Drained but determined.

 

Canada destroys the beauty of cigar art.  Our own FDA is trying to decimate an industry based on tradition and imagination by taking the color from the pigment and the life from the artist.  From blend to bland. Yet in Kiribati (a small country in the south pacific)- 52.2% of adults smoke.  And in Greece, 42.2% of the adult population puffs away. These numbers don’t include children, teenagers, and young adults.  

“The overall message (in George Orwell’s magnum opus – 1984)  is that totalitarian governments such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bad. When Orwell wrote 1984 (published June 1949), he was concerned that governments were (?) moving more toward totalitarianism (in 1949!). He worried that these governments might start taking away more and more of people’s rights and freedoms.  (Du-uh!)

The United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights (written in December 1948) states in article 19, in part that  “We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think . . . .”  It’s like the first line in Allan Ginsberg’s epic poem, Howl.  Everyone thinks they know it – but recite it for me? Now.

Bashing ideas from one end of the brain to the next will cause a hemorrhaging of logic. We fail to reason because too many others have been thinking FOR us – and we continue to let them. This results in ineffectual, intellectual apoplexy.  (I pause now between irrational and rational thought.)

********

Sometimes all this shit causes me to feel drained.  

I don’t get enough sleep.  I eat like a dumpster diver.  My impatience is part of who I am.  

Look, there’s a temporary Donald Judd (1928-1994) exhibit in Paris at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.  Known for his monolithic sculpture, Judd, a minimalist, continued to produce.  Blue.  Orange.  Green.  Red.  He emphasizes primary colors with a dash of repetitiveness.  Plastic, aluminum, steel, acrylic are his mediums.  Various shapes are a hallmark.  Squares dominate.  Did he ever feel drained?  (Note: I’ve not completed his 1016 page book, “Donald Judd Writings.”  Maybe). 

Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019), who adored his cat, Choupette, has passed.  Did his desire ever simply drain away when he was alive? Even if it did, he kept designing.  He revived the Channel brand and extended his own eponymous fashions simultaneously.

Drained as defined in the dictionary is, “deprive(d) of strength or vitality.”  I can’t imagine either Judd or Lagerfeld (me?) ever being listless, limp, or languishing.  But of course, it’s a possibility.

There is seepage.  Ergo, I write to fill the vessel.  I create prose to stem the tide of tedious, tactless, tasteless government and intentional ravenous public intervention, including social media in my life.  Reality + control + overload = drainage.  Tempered glass.

I met someone I hadn’t seen in some time recently.   Our conversation was bright and cheery.  But to depend on someone else’s interaction to maximize or change my mood is a dangerous, deep, dark dilemma.  That cannot be expected.  Happenstance is just that.  Random. Waiting for it (Godot?) and I will be forever disappointed.  I must create the impetus of progress –  or, if left alone will, result in – as I said – being drained.

No one can taste the hollow space in chocolate bunnies.  But the bunny is made.

Can a reprieve relieve the prickly rush of this convulsive conundrum?  

 

Are cigars the problem or is time?

I’m smoking less due to time constraints.

I’m writing more due to time constraints.

Parallel observations.

Or are they relative obfuscations?

Time constraints, according to its definition ”. . .  refer to the limitations on the start and end times of each task in a project’s critical path, which is the sequence of tasks that cannot be delayed without delaying the entire project.”

Hmmm.  

Smoking a Lunatic short robusto habano in the garage reading an article about John Hersey, the author of the “widely read book,” Hiroshima.  The cigar itself is absolutely divine. The article is a prime New Yorker book review written by Nicholas Lemann.* “Lemann is . . . the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.”

Why now?  Hiroshima was written in and published in 1946 and “ It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, covering a period of time immediately prior to the bombing and until about 1984. It was originally published in The New Yorker.”

Hiroshima “is still probably the best-known piece The New New Yorker has ever published,” according to Lemann.  He goes on to say, “(w)hen it appeared, in August 1946, it took up an entire issue.”   Impressive, considering the magazine itself was going through editorial changes under William Shawn, who “edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.”  Prior to the publishing of Hersey’s article, the magazine was considered to be “light entertainment.”  While in fact, it was morphing into a “ . . . journalistic core of moral engagement.”

Why then stop smoking such an enjoyable cigar?  Could it be that knowing I can light up another one anytime I want that gives me such pleasure thus easing the cigar’s unexpected endgame?  I didn’t feel the need to suction out every last draw of its marvelous essences that just keep changing and satisfying the palate and hoping it will never end?

