What Does it Feel Like ?

How are you feeling today?

As the day opens up, broadens and elaborates into the complexities of living, are thoughts and feelings ascending into consciousness, appearing and moving?

Today, everyone says they feel like. 

The phrase has become so common, it's gone totally viral in our culture, infecting not just the susceptible young, but people of every age and sex and class and persuasion. Its apparent harmlessness may be one reason people seem to regard it with such pathetic affection. It just feels so nice and smarmy and innocent and innocuous, that people can't resist using it in place of more active, deliberate and frank expressions. 

In fact, what people really are saying when they say feel like is that they think, or believe, or accept. The choice to retreat from directness to the indirectness or equivocation of feeling allows them to insulate themselves from possible misapprehension, or to hide behind the excuse of personal feeling (i.e., IMO or IMHO). 

My objection to this verb phrase is that it's clearly ungrammatical. It is perfectly possible to feel like one is stupid, or to feel like a bird. But to say that one feels like a thought, or a feeling, or an opinion, is to put oneself in at least one remove from the original motive. Like is a simile, which is to say it sets up a comparison, between one thing and another, or between oneself and something else. But if you say you feel like something is the case, you're actually saying you feel like someone who has a certain thought or feeling, as if you were comparing yourself to someone who had this thought or feeling. 

Feel like is a deeply corruptive and corrosive instance of insincere, imprecise and sloppy language. People who use it with confidence have accepted it as a substitute for direct assertion, as a way of denaturing their thought, as well as the quality of their communication with others. It's a deflection of responsibility not only to quality of one's own thinking, but to the clarity of all discussion. 

The next time you catch yourself saying feel like, say I think or I believe instead. After all, you ARE the person who thinks or believes, not a stand-in. 

If you feel something, by all means describe that feeling. But if you think or believe something, by all means say that, and leave the feeling part out.  

Soglow's Igloo

I first began reading The New Yorker in the early 1960's, when my mother gave me a subscription as a Christmas present. But I had seen the magazine on newsstands as early as the late 1950's. In those days, it was a very fat and prosperous looking rag, often well over a hundred pages an issue. It intrigued me, with its suppressed by-lines, encyclopedic register of events in New York City. The masthead of the magazine sat atop The Talk of the Town, and underneath it ran the lead editorial pieces. There were never any photographic illustrations then, but they had cartoons, and in the Talk of the Town section, they usually had little cartoon vignettes by a cartoonist named Otto Soglow, though the ones in the Town section weren't signed. Soglow's vignettes and cartoons had a simplicity of style, geometric and controlled, and a kind of innocence that was utterly dry. 

Soglow, born in 1900, fell into cartooning by accident, and never left it. Eventually, his association with The New Yorker was so firm and familiar that his visual style was virtually synonymous with it.  

Soglow as a young man

Soglow "illustrating" a model as a gag 

Soglow mixing a cocktail (probably during Prohibition) 

Lots of Soglow's cartoons work off a simple joke--

 

I wasn't able to locate any of the Talk of the Town Soglow vignettes online, though there must have been hundreds over the years. This is typical of many of them (note Thurber's droopy dog following the wagon) --

Soglow's cartoons relied heavily on immediate recognition, since he rarely had captions. Today's hip New Yorker cartoons often have no obvious subtext, and the irony of the tension between the action and the meaning seems almost anti-humor. Soglow's work is reminiscent of an earlier, perhaps more innocent time of simple, light-hearted amusement. 

I haven't been a regular reader of The New Yorker for many years now--I got off that train about the time that Tina Brown was hired as conductor. She's long-gone too, though the magazine still runs good cartoons, but nothing like those Soglow used to contribute. 

Did Soglow ever do a cartoon of eskimos? I like to think so. He'd have done a very satisfying little igloo, with furry collared natives indomitably confronting some redoubtable absurdity. 

Here's a cocktail I've just made up, to celebrate the work of Otto Soglow. It's pleasantly refreshing, and perfectly suited to a carefree afternoon or early evening, when the frustrations and obstacles of the day have been left behind, and some amusing conversation is in order.  

The ingredients, as usual, are by proportion, though the recipe will do nicely for two.  

3 parts gin
2 parts dry vermouth
2/3 part ginger liqueur
1/2 part maraschino liqueur
1 part fresh lime juice

Shaken and served up in chilled cocktail glasses. 

Indian Summer Buzz

Walker Evans Truck and Sign, 1930

There's something wrong with America. We didn't sort out the classes and put them in their places the way they did in Europe. Things got really mixed up here. A lot of the energy was stifled and twisted and fermented and synthesized into a rich brew, an alembic of pain and greed and dreams and grief-stricken loss and betrayal and hopelessness.

America is a country increasingly in flux. Our demographics are shifting. The so-called "races of color" are streaming in, and will soon overwhelm the so-called white races. As the era of the great European diaspora was thought to be dwindling, the third world is now spilling over. Are we any more tolerant of "diversity" than we ever were, or has all this flux just produced tension and free-floating animosity? I've always felt that forcing people to "accept" other ways of doing things is a recipe for resentment and identity anxiety.

