided a lot of law breakin'
I like how Truck "shoplifts" and the cashier doesn't get suspicious
me: It's because he smiles at her in the most suspicious way possible.
It's reverse psychology.
I wonder if she ever jumped bail, would Truck Turner have to go after her?
Brandi: He probably has.
I'm sure that's how they met.
me: You may be right!
He didn't seem like that great a boyfriend.
Brandi: No, really only offered up Coors
and then when shit got bad he offered up a kitten
me: He didn't even clean his apartment when she first got out of jail.
And he met her in a blue jean suit that smelled like cat piss.
Then he gets her locked up, and he shows up to get her with a six-pack of Coors and a kitten.
Apparently she can't resist Coors and cat piss.
Which are basically the same thing.
Brandi: True.
Wait, I think you have a quibble
with the kitten in the car
me: Oh yes. At the end of the movie, they're going on a road trip.
And he buys her a kitten.
It seems like a bad idea to me.
But we've already figured out that Truck Turner doesn't mind smelling like cat piss.
And his girlfriend is a drunk.
So maybe it will all work out happily.
Brandi: You can put a kitten in the glove compartment in a pinch.
It's like a built in cat carrier.
me: Smart.
Oh shit! Before we wrap this up, we have to discuss the climax!
The shootout in the hospital!
Freakin' Yaphet Kotto goes nuts and just starts blasting the place.
He ducks into hospital rooms and shoots patients WHILE THEY ARE BEING OPERATED ON!
He throws his driver in front of one of Truck Turner's bullets!
And then he kidnaps a kid!
Brandi: Yeah, that kid was really calm
I'm thinking it was all kinds of drugged up
or one of those heroin kids from Coffy.
And then he just puts the kid down and the kid skips off as though nothing happened.
me: I liked how, when he ran away from Yaphet Kotto, he was, like, skipping and doing pony kicks.
Brandi: Suddenly he gains energy
probably from Yaphet's amulet.
me: He got Prince of Cameroon energy.
That explains why, when Yaphet Kotto gets shot, it takes him, like, three hours to die.
He walks to his car, which is ten feet away, and that takes him an hour.
Then he sits at the car and paws at the keys. Another hour.
Then he spits blood. Hour three.
Brandi: I think he created his own dance move with that death scene - the jerk and croak.
me: He screwed himself over. He could have just gone to the ER had he not shot all the doctors there.
You have to think about things like that when you go on a killing rampage.
Am I going to need surgery from the doctor, or can I kill him?
He wasn't thinking.
Brandi: He should have held a surgeon hostage.
That would have been much more useful.
Also, that kid was too tiny to be an effective shield.
me: Yes. He couldn't shield Yaphet from the bullet, and he couldn't pull a bullet out of Yaphet. Bad hostage choice.
He should have just grabbed a container of milk.
As we learned, that would have attracted the bullet.
All right. What did you learn from Truck Turner?
Brandi: I learned that being lactose intolerant dramatically lessens my chances of being shot and that if I ever force someone to take the fall for me and they end up in jail, bring a kitten or don't bother showing up.
me: Yes. I learned that you can buy sex off of a girl in prison for a six-pack of Coors. But I think I could have guessed that.
And I learned that Prince of Cameroon medallions might make you inhumanely strong, but they don't make you any smarter.
So let's end this by spilling a few from our 40s for fallen brothers. Specifically, Isaac Hayes.
Although we should probably just go to his funeral and put cocaine on his body.

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A poem about controversial martial artist Ashida Kim, who has been accused of running a certification mill where, for a price, anybody can get official-looking certifications of advanced education in the martial arts. Ashida Kim is also responsible for the instructional video Ninja Sentry Removal Techniques, which shows ways ninjas might use to overpower a guard, such as throwing a pebble over his head, and the book The Erotic Adventures of Ashida Kim.

1.
The erotic adventures of Ashida Kim
Are rarely erotic and frequenly grim.

2.
Is that a pebble? It's Ashida Kim!
Now prepare to lose a limb.

3.
Unexpected in a Florida gym:
A skinny ninja, Ashida Kim.

4.
Such strength! Such vigor! Such remarkable vim!
I do not speak of Ashida Kim.

5.
Ashida Kim. Ashida Kim.
He'll kill you if you dare mock him.

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MUCH HAS ALREADY been written about Jeffrey Lebowski, the aging and potbellied bowler at the center of Minnesota natives the Coen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Critics have noted how Lebowski, called “The Dude” and limned by Jeff Bridges, is a cinematic stock character accidentally placed in the wrong type of film altogether: A sleepy eyed, perpetually stoned, aging hippie who accidentally finds himself cast as the private dick in a Raymond Chandler-styled crime film. Daniels’ “Dude” (or “Duder,” or “El Duderino,” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) is a character singularly ill-prepared for his task: To track down a kidnapped adult actress for her wheelchair-bound and sharp-tongued business magnate of a husband. The Dude is lazy and incurious, only occasionally stumbling across clues by accident. More frequently, The Dude is bullied into action by his bowling partner, a loudmouthed and fatigue-clad Vietnam veteran named Walter Sobachak, portrayed with maximum bluster by John Goodman.

We will not concern ourselves with the preposterous series of turns the plot takes around The Dude — how, step by step, as Lebowski stumbles toward the truth, he loses each of his possessions. (His car, in particular, suffers at the hands of joyriding teenagers, maniacs with crowbars, and arson-minded nihilists.) Neither will we concern ourselves with the film's astounding variety of supporting characters, some of whom, despite their brief screen time, have had an entire industry spring up around their performances. John Turturro’s lizard-like, polyester clad Jesus Quintana, who now appears on any number of T-shirts, or David Thewlis’s pencil-mustached, giggling Knox Harrington, who has inspired, well, any number of video artists.

No. All of this has been covered in depth, as The Big Lebowski has inspired a fervent cult following and reams of critical writing. So we turn our attention elsewhere. The Dude has many fascinating facets to his character. We are fascinated by his drinking.

When we first meet The Dude, he is clad in an open bathrobe and jelly shoes, shambling through a Ralphs grocery store, opening and sniffing cartons of cream. He is, as we find out later, buying one of the three ingredients in his cocktail of choice, the White Russian. (The remaining two ingredients, vodka and Kahlua, are the only items he keeps in a wicker bar that forms his apartment’s centerpiece.) Lebowski will light a jay when he’s in a contemplative mood, but he is never without an alcoholic beverage — upon arriving anyplace new he will instantly search out the bar and mix himself his favorite cocktail, which he has affectionately nicknamed a “Caucasian”; his preference for White Russians is so pronounced that if he fails to find cream he will substitute powdered non-dairy creamer. In all, The Dude downs nine White Russians over the course of The Big Lebowski. College students who attempt to keep up with Lebowski’s pace as a drinking game risk alcohol poisoning. The Dude’s concern for his cocktail is such that, when seized by strangers and dragged into a waiting limousine, his first thought is to protect his drink. “Hey man,” he famously cries out, “there’s a beverage here!”

It should be pointed out that there are a few times in the film when The Dude forgoes a White Russian in favor of beer, seemingly as a precautionary gesture when he needs to have his wits around him. When Lebowski is driving, as an example, or when bowling. The Dude, it should be noted, has as close a relationship with his bartender as any filmic character. Gary, the film’s barman at Hollywood Star Lanes in Los Angeles, knows The Dude’s tastes so well that he will instantly provide a bottle of Miller Golden Draft when Lebowski demands an “oat soda.”

As a result, The Dude is perpetually stewed, to the point that a drugged drink simply impresses him (“You mix a hell of a Caucasian,” he declares before collapsing). “I’m adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug, uh, regimen,” he explains distractedly to one of his employers, “to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.” Of course, it isn’t working: The Dude can barely form a sentence, and often simply repeats, verbatim, dialogue he heard earlier in the film. His few attempts at detective work produce exactly one blank-faced teenager and one pornographic drawing, both dead ends. The Dude is not a great thinker, but, then, he never aspired to be. “All The Dude ever wanted was his rug back,” he complains, referring to a cheap piece of home decoration urinated on at the start of the film, and he isn’t even able to get that.

The Dude may be a failure as a detective, but we at The Bottle Gang celebrate him for being a great drinker. The White Russian, never one of the more popular cocktails, gained new notoriety after the film — the Intertube is littered with tales of young drinkers taking their first Caucasian after watching The Big Lebowski. In fact, Jeff Dowd, an amiable Sixties radical turned film consultant — and the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ character — complained afterward that he hadn’t taken advantage of a Big Lebowski-inspired marketing scheme. “After the film came out I should have put my name on a premixed White Russian canned drink,” Dowd, who also goes by the nickname The Dude, told IFM Magazine.

Perhaps Dowd might have cleaned up on such a scheme, but its more fitting that he didn’t even attempt it; after all, The Big Lebowski is a document of missed opportunities. And, with each new travesty, The Dude’s best friend and nemesis Walter Sobachak has a solution: Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.

It’s a good solution. Gary’s on hand, and it is time for another Caucasian.

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THE TILT-A-WHIRL is a ride that relies on chaos -- the behavior of the ride's seven spinning cars is deliriously unpredictable, and no two rides are ever the same. The Tilt-A-Whirl dates back to 1926 and originated in Faribault, Minnesota. According to family legend, a water slide manufacturer named Herbert Sellner got the idea when he placed his son on a chair, then placed the chair on a kitchen table, and then proceeded to rock the table back and forth. Of course, people play with their children all the time, but it takes a special sort of genius to say, "If my child enjoyed this, anybody might, particularly in a clattering contraption that's dozens of years old, manned by toothless carnies." Sellner was exactly that sort of genius.

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IN RESPONSE to news that sciencist have determined that Magpies are self-aware, as demonstrated by the fact that they can recognize themselves in a mirror:

Once I saw a dapper magpie
Perched before a mirror, tying a tie;
He checked his hair and buttoned his vest
And made certain that he was neatly dressed.
He winked at himself with one black eye
And said: There is none so self-aware as I.
But frankly, if he was so self-aware
Would he go out without a pocket square?
His hairstyle is long out of style
And his tie pattern is simply vile.
And that vest is such a garish yellow!
Such miserable taste for such a little fellow!
So to his self-awareness claim
I ask: What good is it when it lacks shame?

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POOR PETE. The sallow-faced, haunted Pete Krumbein is not the main character of 1947’s carnival noir masterpiece Nightmare Alley — no, that honor belongs to Stanton Carlisle, a handsome young jerk of a roustabout, played by Tyrone Power with a quick smile and murderous eyes. Carlisle is headed for a fall, but first he must rise high enough for it to mean something, and the film adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's tough-minded novel takes Carlisle about as high as a two-bit hustler can get, running his own empire of sham spiritualism, bilking millionaires with parlor-trick mind-readings. Then the film takes Carlisle just as low: Suffice it to say that when the first scene of a movie has a carnie wondering aloud how a man can be brought to a condition where he works as a geek, the subject of the film is going to be finding the answer to that question.

But we do not concern ourselves with Carlisle here. Instead, we look to a smaller character in the film, another sham mind reader, Pete, who has already had his fall. Carlisle and Pete have an uneasy friendship. They are, after all, bedding the same woman, the aging and very willing mitt camp tarot reader Zeena, played by Joan Blondell. With his instinct for cold reading and his commanding presence, Carlisle is an echo of the man Pete used to be, before Zeena’s sexual treachery drove him to drink. Now Pete spends his days slumped under a tent, working just hard enough to earn money for a bottle of rotgut. Pete was a star once on the vaudeville stage, performing impossible mentalist routines with the help of a two-person code he cooked up with Zeena. Magnificently played by Ian Kieth, Pete occasionally shows flashes of his former self, a man who was at once both kindly and charismatic. One night at the carnival, while the geek roams among the tents screaming from night terrors, Pete mesmerizes Carlisle with a demonstration of his act. He stares into a bottle and seems to draw out of it lost tales of Carlisle’s own past, and then he laughs at Carlisle. He’s been hustling the younger man, telling him stock readings that fit everybody. “Every boy had a mother who waited for them,” Pete says, grinning savagely. “Every boy had a dog.”

There are many cinematic drinkers who warrant our attention, but we will focus here on Pete, because he serves as an important warning. Pete’s a good man gone wrong, thanks to betrayal and alcohol; both will eventually kill him, and he seems to want it that way. Without a drink, he’s capable of very little but staggering around the camp, shaking deliriously and begging for alcohol. But, when drunk, he does very little but crawl into a corner and sleep, or stare suspiciously at passers-by. Carlisle wants Pete’s act, he wants Pete’s woman, he wants Pete’s fame, but you can’t have everything that was good in Pete’s life without being infected by some of the bad. When Zeena’s tarot readings for Stanton Carlisle begin to turn up the hanged man card, which had been Pete’s card, and when Carlisle himself begins to surreptitiously purchase bottles of bathtub gin from bellhops, his die is cast. He would do well to remember the words Pete uttered when he drank from his last bottle of alcohol, because Pete’s misfortune will soon be Carlisle’s.

Pete’s last drink was poison, from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, accidentally offered to him as corn mash. When asked how it tasted, Pete screwed up his weary face and complained: “Awful.” Then he grinned, a gallows grin, filled with dark humor, before adding “I wish a had a barrel of it.”

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UNLESS YOU'RE AN ESPECIALLY EXPERIMENTAL DRINKER, you probably haven't tried Galliano, an Italian liqueur with a bright yellow color and a subdued herbal taste, mostly from star anise and vanilla. It's a pricey top-shelf liqueur and isn't found in many cocktails, although it is the central ingredient of one, the Harvey Wallbanger. The drink is essentially a screwdriver with Galliano floated on top, and some drinkers who favor the taste will top off virtually any cocktail with the xanthous fluid. Try it yourself: Just ask for a drink made "against the wall." A bartender who responds by reaching to the top shelf for Galliano is a bartender worth knowing. Galliano is a mellow drink, and, when added to other cocktails, tends to make their flavor richer and more complex without overpowering them.

The liqueur comes in a distinctively tall, Eiffel Tower-shaped bottle, which makes it easy to find in liquor stores, and there shouldn't really be much more to say about the subject.

