The Advil Calendar 2011: December ten ten Ten TEN FOR EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING (i.e. punch)

Is a Saturday night, and YOU might be having a party. Or you might be going to a party, like my friend Dances With Chickens, who will be attending the Drink Until You Love the Baby Jesus Party tonight (is that not the best holiday party name you've ever heard?). Dances With Chickens is currently incadrinkitated (knocked up), but that doesn't mean she is not gonna take something.

I like taking a pitcher of some kind of punch to parties - it doesn't have to be kept warm, it is always welcome, you can give it a funny name (Punch of Ages, The Punch Heard Round the World, 83-Year-Old Astronaut Punch), and if you forget to bring the container home, well you can probably live without that pitcher until the next time you see your host. So. Just in case you were thinking about entering the throwing or going fray:

DECEMBER 10th: DO's and DON'Ts of PUNCH

DO: make your punch beforehand.
DON'T: bust out the fine table linens.

Here's what I've found after reading about a hundred punch recipes: punch is terrible stuff. It always creeps right the hell up on you because you've just been ladling it into a plastic cup all afternoon and too late you realize you don't have the least idea what's in it or how much of it you've drunk.

At best, it might include a high-fructose corn syrup mixer, which - you may not know this - can be a major contributor to the kind of hangover that'll make you start re-evaluating your every life choice.

And at worst, that festive bucket of grog will contain Everclear, which you know can be a major contributor to the kind of hangover that'll make you start re-evaluating your every life choice. Hell, given enough grain alcohol, you might be on your way to a little re-evaluation before the party's even over.

More useful information, right? I live to serve.

I thought about inserting a picture of Mel Gibson (DON'T: grow up to be an adulterous misogynistic drunk penis) or Woody Allen (DON'T: marry your stepdaughter) or Charlie Sheen (DON'T: speak) here as examples of people who probably had too much punch and then started making really dumb life choices, but nobody needs to see that. Instead, I offer my cat's namesake, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, stone cold sober, socking the hell out a some twerp conspiracy theorist who called him a liar and a coward to his face. Guess whose face got the worst of the bargain.

DON'T: invite disrespectful conspiracy theorist
dickheads to your party.
DO: invite Buzz Aldrin.

You wouldn't believe some of these punch recipes, by the way. In addition to calling for truly staggering amounts of liquor - gallons, in some cases - they'll also ask for a whole lot of strong tea, fortified wine, or, often as not, an entire bottle of peach brandy.

Additional advice: avoid peach brandy. It will make Buzz Aldrin want to punch you in the face.

The recipe I picked - well, you're going to think I picked it for the name... and you'd be right. Seriously? Nuremburg? Oh hell yeah, just thinking of that place makes me want to party! But it turns out I am very interested in this punch's main ingredient, arrack.

There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark, but he's an arrack knave! (DON'T: quote Shakespeare at your party, or in fact under any circumstances. And if you do quote Shakespeare, DON'T quote Hamlet.)

"Arrack" is a word that covers a variety of fermented liquors from Asia and the Middle East. If arrack is from Sri Lanka, it is from the unopened flower of the coconut palm. If it's from Indonesia, it's distilled from sugar cane. If it's from the Philippines, it's also coconut based, but from a different process.

NUREMBERG PUNCH. (For a party of 15)
Take 3/4 of a pound of loaf sugar; squeeze upon it, through muslin, the juice of two or more good- sized oranges; add a little of the peels cut very thin, pour upon a quart of boiling water, the third part of that quantity of Batavia Arrack, and a bottle of hot, but not boiling, Red or White French Wine -- Red is best.
Stir together. This is excellent when cold, and will improve with age. 

Because of the age of this recipe - it's from The Savoy Cocktail Book - I suspect that it's Batavia arrack (the sugar cane kind, from Indonesia) that we're looking for here. Also because I cannot imagine coconut and red wine together being anything decent at all. And you want to kind of mash the orange peels into the sugar to release as much of the oil as possible.

I think I might make this as the hot wine punch we serve at our annual Pig Roast on New Year's Day. Two years ago I got my friend Segrid to lend me her ancient family recipe for glögg, and holy shit that stuff was a spicy delicious eight-ball of intoxication. Luckily, I wasn't carving the pig that year. I need allll my fingers.

Can't find arrack? Prefer a more theatrical display? I gotcha covered. Enter Feuerzangenbowle, the "fire-tongs punch." Buckle up, ladies and gents.

2-3 bottles of dry red wine

2 cups amber or dark rum (at least 54% alcohol, 80% would be better)
2 oranges
1 cinnamon stick
5 cloves
1 "Zuckerhut" ("sugar hat")
dash of ground ginger
(optional) 2 lemons

NOTES: If you can't find loaf sugar in the baking aisle, you could use 1/2 lb of sugar cubes, or the Mexican brown sugar that comes in cones or pucks.

This thing is traditionally made with a "Feuerzange," some kind of fondue pot sounding thing, but I didn't have one on hand, so the following instructions incorporate my mittelamerikanische improvisations:

Put the wine into a stock pot and heat it slowly.