Time constraints.  It’s late. It’s always late.  I smoke late at night. Never during lunch. Restrictions made by law.

Time constraints.  It’s late. It’s always late.  I read late at night. I read during a hurried mid-day meal.  I smoke in the car. What? Why? To catch up?

Time constraints.  It’s late. It’s always late.  I write at night. I write after dinner.  I listen to a CD in the car, which gives me ideas, entertains and educates me.  Tingling intellectual stimulation. Ah, brain spasms. All while I’m straight-jacketed by my seat belt.  A pseudo-Hans Christian Andersen starched emperor’s wardrobe garment without the long sleeves “which can be tied together to confine the arms of a violent prisoner or mental patient.” Being a broker becomes the sleeves. Am I the patient? All tight and tidy. Straight-jacketed to time constraints.

Every day.  Get up. Walk the dog.  Take a pill.  Eat a banana.  Get washed. Put on my clothes.  Pack my bag and check to see if I have enough blank order forms.

Straight-jacketed to time constraints.  

But I had time this evening.  Or did I?  I was being sensorially stimulated by the tobaccos and intellectually infused by the article. Yet, I purposely aborted the remaining stub in the ashtray, folded over the page I was concentrating on – and left the garage.  What?  Tobacreadus interruptus?  

No.  Time constraints.  They move us all to do what it is we do.  And depending on what we do, we have to have the discipline to do it.  With time constraints.

It’s warmer here in the office.  I can still taste the blend.  I have the magazine open to the page I shoddily folded over as I left the garage.  I’ll finish the article tomorrow.  I’m reading another book about Patricia Highsmith to lull me into somber sleep.  The cigar is out by now I imagine, still holding its flavors I decided to douse.

Yes, it’s late.  Start earlier. Can’t.

Time constraints.

Both actions produced this article.  It’s good to be under pressure. As long as something is accomplished.  Yes, I am affected by this hurried, demanding, damned world I’ve created. But for me, that’s a good thing.   Without pressure, I find myself stuck in the haze of indifference. So something has to give. In this case a sacrificial cigar.  An unfinished article. But a completed blog post.

Time.  “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a (w)hole” to be filled.

*The New Yorker April 29, 2019  – Mr. Straignt Arrow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Breaking Broker.

I’m not in the garage or a lounge smoking a cigar.  I’m in my office and that’s why I may be so damn grumpy.  No cigar. I also drove seven hours up and back to a store today, drew up a small sale and had multiple issues with other orders that were filled wrong and orders that I made errors on that I have to fix.  At one point I had to stop at an oasis to correct them right then and there.

But what really upset me was what I read in a post that this person writing was seemingly addicted to FB.  And then the thought came to me that as much as it sounds like sheer lunacy, I think this person is right.  FB can become enslavement.  Tin Foil?

Whatever happened to people talking to people?  Are we being pulled into the world of FB by design?  Think about this? What do we check every few seconds?  How do we communicate with each other? Are we paying attention to what’s going on around us?

Chicago’s Alderman Ed Burke, recently indicted for alleged extortion, (Federal agents were seen at Chicago Ald. Ed Burke’s offices at both City Hall and in the 14th Ward Thursday morning. The glass doors to Burke’s City Hall office were papered over, while the purpose of the visit(s) was unclear. Carol Marin reports. (Published Thursday, Nov. 29, 2018, Chicago Trib) was recently REELECTED!???

What?  Are we intellectually slowly going the way of the dodo bird?  A free society so consumed with distractions and apathy and fun, fun, fun that the string theory i.e. “a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings . . . (and that) these strings propagate through space and interact with each other,”  actually makes sense? We’re not human beings anymore.  We’re “particles!” (Wiki)

Yeah.  I’m nuts and the rest of the world is sane, right?  Indifference has been around since the dawn of time.  It preys on our subjectivity of what is and what isn’t.  (I really need a cigar!!! Gotta calm down.) It was highlighted in the 50s and 60s during the reign of Khrushchev.  A period of time when peoples’ minds were so preoccupied with the threat of communism becoming the norm our uncontrolled thoughts began to play tricks on people. Who was (is?) in charge?  “We the People . . . “ And why the constant electronic distractions?  It’s much worse now than in it was in the 60s.  And Zuckerberg?  Who does he really work for?   Look at history.