But there is, at least according to an early-morning call received by deejay Chris T., currently of New Jersey's WMFU, the longest-running free-form radio in America. Chris T. is also a contributor to the station's weird and and fascinating blog. He recently contributed an MP3 of a early morning conversation with a listener who was convinced there was something intrinsically evil about the Galliano bottle.

According to the caller, the Galliano bottle encourages people to engage in all manner of misbehavior, including bottle-induced abortions, severe beatings, and multiple murders. "I'm in fear for my life now because I verbally cursed [the bottle] at a certain restaurant that I was working at," the caller nervously confesses in an adenoidal Jersey accent. Upon declaring his hatred for the bottle, the caller tells of a man with an Italian accent who immediately accosted him and threatened his life, "Just for putting a curse on it!"

The caller is circumspect and hard to understand, especially once he starts talking about priests with premonitions of Galliano-inspired dismemberments, but, as far as I can tell, his concern is specifically sexual. To him, the bottle is unavoidably phallic, and it's shape encourages people to use it as an instrument of -- well, to put it bluntly, violation. "I think they were stupid to make this bottle the way it was made," he declares, "because I think people are stupid. Period."

The MP3 is a weird, fascinating listen -- it's impossible to tell if the Galliano inspired butchery is entirely imagined, or representative of real violence in the caller's life that he has paranoically associated with a vanilla and anise liqueur. Either way, after listening, it's hard not to want to head out to the nearest bar and order a Harvey Wallbanger. And, when the bartender reaches for that Eiffel Tower-shaped bottle with the yellow fluid, it's hard not to imagine he's reaching for something more menacing: A vial of vitriol, for example, or a hatchet, or a sawed-off shotgun.

More Galliano cocktails.

THERE WAS A TIME when there were 14 Band Box Diners throughout the Twin Cities, but nowadays all are gone but for the original, still serving classic American greasy spoon food in the Elliot Park neighborhood of downtown Minneapolis. Authentic both as Americana and as a neighborhood joint, the diner serves as a hub for the area, popular among both the staff of the nearby Hennepin County Medical Center and the assortment of students, working class misfits, and immigrants who live in the area; the restaurant is generally packed with the sort of people that are too-often dismissed as "color," changing clothes for work in the diner's bathroom, cashing their government checks at the Formica counter, and feasting on burgers and homemade fries. Thanks to the exacting standards of Band Box owner Brad Ptacek, the food is something you rarely find in greasy spoons nowadays: well-made of quality ingredients and delicious.

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I HAVE A MEMORY PROBLEM. It's hard to explain. You have heard about blackouts? Those moments alcoholics forget, because they were drunk? They wake up the next morning, and their car is on their lawn, and there is blood on their hands, and they say, what did I do last night?

I only remember the blackouts.

I know you think I'm lying, because I'm drunk, but I swear to God it is true. I don't ever remember not being drunk. I'm sure that I have a day to day life. I must. I mean, look at me. What do you think this suit cost? Look at my hair! It's professionally styled! My nails are manicured! Whatever I do when I'm not drunk, I must be doing it pretty well, but fuck if I know what it is. This suit will be ruined by the end of the evening anyway. At the very least, it will be doused in alcohol. It may be covered in vomit. It might even catch fire. It's happened before.

Most people wouldn't remember that, would they? They would remember going to a party, and having a few drinks, and then they would wake up and think, holy shit, what happened to my suit jacket!

Not me. I remember setting the jacket on fire. Why? BECAUSE IT WAS A COLD NIGHT. And, you know, fuck it. Obviously I can afford to set my jacket on fire every now and then. And I remember burning my hands, and taking a cab to the emergency room, and then passing out while waiting for a doctor, and then -- nothing. There's a dead zone from that moment until I suddenly found myself in the driver's seat of a Porsche, a topless girl standing up in the passenger seat, through the sunroof, screaming and waving her arms above her head.

I looked at my hands. They were bandaged. I was holding a cigarette between the first and second fingers of my left hand. To do this, I had cut, or perhaps burned, a hole through the bandages. There was a mostly empty bottle of Korbel in my right hand. I was steering with my elbows. I looked at the speedometer. 120 miles per hour.

Who was the girl? Fuck if I know. I'd never seen her before, and I never saw her again. Was it my Porsche? Maybe. I don't know. I have some keys in my pockets to a Beemer, but, I don't know, maybe I'm a fucking auto dealer or something.

So, as you can imagine, most of the people I know I only know drunk. I probably know them when they're sober, but I don't remember that. I don't even know a lot of their names, because, you know, your short-term memory kind of sucks when you've been drinking. I call a lot of them by nicknames. Clink, two shotglasses clink together, and suddenly I'm aware of sharing a toast with a burly and red faced man who has his arm around me. I call him The Whang, because it's only a matter of time before he exposes himself to everyone at the bar.

Mostly I drink with a regular gang. There's Tall and Ugly, the Blonde Man, Crater Face, and the Black Guy. I've tried to learn the Black Guy's name, because I feel bad about calling him the Black Guy. I think I called him Omar once. That wasn't his name. He doesn't talk to me very often nowadays. I have a bad feeling he's waiting for an excuse to punch me.

There's another guy, with a bald head and a Swastika tattooed on his neck, who I sometimes find myself sharing Jamison with. I don't know how I know him. I don't know WHY I know him. As far as I can tell, I'm a fucking Jew, if this Star of David necklace means anything. It's always bad news when I find myself in a bar with him. He likes to fight. There have been a few times when I have gone to sleep in county lockdown. That must be a huge pain in the ass for me when I wake up. There have got to be all sorts of fines, and maybe community service. Sometimes I find sobriety chips in my pocket. One week. Four weeks. Once it was for six months. Shit. Six months. What was I doing all that time?

So that's how my life goes. Blackout to blackout. I remember sitting near a beach, alone, surrounded by empty bottles, throwing torn up photographs into a bonfire and sobbing. I don't know why I was sobbing. I don't know who was in the photos. Me and some woman. She looked familiar. I had seen her in some of my other blackouts. I think I recall looking across a room once and seeing her glaring at me. And maybe, in another blackout, she was shaking me and screaming at me. I remember being in a house once and having a woman throwing pots and and plates at me. I don't know whose house it was. Maybe mine. Not anymore. I live in a condo downtown now, or, I think I do. It's where I go to pass out. Maybe I have been collapsing in a stranger's bed. Anyway, I don't know who the woman in the house was. She hit me with a frying pan, and I went down, and the next thing I knew I was burning her photo. I'm sure there's a story there. There's a whole lot that obviously happened when I was sober. I'm sure I don't want to know what it was.

So you? You come up to me in a bar and tell me you know me? You tell me I should know you? I don't know you. I've never seen you before this moment right now.

Yeah, you look like me. A lot of people look like me. I know, you've got a photo of your mother. Yes. She looks familiar. I suppose I remember her, if we used to go out drinking together. There might have been something. So, yeah, it's possible, and you're the right age.

I don't know what you want from me, though, kid. If these bottles mean anything, I've already drunk eight Coronas and a good portion of a bottle of Don Julio. I reckon I have about half an hour before I slump off my bar stool here. I'm not going to do it just yet, because, look at that guy across the bar with the red face. It won't be long until his pants come down, and I don't want to miss that. It's always worth watching when The Whang does his thing. But then I'm done for the night. Done.

I suppose you could try and find me tomorrow, kid, when I've sobered up. But I wouldn't recommend it. I suspect I'm a real asshole.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

I WROTE this a capella number back in 1987, I reckon. I was then reading a lot of nursery rhymes, and to this day I borrow heavily from the folk structures and the ambiguity of these old poems. You're never entirely sure whether it's just some entertaining bit of nonsense you're listening to or whether there is some ancient satire in the words, forgotten after all these years.

I suspect that's what I was going for in this song. I know I wasn't attempting to suggest drug dealers, church beggars, or gallows attendants are all the same -- I think I just wanted to create an imagine of vast hypocrisy and corruption that exists in every level of society. I don't know why I decided to write it in the manner of a prison song, or even where I might have heard prison songs at that time. I borrowed a lot of records from the library and tape recorded them, so it's possible I stumbled on a field recording of chain gang songs and field hollers at some point. They reappear in my play Minstrel Show, which was written more than a decade after this song was written, so I guess they sort of stuck with me. This song has as well.

"MEAN OLD MAN: LYRICS:

I saw you standing by the schoolyard
Selling needles from a black sedan
I saw your black eyes behind sunglasses
I saw you standing you're a mean old man

I saw you standing in the church yard
Collecting pennies in a tin can
I saw your gold teeth when you smiled
I saw you standing you're a mean old man

I saw you standing by the gallows
Behind the minister I saw you stand
I saw you laughing I saw you laughing
I saw you laughing you're a mean old man

LISTEN TO "MEAN OLD MAN"



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THERE'S A STORE on 16th Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis, Ingebretsen's. You might have seen it -- it has a large, rustic mural of Sweden on its exterior, and inside you can purchase all sorts of Scandinavian gifts: Dala horses, ceramic gnomes, Gjetost cheese. And viking stuff. Lots of viking stuff. Minnesotans have a peculiar appreciation for vikings, beyond having named our football team after these seafaring Norsemen. There is, for example, the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, which features giant viking statues and a 40-foot viking ship. As drinkers, we at The Bottle Gang can't help but approve. After all, the viking idea of heaven is a drinker's paradise.

Vikings were ferocious pirates. These rampaging Scandinavians, who terrorized the coasts of Europe between the 8th and 11th centuries, had a reputation for fearlessness and mercilessness, and no wonder: According to Viking belief, unless you died heroically in battle, there was no afterlife. The Vikings even had a special class of warrior, called berserkers, who were everything their ominous name implied. Dressed in bear-skins, they believed themselves to be possessed by bears or wolves (perhaps influenced by hallucinogenic mushrooms), and worked themselves into such a frenzy during battle that they bit their shields, banged their helmets with their weapons, fought with seemingly inhuman strength, shrugged off their enemies' blows, and sometimes even attacked their friends.

After a battle, Vikings believed that that the wolves and ravens who prowled the battlefield represented the Valkyries. These were a group of female deities who worked for Odin, the supreme god of Norse mythology, whose taste for violence was such that he sometimes appeared at battles riding an eight-legged steed and who demanded human sacrifices once every nine years. "Valkyrie," means "choosers of the slain," and these minor goddesses picked through the souls of dead soldiers to choose those who they would carry to Odin's home, Valhalla, in Asgard, the land of the gods.

The lucky Viking who distinguished himself in battle enough to make it to Valhalla had a pretty cushy afterlife. The building itself was a masterpiece of military imagery, with rafters made of spears and a roof made of shields. According to legend, every morning, the crowing of a gold rooster named Gullinkambi woke the dead Vikings, whereupon they dressed in armor, grabbed weapons, marched out onto the plains of Asgard, and cut each other to ribbons. At the end of the day, the battle ended and the Vikings returned to Valhalla, their wounds magically healed. Then the party began: Odin and his dead Vikings would spend the evening feasting on boar's meat and drinking alcohol, until they passed out in a drunken stupor. The next day, with the crowing of Gullinkambi, it all started over.

Fortunately, there was an endless amount to eat, as the Norse believed that Asgard was home to a wild boar named Saehrimnir, who was slaughtered every evening by the god of cooking, Andhrimnir. The boar then came back to life, just to get slaughtered again the next night (it wasn't much fun to be a cosmic boar; but, then, it probably wasn't that interesting to be the Norse god of cooking either.)

While the heroic dead in Valhalla feasted on Saehrimnir meat and regaled each other with tales of war, they intoxicated themselves with huge amounts of mead, poured by the Valkyries. Ordinarily, mead is a wine made from honey, but in Valhalla, according to the Norse, it was milked from the udders of a cosmic goat named Heithrun. All in all, the afterlife in Valhalla was a paradise of fighting all day and drinking all night; in some accounts, the dead Vikings were joined in Valhalla by their wives and lovers and so could end their drunken feast with a little afterworldly nookie. What more could a dead Scandinavian pirate want?

Unfortunately for these dead Vikings, the good times would not last forever. The Norse believed that these heroic dead were brought to Valhalla to train for something called Ragnarok, a massive war between gods, giants, and monsters at the end of time. The outcome of this war is preordained, and terrifying: Most of the gods will die, including Odin. The sun will turn black, the sky will be scorched with fire, and the earth will sink into the sea. Only two humans will survive this destruction, and they will repopulate the earth, worshiping the few gods who are still around.

Oh well. Vikings were famously good at accepting their destinies, and even their gods seemed to accept that there were some things that simply had to be done, no matter how unpleasant. And so Odin and his dead soldiers trained in the afterlife for a war that they knew would destroy them, and why not? Everything ends, even an afterlife of drunken carousing. At least, until that day comes, there is enough meat and enough alcohol to keep everyone happy, and so, in Norse mythology, the heroic dead ended each day by slipping into a drunken and satisfied slumber.

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A CLASSIC MOVIE HOUSE, the Riverview Theater dates back to 1948, when theatergoing was a much more sensual experience than can be found in modern theaters. This is not like the small, inelegant boxes contemporary moviegoers find themselves squeezed into, in which the sound of the movie playing in the next theater bleeds into yours. No, this is a single-screen theater, and it's gigantic: 700 plus seats. The theater is deep, and wide, and, while its look was updated in the mid-50s, it's never been updated again. The lobby is an exquisite example of mid-20th century public space design, managing to be large and retro-futuristic but somehow also homey, sort of like a living room you might see in a Jetson's cartoon. The films are generally second-run and cheap ($2 or $3!), but the theater is also a frequent home to various festivals and special screenings, as well as housing the now-sadly-rare midnight martial arts films booked by Asian Media Access. Best still: The popcorn is freshly popped, delicious, and covered with actual butter; it's so popular, in fact, that locals from the neighborhood will often pop in and buy a bag to go.

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A COUNTRY BLUES song about love and loss on the road to Los Angeles. It's not autobiographical. None of my songs are, not literally. But they all borrow from my experiences, and my experience of moving to Los Angeles was a troubled one.