Wash the fruit with hot water, peel in thin strips.
Now put the zests, spices and juice in the bowl.
Place a wire screen spatter guard over the stock pot and put the loaf sugar on it. You could also use a wire strainer if you have one big enough.
Pour a ladlefull of rum onto the sugar, allowing it to soak in. Then carefully light it.
When the flame on the sugar has stopped burning, repeat the process with a fresh ladle of rum. Add the rum very slowly this time or you will burn your hand.
When the sugar has completely dissolved, remove the screen and add another ladle of unburnt rum to the bowl.
Remove the drowned citrus and spices, and ladle into cups.

 

Party hard but party safely tonight. I leave you with this, because it's really a party once The Nuge shows up:

The Advil Calendar 2011: December 9 - Uptown Friday Night

ON THE NINTH DAY OF DECEMBER
Oh it has been a long week at work, hasn't it? People get extra pissy around the holidays and you are expected to just play along like usual and make believe that they're not being HIDEOUSLY UNREASONABLE and/or unbearably waffley. Plus, have you seen how people are driving?! Yikes. I know two people personally who have had the front of their cars ripped off in accidents this week.

They're both ok, but Jessica and Sue - you guys, and the rest of us, could use a drink. Nothing seasonal, nothing requiring juicing a kumquat or infusing vodka with hazelnuts, nothing garnished with marinated prostate of baby Pacific eel, just a delicious cocktail that we know we love.

A couple months ago I was deep in the middle of reviewing the mightily terrible, inexplicably boring YA novel Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, and believe you me, reviewing that book was exactly like a long work week. I needed to take a break. Inspired by the uptown locales, bloody stabbings, and crystal barware that were the only interesting parts of that book, I invented this:

Murder on the Roof of the Guggenheim Cocktail
1 part Campari
1 part Hendricks gin
1/2 part Lillet Blanc
Chill a martini glass and run a piece of orange peel around the rim. Shake ingredients in a shaker full of ice, strain into the glass. Dribble a tiny drop of bitter brown Punt e Mes into the drink so that it swirls around looking mysterious.

Sam at Parenthetical.net, who marches beside me, figuratively speaking, on the quest for excellent YA, tried this cocktail and gave independent confirmation that it is indeed delicious and rather glam.

It's called Murder on the Roof of the Guggenheim because last time I was on the roof of the Guggenheim, I should have murdered a certain person. If you ever have a chance to go up there, take it. The way the building faces Central Park across Fifth Avenue, all you see from the roof is the Reservoir, making it look like somehow you are on the shores of a lake even though you are right in the middle of Manhattan. (Probably an unintended effect by Frank Lloyd Wright - a nice one, unlike the other unintended effects at that museum, which include poor roof drainage, no loading dock, and exhibition personnel driven insane by CURVED WALLS. What the hell, Frank? You thought in the future people would no longer make art on flat surfaces?) (Dude, I can rant about anything.)


Drive safely, boys and girls, and keep your phones charged. I can come and get you if some flailhead T-bones you, and I'll have a flask in my pocket.

Who's the elfiest of them all? Advil Calendar, Week Two, Day One: The Dirty Snowflake

Before we get down to the second week of our drinks calendar for the silly season, a few updates:

1. Although I am not suicidal enough to keep up with my own cocktail calendar on a daily basis, we did sample the Master of the Hounds cocktail the night of December first, and it was nice, but I think I prefer Tuaca at its simplest: 1 jigger Tuaca + juice of half a lemon, on the rocks.
2. We also gave Tuaca Whiskey Punch (equal parts Tuaca, Jack Daniels, cranberry juice, and fresh OJ) a whirl, and I will attest it's excellent company for spending the day in the kitchen cooking (breaking news: a capon is not a duck!).
3. Tuaca Whiskey Punch had NOTHING TO DO with me stripping my pants off in the kitchen with guests in the next room. NOTHING.
4. I've decided to go Drink-A-Day with this thing, rather than posting a week at a time. So tune in to Your Neighborhood Librarian every day of Advent for a new rumination on seasonal intoxication. 

Now, on with our show.

DECEMBER EIGHT
Let's quit messing around. If you're going to get down to major holiday drinking and you want to go ahead and get all seasonal about it, there's nothing more appropriate for a quiet weeknight of crafting, cookie baking, and tree trimming than this demi-sweet, minty, milky asskicker. Set Pandora to Franz Ferdinand and mix up the:

Dirty Snowflake
Start with a full glass of ice, then add:
1 part vodka
1 part Kahlua
1/2 part peppermint schnapps
Fill remainder with half and half.
Shake or stir real good, garnish with fresh ground nutmeg.
Get happily hammered while you trim that tree.

This recipe is from a kid named Steven Scott, of the band Irving (I think he's the one on the far left), and I got it out of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands, that book that I used last week for the They Might Be Giants Cosmo.


Here's to a great, or at least an only moderately annoying week. This week's to-do list includes making gifts for the kids's teachers. We've settled on candles this year, but if we don't manage that, Plan B will involve rooting through the stacks of review copies I receive and wrapping up a couple picture books. Good luck to us all!

