And now for something completely different...

The two men who sat down had seen hard times, very hard times; or at least that’s the back-story I assigned them.

The scene was my local coffee spot. I had positioned myself within flirting distance of a cute woman I’d recently seen working at the local video place. The line-up was this: her in a coffee-house-chain leather armchair, an empty armchair, me, and another empty armchair. Perfect. Between her and I we had the whole corner on lock. How could anyone get in there? One person would be a creep, a couple would find it awkward, conversation impossible. It was like having Xs in three corners of a tic-tack-toe grid. No one could make a move on us.

Wrong.

Never underestimate the fallout of ill-placed chivalry.

So these men, these two men, walked in; the overhead air blaster, like an Arthur Rothstein photo of a dustbowl homestead, drew embarrassing attention to the last few wisps on their otherwise barren, artificially-wind-swept heads. I’d seen one of these men before, casually slouched over in a crowded plaza hacking and spitting as though it was just the thing to do in that quasi-urbane place. I recognized this man when he came in but like the law, good judgment arrives late if ever.

They were moving on us; like they gave a shit about my set-up, these two. Our solidarity was in jeopardy. Like the Sooners of suburban sprawl we had to confront the fact that, yes, those empty spaces would be filled – and by people we didn’t like.

I was of course way ahead of the latte sipping beauty in realizing the severity of the situation. She was engrossed in some Chuck Klosterman or Chuck Palahniuk thing. I had no choice; I had to be polite to these oldsters, but what to do?

Now, I’ve read Caesar’s Gaelic Wars. I know that when faced with such a maneuver the best thing to do is hold your line. Barring this it’s better to be surrounded than to have your forces cut in two.

They made their move for the empty chairs and I panicked. Instead of moving right and creating a solidarity power-pod, I moved left, ceding our center to this aged enemy. Unfortunately, having lines of communication cut by these two was the least of our worries.

I cannot emphasize enough the repulsiveness of these two men. Now I’ve mentioned the one before: blithely engaged in an act all passersby politely ignored but fully understood to be the preface to a eulogy. Words, alas, do not exist to describe the grotesqueness of what followed. Their actions reside outside the limits of language or any apology I may proffer.

Simply to collect the passel of ailments they displayed these men had to be well into their 90’s. They spoke an unfamiliar language, it may have been Aramaic. One way or another I assumed that these nonagenarians hailed from a place very different from suburban Los Angeles, a place where the life expectancy was at least one-third their walking age. Moreover, these were certainly not the types that skillfully dodged the death, disease, wailing, chest pounding and general raucous that weighed on their miserable compatriots. No, these men had lived lives the equivalent to the pain and suffering of three deaths; as though they pushed on not through continued regeneration but through subtracting death from the equation

The facts thus far: 1.These men were (and are, if still alive) bald. 2. They were very fucking old. 3. They were speaking Aramaic. What’s left? Lots. Once plopped down, successfully fissuring our youthful Kaffeekultur, I began to see these men for what they were: a baroque collection of every ailment known to humankind.

They were certainly ‘old’ and ‘slumped over,’ ‘resigned’ and ‘suffering.’ But I place these terms, these linguistic signs, in scare quotes to insist that the images that, in your mental rolodex, you have assigned to these groupings of letters are wholly inadequate.

Imagine the jet-lag that would accompany a three hundred hour flight. To the moon and back in a cramped window seat. Now imagine being under extreme mental and physical duress for the entirety of the flight – aside from the window seat. Imagine thirteen days in a globe-trotting Guantanamo Bay. An Extraordinary Rendition, indeed. This approaches the lethargy these two men displayed. Their bodies had given up. What, I asked myself, transported them to this suburban coffee spot, besides this flight? From where did they hobble?

And they talked, man did they talk. With sudden dissents into sleep their living bodies tortured the dialectic of their cracked, dead language. The sleep was in-turn shattered by bursts of guttural life, violent clearing of throats, wheezes and bellows. Yet, there were ailments beyond the aural.

Remember that flight, the one that marked these men with severe and irreparable jet-lag? Now imagine that, just before landing in L.A., this flight experienced a violent crash. These fragile, ancient foreigners were jettisoned from the craft, hurtled into the atmosphere. In impossible free-fall they smashed through limbs of trees, bounced of chain-link fences, tumbled over hoods of late-model Buicks, broke through hotel awnings and shattered the inevitable pane of in-transit glass.

There’s a line in Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” where Chuck D states that he was followed by “fifty two brothers, bruised, battered and scarred but hard.” These two men were not hard; though they may have been brothers. However they could no doubt – and each on his own – claim the bruises, beatings and scars of Chuck’s fifty two rebellious inmate cohorts. They had canes, arm braces, S.A.S. orthopedic shoes and one of them was apparently blind. Disheveled, tired, beaten and broken, occupying a liminal position between life and death these men conversed violently.

Their conversation, like the aged vessels that brought it to me, was jarring and repugnant.

Remember the plane crash that mutilated their impossibly fragile yet indestructible bodies? Remember the torture they endured on that flight? Now imagine that before this surreal tragedy lifted off these men were not friends but the worst of enemies. Fattah vs. Hammas; Palestine vs. Israel; The I.R.A vs. the Orange Order; Foucault vs. Chomsky; The Cold Crush 4 vs The Fantastic 5. The apparent beef between these repulsive relics eclipsed all others. What were they talking about? I could not penetrate the hidden plot of this ancient text. Was this some cultural thing? Was their native land a place where robust debate was equaled only by hard-living and sudden sleep?...