********

“Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a Soviet statesman who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964.” (Wiki)

Apocryphal quotes attributed to Khrushchev:

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV — THE “SMALL DOSES” QUOTE(S) – 1960

“We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.”

“We will bury you without firing a shot”

“We will bury you from within without firing a shot.”

“We will take over American and never fire a shot”

“We will destroy America without wasting one bullet”

“We will take America without firing a shot…….We will BURY YOU! We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism. We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”

“You Americans are so gullible! We don’t have to invade you! We will destroy you from within without firing a shot! We will bury you by the billions! We spoon feed you socialism until your (sic) Communists and don’t even know it! We assist your elected leaders in giving you small doses of Socialism until you suddenly awake to find you have Communism. The day will come when your grandchildren will live under communism” (www.metabunk.org)

Is any of this getting through?  Communism?  No!  Socialism?  Ask Bernie Sanders!

“A Cigar PLEASE!”

My point.  Too many distractions cause the populace to wax and wane from truth to fantasy to indifference.  “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. For the next hour (?) we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits.”  And what keeps us inattentive today?  Tiny glass screens.  FB! Instagram! Cell Phones! Tic Toc. Mascara that won’t run! Artists that just sign their names!  New Cigars!  Commercials!

“Remember the shoe incident!  Remember the shoe incident!“

“Hold it.  Stop him. Somebody get a cigar, hurry.”

“He’s freakin’ indoors!”

“Fuck it.  It’s gettn’ bad this time.”

Snip!

Nice glow.

“Now draw, damnit!  DRAW!”

(pause)

“Better?”  

“Yeah, better.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MixNh9L7G5M

 

The Rule of Three.

“The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers.  Examples include the Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and the Three Musketeers.
“The rule of three is (a) powerful speechwriting technique that you should learn, practice, and master. Using the Rule of Three allows you to express concepts more completely, emphasize your points, and increase the memorability of your message. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“The rule of three for survival is that you can (most likely) survive for three minutes without air (oxygen) or in icy water.  You can survive for three hours without shelter in a harsh environment (unless in icy water). You can survive for three hours without water (if sheltered from a harsh environment).  You can survive for three weeks without food (if you have water and shelter).

It’s a shame or should I call it an oddity that the rule of three doesn’t exist in the cigar manufacturing business.  In fact, if I would take an educated guess, there isn’t a cigar manufacturer that knows what “The rule of three is.” That begs that question – why?

It’s a natural number that goes way back not only in humanistic terms but spiritual ones as well.  Per example, “ . . . Three is the number of perfection or completion. This number is repeated throughout the Bible as a symbol of completeness. God’s attributes are three: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. … On the third day, the earth rose from the water, symbolic of resurrection life.”   The Holy Trinity? (Wiki)

So here’s what you get in the cigar business is scrambled eggs and not only from those who have one or two years (candela novices – expected) in the business but sadly even from those who have been around for decades.  (And please don’t bring up the European size connection, stay here in the USA if you can just for a moment.)

Sizes for brands today include 7 x 64, 4¾ x 54, 5⅛ x 55, 8 x 80, 7½ x 40, 4½ x 60, and on and on and on.  When and if the manufacturers would follow the rule of three there would be a 4⅞ x 50 (Cuban Robusto), a 6 x 52 (Cuban Toro), and now the 6 x 60 (USA Gordo).

Now, of course, there are many, many, many more vitolas that are adored by the cigar smoker, but if you had to stick to the rule of three – the Robusto, the Toro, and the Gordo – would fill the bill.

I can’t say the corona (5⅝ x 42), or the Lancero (7 x 38) or even the Churchill (7 x 48) are goofy sizes.  They are traditional and have been made for decades. But for the reason that really no one can explain, a newbie manufacturer comes on the market with as many as 20 sizes!  Are they nuts? Are they trying to cover all their bases? Or are they just ignorant business people (excuse me cigar lovers) who have been swayed by the manufacturers with the old sales adage, “The more the merrier?”  Who can say? I sure can’t. At least not with any certainty.

The only conclusion I can come to is, “Oh, what the hell – why not?”  But by bringing out such a shamble of sizes – that’s not a marketing plan.  That philosophy is simply slinging s..t against the wall hoping that something sticks.  Give it some thought. Perhaps the times they are changing, but three is a sacred number in more ways than some may ever be able to grapple with to succeed in the cigar trade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWTDcP9Y5E

I AM in control, not cigars.