On the first day of Christmas, I sure could use a drink - The Advil Calendar: Year Two, Week One: The Drinkening

What are you looking at right now? What has been coming into your email inbox for a month or more - offers to buy the most beautiful tacky jewelry, the stinkiest holiday-themed candles, the dumbest, most stupid-ass novelty wine bottle caddies?

If you were thinking about buying someone a wine bottle caddy, allow me to talk you down off that ledge. Nobody needs a wine bottle caddy. By the time they get the damn thing fastened around the wine bottle, everybody will have gone off and fixed themselves a real drink anyway, and the wine will just sit there going sour and looking stupid all evening. I'm serious. Wine bottle caddies. That is possibly the only way to embarrass a decent bottle of wine to death.

On the other hand, I don't want you sitting around stressing about what to buy that sister-in-law for whom you were thinking about buying the wine bottle caddy, the one who has no interests, collects nothing, and refers to the stuff she already has as "dust-catchers". Buy her an umbrella from the museum gift shop. There. Done.

But while I am all about x-mas expedience, there is a time and place to slow down, a moment outside holiday time, a moment when no Christmas music is playing, a moment when you are not at wits' end.

That is the time that you spend with... The Advil Calendar.


The Story of The Advil Calendar
Because I am almost unbelievably lazy, I am going to copy this story from last year. So skip it if this is your second year accompanying me on my drinking journey to Santaland.

I cannot take credit for this idea. This idea was suggested by my friend Chris's little girl, Wendy Darling (she is surrounded by feral boys, including my two boys, so her blogonym is Wendy Darling).
Chris was setting up the Advent calendars she'd bought for her three kids, milk chocolate-stocked jobbies from Trader Joe's (um, the calendars, not the kids), when sweet Wendy asked, "But Mom, where's your Advent calendar?" Chris replied that she wasn't really interested in grainy milk chocolate tablets in the shape of snowmen and whatevers, and so she didn't need an Advent calendar.

Chris wearing the doting face.

But Wendy still wanted her mother to share this aspect of the season. She said, "Well you could have a grownup version."
Chris put on the thinking face. "What would a grownup Advent calendar be like, do you think?"
"Well instead of chocolate, your Advent calendar could have different kinds of liquor in it!" And Chris's face turned from the thinking face to the "that's just great, my kid thinks all I do is drink" grimace. Which morphed into the "wonder what she tells the teacher about us" wince.
Chris is doing better than I am anyway - I forgot about Advent calendars entirely, and now it turns out they make LEGO ones. My seven-year-old eight-year-old was outraged. "Why don't we have an Advil calendar?!"

And given my traditional Scroogey humbugginess, "Advil calendar" struck my fancy. Wouldn't you like an Advil calendar, filled with booze? I know I would.

Advil Calendar: Year One
In lieu of sending 24 bottles of liquor to all my friends - a pricey way to ensure lifelong devotion - I decided to showcase a different brand of booze every day of the festive goddamn season, and present a recipe for a cocktail made with that brand. Basically. There was a lot of fudging. There was an ode to Jagermeister. Who cares? It's drinking, it's supposed to be sloppy. I stole a lot of recipes from brand websites.


Advil Calendar: Year Two

And this charming quiz for women.

This year I have decided to do some actual reading on the subject. I cracked open my liquor cabinet and pulled out the small stash of bartending books I've collected over the years. My favorite is Esquire's handbook for hosts, a blindingly misogynistic set of instructions for how to get women to wriggle out of their intricate foundation garments and into the missionary position.

Originally published in 1949 and full of party games, etiquette, and food recipes as well as drinks, the author teaches the Esquire man how to cook such dishes as possum, shashlik, and Canteloupe Obolensky (a vanished recipe involving cutting a hole in the melon, pulling out the seeds, filling the poor thing with sherry, and letting it chill for about an hour, after which I guess you light it on fire and lob it at the neighbor's dog).

There's also a recipe for bouillabaisse: "While there are many women cooks who can prepare a fairly presentable bouillabaisse, the dish reaches the heights only in the hands of a man." Presumably it's only really good after the cook has dipped his dick in it? Who knows.

Then there's To Cook a Bachelor's Goose from 1969, which is actually more offensive than the Esquire guide. This book was no help at all, however, as the author, a Ruth G. Satzman, addresses the subject of alcohol thusly:

"If you have a good gin and a good vermouth, the Martini drinkers will be happy. Guests who prefer wine can have the vermouth, either straight or on the rocks. A name-brand Scotch will take care of whiskey imbibers. And for those who like a mixed drink, serve Whiskey Sours made with rye, lemon juice and sugar."

Honey, you're never going to get him to stay over that way.

A real standby, however, is my dad's copy of The Official Mixer's Manual, first copyright in 1934. In it you'll find the Buby, the Bunny Hug, and the B.V.D. Yuck. Thank god there's no drink called The Banana Hanger.