The first time I went to Los Angeles, at age 21, I flew out there. With me was my 16-year-old brother, who had dropped out of school and was running away from home. We financed our trip, in part, with money from insurance -- my brother had been in a very minor car accident, and had gotten a check for $600 to fix a dent on the vehicle. Instead, we bought airplane tickets. We also went in for hair cuts. I got mine dyed a vivid fire-engine red, while my brother had his shaved into a finlike blue mohawk.

I had never done anything like this, and was terrified. On the airplane, both my brother and I order cocktail after cocktail. I expressed surprise to the flight attendant that she had not checked our IDs. "Well," she said, "I figured, what are you going to do at 30,000 feet?"

We sat in a row with an old woman, who stared at my brother's hair. Finally, she asked him about it. "A fraternity prank," he told her.

I like to tell people that I was so drunk when I got off the flight that I thought there was two of everything in Los Angeles. I also like to claim that I was so drunk I thought there was an earthquake, but it wasn't the ground that was turning and rolling, it was me. Neither of those stories are true. No matter how much I drank, fear made me sober. I was very young and very innocent, and had just made the biggest move in my life, and it was one I was very poorly prepared for. I was shaking when I stepped off the plane, but not from the alcohol.

"ELLEN" LYRICS:

Ellen when you want to go out west
Ellen when you want to go out west
Well she says daddy what would you suggest

Ellen I've pulled my car around for you
Ellen I've pulled my car around for you
Well she says daddy what would you have me do

Ellen you're the one I love the most
Ellen you're the one I love the most
Well she said daddy when do we reach the coast

Ellen soon it is Los Angeles
Ellen soon it is Los Angeles
Well she said daddy what else can you do to please

Ellen I bought you a pretty new ring
Ellen I bought you a pretty new ring
Well she says daddy what else would you have me bring

Ellen all my money's gone and spent
Ellen all my money's gone and spent
Well she says daddy then maybe it's time you went

LISTEN TO "ELLEN":



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WE KNOW. You've done some stupid things while drunk. You may have slept with somebody you shouldn't have. Maybe you got into a fistfight, or drove, or fired a gun into the side of a house. If you've got a real drinking problem, maybe alcohol has destroyed your family, lost you jobs, even come close to killing you.

Forget it. You're an amateur. You can tear your clothes off in public, pee on national monuments, and tattoo death threats against the president on your forehead, and you'll still be nowhere near the level of misbehavior some drunks demonstrate. Don't believe us? Then read the following list for just a sampling of the sorts of outrageous evil achieved by really bad drunks. Next time you wake up in a puddle of your own sick next to an ugly stranger, you'll have some perspective. Things could be worse. Much, much worse. At least you didn't:

1. Trash an entire town: Forget your drunken movie stars and their trashed hotel rooms -- in 1947 a group of motorcyclists actually trashed an entire town, or so the legend goes; bikers today dispute the story as sensationalist. But here's the story: The location was Hollister, California, a nondescript farming town that was the site of a road rally that attracted 4,000 cyclists. Many of these bikers got drunk and disorderly, according to witnesses. Some rode their motorcycles directly into bars, some spun donuts on the pavement, some engaged in impromptu drag races down the city's main street. Time ran a posed photo from the weekend showing a burly, almost bare-chested man with a sideways-turned cap sitting astride a stripped down Harley while holding a bottle of beer in each hand. "There were a bunch of guys up on the Elks Lodge Balcony dropping full highball glasses on the sidewalk below," one witness reminisced in the Bay Area's Metroactive Magazine. Such reports, along with the presence of thousands of leather-clad motorcyclists, made the local police nervous. They jailed several of the motorcyclists, hassled others, and called in the State police as reinforcements. A riot followed, during which the police resorted to tear gas. Come morning, the town's chief of police would survey the damage and declare: "It's just one hell of a mess." The Hollister riot inspired the development of the American outlaw biker, as well as inspiring one famous film: Marlon Brando's The Wild One.

2. Eat another person: A popular story on the Internet a few years ago was that of F.A. Boldyshev and N.V. Ostanin of Berezniki, Russia, who got drunk with a third man and then decided to eat him. They had their mother cook the tastier bits and then sold the remainder on the streets, but for the victim's head, hands, and feet, which they hid in an attic. Unfortunately, a customer became suspicious when she discovered skin on one of the cuts of meat she purchased from the men. Suspecting that she was in possession of human flesh, she turned the men in. They later confessed that their cannibalism was inspired by rising costs of non-human meat.

3. Have sex with family members: According to the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis, upon escaping the burning of the Bible's famously wicked pair of cities and subsequently watching their mother turn into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters believed that the world was ending. So they did what any reasonable person would do: They attempted to single-handedly repopulate the earth with the only remaining living male. Unfortunately, the only living male they knew about was their father. So they got him drunk on wine and slept with him.

4. Kill a princess: Conspiracy theorists dream up complicated causes for the untimely death of Diana Frances Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Princess of Wales. However, her 1997 car crash in Parisian tunnel (which also killed her then-lover, Dodi Fayed, a film producer whose credits included Chariots of Fire) had a quotidian cause: a drunk driver. Blood tests in Henri Paul, Dodi Fayed's limo driver, found that he had a blood-alcohol content three times the legal limit. Paul had attempted to elude nine pursuing French photographers looking to snap pictures of Diana and Dodi. He smashed the limo into a support pillar in an underpass, killing himself and Fayed immediately. Diana died two hours later of massive internal injuries.

5. Execute Che Guevara: Revolutionary leader Dr. Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna, popularly known as Che Guevara, who had helped lead the revolution in Cuba, met a violent death in 1967. The handsome guerrilla theorist had left Cuba to train a revolutionary army in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed. According to one account, the Bolivian sergeant who had been assigned the task of shooting the revolutionary was so nervous about the prospect that he got himself drunk in advance: Witnesses describe him stumbling and vomiting outside the schoolhouse where Guevara was being held. This may help explain why the Guevara killing was so grotesque: the best account has Guevara shot repeatedly in the legs and his throat before a bullet to his lungs ended his life. The Bolivian government then claimed that Guevara had been killed in a gunfight with local authorities.

6. Burn down a national forest: Country singer Johnny Cash had trouble with pills and alcohol. The Man in Black was legendarily wild on the road, and was once arrested in Texas for attempting to smuggle amphetamines in from Mexico in his guitar case. In 1964, Johnny Cash drunkenly set fire to the Los Padres National Wildlife Refuge in California, burning the foliage off three mountains, destroying 500 acres, and killing 49 of the refuge's 53 endangered condors. Cash was unrepentant -- "I don't care about your damn yellow buzzards," he sneered at his judge. The judge responded by fining Cash $85,000. Cash's explanation as to the cause of the fire? "I was high."

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THERE IS very little at Ax-Man Surplus that the casual consumer can make instant use of. The business's three locations are filled with closely stacked bins that overflow with assorted surplus goods, from doll parts to electronics to camping supplies. The bins are generally marked with humorous hand-drawn signs giving a description of the item, its price, and suggested uses; sometimes there are even cartoons, or collages made from magazine photographs. You might be able to go in the streets with a handful of dice from a bin and throw a few games of craps, but, otherwise, Ax-Man is really a store the requires an unfettered imagination. It's a sort of a game, wherein you must ask yourself, given a hazmat suit, a plastic tripod, six brass washers, and a watercolor paint set, what could I make?

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ENTERED the New Yorker caption contest. For those of you not already familiar with the contest, they show you an uncaptioned cartoon and you concoct a caption for it. Apparently you then win a signed copy of the cartoon with your caption on it.

The cartoon shows a group of people sitting in sofas in a spacious room with very high walls painted with planets and stars. My caption: "So I figured, to hell with nature."

Well, it made me laugh.

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IF THERE IS ONE THING we at The Bottle Gang have found to be an absolute in the world of alcohol, it is this: You can take anything, mix a little sugar and yeast into it, and if it ferments there will be somebody to drink it. Try it yourself. Ferment some horse milk and see if Mongolians don’t show up at your door to drink the foul-smelling fluid, which they call airag. You could even let a fish ferment — the Swedes will eat it and call it surstromming.

What follows is our list of the world’s ghastliest alcoholic beverages. Some are simply revolting, some legitimately poisonous. Snobs take note: the next time you sneer at a fellow drinker for his choice of bottom shelf liquor or cheap rice wine, remember that somewhere in the world, someone is happily intoxicating themselves with something far worse.

Army worm wine: In 2001, Ray Reigstad, an amateur wine maker in Northern Minnesota, decided to brew up 11-gallons of white wine. Northern Minnesota is not particularly known for its wine grapes, but that didn’t matter to Reigstad, as he wasn’t planning to use grapes anyway. Instead, he planned to use something that already grew in abundance in the Northland: the forest tent caterpillar, commonly called the army worm. Reigstad had heard about the recipe from a coworker who claimed his grandfather made it, and the winemaker saw a peculiar logic in using the insects as an ingredient for winemaking. “Army worms eat leaves,” he told the Duluth News Tribune. “So essentially they’re a combination of fruit and flowers.” Reigstad offered the wine to local connoisseurs without first telling them what they were drinking, and the results were unanimously positive. “If I was looking for a wine made from larvae, I’d choose this,” one later said. According to drinkers of the wine, it is sweet and unexpectedly similar to grape wine; Reigstad recommends drinking it with Walleye.

Bone beer: There’s a little known, although once common, funerary practice called “mortuary cannibalism,” in which a recently deceased body is consumed by family, friends, and tribe. Anthropologists sometimes refer to this as “compassionate cannibalism” — and not without controversy — but the logic of the practice is neatly summed up by a quote often attributed to the Cocomo Indians of Peru, who are said to have explained to Missionaries that it was “better to be inside a friend than to be swallowed up in the cold Earth.” Mortuary cannibalism has been well-documented in South America — in particular, the eating of the bones of the dead, properly called osteophagy. Mind you, South American tribes didn’t simply de-bone their loved ones and begin gnawing on their ulnas. Instead, they ground the bones and concocted complex meals with them, including mixing them with honey, cooking them into soups, and brewing them into manioc beer. By the way, for those of you who don’t mind the thought of a hint of corpse in your beer, it should also be pointed out that the traditional process of brewing manioc beer was to have women of the tribe mash up the manioc root, chew the mash, and then spit it into a bowl to ferment.

Canned Heat: “You know,” bluesman Tommy Johnson sang in 1929, “canned heat killing me.” Canned heat, after all, is a popular nickname for one of history’s most murderous alcoholic beverages: Sterno. A jellied mix of ethyl and methyl alcohol intended to be used as fuel for a portable stove, Sterno has often been the last-ditch drink of choice for hobos and Bowery alcoholics, who converted the gel into a drink (sometimes called “squeeze” or “pink lady”) by heating it over a fire and squeezing it through a sock. Because canned heat has a high quantity of methyl alcohol, the same stuff used in antifreeze, it has killed or blinded untold number of desperate alcoholics. As to the taste? According to literature about Skid Row alcoholics, some found Canned Heat so unpalatable that they took to sniffing rubbing alcohol instead.

Pruno: Jarvis Masters, a resident a San Quentin’s death row who has also made a name for himself as an author and poet, provided a recipe for pruno in 1992. The details of brewing this prison house cocktail is intertwined with Master’s own death sentence. “Pour the remaining portion into two 18 oz. Cups,” Masters writes. “May God have mercy on your soul.” Masters isn’t kidding about pruno, either: this contraband alcoholic mash of fruit, sugar, and ketchup, cooked up in a baggie, can be deadly if fermented wrong. Come to think of it, the stuff —which has been described as tasting like alcoholic vomit — can be deadly even if brewed right. In December of 2003, two inmates of Los Angeles’ Men’s Central Jail beat a third inmate to death in his cell. They were drunk on pruno at the time.

Sour-Toe Cocktail: Visitors to the Yukon desiring a truly abominable potable might swing by the Dawson’s Downtown Hotel, the only place where you can enjoy the Sour-Toe Cocktail. The alcoholic content is up to you, but the drink comes with a special garnish: a human toe. The original toe belonged to a gold miner who reputably lost it to frostbite, but was accidentally swallowed after 700 servings; through the years, any number of toes have been lost to accidental ingestion and theft. Upon request, the bar now produces a chest filled with pickled human toes, although they will discreetly demure from explaining the source of their human remains. The bar offers a souvenir certificates to those who let the toe touch their lips while drinking.

Three-Penis Wine: A traditional Chinese remedy consisting of powder made from the penises of dogs, deer, and seal mixed into wine. This noxious mixture is reputed to provide a number of health benefits, not the least of which is enhancing the libido. A seal pizzle can sell for as much as $650, so this cocktail can be quite expensive, even if the contents are often fraudulent: A Canadian sampling of the DNA of seal penises in Toronto shops found that all but one were from other animals, mostly dogs, and that many of them weren’t even penises! For the more daring — or desperate — five-penis and nine-penis variations are available.

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IN GENERAL, educational video games are not very entertaining -- think of the typing exercises in which you must pound out words like "pool" and "sky" in order to shoot down attacking aliens. It's just too much work when a joystick and a button accomplishes the task admirably well. But there is one educational game that manages to stir something resembling passion in the ironic Gen-Xers who played it: Oregon Trail. It doesn't sound like much -- a wearying march in a Conestoga wagon across the half the US continent in the year 1848. In fact, the earliest versions of the game, dating back to 1971, were entirely text based, so the player would simply type into a computer terminal that he wanted to hunt and wait for the computer to teletype back to him whether he had managed to kill enough meat to continue westward.

But there was something about the game that made it special. Famously, there was the fact that you could name your own characters, and children who played it away from the watchful eyes of their teachers notoriously concocted preposterously foul names for their team of pioneers. This was especially entertaining when the game became sophisticated enough to leave little markers on the trail where characters had died, and these markers would carry over from game to game. Months down the road, you might be starting a new wagon on the trail, and discover the grave of a long-dead player with a hysterically lewd epitaph. Additionally, your characters' various deaths, from disease and accident, were weirdly satisfying -- it is, to this day, possible to buy t-shirts that show a bitmapped representation of the game's Conestoga wagon with the words "You have died of dysentery" emblazoned underneath.

