Archives for the 'alcohol' tag
Party Like It’s 1933
Eric Felten hoorayed Repeal Day in Friday’s Journal by calling attention to one of my favorite Prohibition pastimes: the hotel party. Folks would BYOB to a hotel room, then call down to the kitchen for ice and glasses. The transitory nature of the get-together and the collusion of hotel management and staff made the parties nearly immune to police interruption, while the scandalous circumstances — men and women mixing in a bedroom, women openly smoking — only drove the stake deeper through the heart of Victorian morality.
Felten recommends the Commodore Bedroom for Repeal Day libations, which I may request of my bartender Friday night. And you, dear reader? Do you have any plans to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Prohibition’s demise this December 5?
Photo credit zoethustra, who I am sure is never a mean drunk.
Wisconsin food police tackling beer before cheese
The New York Times has a piece today in which it looks down its arugula-eating nose at Wisconsin’s drinking culture. The article starts by explaining that 15-year-olds are routinely served beer at bars there—so long as they’re accompanied by a consenting parent. This is no doubt meant to shock, and I was indeed shocked that Wisconsin still manage to receive federal highway money.
The point of the article seems to be that Wisconsin, apparently alone among the states, has a population that gets drunk a lot, and that public health people there have had enough. Specifically, a group led by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health plans to start a campaign to “to dramatically change the laws, culture and behaviors in Wisconsin.” How? “[S]tate agencies would use a $12.6 million federal grant to step up screening, intervention and referral services at 20 locations around Wisconsin.” Do you know how many PBRs and shots of Yeager $12.6 million can buy?
Now, I can do without puritan moralizing; I drank plenty in Spain the summer after I turned 15 and I’m the better for it. But what about drunk driving? Is that not the definition of negative externality? I was a bit surprised to learn that in Wisconsin drunk drivers “are not charged with a felony until they have been arrested a fifth time.” Have I lost my libertarian credentials for thinking that you should be free to drink as much as you’d like as long as you don’t get behind the wheel of a car? What’s the right way to tolerate, if not encourage, a healthy cultural relationship with alcohol while keeping drunk folks off the road?
The Enchanted Tiki Boom
The weekend Journal has a great article by cocktail connoiseur Eric Felten on the revival of tiki bars:
With the much-repeated words “worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” marking the moment, it seems appropriate to visit that peculiarly American escape — the tiki bar — itself born in the depths of the Depression.
Market meltdowns and bailout ballyhoo aside, the timing of the article couldn’t be better after a summer of exploring regional tiki bars with my research assistants — not an easy feat in New England once you move beyond Boston. And pegged as it is to a San Francisco tiki crawl happening this weekend, space and structure prevent the story from detailing the cross-country thriving of tiki, from Brooklyn to Chicago to Los Angeles. But it does entertain the question of why:
The tiki-craze may have reached its zenith in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but there’s a new allure to the escape it promises. What are we escaping now? The financial woes may be the best excuse of the moment, but tiki provides an escape somewhat more fundamental, a vacation from the everyday, even if today’s bears little resemblance to the everyday of the ’50s.
Felten suggests that in wired America, tiki is a vacation from technology, a TARDIS to a Stone Age of topless hula girls and mysterious mixology. But I think he betrays his point and arrives at a closer truth when he writes:
There’s good tiki and bad tiki. Anything sleek and postmodern — say, a steel-and-glass totem — is bad tiki. Anything you can find in the luau section of your local party store — think cheap plastic leis and cardboard cutout hula girls — is bad tiki. I’m also of the opinion that “camp” makes for bad tiki. Ours is an irony-soaked culture, and camp is just a gaudy variety of the old, knowing wink-and-a-nod. Campy tiki provides no escape at all.
Tiki, like belief in the Great Pumpkin, must above all be done sincerely. It is “a vacation from the everyday,” and in a world of slack, that means a refuge from cynicism and poseurs and T-shirts with slogans on them. I’ve been to more chic New York bars and restaurants than I can remember and I always think to myself, God — would it kill these people to drop the act and have fun?
Genuine tiki and its aficionados love it not because of its kitsch or even the great drinks but because they — the bartenders, restaurant owners, totem carvers, mug makers and collectors — feel something we’re not supposed to feel amongst the snark and snideness: emotion. It’s the passion that’s retro. Or as tiki blogger Humuhumu puts it another way:
The author, Eric Felten, even mentions something I’ve long held to be true — that while yesterday’s PolyPop escapism was about eschewing formality, today’s escapism is more about eschewing informality.
Mahalo.
UK Grocer Tells Shoppers to Leave Kids in Car if Buying Booze
England has to be about the most horrid place to live these days.
Tesco is refusing to sell alcohol to parents shopping with their children under rules designed to tackle underage drinking.
The supermarket has told cashiers not to supply alcohol if they suspect an adult is buying the drink for an underage youth.
Staff have been told to “err on the side of caution” when interpreting the policy, leading to cases of parents out shopping with their children being told to put alcohol back on the shelves.
Tesco says it believes parents will support the policy and it would rather apologise where it has misjudged the situation than sell to underage drinkers.
[...]
A Tesco spokesman said: “I can understand the frustrations of the customer but I think that any reasonable parent would understand the problem and support our policy.”
I’m guessing Tesco’s a bit mistaken on this one. As in people are just going to buy their booze–and groceries–elsewhere. More here from the Telegraph.
[Via Slashfood.]