But there is the Third Rail, the Bosom Caresser, and the Weep No More. The Golden Dawn! The White Cargo! The Shining Path!

Just kidding. There's no drink named after Peru's most vicious crew of Maoist terrorists. There's a drink named after the Shriners though, and after South Africa's Transvaal district. They're both gin-based, of course.

Well. That's a sufficient warm-up, I'd say. Let's get to it.


THURSDAY DECEMBER ONE:
With my accustomed randomness, on December first I'm invoking a trip to Target. At Target we will buy winter loungewear, a tacky-ass wreath, cherry Pop-Tarts, and lip balm light-up lightsabers - several of those, one for every stocking.

And since we are planning ahead, here is a make-ahead marvel from Treasured Armenian Recipes, published by The Detroit Women's Chapter of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, Inc. and given, so the endpaper tells us, to Betty and Louie by their friends John and Rose Smith in appreciation of "several enjoyable dinners" in December of 1964. "Several," huh? Sounds like faint praise to me.

Sour Cherry Cordial
Pit cherries for preserve. Cover with sugar (1 cup cherries to 1 cup sugar). Let stand over-night. Bring to a boil. Drain off most of the juice for the cordial. Use 1 cup whiskey to 2 cups cherry syrup. To one gallon jug add 1 tablespoon whole cloves, 2 sticks cinnamon, 2 whole nutmeg. A cup of whole cherries may be added to serve with the cordial later.
Ready in 1 month.

But I also have a job interview today, so here's a strong, flavorful straight-up alternative to drink right now, also with a cherry theme. Wish me luck, y'all.

Master of the Hounds
1 jigger rye whiskey
1/3 jigger cherry brandy
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Stir well with ice and strain into glass.

You're buying Pikesville Rye, right? Do I have to remind you why? As for the cherry brandy, Zwack, makers of the fine weird Hungarian black liquer of the same name, makes one, and so does Schladerer, if you can find it.


DECEMBER 2:
Today the UPS driver stops in front of your house to deliver your Century 21 order only to be hollered at by the jackhole in the white van who had come speeding up your quiet one-way street behind her. And it's raining. She's got to get back in the truck, start that thing, drive two doors up to where there's space at the opposite curb for her to pull over, and then hump your boxes back to your doorstep in the rain, all so that this nimrod can get by.

Here's the drink for my noble UPS driver, from Old Man Drinks by Robert Schnakenberg. I'll have one too.

1 jigger cute + a whooole bottle of weird.

The Dry Mahoney
2 1/2 ounces bourbon
1/2 ounce dry vermouth
lemon twist
Shake with ice. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist.

In other words: What exactly can Brown do for you, motherfucker?



3 DECEMBER 2001:
The gift catalog from the wholesale club comes and guess what? You could have saved ten bucks on the ereader you bought for your husband this year! Do you:

1. tear the office apart looking for the receipt so that you can return the reader to where you originally bought it, and then hope you have the wholesale club coupon in your bag when you finally get the time to run over there to buy the reader? 
2. shut your eyes and roll your eyeballs up into your head for a long shuddering moment and then open them again, turn on some peppy music, and mix yourself a drink?

I know what I'd do. They're going to be out of that reader by the time you get over there anyway. For your peppy music I recommend Flansburgh and Linnell, the Johns known as They Might Be Giants. And for your drink I offer this juicy Cosmo variant made up by Flansburgh and published in the book I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands.

TMBG vs 007

The Countrypolitan
2 parts vodka
1 part Cointreau
1 part real cranberry juice
1 part pomegranate juice
a liberal amount of fresh lime juice
Shake with ice, and strain into a martini or champagne cocktail glass.

DECEMBER 4, 2011
Somebody brought a bottle of Tuaca to an extremely excellent wedding we attended this autumn down on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Labeled as "vanilla citrus liqueur," boy is that stuff good. Complex, not supersweet, aromatic. The company claims that Tuaca was created for Lorenzo de Medici, and who am I to skepticize? After all, people like Tilda Swinton and Pam Anderson have perfumes made for them - it's kind of the same thing.

Smells like oranges and pumpkins and... baby. That's apparently what she said she wanted.

Smells like butterscotch and heaven.

Eau de antifreeze and baby powder.

On the brand's website, they mix Tuaca with warm apple cider or with root beer, both of which drinks sound good and not super-strong. The apple cider combo would be especially excellent for an afternoon addressing cards. For summer, they suggest Tuaca and green tea with lemon, garnished with mint.

And I know I'm going to try the Livorno:

1.5 oz old tom gin (Hayman’s)
0.75 oz Lillet blanc
0.25 oz Tuaca
2 dashes orange bitters
Stir over ice, strain into cocktail glass.

Lillet? I'm there for that. It also features old tom gin, which I've never known what... was. What it was. What was it. I swear, it's 3pm, I haven't even started on this stuff yet.

But the winner might just be the simple and appealing Tuaca Whiskey Punch:

Equal parts Tuaca, Jack Daniels, OJ, and cranberry juice, poured over ice and given a good stir.