What do I do when my tank as a cigar broker reads empty?  I fill it with ideas, shapes, forms, crowds of people, the silence of a church, noises, artists, sculptures, images, contemporary thought, ancient scripts, books, magazines, brochures, architectural masterpieces, an hour at Chicago’s Art Institute the Modern Wing, Rembrandt, I visit mentally and if possible, physically someone who I am afraid of, I drink fizzy Coke®️and revel in the effects of caffeine, I listen to my heart racing in my throat, I stand in front of a Gerhard Richter painting and discover all of its implications, I try to decipher Cy Twombly’s diction, or I cock my head trying to understand Portrait of Marevna by Diego Rivera (above), I get onto the train early, I ignore those who arrive after me, then I stare, I listen for a sound that I have never heard before, I change my seat due to a bad smell, I scribble notes, I imagine myself as a dry sponge that’s just now beginning to expand, I feel guilty, I regret not walking to Christie’s, I remain grounded, I sense a trickle of energy as one would sense a suture without pain relief, I marvel at the green-colored glass that makes me sleepy, I take a photo, I review those I took, I try to remain in the present always and can feel that the sponge has overflowed and its drippings are filling my tank, and most of all I try to feel safe and reject consternation (Ha!), I can have a dry vessel but the opportunities to keep it brimming with life is always my choice, no one else has the power, the strength, the temerity to tangle with my vision, be it oftimes blurred or crystalline clear. Peace is difficult to capture but reaching out isn’t.

(Painting: Portrait of Marevna About 1915, by Diego Rivera – Mexican 1886-1097)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaQVdpl9fS8

 

You are HOW you smoke.

You are how you smoke?  Not what you smoke?  What?  Take this tact for clarity:

“Typography can be elegant or clumsy, alluring or off-putting, but the reader may feel that the authorial presence is only partly there on the printed or electronic page. Handwriting conjures up not only the voice but the movement of the writer’s hand that Richard Wilbur once compared to ‘“fresh tracks across a field of snow.’  In the eighteenth century, the Swiss philosopher and physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater observed: ‘I have remarked a perfect analogy in the language, movement of the body of a person, and his handwriting. The more I compare different handwritings, the more am I (sic) convinced that handwriting is the expression of the character of him who writes’”.*

This could be expanded to include – IF we write at all –  “Anne Trubek, (the) author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, once wrote ‘I am a college professor and a freelance writer, and the only time I pick up a pen is to sign a credit-card receipt . . . We cling to handwriting out of a romantic sense that script expresses identity.’”

Point of fact, note how any smoker holds his or her cigar.  Some are grabbers, others are prissy, such as those who hold the cigar with his or her thumb and index finger.  Rocky always holds his cigar to pose. He’s always posing. Most cradle the cigar within the index finger and the crook of the thumb joint against the middle finger.  Others just don’t have a clue how to hold the damn thing.

Question is, what does this say about you?  Are you an aficionado if you hold it one way or considered a classless prole if you hold it another fashion?  So that begs the question, what is the right way?  Which will immediately be answered by the smarmy smart ass in the lounge, “Who gives a fuck?”   Slop, slop, draw, draw.

That wasn’t polite.  My apologies.  But he’s right.  Who does give a hoot?  The real conundrum at hand is HOW you smoke a cigar NOT the position it’s held in your hand that reveals your character.  Though it is part of the equation.   Hmmm.  That edges into the realms of philosophy, manners, and ultimately – civility.  Yes? The latter word that seems to have lost all its gusto over the years.  Merriam-Webster defines civility as, “archaic : training in the humanities.”  OhhhhhhhKay.  The definition that may turn our head is really quite mundane,  having a modicum of “courtesy or politeness.”  Which is fine but not realistic, considering were closing in on 2020, teenage girls say “Fuck you” at a drop of a hat, and condoms are offered free at least in one cigar lounge’s loo.  “For the times they are a changin’.”

So in reality, if, as suggested by Christine Nelson, editor of “The Magic of Handwriting” the latter practice, i.e handwriting, is an extension of our identity, isn’t how we smoke a cigar the exact same thing?  Methinks it is.  “Sam!”

I mean,  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine.”    Life.  Sorry.  I digress.  Terrible affliction (a blessing?) to have rushing thoughts.  Look around at any lounge in any city, in any country, in any town. The guys and gals come in to smoke a cigar. If a patron can take his or her eyes off the big screen and observe how other people smoke cigars, they might have an inkling as to why this or that person is acting one way or why another person acts in a totally different manner.  Character, man.  Woman?  

