Sub-exercise in compulsive discipline

"You can't keep me from writing. It's a kind of madness." - Charles Bukowski

"Shit won't happen if I work harder." - Cheeky college T-shirt's summation of Protestant theology.

Since I'm on a full-time hunt for a new advertising copywriter gig, I've been in need of a new way to exercise my smack-your-arm-and-raise-a-vein need to sit down every day and punch out something creative. Under my present circumstances, it was easy to concoct the resolve. Just mix one part straight artistic discipline, one part professional survival, and one part pure compulsion. Stir it all over the cold, bracing rocks of unemployment, and pour it all straight up in a glass deep enough to drown your neuroses in. Finally, garnish with enough loud, noisy fruit that the Creative Director at the other end of the bar will have no choice but to notice you, admire your flamboyant creative flair, and please, please, please God almighty, employ you.

You can see the broad contours of where this is going. he specifics are bound to get interesting - so stick around.

"Excuse them for being a little weird."

This blog made me a chuckle a deeply existential chuckle.

There’s a delicious irony to it. After all, who in the strange land of Advertopia would ever imagine that the copywriter would happen to be the one to come up with a fascinating, all-encompassing "one word" of a campaign? The copywriter? WTF? The word nerd? The scribe of the hive? The dude who, like, reads 'n shit like that?

I’m reminded why writers in advertising make for such well-practiced underdogs. While “The Idea” behind any campaign ideally comes from the classic "art and copy" duo, today's copywriters are the stepchildren in a supposedly filial arrangement. More than ever, "Art" comes first in the paradigm, and it’s not because of the syntactical rhythm: in our cultural of constantly iterating spectacles, it’s sight that sells, pictures are worth more than ever, and 90 million tweets a today have relieved consumers of the responsibility of ever reading a thousand words. And those business-driving ideas we all pursue and love to discuss on conference calls? They may start as eloquent PPT slides for a marketing manager’s benefit, but they’re all aimed at developing perfectly crafted, digitally perfected sights and visuals, the fewer words the better. As my first creative director (an erstwhile designer) once put it, an ad without design is a crowded fortune cookie. An ad without copy is a full-signature Bulgari spread in GQ.

And copywriters? Well, our lot in that life is that we have to play by rules that can’t be bent by PhotoShop. You can’t airbrush a verb to make action-ier, and you can’t run an adjective through infrared filter to give it an edgy look. Writers can only monkey with his raw material so much before their work becomes unintelligible; we can’t slap a gradient on a sentence and cut the saturation on it to hide the fact that it has a few ugly grammatical pores. Sooner or later, a copywriter has to rely solely on that most inflexible, clumsy, and clunky of media: language. No miracle of airbrushing. No CS5 programs to make it work. No “we’ll fix it in Post.” Nothing but words and the fabulous interplay of words.

Not that I won't take that hug. But no wonder we’re all “a little weird.”

Tuesday night creation

Last weekend I put in a little time trying out a new Swedish Punsch recipe - this one courtesy of the Underhill Lounge. It's a delicious "alt" version of the last Punsch I made, which featured a more varied spice palette, more sugar, and left out the rum. The Underhill Lounge version has a bit more burn, and its flavor is *way* more punchy - thanks, I think, to the fact that I varied the "official" recipe a bit and used Myer's dark rum and Lapsang tea. It takes a bit of arithmetic to get the recipe down to the point where it's suitable for household production and consumption; the original version looks to be set up for a bar full of people named Jorgensen with serious hankerings for double Diki-Dikis. But with the help of a calculator (copywriter here, okay? Spare me your chuckles), the Underhill recipe renders a Punsch that's way bolder and spicier, if less silky, than the previous Deep Ellum version I tried.

Even dropping the recipe by two thirds, though, I still wound up with about a fifth of the stuff. And when you're talking about just one guy's habit, a fifth of any liqueur is several months' worth of drinking with even a modicum of variety. Sadly, I don't yet have The Dude's dedication to a signature drink; and if my personal brand every incorporates a trademark cocktail, I hope for my own dignity and my friends' sanity that it doesn't involve an obscure Swedish liqueur. Alcoholic trademarking aside, however, Punsch also comes with another significant shortcoming: a relatively short shelf life. Sadly, homemade Punsch goes bad in a few weeks - and by "bad", I mean you wake up one morning and realize that something in your fridge got to your leftovers before you did. Thanks to all the organics added to the homebrew variety, it doesn't benefit from the pure bouquet of chemical compounds that give most cordials the staying power of a German roach in a fallout shelter.

So, not being one to willingly waste good alcoholic capital, I've launched an exploratory commission in search of new sources of cocktail ROI. Having covered the obligatory Doctor Cocktails and Diki-Dikis, I got a little creative this evening and stumbled on something quite obliging:

2 oz white rum (I used Appleton.)
1 oz Punsch
Juice of a 1 lime (3/4 oz or so. Unless you buy your limes at Shaw's, in which case just buy a dozen and hope for the best.)
1 tbsp of falernum

Shake, pour straight up, and garnish with a lime twist or wheel. 