Additionally, the game was, and remains, surprisingly challenging, a battle against a hostile environment and rapidly dwindling supplies. At the end of the trail, the whole undertaking becomes a grueling slog through frozen tundra, interrupted only by hunting expeditions that pull in just enough meat to allow you to continue for a few more days, punctuation by attacks by Indians and bandits. Generally, players lost a sizable portion of their team of pioneers, a grim detail supported by history -- 1 in 10 actual pioneers died along the Oregon Trail.

Few Minnesotans seem to know that the game originated here -- at Carleton College, in fact, with three student teachers, who uploaded it to a Univac computer installed to provide time-share computing to schools throughout Minnesota, via modem and terminal, which, in those days, were large, clattering machines that typed out messages from the mainframe. To modern eyes, these early days of computing would seem as laborious and as primitive as the technology used in tethering oxen to wooden covered freight carriers, but in those days it seemed like the future had arrived. And what were Minnesotans doing with technology that just a few years previously had been the stuff of science fiction? Dying of dysentery and leaving crude messages scrawled along the Oregon Trail.

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IT'S BEEN a long time since I have been to London. 30 years, to be precise. I lived in Bath, England, for a year when I was 10, and my mother took me and my brothers on occasional weekend trips into London, where we stayed at bed and breakfasts and took in the sites. I have very strong memories of those weekends, and of England in general; I suspect because that year was so unusual for me, it has stayed with me in a way that much of the rest of my childhood in Minnesota hasn't. I found our old house in Swainswick on Google maps recently. It was strange to look down on it from above and recognize it anyway. There was the little church down the street that we occasionally visited. There was the school I went to, across the street from where I lived, and the house the school's headmistress lived in, right next to mine. There was the grave in the back with a stone lid carved with the figure of a supine knight, still clutching his sword.

I've been thinking about this, on and off, for a long time, because I would like to go back and visit, but haven't been able to afford to. I started writing this song inspired by that sense of longing for a place I knew when I was a boy. Then it turned into something else, the way songs do, especially when I write them. It sort of turned into a Neil Jordan film. And that's fine with me, as I like Neil Jordan's films.

"YOU CAN'T GO BACK TO LONDON" LYRICS:
He went down to London town
A train ticket cost 30 pounds
He saw the Thames he worked a job
He met some mates and had a mob
But you can't you can't you can't
Go back to London

It was a time a time he had
He was then a Hackney lad
He met a girl from Islington
She said he was her only one
But you can't you can't you can't
Go back to London

He liked to smoke and she liked pills
And they met a man from Stamford Hill
They met with him at St. Paul Bells
They bought from him and they did sell
But you can't you can't you can't
Go back to London

She would fight and she would scold
And she used more than they sold
There was debt and debt again
And they came for her and he let them
But you can't you can't you can't
Go back to London

She was found on Drury Lane
The needle was still in her vein
He hopped a train that was westward bound
A train ticket cost 30 pounds
But you can't you can't you can't
Go back to London

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LET ME TALK for a moment about the idea of advocacy. I have started to believe that an important element in any sort of success at all is an advocate, or a series of advocates, who have already enjoyed some success. Particularly when it comes to the arts. It's just such a glutted market, and so much of the glut is garbage, that professionals in the industry are generally loathe to pay any attention to someone that doesn't come with recommendations from someone they trust.

At least, that's what I have been telling myself, because I knock at a lot of doors and get very little response. I always sort of figured that my résumé might act as a sort of introduction to my work -- after all, my play Minstrel Show got glowing reviews from the Variety, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. And yet, when I sent out query letters concerning Minstrel Show a year or so ago, with the reviews prominently featured, I mostly got no response at all. The few responses I did get were, for the most part, "no." Mind you, these responses did not come from theater professionals who had read the script and did not like it. These were responses from people who had not read the script at all, and did not want to.

In fact, in almost every instance where I have had any success with anything, it has come as the direct result of personal contacts. Minstrel Show was first produced because I was friends with the artistic director of the Blue Barn Theatre in Omaha, and that remains the theater that has done most of my work. When I have gotten paid writing gigs, it has mostly been the result of recommendations from other writers. And this isn't exactly news -- any book you read on pursuing a career will stress the importance of developing an extensive network of personal relationships.

But I'm not very good at this. I have very little interest in working at a relationship with someone I don't like or respect personally, and I am generally shy about asking my friends to promote me, as I do not want them to feel as though I were simply using them. But, even when I have asked for this sort of assistance, I have sometimes been rebuffed. And I understand that. I write to please myself, and a lot of what I do is awfully idiosyncratic. As Robert Towne once famously said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything, and the same is true of the rest of the arts. People are rarely certain about work that doesn't completely jibe with their tastes, and are not especially interested in advocating anything they aren't 100 percent certain about. And some, unfortunately, are not interested in advocating anything they don't personally benefit from, even if they believe it to be excellent.

I also find myself in a strange situation, in that I don't think people believe I need an advocate. A lot of people think that my résumé must be established enough, and I must be well-known enough, that my body of work now speaks for itself. Heck, I thought this myself until every agent in Hollywood refused to even read one of my screenplays, despite my writing résumé, and despite the fact that the story the screenplay was based on had won a Premack Award for excellence in public affairs journalism. You would think this would at least get me in the door enough to get the script read. You would be wrong.

But advocacy isn't the only route. There is one other fairly established mechanism for getting your work seen, and it is one I haven't really investigated until now. I speak of contests. There are, for instance, a handful of screenwriting contests every year. The winners generally have their scripts sent out to studios and agencies, who otherwise would not be interested in reading them.

There is a lot of competition about there, but there are also a lot of contests. Often, there is no real way of insuring that your work will be given a fair shake. Some contests are judged by the public, which often means that the winners are those that can round up the most friends to vote for them. Some contests have juries, and they can be highly dogmatic or tendentious, mistaking their own preferences for excellence and rejecting anything that doesn't fit an arbitrary formula. But, then, such is the way of the world. And, who knows? Your creation might just sync up with their preferences.

And so I have begun applying to contests and awards. As many as I can. I won't win them all. I might not win any. Who knows? But you can shove your original creation into a file somewhere and wonder why nothing has ever happened with it, or you can get it out there, as unlikely as success might be as a result. More than anything, I have always wanted the things that I make to create the opportunity for adventure. They're not going to do that moldering in a file somewhere.

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THE MIXTURE OF LIQUOR AND FAME has produced many tragedies, some exceptional, such as Fatty Arbuckle's notorious 1921 party that left one woman dead and his career in ruins. And then there are the more quotidian tragedies, actors and directors who thirsted too much, drank too frequently, and died too young as a result. Their names are legion: Peter Lawford , Ed Wood, Oliver Reed, Elisa Bridges, Natalie Wood. Hollywood is a town that adores a tragedy, and too much money, fame, and liquor are the ideal ingredients for an appalling contretemps.

But we are not here to beat our chests and mourn those who have drunk and fallen. Like all worthwhile adult activities -- including driving and sex -- drinking carries with it both great responsibility and great risk. Hollywood has had its share of those who risked and lost, but it has also produced more than its share of truly great drinkers, who drank deeply and well. Frank Sinatra, who made it to a respectable 82, closed almost every bar in Vegas, swilling his favorite bourbon, Jack Daniel's. Robert Mitchum was rarely without a drink in his hand, and celebrated the bootlegger in his 1958 film Thunder Road. Mitchum lived to 80. Even such minor-league stars as Fred MacMurray managed to find a place in drinking history. The My Three Sons star was a member of a group of rowdy Hollywood drinkers led by John Wayne and including Lana Turner, a group dubbed "The Team." This group claims to have been present for the creation of the Margarita. This claim is, of course, disputed, but nobody disputes The Team's importance in popularizing the beverage. Next time you enjoy the tequila cocktail, remember that you wouldn't be drinking it were it not for Fred MacMurray's love for the drink.

But we are not here to celebrate your everyday Hollywood drinking, we're here to celebrate the best. This list of of the five drinkers for whom the act of consuming alcohol was part of their art, essential to their character. Some drank gladly and died well, some drank greedily and died as an eventual result, but all of them created award-worthy personas as drunks. Some were comical, some were elegant, but in each case it was hard to separate the onscreen drunk from the offscreen drinker. With such recent Tinseltown drinking catastrophes as Mel Gibson's boozy antisemitism and Britney Spears' humiliating intoxications, its worth remembering actors for whom drinking was an art.

1. W.C. Fields: The legendary comedian looked every bit the drinker he was, with his portly body, his bulbous red nose, and his genially cantankerous persona. Fields played a lot of characters, from scowling misanthrope to put-upon everyman, but they all seemed to share a few common characteristics. For one, every role he played seemed to give him opportunity to express a sort of general disgust at children. For another, he always seemed ready for a hard drink. In My Little Chickadee, he regales fellow card players of his adventures with alcohol. "During one of my treks through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew," he tells them in mock horror. "Compelled to live on food and water for several days."

Offscreen, he was rarely seen without a drink, and once stormed out of a dressing room in a rage after someone had inadvertently spilled his bottle of whiskey, crying out "Who took the cork out of my lunch?," a line that was later used in the film You Can't Cheat an Honest Man. He refused to drink water, and would dismiss it curtly, explaining thusly : "Fish fuck in it." And yet Fields had an extraordinary ability to hold his liquor, and was almost never seen drunk, which he once explain with this elegant turn of phrase: "When you woo a wet goddess, there's no use falling at her feet."

Fields died at age 66 of a stomach hemorrhage, often attributed to his drinking, and, in fact, his death certificate lists "cirrhosis of the liver" as his cause of death. On his deathbed, Fields is reported to have wondered aloud to friends how far he could have gone "if I had laid off the booze." But Fields was a comedian, and frequently opined that there is nothing funny that was not also terrible. This is not to excuse Fields' drinking, which was suicidally excessive, but merely to explain how it might have been that he mined his drinking so effectively for laughs. After all, Fields explained comedy in this way: "If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't."

2. Dean Martin: For much of his early career, Dean Martin was primarily known as the straight man to a lunatic beanpole named Jerry Lewis, a job he handled with exceptional grace. The job of a straight man is to let audiences know how to respond to a comedian, and Martin set an example of tolerant affection, which gave permission to the audience to feel the same toward Lewis. Otherwise, the spasmodic man-child Lewis portrayed might have been a little too much to take. When the team broke up in 1956, Martin was left to his own devices; although his lone purpose in films up until that point had been to be a pretty boy accomplice who enjoyed a few songs every film, suddenly Martin turned in a few terrific dramatic performances in films like The Young Lions and, especially, as a boozy loser in Howard Hawks' 1959 film Rio Bravo.

On his own, Martin demonstrated considerable comedic chops, and he quickly fell in with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. During the 60s, the Rat Pack took over Vegas for extended periods, lensing a few movies (including the original Ocean's 11) while performing extemporaneously at The Sands Casino. There, Dean Martin began to develop a reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer, borrowing equally from his Rio Bravo role and from the antics of hard-drinking comedian Joe E. Lewis, who was always a favorite with the Rat Pack crowd (so much so that Sinatra played him in a 1957 biopic called The Joker is Wild.) Lewis, who once quipped "I always wake at the crack of ice," tacitly gave his blessing to Dean Martin's persona, regularly saying "I don't drink any more than the man next to me, and the man next to me is Dean Martin."

In the late 60s and 70s, Martin really came into his own playing the soused playboy, which he turned into an international superspy in the Matt Helm films, as well as hosting his own television variety series, "The Dean Martin Show," in which he staggering around the set, singing a few phrases of a song, working overtime to make his guests and costars lose their composure, and always clutching a cocktail. He had a vanity license plate at the time that read "DRUNKY," and was often charged with alcoholism. However, Shirley Maclean once sipped from Martin's ever-present cocktail when he wasn't looking, and discovered it contained apple juice. In fact, Dean Martin's private life was considerably different than his public one. He was a loving family man, and spent his free time either watching Westerns on television or playing golf. Nonetheless, Dean Martin produced some of Hollywood's best one-liners about drinking, including this sage bit of wisdom: "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."

3. Barry Fitzgerald: A diminutive, scowling Irishman, Barry Fitzgerald got his start at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, originating roles in the plays of a former roommate, Sean O'Casey's; In fact. O'Casey wrote The Silver Tassle specifically for Fitzgerald. It was O'Casey's work that brought Fitzgerald to the screen, first in Alfred Hitchcock's 1930 adaptation of Juno and the Paycock and later in John Ford's 1936 lensing of The Plough and the Stars. From that point on, Fitzgerald was Hollywood's go-to actor for exaggerated Irishness, and was often found in films playing characters with names like Thady O'Heggarty, Denno Noonan, and Stooky O'Meara . He naturally spoke with the sort of "ta ta tee tee ta" cadence that stage actors affect to parody the Irish, and he could often be found in films leering lustfully at a bottle of whiskey. His most celebrated role was as Father Fitzgibbon in 1944's Going My Way, playing a mock pious parish priest who relentless scorns the progressive attitudes of his assistant, played by Bing Crosby, while sneaking "a drop of the craiture" before bed. Fitzgerald was so popular in this role that the Academy nominated him for both best actor and best supporting actor, the first -- and only -- time this has happened.

Fitzgerald was actually more fond of golf than he was of drink, but he produced one absolutely seminal performance as a great Irish drinker. In 1952 he was cast opposite John Wayne in John Ford's The Quiet Man, playing Michaleen Oge Flynn, a carriage driver and matchmaker in the Irish coastal town of Inishfree. When Flynn isn't helping The Duke scheme to win the heart of neighbor Maureen O'Hara, he's drinking -- and, whenever he can, he combines the two activities. He frequently appears at O'Hara's house dressed in the uniform of the matchmaker, including top hat and tails, but the belabored formality he affects is undermined by the fact that he is either already drunk or soon will be, and can be quite sharp about the subject: When O'Hara offers him water for his drink, he snaps back at her "When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey; and when I drink water, I drink water." He seems to have an infinite variety of ways of pleading for alcohol, crying out "me mouth is like a dry crust and the sun is that hot on me pate!" In fact, Michaleen Oge Flynn is so regular a character at the nearby pub that his mule automatically stops there when they pass, out of sheer force of habit. Fitzgerald's expressive face rapidly moves from vexation to contemplation when this happens, and he quickly allows that his mule has the right idea, he could go for a drink at this moment. And then off Fitzgerald goes, top hat and all, into the pub.