But the fact remains, there is a certain amount of truth in the fact that a person smokes a cigar a certain way for a variety of reasons such as vanity, self-consciousness, ignorance, intimidation, arrogance, shyness, or even illness.

It’s all up for discussion.  Note TLS reviewer Alberto Manguel writes that “Electronic type allows anyone to be a published author.  Future generations will tell if this miraculous technology has also eliminated what Lavater saw as ‘the expression of character’ in the movements of the writing hand.’”

Or to further this postulation “the expression of character” in the movements of how one smokes his or her cigar.  And does it really actually matter.  Or is it just another variation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  Could be.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEeEEc_djco

(*Times Literary Supplement 3.15.19.   Quotes from “”You are how you write.”  From “The Magic of Handwriting,” edited by Christine Nelson, reviewed by Alberto Manguel.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Burroughs Cigar Connection.

Every cigar has a fan.  There is not one rolled up cylinder of fermented tobacco out in the marketplace that will not please someone.  I call this the “Burroughs Cigar Connection.” Why?

It’s so simple I’m surprised I’m writing about it.  I can name hundreds of cigar brands and I can name hundreds of authors or writers, you can call them what you will, depending on your pedigree and ego.  They both put pen to paper, or now – fingers to a keyboard.

William S. Burroughs was a writer of what some call the “Beat Generation.”  Summed up the “Beat Generation” was a group of writers that included, of course – William S. Burroughs (1914-1997); Jack Kerouac (1922-1969); Allen Ginsberg (1922-1997); Neal Cassidy (1926-1968); Gregory Corso (1930-2001); Peter Orlovsky (1933, 2010); Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Holmes, Herbert Huncke ((1915-1996) and so many more.

Why the moniker “Beat Generation?”  “Kerouac introduced the phrase ‘Beat Generation’ in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes.” (Wiki)  And on the Steve Allen show broadcast in 1959, Kerouac himself said it meant “sympathetic.”

It was in a sense similar to the Dada Art movement.  “Dadaism is an artistic moment in modern art that started around World War I. Its purpose was to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world. Its peak was 1916 to 1922, and it influenced surrealism, pop art, and punk rock. It favored going against the standards of society.” (Wiki).

Why Dada?  “The founder of Dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In 1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ‘Dada.’  ‘Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’ This was the first of many Dada publications. Dada became an international, (legitimate art) movement and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war.” (Tate.org)

It’s contrarian thinking at its most base form with a permanent moniker attached that somehow stuck and has, through time, remained.  But what it was, or is, is simply going against the grain. Splinters. Mostly painful, but the insertion heals and the bump remains.

Ergo, the Burroughs Cigar Connection.  Oh, I’m sure one could call it, the “Contrarian  Generation,” or “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama.” “A pistol.”  It doesn’t matter.

What’s inimical is there were (are) so many detractors to anything new.  My raison d’être (taken from a sentence in a book by Carl Gustav Jung: “the individuation is the raison d’être of the self”) for calling out those who have (a) harsh criticism of a cigar to be forever known as being unaware or of the “Burroughs Cigar Connection.”

Burroughs would try anything – often drugs, experimental filming techniques, but mostly novels – and he would attempt to jerk you to one side with his phrasings and subject matters in his literary works of addiction.  For example, from his most famous, infamous nee notorious novel “Naked Lunch.”  If I may quote Wiki, “‘Naked Lunch’ is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant. The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (also known as “Lee the Agent”), who is Burroughs’ alter ego in the novel.” Sounds innocent enough. But it ramps up to “Because there’s always a space between … giving away the basic American rottenness.”  Escalating to  “Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.”

May I quote a small portion of Stefan Beck’s review from salon.com of the underground classic as it turned Fifty.  “Naked Lunch” is one of those regrettable works that must be defended on the grounds that it does well what it set out to do, with no consideration given to whether what it set out to do is worth doing. It is very . . . like a nightmare — so? Its vocabulary is pathetically limited, with ‘insect,’ ‘erectile,’ and ‘atrophied’ appearing as adjectives over and over again, whether or not they make any sense; its stunted imagination reaches reflexively to drug culture and medical or anthropological gross-out lore. Its satire is all telegraphic . . . .”

As in the literature of the underground, including Charles Barovsky, there are those boutique cigars that can be considered immersed in that same viscous milieux.  But they are enjoyed and revered among those who like them!