“This esoteric Byzantine debate must be settled before we both die…We cannot die until there is an answer… we must go to a franchise coffee shop adjacent to a small Southern California liberal arts college campus and finish this…Whatever it takes, whatever it takes.”

Had I underestimated these two? Was I actually witnessing the concluding remarks between Glaucon and Thrasymachus regarding the nature of justice? If this had been the case, I would have liked to interject that what the video vixen and I were being forced to endure was certainly not a valid notion of justice. This was a tyranny of repulsion.

Are you beginning to understand the gravitas of this situation? What am I leaving out? What more can I tell to lend texture to this nauseating scene? Have I mentioned that the pants of both men were unbuttoned? Not in a casual, “oops, forgot to zip,” kind of way but in a way that suggests a fierce lack of concern. Did I say that one of the men had a substantial shit stain on the back of his pants? Did I tell you how, roused from his torpor, the blind man turned to his right and grabbed the movie madden’s white leather hand bag? (She quickly and commendably rubbed both her hands and the bag with Purell squirted from a tiny travel-size.) “I no see it…I’m blind…soorry” was his rejoinder. Did I fail to mention that this be-feebled purse thief, when not muttering, bellowing, or crumpled and sleeping, would slowly spit into tiny napkins and toss these cess-pods onto the travertine floor? No, I spared you these nauseating details. But I lived through them and I bare witness.

The girl is gone now but the men remain. I have a video to return today. Perhaps I should apologize: “I’m sorry, I had no idea it would be that bad. And I know this doesn’t erase things or make it better but, I should have moved to the right.”

"It's black, it's white, it's tough for you to get by..."

Sometimes things aren't as they seem. Other times things are very much as they seem, so much so that we don't believe what we're seeing. Take this famously creepy pic we all remember from thin, dog-eared picture books of our youth:
Coy Beauty or Grizzled Hag? (Watch "The Shinning" for the definitive answer.)

Sometimes we see things that unsettle us, sometimes we experience things that aren't one/the other but are both/and.

This is purportedly a blog about "food," but I don't see how that baggy term precludes me from talking about other things like, say, alcohol, and racism. I mean, I grew up in suburban Detroit and from what I can remember of the "grown-ups' table" - or at least a large contingent thereof - food, alcohol and racism were as much a part of the holidays as Fords caravanned in the circular drive.

So, keeping in mind the above photo, what should we think of this picture:
You can find this curious drawing along the left side of most Jack Daniels bottles (half pints don't have sides, ya dummy!). Sure, it's a hand clutching - if awkwardly - a glass of Jack. But, what else do we see here? With the above image in mind, lets now look at another item with deep roots in American culture:
Anyone? Anyone? Now with blackface in mind (or better yet a Sambo character) what else do we see in the J.D. label? Can we also see the thumb, forefinger and empty top half of the glass as a hat? The two curious white dots just below as eyes? The remaining fingers as bulbous nose and obscene, larger-than-life lips? Like the old woman photo, Jack Daniels gives us an image that is both/and; both white hand clutching a glass and a minstrel image evoking better times - presumably in the glass and in the past; what with all J.D.s talk of tradition that surrounds the drawing how could it not?

With these images - and any "optical illusion" - you see what you want but you cannot "un-see" its other half, it creeps into the periphery of what you'd prefer to see. Because it's there too, it's part of the image .

So what? Is this just some dumb exercise of my passion for academic pedantry and booze? Well, yes and no... Actually yes on both counts, but it's also bigger than that. Let's look at another image with a curious message:


So besides robust, alcohol inspired homo-social bonding, what is this an ad for? Certainly Chivas would say "honour" and "gallantry" - in fact, if I heard them correctly, they do say this. As Chivas would have it these are frail and forgotten ethics that can be resuscitated if we just drink enough whiskey. And while it's a step up from Jack's Jim Crow and The Minstrel Show, it still has an illusory quality that demands deeper focus. What was all that about a "code of behaviour that sets certain men apart"?

If the Jack Daniels label is haunted by what is there, the Chivas ad, and its message, springs from a fear of what is not there. Anyone? Anyone?

Answer: Be suspicious of an ad that features a bunch of white guys and ends with "Here's to us." (Unless it's an ad for stormfront.org or the Republican Party.) 'Us' in the Chivas world means the kind of guys who not only drink Chivas but are also predisposed to do all those great things the ad is suggesting. 'Us' is the guys in the ad, white guys - only.

Still don't buy it? Or is the advert just too English with its "sporting" types and effete, Thom Yorke-esque bellowing?

Then how about this one:


I much prefer the Stranglers-inspired soundtrack but I think these guys have seen "Lock. Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels" one too many times. Visually, this looks a lot like the Jack ad: all chiaroscuro, glass clutching, and masculinity. But while blackface is right up front in the Jack image blackness simply surrounds the guys in the Ketel ad. In the end the cool, brash, young dudes end up looking like these old ladies.

So why are these ads so amped about white guys and the past? Admittedly all Ketel is pining for is "last night" (albeit filtered through "300 years of tradition) while Chivas seems to want to get out of that gray city and find a place on which the sun never sets.

The cynical response to all the images, to the whole post, from the Jack label to the Ketel ad is that I am "reading too much into it," that all this racial stuff isn't there. However, like the old lady picture, the whole point is that it is there, but it's there in such a way where, whether you see it or not, it's part of the image, part of the message. You don't have to see the racial undertones of the Ketel or Chivas ad for these very undertones to seep into the periphery of your thought - in fact, it works better this way.

So have a drink, think about it, but remember: a lot of thought went into these ads - and vision can be impaired by more than alcohol.