4. Tallulah Bankhead: Here we have one of the great amoral legends of Hollywood. The beautiful daughter of the speaker of the US House of Representatives and niece to two senators, Bankhead was the original rich girl gone wild -- which she did with considerably more wit and class than her modern counterparts. A peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table, she specialized in provocation, her humor rooted in crying out inappropriate pronouncements at inopportune times. Any list of Bankhead quotes are lists of brilliantly wicked mots, such as her explanation that "my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine." At a wedding, she was reported to have declared, in a stage whisper, that she'd had both the bride and the groom, and neither were any good.

Bankhead was better known as a character than an actor -- although studios tried to promote her as "The Next Dietrich," she was widely regarded as a rather flat actress, unable to translate her indomitable personality to the screen. Instead, she found her success mostly through stage work, although she did turn in a superlative performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Despite her limited success in motion pictures, she was a perennial on the Hollywood scene, throwing parties that lasted for days, pouring copious quantities of Kentucky Bourbon down her throat, and pulling off her clothes during conversations,prompting one friend to query " Tallulah dear, why are you always taking your clothes off? You have such lovely frocks!" It was, in fact, her predilection for nakedness that would be her undoing: her death from pneumonia was rumored to have been caused by a nude stroll in a rainstorm. Her last words were perfect, a final, lustful cry from a woman who had made an art of both vice and epater le bourgeois: "bourbon . . . codeine. . . "

5. William Powell: The greatest drinker in film was Nick Charles, the gadabout former detective and tipsy cynic at the center of the Thin Man movie series. Nick has married well, to the ditzy but adorable Nora Charles, and has married her fortune along with it, but his plans of enjoying a semi-retirement of sleeping, drinking, and throwing cocktail parties is endlessly interrupted by crimes. Dashiell Hammett's breezy, semi-autobiographic original novel benefited in its screen adaptation from a coup of casting. William Powell was hired to play Nick Charles, and Powell was perfect. Powell specialized in playing urbane characters; he was cheeky, droll, and surprisingly rough around the edges. He already had a successful run playing sophisticate detective Philo Vance in a series of films, but the gentlemanly Vance was much less an interesting character than Nick Charles.

We first meet Charles in a New York hotel, where he is glibly explaining to a group of interested bartenders the proper techniques for shaking cocktails, with the Manhattan shaken to fox-trot time. "a Bronx to two-step time," he continues, "a dry martini you always shake to waltz time." Charles consumes heroic amounts of alcohol, in part because he loves the stuff, and in part, one suspects, because if he is drunk enough his wife, who wants him to investigate the disappearance of a family friend, will leave him alone. Most of the important scenes in the film take place at cocktail parties, with Nick Charles porting liquor down his throat, but he's never too drunk to ask a revealing question or act quickly when things turn sour -- in once scene, he manages to knock his wife unconscious and disarm an intruder in a single motion, despite having drunk enough liquor to kill a hobo. When she wakes, he explains that he had to knock her out -- she was in the line of fire. Most of us wouldn't be able to think so clearly when sober.

William Powell would play Nick Charles in six more films, but, even when playing other roles, he blended a cynical intelligence with a love of drink -- he starred as an elegant derelict in My Man Godfrey and played a sodden bohemian in "Double Wedding." In his last film, 1955's Mister Roberts, he plays a genial navy doctor whose primary responsibility is to tend to sailors with hangovers. In a bravura scene, Powell assists a lazy, wolflike ensign, played by Jack Lemmon. The junior officer is looking to intoxicate an attractive nurse, and so Powell concocts a passable facsimile of scotch using medicinal neutral spirits, Coca Cola, and iodine. It was Powell's last screen appearance, and it was a fine adieu: His performance called to mind an older and less reckless Nick Charles, sober-minded and cautious but still wry and mischievous, and still showing a connoisseurs taste for hard liquor. If Nick Charles was an elegant drunk, at the end of his career William Powell showed us something even finer: An elegant drinker.

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THE PAVEK MUSEUM OF BROADCASTING prides itself on its enormous assortment of vacuum tubes, organized chronologically, and that's the sort of thing that may keep people away from the museum. After all, who is going to go out of their way to track down some dusty nerditorium tucked away in an industrial section of St. Louis Park? And for what? To stare at a 1912 rotary spark-gap transmitter? To look at a wall of ham radio callsign cards, or try tapping out Morse code on an antique transmitter?

In fact, all those things are fascinating, in their own way. The spark-gap generator is just like the one that sent out its last desperate messages on the Titanic, for example, while the carefully handcrafted callsign cards are gorgeous examples of folk art, including some from the south seas that are illustrated with cartoons of cannibals. And Morse Code? Where to start?

But the museum has a lot more to offer than just the science geek pleasure of discovering that you can build a radio out of a rock and a needle, mind-blowing though this may be. Because the Pavek Museum has dedicated itself to preserving the history of broadcasting, and, to a large extent, this means preserving the machines used for broadcasting. Walking into their central display room is a breathtaking experience for the audiophile: There, on meticulous display, are hundreds and hundreds of record players, radios, and old televisions. We're talking about everything from elegant hand-carved deco masterpieces from the 1920s and 30s to ultramodern creations from the 60s, made out of chrome and steel, that swoop into forms that alternately resemble space ships and Crown Imp convertible automobiles. There is even an entire wall of novelty transistor radios fashioned to look like disco balls, advertising characters, and cartoon icons. It's a dazzling reminder of a time before the ipod, when collecting and enjoying music was a cumbersome, space-consuming activity, and, as a result, the machines used to broadcast music were built to resemble carefully crafted pieces of furniture, or precious objets d'art. It's been a long time since recorded sound looked this good.

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THERE'S NOTHING ESPECIALLY UNIQUE about Hollywood rockabilly Kip Tyler's 1958 platter "Jungle Hop." It relies heavily on a Bo Diddley-style guitar part and melody. It's sung in an excitable, occasionally hiccuping tenor that was favored by rockabillies of the time. It has a saxophone break, just like Bill Haley's numbers. And lyrically, it's about a group of imaginary Africans gathering in the jungle for a primitive sock hop. All of this was rather standard, and the song might not be worth mentioning, except that it's excellent. Typical though the song's elements may be, in the right hands they could be awesomely exciting, and Kip Tyler had the right hands.

Tyler is probably best known now for having voiced the rock and roll songs that actor John Saxon pretended to sing in the movie Summer of Love (and, in fact, Kip Tyler's first records were released under the name Jimmy Daley, Saxon's character in the film). But Tyler was a legend in the LA rock and roll scene, and, with his band The Flips, were the de facto house band at the El Monte Legion Stadium, a former Olympic stadium that turned into the epicenter of 1950s Los Anegeles rock, as was immortalized by Frank Zappa in the song "Dog Breath." The stadium had a reputation for wildness, and you can hear that same wildness in Tyler's "Jungle Hop."

The song starts with jungle drums, tropical bird calls, faux-African muttering, and a falsetto "I don't wanna! I don't wanna!" It's hard to know what's being represented here, although the "booga booga booga" dialogue is unfortunate; rock and roll's obsession with the supposedly "primitive" never seemed to extend beyond cartoonish representations, and some of these, to modern ears, sound utterly racist. (Interestingly, African-Americans sometimes drew on these same caricatures, such as the blackfaced Zulu krewe that parades on Mardi Gras or the similar faux-African chattering on that Screamin' Jay Hawkins affects on "Feast of the Mau Mau.")

But soon into "Jungle Hop," a lion roars, the Bo Diddley guitar backbeat starts, and things get better -- much better. While rock's interest in the primitive might have come from a soda shop humor comic book, their appreciation for the idea of primitiveness was unfeigned. Here, Tyler sings about an all-night jungle bash, and the excitement in his voice is palpable. Lyrically, he seems to be taking real pleasure in the fantasy of rejecting civilization, or, at least, everything but a record player: "Trade the skins of ten giraffe / for one beat-up phonograph," Tyler sings. In his song, the dance never ends, and involves pleasures beyond merely dancing: "Under jungle stars above / all night long make jungle love."

Also worth mentioning is the saxophone solo, which is sleazier than anything Bill Haley ever recorded, sounding borrowed from a strip club combo and ending with the solo quite literally growled through the instrument. But the song is really made by its wordless chorus, which consist of nothing more than the word "Oh" stretched out over the melody, sung by the entire band over frenzied drumming, and is the most primitivist moment in the song: Rock and roll has so completely rejected civilization at this moment that it has actually abandoned using language.

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NWA AIRLINES is offering a free trip to Cancun to the winner of a contest, and the only requirement is that you send in a story about a vacation experience you had, 600 words or less. I sent them a tale of when I was in my early 20s, in Thailand, and went to a trained monkey show with my mother. A monkey leaped off the stage at her, then stole and drank my Coca Cola. The winner will be informed on or before October 31.

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ANYBODY ELSE get the eerie sense, when watching a show like MTV’s Cribs, that every time the camera focuses on a rock star’s swimming pool we are seeing the site of a future drowning? It might be, oh, let’s say Tricky’s swimming pool instead of Brian Jones’s, but it doesn’t matter. Within a year or two, there will be a bloated corpse floating at the pool’s surface.

Rock and Roll just seems to have a natural affinity for self-destruction, and, often enough, a rock star’s decline will be spectacular. When they’re not dying in plane crashes, a la Buddy Holly and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they’re crashing cars (Marc Bolan), getting crushed under a bus (Metallica’s Cliff Burton — twice in one night!), or just offing themselves (Johnny Ace, Roy Buchanan, Kurt Cobain, et al). Sometimes they simply drink themselves to death.

We’re not talking about the rock stars who drank and died young, such as that of the hard-boozing Jim Morrison, whose bathtub heart attack at age 27 has longed fueled speculations that his appetite for alcohol and drugs eventually simply stopped his heart. As much as Janis Joplin loved her Southern Comfort, it was heroin that killed her, also at age 27. Certainly booze played a factor in Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970 — but mostly because he had used it to wash down nine sleeping pills.

We won’t concern ourselves with these famous casualties of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not when there are rockers whose ends came exclusively as a result of hooch. These are the men — and they are all men on this list — for who alcohol was their poison, and had the steely resolve to keep pouring the stuff down their throats until it did them in. Rock and Roll is famous for those who live its hard-drinking lifestyle, and some of them went ahead and died from it.

We give you the men and their drinks, and those of you plucking a scratched up old guitar while sipping Jack and Cokes and dreaming of fame might pause to reflect on them.

John Bonham: The man behind the ferocious drums on Led Zeppelin’s albums was a former construction worker from Worcestershire, England, with a taste for breaking drumheads. He had an intense dislike of the itinerant life of a rock star, though, and took to drinking shots of vodka. On September 20 of 1980, Bonham, en route to rehearsal for an upcoming tour of America, began binge drinking, downing four quadruple vodkas. He continued drinking throughout the evening, consuming an estimated three-dozen shots of vodka before bedding down at Jimmy Page’s house. By morning, he was dead. The coroner determined that Bonham had died in a manner that seems especially popular among rock stars: He had choked on his own vomit.

Rory Gallagher: “I wanna try some one hundred percent,” Irish rocker Rory Gallagher sang in a song presciently titled “Too Much Alcohol,” ending the song with the words “Then I won’t feel a thing at all.” Gallagher developed an exceptional reputation as a guitarist and bluesman in the Seventies: He was invited to become a permanent guitarist for the Rolling Stones and took the title of Melody Maker’s Musician of the Year from Eric Clapton in 1972. Gallaghar toured relentlessly, appearing in grueling, marathon performances, one of which was preserved in a film titled Irish Tour ’74. Unfortunately, Gallagher was also a drinker, although he seems to have been unusually discreet about the fact. His consumption was significant enough to destroy his liver: Rolling Stone lists the cause of his 1995 death as being cirrhosis, but most of his other biographers demur from being so explicit, simply stating that Gallagher died from complications brought about by liver transplant surgery. True though that might be, it's an unsatisfactory explanation. After all, Gallagher’s original liver didn’t just go bad all on its own. But if Gallagher’s fans wish to be delicate about the subject of alcoholism, so be it. We do not lack for rockers whose drinking is a public spectacle.

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan: For some reason, it just doesn’t seem like a member of the Grateful Dead should have died from alcohol abuse. After all, this is a band who will forever be associated with the two great countercultural drugs of the Sixties: LSD and marijuana. These drugs were supposed to liberate the spirit; if someone were to die of either (a rare scenario, except for the occasional acid casualty who, convinced he can fly, leaps from a roof), the death should be suitably trippy. After all, wasn’t it at a Dead concert that a fan reportedly simply evaporated in an ecstatic trance? Ron McKernan, known since high school as “Pigpen,” wouldn’t enjoy such a metaphysical end. No, the singer, harmonica player, and organist for the Dead had fashioned an image for himself that drew equally from old-timey bluesmen and contemporary bikers, and McKernan’s steered clear of hippie drugs in favor of Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort. McKernan drank so much that it only took a few years for his liver to begin to fail; he quit alcohol in 1971, but two years later was dead of a hemorrhage in his booze-weakened gastrointestinal tract.

John Panozzo: If pressed, the casual fan of Styx might be able to name its singer and keyboardist, Dennis DeYoung. But this Chicago-based prog rock band from the Sixties and Seventies would not have enjoyed its four consecutive triple platinum albums were it not for the band’s distinctive rhythm section, made up of twin brothers, Chuck and John Panozzo. The band named themselves after the river the dead pass across on their way to Hades, but, for John Panozzo, his passage into the afterworld would be across a river of booze. He died in 1996 of the same cause as Ron McKernan: a hemorrhaged gastrointestinal tract, in this case brought on by a decade of alcoholism that had made it impossible for Panozzo to participate in any of his band’s recordings or tours in the mid-90s. Bandmember Tommy Shaw penned a saccharine ode to Panozzo for the 1997 live album Return to Paradise titled “Dear John,” which included the following lyrics: “Dear John, how are you; God knows its heaven where you are.” Wherever he wound up, one thing is certain: Thanks to his taste for drink, John Panozzo managed to be the first member of his band to actually get to the river Styx.

