Archives for the 'wall street journal' tag
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.
Mack of All Trades
With Baylen about to be pinched for running strange meats across state lines, the WSJ suggests he may want to keester a fish before heading to federal prison:
When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, “I had a stack of macks.”
Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel — the “mack” in prison lingo — was the standard currency.
“It’s the coin of the realm,” says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish.
And just like certain assets topping our government’s Xmas wish list, mackerel is valuable precisely because of its undesirability:
Unlike those more expensive delicacies, former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few — other than weight-lifters craving protein — want to eat it.
But piscine procurement in the penitentiary is not as easy as throwing an M-80 into a school of jumping baitfish. It seems the free market is discouraged on the inside almost as much as it is out here:
The Bureau of Prisons views any bartering among prisoners as fishy. “We are aware that inmates attempt to trade amongst themselves items that are purchased from the commissary,” says bureau spokeswoman Felicia Ponce in an email. She says guards respond by limiting the amount of goods prisoners can stockpile. Those who are caught bartering can end up in the “Special Housing Unit” — an isolation area also known as the “hole” — and could lose credit they get for good behavior.
Makes sense. The dampening of a trade economy never leads to privation and violence, right?
The Journal has the full story here.
How Many Ounces of Beer in that Pint?
There’s nothing more annoying than the short pour, right? Bartenders and servers who don’t fill your beer up to the point where the head arches over the top of the glass tend to piss off customers. But how about ones who do fill up the glass, except that the pint glass they’re using is actually a couple ounces short of a pint? The Wall Street Journal reports on the (unfortunately growing) phenomenon, which was first documented by a Pacific Northwest jack-of-all-trades.
Jeff Alworth, a Portland, Ore., beer blogger, university researcher and a founder of the Honest Pint Project, has been testing suspected short-pouring bars, in some cases measuring his beer-glass capacity by the men’s room sink. His group collected more than 400 names in two weeks for an online petition urging state regulators to enforce a 16-ounce rule. And at one point, he was posting the names of bars that didn’t measure up on his Web site. But in response to complaints, he now has taken to listing the names of establishments serving full pints in bigger glasses.
More on the Honest Pint Project from its originator, Beervana blogger Jeff Alworth, here. Honest Pint Project on WSJ coverage of said Project here.
I’m happy to see that BridgePort, my favorite Portland brewhouse, pours an honest pint, according to Beervana.
One final point… The legislator noted in the piece who wants to spend tax dollars to enforce the pint, when the Honest Pint Project seems to be bringing things into line nicely–and without taxpayer money–wouldn’t get my vote.