That's the kind of thing you could mix up in a pitcher for a party, or mix up in a pitcher and drink all by yourself doing those damn cards. I mean, if you're not too picky about whose address the cards eventually end up at, or what they say. I could see, like, your aunt getting fifty in the mail at once, all signed, "WHAT THE HELL! MERRY XMAS! GOD!"



The Fifth Day of Christmas:
Monday is actually my Saturday night because of the way my work schedule coincides with my friends' workout schedule. Actually, I don't think those guys have exercised on a Monday night in years, but we keep meeting at the bar by the Lynne Brick as if they've just come from doing Body Pump.


Whatever that is.

Here is a drink for our estrogen-fueled bitch sessions, our evenings bragging about our kids and complaining about our husbands. Don't judge:

We look exactly like this when we drink

The Cointreau Teese, named for, yes, Dita von Teese, the Cointreau "brand ambassador"
1 1/2 oz cointreau
1 oz creme de violette
1/2 apple juice
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
Rim with fresh ginger

It's the ginger rim that sold me. Plus, it's purple, which - oy. I have to admit, even I am getting into Ravens football this year.



DECEMBER 6th:
For my birthday this year an old friend sent me a polyurethaned plywood portrait of Malcolm X with a clock face in his armpit. Now, everybody knows that Malcolm X was a teetotaler - probably part of why he looks so pissed in his official portraits - but the old friend, an ex-cop in Cleveland, is not. Er, which I guess may be self-evident. Because he sent me a polyurethaned plywood portrait of Malcolm X with a clock in his armpit. The return address on the package read "Jerry Sherk".

Uncle Shawnie's Cocktail: The Paddy

I have to admit, when I looked this up I  assumed it had less to do with ingredients than with quantity and procedure: i.e. drink Irish whiskey at the cop bar until you see double (and as previously noted, Cleveland drinkers are not amateurs, so that is a lot of Irish whiskey), then drive over to your ex-girlfriend's house. Get out of the car and stand there unsteadily, staring at the house for about half an hour, then mutter, "Shit," and drive back to the bar.

1/2 Irish whiskey
1/2 sweet vermouth
1 dash Angostura bitters
Stir well with ice and strain into glass. I myself would serve this on the rocks just in the hope that Shawn gets a little hydration.

12/7/11: WEIRD DRINK WEDNESDAY
The Official Mixer's Manual has a small section at the back called Food To Go With Drinks. Here you'll find instructions for salting your own nuts, for mashing avocados, and for making Chex Mix. Challenging these recipes are not.

Except this one, for Raw Meat Spread, which is challenging in its own way:

Combine 1 1/2 pounds ground round steak with no fat (have it freshly ground), 1 egg, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 Tablespoon French mustard, 2 Tablespoons A-1 sauce, 1/2 cup chopped green onions, 1 clove garlic minced. Blend well and place in a large bowl and sprinkle with chopped green onions and parsley.

Serve with generous amounts of pumpernickel and hot toast.

And a flyswatter and a vomit bowl, I think.

But it's Wednesday, aka Weird Drink Wednesday, so here is a drink inspired by another old friend, a woman who claimed she saw waves of color when she had an orgasm. She said it was like the Northern Lights. I said she should probably not stick her thumbs in her eyes at that - or really any other - moment.

The Northern Lights (adapted from Gourmet magazine)
3 oz Scotch
1-1/2 oz St. Germain elderflower liqueur
1/2 oz Clear Creek Douglas Fir Eau de Vie
1 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1/2 oz fresh-squeezed orange juice
1/2 oz simple syrup
4 dashes Angostura Bitters

Shake over ice, strain into a couple glasses, and garnish with a lemon twist.

I have strong, fond feelings for St. Germain. It plays beautifully with blueberries and ice tea (and gin) in the summer, and equally well with honey and hot tea (and Scotch) in the winter. But this Douglas Fir Eau de Vie is a new one on me. Supposedly it's actually distilled from the Douglas Fir tree, and "recalls the scent of fresh pine needles." Well, I'll bet it does.


Coming up next week: more booze recipes by indie rockers, asshole bachelors, and one heck of a Bloody Mary. Plus Wendy Darling is proved to be dead-on in her assessment of parental priorities at her house, as her mom shares her recipe for a jalapeno margarita that is really really REALLY good.

You were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six

Bob, Jim & Mary playing "What's that building?", originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We were just in Cleveland this weekend for a family thing. I love Cleveland, and it's not a joke. I went to college there, lived on my own for the first time, met my husband there. I like that town's shape and history, the long straight avenues and the crooked filthy river.

We drove out from Baltimore, arriving at our downtown hotel at about 9pm on St. Patrick's Day. Now, St. Patrick's Day in Cleveland is an ugly affair. Even though Cleveland drinkers are far from amateurs, the poorly-considered dye jobs, plastic costume accessories, and truly epic all-day consumption makes everyone look like a stumbling frat-boy pledge.