Bon Scott: Prior to taking the reigns as lead singer of the Australian rock band AC/DC, the Scottish-born Ronald Belford Scott had quite a diverse career, including playing in a pipe band, spending several months in a coma after a motorcycle accident, and being rejected by the Australian Army, who claimed he was “socially maladjusted.” The singer, better known as Bon Scott, howled his way through most of AC/DC’s best known albums, singing lascivious ditties that barely qualified as single-entendres, fronting a band best known for noisy, stripped down power chords. As a performer, Scott seemed every inch the wild man, and so, on February 20, 1980, it came as a surprise to nobody when he was found dead in his car after a night of binge drinking. Scott, famously, once sang that “it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.” Unfortunately, he discovered that, with the help of too much alcohol, it can be a very fast plummet downward.

Gene Vincent: Gene Vincent nearly died in 1955. The Virginia-born rockabilly singer responsible for “Be-Bop-a-Lu-La” was in the same car accident that killed Eddie Cochran, a fellow rockabilly now best remembered for the song “Summertime Blues.” The accident left Vincent with a leg brace and constant pain, which might explain why the singer started drinking. Then again, after The Beatles arrived in the United States in 1963, Vincent’s career bottomed out — like many other early rock stars, he languished during the British Invasion. Ironically, the only place Vincent could make a living was in England, and he spent most of the Sixties touring Europe while English pop acts stormed the American charts, which might drive anybody to drink. Vincent’s increased dependence on alcohol sent his health into a steep decline, and he returned to the United States in 1971, where he died in October of a heart attack. Perhaps it would have been best for Vincent had he died in the crash that took Eddie Cochran’s life. It would have spared him years of pain and decline. But Vincent recorded several sides of country music in his last few years of life that are gorgeous and haunted, suggesting that, had liquor not killed him when it did, he might have had a career ahead of him singing honky tonk. Country music would have been a good for Vincent, as it was for fellow disgraced rockabilly star Jerry Lee Lewis. After all, it’s a style of music that encourages singers to weep into their drink and complain of their troubles, and Gene Vincent had drinks and troubles to spare.

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MINNESOTANS have been eating Jucy Lucys since at least 1954, when Matt's Bar in south Minneapolis claims to have invented it -- although the burger's origin, like the origins of such classic cocktails as the Martini and Manhattan, is disputed. But, for some reason, the sandwich, in which cheese is cooked to volcanic levels inside a beef patty, has never really caught on outside its point of origin the way, say, the Phillie cheese steak has. Twin Citians know and love the Jucy Lucy, which is available at a dozen or so local eateries (often spelled "Juicy Lucy"), and many of those places have attempted to put a distinctive stamp on the burger, such as the jalapeños added to the Cajun Lucy at St. Paul's Groveland Tap. But the further you get from the Twin Cities metro area, the more obscure the burger becomes; perhaps because it's one of the few foods that is actually dangerous. You can often tell tourists, even from rural Minnesota, by the way they eat their first Lucy, biting into it the moment it arrives and subsequently heading to the hospital to treat their scalded lips and tongue. At Matt's, they always quiz you if you've had a Lucy before, and warn you about the burger's molten magma temperature before you eat.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

I HAVE JUST SUBMITTED a poem to a contest. Properly, though, I have submitted a single poem to two contests. The first is the ongoing poetry contest at Poetry.com, which, as Wikipedia so helpfully points out, is "considered by many to be a vanity publisher." Vanity publishers will accept pretty much anything, as their economic model is rooted in such activities as publishing expensive collections of poems and then selling them to the poets themselves at a considerable markup. This sort of thing is scorned by the legitimate poetry community, but I expect these tomes of wretched poetry will find an audience in the future, in the same way that albums of the similar song-poems are currently collected and enjoyed as being a sort of folk art.

But I did not enter my poem into the Poetry.com contest in order to eventually buy a collection of poems that happened to contain my little offering. I publish for free on the Web, and find that perfectly satisfying. No, instead I submitted a poem to Poetry.com because doing so is the first condition in entering the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, which exists, in part to mock vanity publishers by encouraging writers to submit deliberately ridiculous or wretched poems to them, which are inevitably accepted. A poem that has been submitted in this way is then eligible for the Wergle Flomp contest, which awards cash prizes, including a grand prize of $1,359, an amount that is itself a satire of vanity publishers, as it is the price of two registration fees to a Poetry.com Convention and Symposium ($595.00 each), plus a Poetry.com Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Silver Award Cup ($169.00).

Announcements for this year's winners will be announced exactly a year from now, on August 15 of 2009, which is quite a long time to wait, but it is my own damn fault for submitting my poem on the first day that submissions are being accepted. The poem I submitted is actually too long for Poetry.com, which has a limit to how many characters a poem can be, and I submitted rather an epic. So I did what I could: I cut up the poem and submitted it in pieces, a stanza at a time.

Here is the poem, first published in my bad poetry blog Bawd quite a few years ago, and still, I think, the worst poem I have ever written:

The Doom That Came to Potter's Square

Poor Mrs. Crumbpot, she fell deep in a spell
Her disposition was low and her mood wasn't well
She fumbled for the plug from which her room was lighted
She inserted her finger and Mrs. Crumbpot ignited.

Her husband he wept when he discovered her there
Her flesh it was ashen and ash was her hair
"I cannot endure this," he cried of his wife
And he seized up a razor and he ended his life.

Their daughter she found them coming home from a date
She pounded their chests but she pounded too late
Her boyfriend he found that he couldn't console her
She gave him a gun and he agreed to pistole her.

But he shrieked in alarm from the thing that he'd done
The girl he adored he had bored with a gun
He seized a long rope and he stood on a chair
And tied a tight noose and hanged himself there.

The lad was beloved by many young fillies
At the news of his death they mourned themselves silly
At midnight they met at the town's central square
They'd brought kerosene with them and they immolated there.

In the fumes of burnt girls the town went into a tizzy
They screamed and they cried and they beat themselves dizzy
They tore at their hair and wore sackcloth and ashes
And they cut at their throats in long, grizzly slashes.

Come morning a queer silence it fell on the town
Quite different from the shrieks heard since sundown
In a frenzy of gore the madness had ceased
And the sign to the town said, "Population: Deceased."

More of The Contestant!

ENHANCE your hosting reputation with swinging parties -- eagerly anticipated and reluctantly departed -- by introducing your guests to the sophisticated, high-spirited frolics of Playboy's Party Games.

Need an icebreaker to get things going? Try DANCING IN THE DARK wherein nonverbal communication is sure to promote a convivial atmosphere.

Got a yen for dramatics? CASTING COUCH lets you both direct and star in a torrid love scene. Fro those fascinated by the human psyche, PSYCHOANALYSIS hilariously reveals unconscious fantasies.

Naive guests who think a kiss is as unmistakable a mark of identification as a fingerprint will be startled by KISS AND TELL.

And for a game that winners and losers can relish equally, try the body braille of GUESS WHO.

These, plus 199 other games, puzzles, wagers and the famous PLAYBOY SEX QUIZ will assure you and your guests a revelrous good time.

NOTE: The most interesting thing about Playboy's Party Games is not the games themselves, which, for the most part, consist of typical party games slightly modified to make them vaguely naughty, but the typographic excesses the book's publisher engaged in. Case in point:



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I SUBMITTED my screenplay Baba Yaga to this year's American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. This is a juried competition, so there is no need for my readers to click on any links and vote for anything. Instead, I just upload my PDF, pay my fee, and wait to hear back. Francis Ford Coppola himself will read the scripts that make it to the finals, and choose which one wins. The winner gets $5000, but the winner and all 10 other finalists will have their screenplays submitted to various agencies and film companies to be considered for representation and production. The winners, finalists, and semifinalist will all be announced on February 3 of next year, so there's not much for me to do but wait.

More of The Contestant!

THE SILVERSMITH PAUL REVERE rides across American history books as a colossus, where, at least in elementary school, he is granted a central role in the founding of the United States. It was Revere, after all, who made the famous Midnight Ride of April 18-19, 1775, warning the Boston Minutemen of forthcoming British troops, a clarion call that set in motion the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the first major skirmish of America’s War of Independence. But there is a detail often left out of tales of Revere’s ride, and, for our tastes, it is an intriguing puzzle. Did Revere stop on his route in Medford, and, while paused, did he imbibe several hot toddies, as Medford historians claim? Is it possible that Revere’s famous ride was undertaken by a man who was, at the very least, two sheets to the wind?

Sentimental poet American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Revere’s adventure, penning an ode titled, simply, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” on the 85th anniversary of the event in 1860. Most of what Americans think they know about the night is contained in this poem, including the signal light in the Old North Church, Revere’s frantic warning to “every Middlesex village and farm,” and the eventual skirmish at Lexington. The only popular detail of Revere’s ride that is absent from Longfellow’s poem is the messenger’s famous cry of “The British are coming,” although it is probably for the best that this detail is absent, as Revere never said it. He did do an awful lot of shouting that night, despite instructions that he should make as little noise as possible along the route. However Revere probably warned of approaching “Regulars” or “Redcoats”; most Bostoners viewed themselves as British, and therefore a warning of that the British were coming would be nonsensical.

Even minus this detail, Longfellow’s poem isn’t especially good history. For example, he forgets to mention that two other men rode with Revere that night: a cordwainer named William Dawes and a surgeon named Samuel Prescott. He also neglects to mention that Revere was captured by the British along the route to Concord, where was detained and his horse was taken from him. Revere walked the rest of the way to Lexington, where it was Dawes who had successfully delivered warning of approaching British troops. Revere arrived just in time to see the first shots in the skirmish in Lexington, where the American militia successfully routed the Redcoats.

The fact that Revere never really completed his Midnight Ride, and that it was an obscure shoemaker who finished it for him, is one of those messy historical details that so often get lost in the wash. Longfellow’s poem actually described Revere riding on horseback into Lexington, and gives an exact time for an event that never happened: “It was one by the village clock.” Longfellow might have argued that he created this detail out of dramatic necessity — after all, the poem isn’t called “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and Two Other Guys Who You Have Never Heard Of.” You’ll hear this sort of argument made in Hollywood all the time nowadays, when filmmakers such as Michael Bay create travesties of history like Pearl Harbor and claim that their many anachronisms, geographic errors, and historical impossibilities are simply in the service of good storytelling.

So be it. But such an approach to history leaves out interesting, if messy details, such as Paul Revere’s brief stop in Medford. A small Massachusetts town just Northwest of Boston, perhaps most famous for being the site where local resident James Pierpoint wrote “Jingle Bells” (in a pub, no less), Medford was the site of a brief stop on Revere’s incomplete trip to Lexington. In a letter in 1798, Revere mentioned it briefly: “In Medford, I awakened the captain of the Minutemen.” But local historians insist there was more to it than a simple wake-up call: They insist that when Revere left Medford, he had a belly full of rum.

And there may be something to that. After all, Medford was home to Old Medford Rum, a potent and internationally distributed liquor owned by a family named Hall. The captain of the local militia, by the way, was Isaac Hall, from that same Hall family, himself a distiller. Medford historians claim Hall was famous for his hot toddies, and, furthermore, that Revere partook in this particular rum cocktail that fateful evening.

They offer little by way of evidence, but, then, there is little reason to doubt them, either. Revere was not a teetotaler, and rum plays an important part in early American history. After all, at this time, rum was the favorite drink of the colonists, who each consumed an average of four gallons per year. Rum represented about 80 percent of New England’s export trade, and the Colony’s schism with England was largely based on the imposition of a heavy tax on French molasses, intended to force the Colonists to purchase inferior molasses from the British West Indies. This led to the famous cries of “No taxation without representation” and the development of the Sons of Liberty, an independence movement that frequently met in saloons and schemed political action over pipe smoke and rum drinks. These same Sons of Liberty would eventually respond to a new tax on tea by dressing as Mohawks and flinging the stuff into Boston Harbor, an act that was deeply motivated by simmering outrage over the rum tax, and which, one presumes, was plotted over endless rum punches.

By the way, Paul Revere was one of those Mohawk-clad protestors throwing tea into Boston Harbor. Along with brewery owner Samuel Adams, Revere led the Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts.

So it is very possible to imagine that on that chilly April night in 1775, Revere might have paused in his famous ride to drink a rum cocktail or two. As to what effect it might have had on the silversmith, well, we can only conjecture based on the potency of Old Medford Rum. And it was potent: 68 proof. Perhaps Revere, after years of plotting in saloons and quaffing his two gallon yearly average of rum, had built a tolerance for the drink, and it had no more effect on him than to brace him for the remainder of his ride.

Otherwise, the scene would have been similar to an annual reenactment attempted a few years back, during which an actor recreated Revere’s Midnight Ride. "He always has two other riders with him as escorts," said Medford historian Thomas E. Convery recounted to a publication called Massachusetts Beverage Business. "One year, it was a lucky thing those escorts were along. Paul had his rum toddy at our gathering, and it hit him hard. When he tried to climb aboard his horse, he fell off on the other side. He finally got up on the horse, but those escorts had to ride real close to him, as they galloped out of town, to make sure he didn't fall off the horse.”

More Bottle Gang!

MINNEAPOLIS is a town with a strange relationship with food -- bring up the subject of grocery stores and locals will spend hours discussing where they shop, and why. This is, after all, a town where hippies and Maoists went to war with each other over control of local coops in the 70s. Thankfully, a few locals have chosen to be creative, rather than obnoxious, when it comes to the subject of groceries. They go to grocery stores, carefully select seeds that grow locally, and then take them home and glue them to a canvas. We're talking, of course, about seed art, also known as crop art, a folk craft that has such a following locally that there is an annual exhibit at the State Fair. Where else would you find local celebrities whose claim to fame is their skill at creating rural scenes out of oat and flax, such as "Seed Queen" Lillian Colton, whose death a few years ago was the source of genuinely heartfelt mourning, and who now has a book of her work available? Local hipsters in particular seem to have a peculiar affection for the craft. Each year at the Fair, nestled in with the sorts of portraits and still lives popular among amateur artists, you will find a number of crop art pieces that demonstrate a decidedly balmier aesthetic; past examples include a panel from a Harvey Pekar cartoon, a decorated box containing Jambi from Pee-wee's Playhouse, and a portrait the great, though now sadly obscure, St. Paul rocker Augie Garcia.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

I AM AWARE that when you find yourself writing a song called "They Never Found her Head," you should probably stop what you're doing and reconsider. And not simply reconsider the lyrics, or the song itself. I mean you should reconsider what you're doing with your life. You should drag yourself away from the ukulele and over to a nearby mirror and look at yourself, shaken and ashen, wondering how things went so wrong.