Granted, this is essentially a variation of the Doctor Cocktail - but you'll be surprised by how much a difference dry white rum and falernum make. The falernum, not surprisingly, comes courtesy of the Boston Shaker (I used Trader Tiki's, which was their recommendation.) All in a all, it's a hearty but refreshing drink, if I dare say so. Weirdly, perhaps, it actually reminded me a little of the few bowls of aromatic pipe tobacco I've put back in my time.

In keeping with the studious, inquisitive, but vivacious attitude that vice reminds me of, I think I'll call it "the Cambridge". Once I get tired of this one, it's off to go leer not-too-subtly over the bar at Rendezvous to see if I can steal their recipe for the Rabbit Stick.

Sippin' like it's 1899

Back when I was in grad school, I had a professor who once had to chide me for the fact I didn't have a single source in my research from beyond the last few decades. He informed me that I had to dig a bit farther back to find some better established gems of literary insight. Don't worry, he told me: "people were smart before 1970 too."

At the time, I didn't take that as well as I could have. My theory classes had taught me all too well that what constituted intelligence got recycled every fifteen years so. All that changed was that a new Frenchman with an unpronouncable name got heaved to the top of the heap of accepted wisdom each time.

Luckily, though, I have since had the pleasure of discovering that my professor was oh-so-entirely-right in many more practical matters than semiology. Take drinking, for example.

I've just been reminded this evening that people who had the pleasure of drinking in the nineteenth century were very, very smart. Ingenious, even. For proof, I'll take the liberty of referring you to a handy little book called The Flowing Bowl, copyright 1892. I'm presently enjoying the recipe for The Manhattan it contains, one that savors of the sublime.

The Manhattan (for the insufficiently initiated who need a refresher) is a venerable booze hound classic. Make it at home, and it will give you a good example of the best in aromatic cocktails. Order it in an average bar, and it usually involves slamming together an unspecified whiskey and an unpredictable combination of vermouths and throwing in some bitters and rattling some ice cubes through it and pouring it up and charging you 12 dollars. The result is often one of those drinking experiences that will remind a hardened cocktail drinker why he/she always resort to drinking bottled beer in public.

(Side note: Props to a prominent and delightful exception to this statement. Deep Ellum in Allston, Cambridge St. and Brighton Ave., offers 10 different variations of the Manhattan, all of them delicious. Not that I'd know anything about all of them, of course.)

Back to my revelation. The Flowing Bowl, c. the White City, includes a recipe for "The Manhattan Cocktail" with a few unexpected twists that add some truly fantastic new dimensions to a handy old standard. The author's recipe (p. 128):

"Half a tumblerful of cracked ice.
2 dashes of gum
2 dashes of bitters
1 dash of absinthe
2/3 drink of whiskey
1/3 drink of vino vermouth
(A little maraschino may be added)
Stir this well, strain, and serve."

Obviously, a little intuition helps out: gum = gomme syrup, bitters = presumably Angosturra, "drink" = ounce ( I guess? I usually measure "drinks" in glasses, not exact fluid measurements. God help me if I took that analogue literally in this case). Not being an anise devotee, I used Herbsaint instead of absinthe, since I find the flavor of Herbsaint a bit less forward. By way of "Vino Vermouth", I used Carpano Antica, which has recently become a liquor snob-ish necessity in my bar. I suppose a clunky average sweet vermouth would be functional - but who wants to date the bland plasticine blond prom queen when you can have the multifaceted brunette artiste in the illustration class?

Result: divinity. I even got to try out my new julep strainer, courtesy of The Boston Shaker. Those nebbishy, uptight Victorians, as it turns out, knew a thing or two about a drinking as well as wanton colonialism. Now if only they could work a few stiff ones in between linguistic theory professors and their Jacques Derrida. Then I'd have even more to thank them for.

Of choking with the best of 'em

There are mornings when I wake up and realize that I don’t trust myself any further than I can pee.

These are the mornings when nothing I write makes sense, when I’m dead certain everything I put down sounds juvenile, predictable, and unnecessary. I rewrite everything a second after I’ve put it on paper, revise sentences one after the other before I even finish a paragraph, endlessly and unproductively circling back and forth on myself over and over again. Rather than composing anything new, since I don’t trust a word I have to say, I move modifiers around instead, swapping them between sentences, reordering clauses, moving some callouts back and forth, and agonizing over whether the button at the top of the webpage should say “Learn More” or “More Info”. On these days, a headless chicken could pound out something that would make David Ogilvy proud, compared to what I can do.