But even at that moment - possibly the least charming one in Cleveland's drinking year - and even in that place, which, more so than most American downtowns, has been converted to a pedestrian mall of theme bars, the composed scale and dignified proportions of those buildings made the screeching drunks seem insignificant and temporary. Which, luckily, they were.

When I was in college, the mayor's daughter was one of my boyfriend's roommates. We had nascent urban-design conversations in her parents' kitchen about how on earth to get people to come back to downtown, which emptied utterly after the working day was done. Wasn't too bustling between 9 and 5, either, for that matter. Personally, I liked it that way. Any weekend day, you could run down the center line of any street and holler down the alleys, climb fire escapes and listen to the wind and nothing else.

We kept telling my friend's dad, "It's all about the drinking. Just keep inventing reasons to bring in beer trucks, and eventually people will open bars down there and stuff." We were no geniuses, believe me. It took at least two major sports venues and, I can imagine, tax concessions made to several large corporations in order to really stimulate development down there. But we weren't wrong about the drinking.

There's a great article in Cleveland's free weekly, Scene magazine, about bars that open before dawn. I used to go to at least one of them, but usually not until after dark. Which, granted, in Cleveland is about 3pm sometimes.

It was fun to read Scene again. I had forgotten how fast and loose that paper feels. With all the cussin' and the jokes and the pithy movie criticism ("In 1984, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves explored the Freudian psychosexual themes of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. In 2011, Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood explores that story's capacity for cheesy CGI effects, fake exteriors, bad acting, and oafish dialogue"), it surely makes Baltimore's City Paper feel prim. Fucking prim, not to put too fine a point on it.

Bob and I were discussing this - how much we enjoyed reading Scene and how we sincerely do not enjoy reading City Paper - and one of us floated the idea that Scene writers are recent college grads and part-timers, while people who write for the City Paper actually have some ambition to get jobs in a major market or for a major news outlet or for whomever they imagine is actually going to be hiring writers in the future, which, frankly, hello look who's been writing almost exclusively for free since 2006. Give it up, man. Write for free, you get to swear more. True, you eat less, but this is why your parents warned you not to be a liberal arts major.

In general, it seems like Clevelanders are game to try things, in galleries and on stages, even in marketing campaigns (that's a joke, I know that), that people on the East coast are not.

Here, our willingness to start a Wang Chung cover band or make a musical based on The Wedding Singer is dampened by our desire to not to look stupid in front of New York. In Cleveland, they know New York is not looking at them. They are free to be the spitball table in the lunchroom.

They turn houses inside-out.

They construct the high school stoner's ultimate fantasy hangout:

couchbleachers, by Nate Page, Machine Project at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland

Baltimore has Stoop Stories, evenings of themed storytelling, but Cleveland has StorySlam!, hosted by a guy in a bear suit. Participants are invited to share their 'true until proven otherwise' Cleveland tales, and the audience is invited to create shoebox dioramas illustrating one of the stories they heard, or one of their own. Shoebox dioramas. The ultimate creative leveler.

Pittsburgh is like this too, to a lesser extent. Pittsburgh flies beneath the New York radar, luckily for them. Also St. Louis.

Minneapolis? Minneapolis knows New York is looking at them, and they will put on a musical based on the The Wedding Singer knowing full well that some New Yorker is going to steal the idea and charge Williamsburg hipsters thirty-five bucks a head to sing along to "Pass the Dutchie".

You know you know the words.

On Crap

File this one under Actually Library Related, For Once, and Not About Children's Books.

And now I'm going to start a post with "Have you ever noticed...?" just like some damn comedian. Some damn lazy comedian, who always follows that phrase up with something banal. Banal and self-promoting, because the point is that everyone has noticed that the waiter who takes your order is not the one who brings your food anymore but they've never realized it was funny until Jerry Seinfeld pointed it out to them. And not even then.

Although I think Carlin invented that trope, and I'll give Carlin a pass. You've got to admit that, even after all these years, their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff.


So... have you ever noticed... that men read crap? I mean it. I've been working at the library for going on SEVEN YEARS now, and men? they read CRAP. You see a guy trolling the New Fiction shelves and ask if you can recommend something for him? He'll say "I was looking for something like Lincoln Child." Your friend introduces you to a dad from school and she tells him, "She's a librarian, she can tell you a good book to read," and he'll say, "Oh good! I really liked The Last Templar."

And hey, I do not begrudge a person their crap. Crap can be a soothing, entertaining part of life. But I find it mind-boggling that so many men can so unselfconsciously consume nothing but crap.

You ask fifty different women, "What was the last thing you read that you really liked?" and you'll get a couple repeats of The Help, but by and large it will be an eclectic list, ranging from high- to lowbrow, sampling genres, with a surprising amount of nonfiction represented. You ask the same thing of 50 men, and I guaran-goddamn-tee a narrower result. Lots of thrillers, some nonfiction.

In most cases, they don't even know it's crap. But go ahead and try to interest one of these guys in David Peace or Colum McCann or Marcel Theroux - any Theroux, for that matter - and they're just not going to bite.

There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a
lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, “I know what I’m
doing, just show me somebody naked.”