You should; I don't. I suppose I've always like the grimness of some old country songs, which don't shy away from grotesque details. Some early country is taken straight from news stories of local tragedies, and, back in the middle part of the century, newspapers had no problem publishing lurid photographs coupled with pathetic text, telling tales of small lives and early, violent ends. I have quite a few books of photographs from the era, and they are startling both in their immediacy and their intimacy. We often see the dead photographed shortly after their death, at the place they fell, unflattering and invasive as such an image might be. I guess this is the lyrical version of such a story, and, in keeping with country's longstanding tradition of telling sad tales, I have tried to make it as sad as possible.

"THEY NEVER FOUND HER HEAD" LYRICS:

They never found her head
They never found her head
There was only a ring to identify her
In the place where she lay dead

The place where she lay dead
The place where she lay dead
They found a letter she was writing him
But they never found her head

She'd moved to the city from Omaha
Only three years ago
She didn't have enough money to make it there
But she had too little to go
She sent postcards home every month
And she lied on every one
Telling of jobs she'd never had
And of things she'd never done

He visited her once a year ago
And said she didn't look well
She was living with two girls in one bedroom
In a residence hotel
They talked for a while over fast food fries
Of the times that they once knowed
The next day he rode a Greyhound home
As she watched him from the road

It was two am when the call came in
It was five when it made the news
But it took two weeks for word to get to him
Along with her ring, her dress, her shoes
There was a letter packed with her effects
And it's first word was goodbye
It said I know I'll probably die out here
But we all someday die

LISTEN TO "THEY NEVER FOUND HER HEAD":



DOWNLOAD "THEY NEVER FOUND HER HEAD."

MORE NEW SONGS!

IT'S BEEN a while since I have eaten tuna, as I have been a vegetarian since I was 16. But Chicken of the Sea is throwing a contest in which they ask for jingles that incorporate their famous theme: "Ask any chicken you happen to sea / What's the best tuna? / Chicken of the Sea." I used to eat tuna and enjoyed it quite a bit, and I felt I could write a snappy little jingle. Besides, the first 100 entrants get a new iPod shuffle, and my old Shuffle is starting to look a little outdated, so why not enter?

The Grand Prize winner gets a trip to Los Angeles, goes on the Universal Studios tour, as well as getting put up at a hotel and getting fed at a fancy restaurant. I believe there will voting on the semifinalists in October, so, if I make it that far, I'll let you know where to go to vote.

More of The Contestant!

I HAVE MET BIGFOOT.

I was living in Los Angeles at the base of the Hollywood Hills. I was doing some writing for an actress I knew, trying to piece together some ideas for a television movie that she could pitch to her studio. Every day, I walked up Outpost Drive a few miles to her house. We'd have brunch and talk about our project. Then she would head on in to the studio to work on the sitcom that then employed her, and I would get on her computer and type for a few hours; I had no computer of my own then. Then I would head home, back down Outpost Drive.

One day, as I was walking back to my apartment, an approaching car slowed. The driver leaned out the window. She was a middle-aged woman with pinched eyes and mouth. She spoke to me quickly and nervously. "You're headed toward a Bigfoot," she told me, and then drove on.

I had passed wild animals on Outpost before. Just the past week, a coyote scampered past me, looking like a lean, skittish dog. I had seen owls pluck field mice right out of the grass on the side of the road. Once, in the sky, I saw a bald eagle. There is a wildness to the Hollywood Hills that you would not expect. I sometimes wonder if badgers or bobcats ever wander out of the Hills into Hollywood, menacing transvestites on Santa Monica or lunging at tourists on the Walk of Fame.

There had been reports of a Bigfoot in the Hills for decades. Frank Zappa was supposed to have recorded the creature's plaintive night cries and used them on his album We're Only In It For The Money, and Pamela Des Barres claimed to have had a three-month relationship with the monster. Bigfoot is supposed to have chased the Batmobile when the Batman television show was filming in Bronson Canyon, and Sonny Bono often claimed that his famous "caveman" vest was inspired by an encounter with the beast outside the Griffith Observatory, although Bigfoot is supposed to have been frightened off by Bono's smell, as he was in a Sandalwood body oil phase. More recently, if you look very carefully, you are supposed to be able to see Bigfoot in the background of the scene in Queen of the Damned when Aaliyah begs Stuart Townsend to make her a vampire.

I have watched that scene, and, while it is possible to see a hulking shape briefly move behind a tree in the background, it is impossible to identify what that shape is. I thought of the story of the Bigfoot of the Hollywood Hills as an entertaining urban legend, the same way I thought of the stories of the humanoid frog creatures that are supposed to feed on the homeless near the Santa Monica Pier, or the cabal of werewolves that are supposed to own Warner Brothers. There are a lot of stories like that in Hollywood. It is a superstitious town.

So I did not know what to make of the fast warning from the woman with the pinched face. I could not even be sure I had heard her correctly, although I could not imagine what she might have said that I would mistake for a warning about Bigfoot. I continued walking, nervous and curious. And then, down the hill, I saw him.

He was 100 feet away from me, or more, and, at that distance, all I could see was a brown blur. He seemed very tall, and his head seemed high and domed. He was running toward me. No, not running, not precisely. He was trotting toward me, moving at a deliberate but leisurely pace. And there, in the distance, he stopped. For a moment I though he had seen me and was staring at me, but, no. Bigfoot waved his hands energetically in front of him, then stretched forth his legs, one at a time, and shook them vigorously. He doubled over slightly, evidently breathing hard, and then pressed one hand to his neck, seemingly to take his pulse. After a moment, he straightened up, ran in place for a moment, and then started his slow trot.

Perhaps I should have looked to hide. There was thick brush off the road, and I suppose I might have thrown myself into that and hoped that it would cover me. Honestly, it didn't occur to me. Instead, I continued to walk toward the Bigfoot, and he continued to run toward me. As he got closer, I could make out the details of the beast. He was about seven feet tall, and his domelike head sat necklessly on his shoulders. He had long arms that swung gracefully as he ran, and he had thick legs that ended in bare, oversized feet. His eyes were small and almost hidden beneath a protruding brow. His nose was humanlike, but beneath it was a large mouth with thick, rubbery lips. He panted as he ran, expelling sharp breaths through his mouth, and, when he did so, I could see fangs. He was covered with thickly matted reddish brown hair, and was naked, but for sweatbands wrapped around his wrists and high forehead.

As he passed me, he turned to glance at me. Our eyes locked for a second. He nodded his head at me and then returned his gaze to the road ahead. He jogged past me, breathing in long,rhythmic grunts, his footfalls loud and even. I stopped walking and turned, watching the Bigfoot run up Outpost Drive.

I never saw Bigfoot again. I did meet Pamela Des Barres a year or so later, and related my story. She seemed happy to hear it. According to her, when they dated, Bigfoot had been a three pack a day smoker, stealing cigarettes from the patios of Laurel Canyon homes. "He coughed all the time," she said, shaking her head. "I'm glad he's getting healthy."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that I found a trail of recently smoked cigarette butts winding down the Hill behind Bigfoot, and a crushed soft pack of empty cigarettes at the base of the hill, half-buried in a giant footprint. Everyone in Hollywood jogs, or joins a gym, or hires a trainer. They all smoke on the sly, dipping out into the alley behind a restaurant for a clandestine cigarette, or lighting up in their cars on the Freeway, or walking along the beach late at night with a Natural American Spirit dangling between their lips. So Bigfoot smokes while he runs. So what?

Everyone in Hollywood has a bad habit or two.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

LET US NOT EVEN MENTION the subject of the vodka martini, which, as regular readers know, we at The Bottle Gang don't consider a martini at all, but rather some sort of Champanska, but with vermouth replacing the usual champagne. Despite James Bond's cinematic reputation as a sophisticated international playboy, his taste in alcohol has always been suspect. I mean, honestly, "shaken and not stirred?" Connoisseurs of the martini prefer their drink stirred, because shaking it might "bruise" the drink, referring to a possibly apocryphal bitter flavor that can be produced by shaking. And it must be noted that Ian Flemming, Bond's creator, preferred his martinis with gin and vermouth, just as all reasonable people do.

But Flemming's Bond -- the literary one, who bears scant resemblance to his filmic versions -- was a man of suspect tastes. Flemming takes great care to describe 007's garments, his dining choices, his liquor choices, and his car (a Bentley), and in these ways Bond is very much the proto-metrosexual he would be in films. But Flemming gives Bond enough self-awareness to occasionally be embarrassed by his almost feminine attention to style: In Casino Royal, Bond actually apologizes to Vesper Lynd after making something of a fuss out of ordering their supper. And Flemming has one word for Bond's taste in alcohol, spoken by Q in Moonraker: "Rot-gut."

Bond favors bad vodka, you see. In 1955, when Moonraker came out, vodka was most often made from potatoes, and many brands were very badly fermented, leaving them oily; actually, shaking a vodka martini is a rather good way to separate the oil from the cocktail. Like his smoking habit (60 cigarettes a day), Flemming seems to treat Bond's drinking as a destructive affectation; at the start Thunderball, Flemming has Q sent Bond to a health farm because these affectations are ruining his health. (Interesting, Flemming was also a heavy smoker, and died of a heart attack at the age 56.)

But though we at The Bottle Gang may sneer at Bond's ghastly corruption of the martini, he has one vodka habit that we've rather taken a liking to, described in Moonraker thusly:

When M. poured him three fingers from the frosted carafe Bond took a pinch of black pepper and dropped it onto the surface of the Vodka. The pepper slowly settled to the bottom of the glass leaving a few grains on the surface which Bond dabbed up with the tip of a finger. Then he tossed the cold liquor well to the back of his throat and put his glass, with the dregs of pepper on the bottom, back on the table.

M. gave him a glance of rather ironical inquiry.

"It's a trick the Russians taught me that time you attached me to the Embassy in Moscow," apologized Bond. "There's often quite a lot of fusel oil on the surface of this stuff -- at least, there used to be when it was badly distilled. Poisonous. In Russia, where you get a lot of bath-tub liquor, it's an understood thing to sprinkle a little pepper in your glass. It takes the fusel oil to the bottom. I got to like the taste and now it's a habit."

Curious, we at the Bottle Gang gave Bond's habit a go. Why not? After all, you toss pepper into a Bloody Mary, and that's a vodka drink. Pepper is also in the various Prairie cocktails (Prairie Hen, Prairie Chicken, Prairie Oyster), and in the Philomel Cocktail, so there's precedent.

And Bond's right about this one -- it's easy to get to like the taste. We're tried pepper shots of vodka only with relatively neutral vodkas, such as Skyy, and we've done it just the way Bond does, adding a dash of pepper, waiting for it to settle, and removing any grains that are floating on the surface before drinking. The results are, well, slightly peppery. The pepper flavor is subtle and surprisingly mellow, adding just a hint of complexity to the vodka's basic flavor. We haven't added pepper to vodkas that already have a strong flavor -- Bison Grass vodka, for example -- as there didn't seem to be any point, but, like Bond, we've grown accustomed to the pepper, and might just toss it into any vodka drink that comes our way.

Additionally, we've discovered that Russians continue to enjoy the flavor of pepper in their vodka, to the point that they manufacture a vodka with a surprisingly potent pepper flavor called Pertsovka. And we're determined to get some, keep it in our freezer, and take a shot of it before bedtime. It's supposed to be a remedy of some sort, for colds or something like that. We don't really care what it cures.

Jesus Christ. Pepper shots of vodka before bedtime. What have we become? Soon it will be vodka martinis and 60 cigarettes and day, and then how will we look at ourselves in the mirror?

More Bottle Gang!

FOR THREE YEARS, between 1984 and 1987, the Twin Cities took a serious stab at being the broadcasting epicenter of the artistic avant-garde with Alive from Off-Center, coproduced by the Walker Art Center (some clips of the show can be seen here). With theme music by David Byrne and frequent appearances by Laurie Anderson and Eric Bogosian, it's no wonder the New York Times sniffed at the show's debut, saying "Much of the material in the potpourri has already been seen on television, at least in the New York metropolitan region." But most of America didn't have access to New York television, or the exploding downtown New York art scene, many of whose artists were finding a second home at the Walker. And what the Times missed in its review was the fact that, thanks to the Walker, the Twin Cities was an unlikely sort of hub for an international art community, many of whom were experimenting with video. For the Twin Cities, and the various PBS affiliates that broadcast Alive from Off-Center, there were precious few other opportunities to see Japanese butoh, or the wild animated shorts of the Brothers Quay or Sally Cruikshank. And, to paraphrase David Byrne, thanks to KTCA, every week the world of experimental art crashed in, into our living rooms.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!

A VERY BRIEF NOTE to mark a moment of personal significance. With this post, this blog, which I started at the end of December last year, has reached 500 posts. I am told that you don't really start getting an audience for a blog until you reach a thousand posts, but I am one man, and there is only so much I can do in eight months. Talk to me in another eight. Jeez.

A ONE-MINUTE video for Southwest Airline meant to demonstrate that I would make an ideal "blog-o-spondent" for the company, traveling to four destinations across America, in cities that are served by Southwest, and producing short films about my experiences.

Head on over to the contest site and vote for me, if you would.

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FIRST, IT MUST BE SAID that there doesn't seem to be a Minnesota bartender who can make a proper Pimm's Cup. Now, to be fair, that doesn't point to a lack of sophistication on the part of local mixologists. We've sampled Pimm's Cups across the United States, and Yanks just don't seem to know how to make this distinctly English cocktail. Even at the Napoleon House in New Orleans, which has made the Pimm's Cup its signature drink, they don't get it quite right.