These are the days when the Big Choke comes to town. The Big Choke is not Writer’s Block, though there’s a common misperception that they’re the same thing. In fact, the Big Choke is to Writer’s Block what an epileptic fit is to a full-out catatonic trance. When you have Writer’s Block, you stare blankly at the blinking cursor, with genuinely no idea how you’re going to make pharmaceutical sales in Japan sound seductive, and a paralyzing conviction that you never will have one. When you experience the Big Choke, on the other hand, you compulsively scribble 5 pages about Japanese pharma sales by repeating and reordering the same three thoughts in different syntax and fonts, only to get to the end and panic when you realize you’ve used 5000 words to produce 127 characters of useful information. The Choke comes in when you realize that after all that effort trying to gag down your own bullshit, the only remedy is the Copy Heimlich: ctrl-A-backspace.

After you’ve experienced the Big Choke a few times, Writer’s Block can start to sound pretty appealing. After all, if you never write anything, you’ll never puke out anything timid, repetitive, and asinine. The Universe can never disappoint your aspiration to write crystalline prose when you don’t put down a single word that could ever be judged as insufficient – secure in your conviction that in your head, where your Muse is safe from ACDs, over-helpful friends, constructive criticism of any kind, and objective reality in general, you’re actually Fitzgerald reincarnated.

So, hell with that, who wouldn’t retreat into Writer’s Block? Paralysis, if you think about it, can be kind of cozy. You don’t have to do anything; you just sit there, nice and still, maybe blinking once in a while. One spasmodic fit after another, however, bites immensely – especially when your paycheck rides on your ability to write your way through everything short of an artistic aneurism.

But that’s exactly what you have to do – after all, trusting your work has virtually nothing to do with belief and expectation, and ever so much to do with cussed perseverance. Once you’ve coughed out what you’re choking on, you try and get it down again; you get it down, you hate it, you fix it, you do it again, and then maybe you like it better.  And once you like it, once you see it start to go to work on its own – even if no one else does – then you start to trust it.

Granted, there was A Guy once said that the worst writers are the ones with most trust in themselves. I tend to believe him. Hell, I know every morning I could wake up with a Big, Fat, Ugly Choke staring me in the face, and the only thing I can do is try to get it down anyway. And if I choke, so what?

I know which keys to hit.

*wince*

At the distance of a few weeks, my first posts already make me blanch. Apparently, at some point - probably late at night and not on my best game - I came up with a grand concept for this blog that looked like some kind of misshapen and ill-conceived love child of HL Mencken and Ferdinand de Saussure.

We can do better than this, Hamilton. The posts stay, of course, as a cruel but crucial reminder of the constant need for humility and self-improvement - the same way we all secretly hope that someone still makes Dustin Hoffman watch Ishtar at least once a year. But if you ever catch me abruptly turning pale, steadying myself on my desk, and compulsively making the motion of smoking a phantom cigarette, you'll immediately know that I just scrolled down a little farther than I intended.

Adventures in gookum liquor (Part the First)

I have made Swedish Punsch.

... he declares in the same voice a primitive Neanderthal once used to announce he'd just inadvertently lit grass on fire with two dry sticks. Imagine tones of excitement and elation, inflected by uncomprehending shock, and tempered by agitation at the thought of having just lit one's own loin cloth on fire. The poor, laborious hominid... what else could he have accomplished in the same time if he'd had just one Djeep lighter? He might have discovered trigonometry a few millenia early. By the same logic, what, I wonder, could I have got done in the afternoons I've spent sniffing around the bottom shelves of the back aisles of dim liquor stores around town, looking for alcoholic oddities with names I have to spell for the staff. To keep the implications of that question from hounding me,  I have to keep telling myself that if the same caveman had had a bunch of random spices, citrus fruit, and, oh, say, a bottle of historical Indonesian booze lying around, he'd have used it all to make an obscure cocktail ingredient too. Naturally!

Swedish Punsch is a sort of pine smoke-flavored, quasi-rum-based concoction. It's based on some stuff called Batavia Arrack, which is more or less a rum spliced with a sake. From what I read, a lot of Dutch sailors used to call it breakfast; four centuries later, I call it a rough remedy for sinus infections. Not to be imbibed straight, for fear of needing a new hard palate - but like so many orphan elements that are awkward and off-putting in isolation, it has great potential in combinations!

To whit, the aforementioned SP. To make it, you get arrack, nutmeg, cardamom, a shitload of sugar, lapsang souchong tea, and lemon zest together in a bowl, mix it all up, and let it steep for a while. After a day or so, you strain it and - if you're me - you dump it into a leftover Vitamin Water 0 bottle. No matter how you present it, though, you wind up with something that looks like a rain puddle in baseball dirt and smells like a burning Christmas wreath that someone put out with Five-Alive.

But lo - though so humble and contorted, yet so divine. Mine eyes have seen the glory - and mine tongue has savored it too. Don't be deceived by the incongruous makeup: it's like kisses from a lusty tropical Valkyrie. Stay tuned for lo-down on our first vigorous make-out session.