I did not say that. Jerry Seinfeld said that, and if Jerry Seinfeld said it, you can bet that it is as obvious a truth as the fact that most people have two feet. "What's the deal with that?"


And women don't read the kind of crap I'm talking about, hardly ever. Maybe Daniel Silva. The Kellermans. But most women do not end up in the checkout line with books by members of the All-Caps Squad under their arms.

It's the men. W.E.B. Griffin (Under Fire, Secret Honor) would be running a paintball range if it weren't for men. Actually, if it weren't for men, he wouldn't be doing that either. Brad Thor (Blowback, Takedown) would be a porn star. Harlan Coben (One False Move, Hold Tight) would be coaching high school football and getting sued by the parents of injured players if men didn't put their brains on hold and let their eyeballs plow through these fields of crap.

Nelson DeMille (Wild Fire, Upcountry)? I assume that's a pseudonym. If there were no Nelson DeMille, Cormac McCarthy would have nothing to do between thinking up ways to torture the characters in the novels that he admits to writing.




Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers.


This is why Your Neighborhood Librarian is anonymous. Those guys (the authors, not the Coens) would murder me. Or just write me into a novel as the snobbish harpy at the reference desk who's probably a lesbian. A man-hating lesbian, my friend 'Librarian' is a Euphemism for What?! clarifies for me, and she is right.


What's amazing is that when you Google "Books men like" you get lists by Esquire magazine, Oprah, and the authors of The Art of Manliness, among others, suggesting that men like Hemingway, biographies of athletes, and John Dos Passos.

Yeah. SOME men read Dos Passos. Literature majors who are men have read John Dos Passos. Guys who live in rehabbed Craftsman bungalows have Dos Passos on their shelf. But the guy on the plane next to you? He's reading Stuart Woods.

You may notice that I have only just begun to qualify my outrageous opening statement. "Some men read Dos Passos." Of course, some men do not read crap. Some men read nonfiction that is relevant to their job or interests. Some men are Andrei "I'll never read that awful book" Codrescu. (Andrei Codrescu YOU ARE MY HERO.)




POET, TRAVELER, HERO.



My husband, famously, reads nothing but Sports Illustrated and The Economist. But I have a sneaking suspicion, given his (no longer quite so) secret feelings about Matt Damon (sorry honey), that, were I to bring home a Robert Ludlum novel, Jason Bourne would be his seatmate on the plane until he died or Ludlum's ghost stopped publishing books, whichever came first.


The whole thing is weird. Because, in addition to these amazingly unhelpful lists online, there's this survey that just came out, the VIDA Count (of literature reviewed in popular journals broken down by gender), which seems to suggest that unless a work of literary fiction is read by men, it is not taken seriously.

WTF, man. The EIGHT men who regularly read Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer as they sit in Ozzie's Coffee and Tea in Park Slope are ruining things for the likes of Amy Hempel and Mona Simpson? NOT FAIR. Mona, trek down from the Upper West and smack those boys.

It must be them. Because it's not your uncle, your brother in law, or your dentist who are preferring Dan Chaon to Marcy Dermansky. Dan's name might be in all caps on the cover, but those caps are NOT BOLD ENOUGH for your dentist. Look:



This is a book for men.



This is a book for women, former film majors, and men who flip through the Crate & Barrel catalog when it comes. God bless 'em.


Again:


Drama and action.



The word "internal" comes to mind.



BIG BOLD CAPS + CAR IN POOL = LOOK OUT



And women read crap, we do. SOME women read crap. Everybody likes some crap now and then. TinkerCinderBellaHontas reads the Sookie Stackhouse novels. The Baking Librarian swears by Jayne Ann Krentz. I read the Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay. The romance novel industry is going great guns right now, with spectacular sub-genres: Christian romance, erotic romance, Western romance, fantasy/SF romance (love that zero-grav humping!). BISEXUAL REGENCY EROTIC ROMANCE. I am so proud that the author of that book is a personal friend of mine.

Many women are gobbling up YA novels nowadays, and I think it's because they have an appetite for the elements of crap - fast pace, snappy dialogue, lots of action - but no taste for actual crap. Many of my friends who read YA have tried Laurell K. Hamilton - paranormal action crap ostensibly For Women - and tossed it aside with a grimace. The writing, she is not so good.

Once free of the lobby, the crowd flowed towards the different aisles like water searching for the quickest route downstream. The quickest route was still pretty slow. I dug the tickets out of the pocket of my suit jacket. I didn’t have a purse. There was a small brush, a lipstick, lipliner, eye shadow, ID, and my car keys stuffed in my coat pockets. My beeper was tucked in the front of my skirt, discreetly to one side. When not dressed up, I wore a fanny pack.

Or maybe my friends just refuse to accept the idea of a badass vampire hunter wearing a fanny pack.