We'll go into the reasons for this in a moment, but, first, let us introduce you to Pimm's No. 1, the liquor behind the Pimm's cup. You'll find it in a number of local bars, but, often as not, if you request the drink, you'll discover the bottle has never been opened. We presume it is kept on hand for English tourists, for whom Pimm's is a favorite summer alcohol.

Simply put, Pimm's is an infused gin. Nobody is completely certain what it is infused with, or, at least, nobody but the seven some-odd people in the world who are entrusted with its recipe. The alcohol is subtler than a proper gin, with very little of the typical juniper taste. It is tea colored, and tastes strongly of herbs and fruits. Wikipedia claims that the taste of Pimm's can be approximated with gin, triple sec, and sweet vermouth; we haven't tried it, and do not plan to, but this should give you some sense of the flavor.

Pimm's was originally marketed as digestive tonic by a fellow named James Pimm, who owned an oyster bar in London in the early 1800s. We're told it contains quinine, but we must assume this is in small quantities as Pimm's No. 1 is far from bitter. Drunk straight, it has a strongly herbal flavor, and is sweet, although it does have a slightly medicinal nose and aftertaste.

You may be wondering why the alcohol is numbered. After World War II, the Pimm's Distillery offered a series of Pimm's liquors, each with a different alcohol base: No. 2 was whiskey based, for example, while No. 3 was an infused brandy. Most of these have ceased production, although the current owner of the distillery, Diageo, does offer small batches of No. 6, which is vodka based, and produces a seasonal version of No. 3, now called Pimm's Winter Cup.

Let us take a moment now to discuss why Pimm's Cup is called a "cup," as it will point out the problem with the way most American bartenders serve the drink. A cup is a specific sort of cocktail, generally one mixed in a large bowl and served with seasonal fruits, a sort of hard liquor version of a sangria or wine cooler. The Pimm's Cup requires a selection of fruits and herbs, and, yet, American bartenders serve them without either, sometimes even neglecting to add a garnish. They often serve the drink in a lowball glass, even though the instructions for a basic Pimm's Cup are printed on the back of the bottle, and explicitly call for a tall glass.

The recipe on the back of the bottle forget to include cucumber, a criminal mistake. While a proper Pimm's Cup should be made with borage leaves, most bars won't carry them -- in fact, you'd be hard pressed to find this Syrian herb in the United States, although it is quite common in Europe. No matter, though, as borage tastes quite a lot like cucumber. So much so that London pubs generally substitute cucumber for borage during the Wimbledon tennis tournament, when as many as 15,000 Pimm's Cups are served per day. The substitution is allowable, and forgivable, but a Pimm's Cup must have borage or cucumber. Without it, it's not a Pimm's Cup.

Mind you, this isn't just a vestigal affectation of cocktail snobs, and something the drink can do without. Pimm's takes the flavor of cucumber exceptionally well; without it, the cocktail is missing one of the flavors that defines it. If you receive your Pimm's Cup without cucumber, or in a lowball glass, send it back. And the cucumber should be more than a garnish. Several wheels of cucumber, or even wedges, should be in the drink.

Now, there is the issue of what to mix Pimm's No. 1 with to make a genuine Pimm's Cup. Properly, it should be mixed with British Lemonade. This tends to confuse the subject, as, in England, Lemonade is a lemon flavored soda, similar to 7-Up, but without the lime. There's no real equivalent here. 7-Up works fine. Some bartenders use American lemonade, which, to our tastes, loses the effervescence of a true Pimm's cup. If you use this lemonade, top it off with seltzer, and add some lemon wedges to the cocktail. Actually, whatever you use, add some lemon wedges to the cocktail. Some people like to make their Pimm's Cup with ginger ale. We did for years, and it's delicious, but a proper Pimm's Cup should have a strong lemon flavor.

A bartender can do all this right (it is, essentially, what you get at the Napoleon House), and the resulting cocktail will be quite flavorful, but it still won't be a Pimm's Cup. The last step, the step that makes it a proper "cup" cocktail, is the addition of fruits and herbs, as we've mentioned. Typically, the drink will have a sprig of mint and slices of green apple added in. Orange and strawberry are also popular additions, although strawberry, in particular, is considered blasphemous by some, and an Internet petition has started to discourage this practice. This is really a matter of taste, and best left up to experimentation, but the resulting drink should look a little like a fruit cocktail has been tossed in. The Pimm's Cup also requires a lot of ice, and this is why it must be served in a tall glass. The taller the better.

When mixing the drink, add one part Pimm's No. 1 to three parts Lemonade. It's a good idea to put all the ingredients, including ice, in a pitcher or shaker and stir or shake them -- you want the fruits and herbs slightly bruised, releasing their flavor. Also, if you simply pour the Pimms and Lemonade into a tall glass with ice, it's going to be quite a trick to get the various fruits and herbs into the drink. There is some speculation that the historic Pimm's was stronger than the current version -- some people even add extra gin to their Pimm's Cups, which you may do if you please.

The resulting cocktail is exceptionally flavorful and refreshing -- it's no wonder the Pimm's Cup is so popular a drink in the United Kingdom. As to why it hasn't caught on in the United States, well, who knows? Made improperly, the Pimm's Cup is a good drink, but not so good that people might go out of their way to try it. And to make it right, chances are you will have to instruct your bartender every step of the way. We at the Bottle Gang always keep a bottle of Pimm's No. 1 at home, along with the various sundry ingredients for the cocktail; we recommend you do too. The weather is getting hot, and a Pimm's Cup is just the thing to relieve the heat. But unless you're willing to make it yourself, you're probably not going to get a proper drink.

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ED ASNER stars in this low-budget ode to the American Wrestling Association, produced and costarring the organization's unbeatable founder and seven year AWA World Champion Verne Gagne. The wrestlers on display here are distinctly working class, muscular but heavyset men who destroy bars, chomp on cigars, and too-frequently take their shirts off to reveal bear-like masses of matted chest and back hair. The story is frankly ridiculous, with Asner going toe to toe with the mob to keep them from fixing wrestling matches (apparently nobody informed the mafia that the matches were already fixed). But for fans of early 70s midwestern wrestling, the film is a treat, with outrageous performances by such old school grappling legends as blond-tressed Crusher and his partner The Brusier. In one lunatic scene, two wrestlers, threatened in a bar by a burly Asian man in a bowler derby, take turns pummeling him. The Asian man is none other than Harold Sakata, reprising his role as Odd Job from the James Bond film Goldfinger.

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ONCE big hair was de rigueur,
But their hair kept getting bigger!
A piled and teased bouffant hill --
And their hair grew bigger still.
Gallons of lacquer to make it stay
And yet their hair went fast astray!
Their hair it reached up to the sky
And more! And more! It grew so high
That one day, with a snap and croak
The hair grew so heavy that both their necks broke.

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IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN A YEAR since Esquire declared Nye's Polonaise Room to be the best bar in America. The author of the story, a former sports writer from Toronto named Chris Jones, obviously greatly loves the St. Anthony institution. He meticulously researched the place, describing in great detail the bar's kitschy decor and antique staff. Jones drove himself into a frenzy of purple prose trying to find the right words to describe the place, coming up with an embarrassingly orchidaceous intro in the process. "The best bar in America occupies a corner where the path to righteousness and the road to perdition run parallel, east to west, perpendicular to the muddy river that cuts this country in two, north to south," Jones wrote, and it's a mouthful for a bar and restaurant that remains stubbornly charming, despite the fact that the bar is so thoroughly a nesting ground for slumming Yuppies and white-belted hipsters that it's nearly impossible to find a quiet spot to enjoy an overpriced drink.

Jones gets the details of the place right, mostly. But here's a Nye's story he didn't know, or neglected to tell.

Back in 1972, Dayton's had a rather formidable art gallery called Gallery 12, which offered such upscale items as works by pop artist Tom Wesselmann and sculptures by Venezuelan artist Marisol, which even in 1968 were selling for $8,000. Gallery 12's curator was a fellow named John Stoller, and Stoller had an interest in a German artist who was then still somewhat unknown in the United Sates: Jospeh Beuys. The 51-year-old Beuys, a thin man with a long face and a taste for fishing vests and enormous Trilby hats, had a sizable reputation in Europe for producing highly symbolic and idiosyncratic work loosely affiliated with the Fluxus movement, such as 1965's "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare." In this piece, Beuys put himself on display through the window of a Duesseldorf gallery, his face covered in gold paint, cradling a dead hare and explaining art to it.

Working with a New York art dealer named Ronald Feldman, Stoller arranged to bring Beuys to the United States on a speaking tour: The artist, over the course of 10 days, would lecture in New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis, appearing locally both at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the University of Minnesota. Beuys' lectures were sprawling and ambitious, and he illustrated them on chalkboards, dubbing his lectures "Energy Plan for the Western Man" and detailing his ideas for combining art, science, and religion in such a way that might restore the balance he saw lacking in the western world. In Minneapolis, Beuys replaced his chalkboard with zinc printing plates, and his diagrams became a piece of art themselves, titled "Minneapolis Fragments." But it was not the only piece of art he created while in Minneapolis.

During his stay, Beuys was taken to Nye's Polonaise Room, and while he was eating, he noticed that the sugar packets in Nye's were printed with the image of a hare sipping water at a lakefront. The hare was a recurring image in Beuys' work -- he was impressed by the fact that the hare burrowed in the earth and emerged from it again, which, to the artist, symbolized death and rebirth. So, with the help of other diners, Beuys rounded up all the sugar packets at the bar. These he later marked with a self-fashioned stamp and exhibited as readymade art, in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, who was an early and important influence on the artist. These stamped sugar packets from Nye's formed a series named "American Hare Sugar," and can be found in the Tate and other important collections; as of this writing, one can be seen at the Walker.

Most of the pleasures to be had at Nye's are joyously lowbrow, and Twin Citian's know them well: The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band, with Ruth Adams, the band's toothless accordion player; Sweet Lou, who leads the piano bar; the Formica tables and glittery plastic booths. It's just what Chris Jones wrote about in Esquire, and it's exactly what locals love about the bar. But it's worth noting that Nye's contribution to the world hasn't just been kitsch: At least once in its history, the bar produced art.

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WE MINNESOTANS SPEND AN AWFUL LOT OF ENERGY trying to claim our local celebrities, even those who we don't have that much a claim to. Take Judy Garland, for example. Sure, she was born in Grand Rapids, but she moved to Lancaster, California, at about the age of 4. She was hardly old enough to have absorbed much indigenous Minnesotan culture, and she wouldn't have gotten much from parents, as they were wandering Vaudevillians who had briefly settled in Minnesota.

The pity of it is, Minnesotans are often woefully ignorant of locally born celebrities who we really can claim as our own. Case in point: Barret Hansen, better known to novelty music aficionados as Dr. Demento. Although the bespectacled, bearded, and top-hatted deejay produces his show in California, he hails from Minneapolis, and credits his childhood here as inspiring his eventual career. And yet, while a statue of Mary Tyler Moore stands, beret in hand, on Nicollet Mall, no such monument exists for Dr. Demento. In fact, precious few locals are aware he's a fellow Minnesotan, and, to add injury to insult, no local radio station currently plays his show.

According to Hansen, he spent his youth in Minneapolis haunting local thrift stores, snapping up inexpensive novelty 78 RPM records (a hobby that is still possible thanks to the Vintage Music Company on 38th and Cedar). His father, an amateur pianist, introduced him to madcap bandleader Spike Jones, and, as Dr. Demento, Hansen has been Jones's most steadfast promoter.

Sure there's something a little cornball about Dr. Demento -- he has a tendency to program innocuous song parodies (after all, he gave Weird Al Yankovic his start) and cheesy regional humor (Da Yoopers springs to mind). But, at its best, Dr. Demento's show is wildly anarchic, calling to mind an audio version of the early Mad Magazine. In fact, his 2000 Rhino Records boxed set contains one of Mad's infrequent musical outputs: an organ-based, garage band marathon of belching titled "It's a Gas." A glance at a typical Demento playlist demonstrates Hansen's catholic tastes in novelty records -- what other deejay would play slapstick British musical maniacs like The Bonzo Dog Band alongside loudmouth comedian Ruth Buzzi, or ukulele serenader Arthur Godfrey on the same program as pothead comics Cheech and Chong?

It is this sort of aural diversity that is Demento's greatest legacy. Back in the Eighties, his was one of the few shows that regularly played punk rock, and, to this day, his is one of the only nationally syndicated shows that makes regular use of music recorded before 1940. There's a wealth of music that goes unplayed by mainstream radio, obscure but excellent, that Demento still champions because he finds it funny.

There is just no other place on earth you're likely to stumble across such weird masterpieces as Jim Backus's "Delicious," a tinkly cocktail number punctuated by uproarious laughter from television's Thurston Howell III, or Nervous Norvus's jive-talking ode to automotive accidents titled "Transfusion." These are great, wild songs, deserving of an appreciative audience, and, thanks to Dr. Demento, they have one.

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YOU HAVE TO appreciate Rachel Kramer Bussel's introduction to Spanked: Red Cheeked Erotica, the book she edited for Cleis Press: "Just as I have a seemingly endless capacity to bare my ass and get it smacked soundly or make a squirming bottom hover on the edge of erotic oblivion with loud, stinging whack after whack, I don't think I'll ever get tired of reading stories about spanking." Rachel is on the editorial staff of Penthouse Variations (she carries copies in her backpack and passes them around to anyone who shows interest), and while her anthologies of erotica tend to be more literary than the material found in the Penthouse magazine, her introduction, with its mix of sudden intimacy and breathless confession, would do Penthouse proud. We've just opened the book and we're starting with a bang.

Rachel edits a lot of erotica -- Amazon has her name on about 20 anthologies of various themes, including rubber, oral sex, and feet. She also has a great interest in cupcakes, and spent a recent weekend in Minneapolis hurrying from readings of the fiction she has anthologized to various events that featured cupcakes. This was an enviable, albeit obviously exhausting schedule. The Sparber bookshelf caught her during a free moment and posed some questions about the world of published erotica.