One aspect of America's energy and drive and expansiveness has been its alcoholic indulgence. We went through a deep introspective convulsion in the 1920's, attempting to "temper" our temptation through Prohibition. It's widely thought that Prohibition was responsible for most of the big crime wave that swept over the country during that decade. The Stock Market Crash may have put an end to the sinful flagrant waywardness associated with it, but crime continued to flourish throughout the 1930's and 1940's. Where would Hollywood have been without the inspiration for the Noir paradigm, with its dark shadows and haunting evil undertones? 

Drinking--that is, the "hard drinking" we associate with hard living and a devil-may-care attitude towards our own welfare and well-being--has also suggested the "high life"--care-free pleasure and a release of inhibitions and cautions. 

Capitalism runs in cycles. Boom times and bad times. Overheated markets and periodic recessions. I've lived through a couple during my lifetime, but nothing like the 1930's, the Great American Depression. 

America's drinking habits have been partly a reflection of the economy, and the general mood of the nation. After Prohibition, the American wine industry languished for decades, until its revitalization during the latter third of the last century, when it really took off. Drinking wine is usually associated with food, though taking it alone has its adherents. 

Some people actually have hard drinks with food, though they're more often appreciated as a pre- or post-dinner libation. I like them best as a pre-dinner start, though I also like them for a mid-afternoon snack. In Berkeley, Cesar's is the perfect fair-weather hang-out, with seating that abuts the sidewalk, and a fascinating bar menu that changes constantly. It's very like a Spanish tapas place, but with a full bar that can handle a wide range of mixes--something that is pretty rare these days. 

Here are three more recipes that I've chalked up on the weekly board over the last couple of months. Who knows whether these were invented sometime in the past by another curious bartender? There are hundreds of drink recipe books, whose contents aren't ever likely to be collated. So I'll have to assume originality here, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Cheers! 
      


1 part tennessee rye whiskey
3/4 part sweet vermouth
3/4 part Sambucca Black
1/3 part creme de cacao
1/2 part fresh lemon juice

served on the rocks



4 parts dry vermouth
1 part blue curaçao
1 part anisette liqueur
1 part lime

served up with a lime twist



3 parts gin
1 part dry vermouth
1 part mandarin orange
1 part violette
1 part lime

served up with a lime twist

Near the Arctic Circle

My maternal ancestors came from Northern Scandinavia. Norway, apparently. I've never been to Norway, but whenever I see a travel show on television about Norway, I try to imagine--from my "deep" racial memory (if indeed there is such a thing!)--how "at home" these chilly green and white landscapes seem to my sensibility. 

Personally, I don't particularly like extremes of either hot or cold. When the temperature rises about 85 degrees or falls below 45 degrees, I get sort of miserable. The heat makes me lazy, takes away my appetite. The cold makes me want to bundle up. Doing physical work in the cold is probably easier, since the heat generated from exertion tends to moderate the affects of cold on the body. 

In the movie Fargo, there's an attempt to satirize Minnesotans by having them mouth Scandinavian pronunciations, like "Yah!" or "Jah!" Maybe Minnesota, with its cold weather, is just enough like Scandinavia to justify this kind of stereotypical mugging. It's amusing, but maybe a little exaggerated.

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Redner, or Raedner. I tried once to trace it back. I even visited the genealogical library in Salt Lake City, the one the Mormons maintain. Mormons are very interested in tracing ancestry. Ancestry has become a big part of the internet database, where you can interact with other "relatives" and build up surprisingly complete lines of verified descent on your family tree. At the Salt Lake library, I was only able to find a few faint references in Wisconsin, but nothing before about 1850. I haven't seriously followed the trail online, but I suspect I'd get somewhat farther back, if I tried. 

Anyway, all this as introduction to my latest cocktail invention, for which I haven't found an appropriate name. Here's the recipe:


1 part Boodles gin
1 part limoncello
1 part Key Lime Liqueur 
1/2 part fresh lime juice

garnish small wedge of lime if desired

mixed together over ice

makes one portion

____________________

The only unusual ingredient is the Key Lime Liqueur, which I find locally at BevMo. It has a pale green smooth creamy texture, and it's unlike almost any other mixer that I've tried. It's smooth without being dry (the way lime usually tastes). I've added some pure lime juice to this mixture, and even then, the Key Lime tends to make this gin-based drink on the sweet side. If I wanted, I could put in a whole portion of fresh lime juice, which would make it a bit more "cocktail-y" I think. 

Sweet and cold, with a bit of citric acid. It's a classic combination, augmented by a commercial mix that is proprietary. The Key Lime may have other flavors added to it--perhaps cinnamon, or licorice? Who knows? Using proprietary mixes suggests that you're not completely in control of the combination, since some of its ingredients are unknown. But that's always been the case. So-called "bitters" fluids are mostly also secret, and those have been used for over a century. There are today dozens of new bitters formulas on the market. It seems to be the new horizon of cocktail mixing! Personally, I like to know what I'm putting into a drink, rather than using a brand-name combination which serves as its own advertisement. 

Cheers!