Speaking of TinkerCinderBellaHontas, it was she who insisted that Bob and I start watching Castle, the Filliontastic TV show about an author of crap who falls in with a skinny police detective, a dead ringer for my friend The Meanest Cop in Ann Arundel County. Amusingly, the fictional novelist sits down to play poker with real-life crapslingers Stephen J. Cannell, Michael Connelly, and industry-unto-himself James Patterson. Less amusingly, Castle's fans are depicted as women. Women lining up to get his books signed, women attending his release parties. Even the pantsuited police detective is a devoted reader.

Crap! This is crap! Castle's readers would be men! Look at this actual quote from Nathan Actual Fillion: "I often say that Castle is Moonlighting meets Murder She Wrote having not really remembered Moonlighting and never having actually seen Murder She Wrote."

Those shows - and Castle - are Women's Crap. Richard Castle is Men's Crap.


"Pretend to write, Nathan." "How 'bout if I just sit here and try to look kind of stupid?" "Love it, perfect!"

I have obviously been fretting over this for months. When it comes to reading, women come in all shapes and sizes. You have Book Club Readers, Mystery Ladies, the I'll Try Anything Once type, Weepie Women, Memoir Moms, McSweeney's Groupies, and tons more. But men are so much more predictable. Why is this? If I had an answer, I'd be proposing this article to Harper's, and not just running my mouth on my blog.

Which I'm done doing, for now. Go in peace.

Fug the READ poster - 2011 edition

Hello, library lovers!


Your Neighborhood Librarian is *just about* off to sunny San Diego, California to attend the American Library Association's Midwinter conference. I have an exhibits pass, a rental car, the names of several restaurants of good repute... and my kids!

Yeah! Bob's going to meet us out there, so it's just me flying coast to coast with two boys under the age of ten, both of whom are so excited about LEGOLand that they are practically hallucinating. I spent all of yesterday doing laundry, packing, downloading books onto the eReader and the iPod (note to MD Digital eLibrary Consortium Fuckwittery: YOU DON'T WORK), and hollering down the stairs, "WHAT are you arguing about NOW?"

I had to invent dozens of tasks to keep them apart. "Get all the nickels out of the change bowl and put them in this jar." "Sort through the short markers and find one of each color that works." Can a seven-year-old unload the dishwasher? He can if your kitchen has a Cramer Kik-Step. At one point I asked Facebook if it was ok to give children Xanax.

(Facebook said yes. (Love ya, Ginny Schmidt!))

So it wasn't yesterday, but it was a different day, that I picked up my copy of American Libraries, the monthly print appendage of the American Library Association, to see if there was a conference map (there wasn't), and saw a full-page ad for the latest and greatest ALA READ posters. You know, those posters that show a famous person posing stiffly with a book. You see them adorning the walls of school libraries, children's sections, and, in rare cases, librarian workrooms (Hello, Orlando Bloom!).

I have in the past been... critical... of these posters. I think they're poorly styled, badly posed, and the celebs are sometimes weirdly chosen. In my first ever critique of these posters, I said, "the ALA has the uncanny ability to honor any good-looking celebrity willing to take time out of his or her busy schedule (making out with other celebrities, shopping, learning to swing from vines) in order to promote literacy - by making that person look like a grimly hung-over version of Mickey Rourke."




Fortunately, it seems that the ALA has stepped up their game. The posters featuring the Harry Potter principals are particularly good, especially as it seems a little challenging for anyone to get a nice picture out of Rupert Grint. (Those Phelps twins, though, that play Fred and George? Hoo wee. I'd read Thomas Kinkade novels if those boys told me to.)

Anyway, the Harry Potter READ posters. What's good about them? First of all, these kids are famous for movies that are adaptations of successful books, so they're appropriate models. The actors are lit right, shot straightforwardly, framed by competent graphics, wearing their own clothes, and holding books of their own choosing (Oh I know you want to know - Weasley has a copy of A Clockwork Orange with a cool vintage cover; Radcliffe is holding The Master and Margarita - I am pretty sure that boy is a little pretentious; and Emma picked Romeo and Juliet. Well, two out of three).

There are also some good group shots. The Jonas Brothers look blue-jeany and arena-rocky. The Glee cast - well truthfully you'd have to work pretty hard to make that group look bad. They even come with their own graphics. And I adore that Amber Riley is carrying a copy of Sorta Like a Rock Star.

Seth Meyers looks good and apparently remembers enough of his college lit classes to choose Catch-22. They let Hugh Laurie look studly - rugged and tan - for once in his dear British life. Nathan Fillion looks like a boob, reading the last of the Softwire series (YA SF FTW!) but I suspect that's Nathan Fillion being Nathan Filliony and is not the fault of the ALA photographer. I note with appreciation that he's still sporting his Captain Hammer shoulders.

But then there's this:



OH MY GOD ALA there's NO way you could have made him look smarter? At all? I caught a look at this thing, this dumb-looking beefy stud with the atavistic brow ridge peering bemusedly into a book like a dog peers into a grocery bag, and instantly I heard Ian Holm intoning, "Ra-zor... Mir-ror!" in my head. If you don't know what I'm talking about, i.e. you are either not as old as I am or you are not as tolerant of screamingly bad movies that are really just thin excuses for putting long-haired men into loincloths, I offer you this: