Perfect example: Papaya King, the one in New York that has cuddled itself on the corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue for seventy years is staring eye-to-eye at the demolition ball to make room for more Midtown mayhem.
For those unfamiliar with this institution of Manhattan’s uber-famous eateries, may I quote from an article written by Adam Platt in the August edition of New York Magazine:
“This original branch was opened in the late 1940s by a juice-loving entrepreneur named Gus Poulos, who at first sold only his tropical potions but added hot dogs — along with his trademark sweet onions — to the menu a few years later in deference to the legions of sausage-loving Germans in Yorkville. The slim, snappy dog has its charms, but what has long separated the experience from your average street cart is the sweet, tangy papaya drink that, to me, has always tasted like the magic of the big city.”
Now why this impending act of doom affects me in such a dramatic manner that compels me to write about my feelings about the inevitable is really a mystery to me. But I do know that anytime there is a landmark that is destined for the destruction that epitomizes New York – The BigApple – I become agitated.
Change sucks.
New York is The Empire State. It is the epicenter of civilization as we know it. If I were to mention Madison Square Garden, Broadway, or even Howard Stern, who but a melting butterhead wouldn’t know that I’m speaking of “The City That Never Sleeps.” Gotham, baby!
I wasn’t going to connect this with cigars, but just in case there are those few out there who can’t stand to ignore our passion even for just a few hundred words about something else – think of those real cigar brands that if they were to disappear tomorrow how the tears would flow, the heart would ache, and the taste buds would shrink to Lilliputian proportions. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Adam Platt, the food critic for New York Magazine, is retiring after 22 glorious years. Some of you may know Adam, and some of you may not. Some may even know his predecessor, Gael Green, who grasped the job in 1968 (when the magazine was founded), as the readers gasped 40 years later when she was fired.
The latter paragraph may or may not be of immediate interest to cigar magazine readers, but in fact, it has all to do with the current situation at New York Magazine. I’m sure there are among the cigar intelligentsia who have a favorite magazine writer and will hate to see him or her go when they do. And they will because everything has a beginning and an end. EVERYTHING.
As Adam mentions in the article he wrote in this June’s issue of New York Magazine, “Some of the greatest critics . . . expired on the job way before their retirement years and even my friends and colleagues who have survived the obvious perils of the occupation (budget cuts, creeping drunkenness, heart failure, choking on a stray chicken bone) do so in a way that is decidedly less glamorous than it was in the glory days, when a friend of mine called it, ‘the last great job of the 20th century.’”
My point is he’s leaving and I’m staying because I believe being an independent cigar broker is “the last great job of the (21st) century.”
My job has the same risks as a food critic. The difference is the negative fallout was far greater for Adam than it is for me, depending on your point of view as regards exposure. The story goes that he was adored and despised. Celebrity chef, Mario Batali, once said, and this is a direct quote, “I believe Platt’s a miserable fuck.”
Anyway, Adam retires. I don’t – not yet anyway. I haven’t been out lately because contracting COVID messed up my body chemistry and aggravated an existing medical condition that has resulted in less travel and a trip to the hospital.
But I worry not. There is always a cigar that will need me. Therefore I feel loved, despite any sharp words that are spewed (if any) behind my back.
Adam, I bid you adieu! I will certainly miss your reviews. Have a cigar on me.
Being stuck at home with an illness is not my idea of a good time. It was when I was in grade school, but as an adult, with responsibilities, it’s more of a psychological gut punch than a physical inconvenience. (Though in my case I have both.) And, since there have been enough Covid stories written and slathered on the internet wall to last a lifetime, I won’t add to it.
But I will say this – when given the opportunity to be still – it is incredible what the mind can hear. In my case, it was the whispers of what I’m doing with this short life I’ve been given and what I’m going to do with what’s left of it.
No, I can’t predict the future. But I will say that it gave me the time to consider what’s crucial to living out the balance of my existence and what isn’t.
Will these embryonic thoughts continue to grow to maturation and release themselves into my reality? I don’t know. As I said, I can’t predict the future, but I can sure as hell can guide my life in the direction that is the most magnetic to my imagination.
So as I continue to use this blog as my intellectual Playdough® instead of all the time cigars, cigars, cigars – I welcome you to enjoy my thoughts about the balance of what time I have left, shove back the past, and perhaps play a little with the phrase, “predict the future.”
Comparing why I like a particular cigar to my inability to fully understand the plot of a movie can have its pinnacle in the idea of mysterious thought of how a particular film confuses me or how a specific brand of cigar draws me to it repeatedly by trying to comprehend what that magnetic attraction is – is thereby creating a silent void that genuinely pulls me into trying to figure it out (such as the palindrome “Hannah” which is the same be it spelled backward or forward – or how did it become what it is?) grabs me even tighter to try and untangle the reality of such a phenomenon such as the unexplainable essence if I may call it that of a blend because it is hardly attainable through the normal course of trusting the senses or intellect to battan down the actual reason it is unsolvable and not wanting to let go or give up on its baffling existence that will not or cannot penetrate my psyche or my awareness to answer the conundrum (which in and of itself is a polymorphous predicament) with a logical and satisfying resolution because despite the voluminous varieties of brands available – and the sheer number of ideas that can twist and turn a plot into an extreme existential experience that there really is no definitive conclusion as to why one movie is impossible to make sense or why the description of a brand’s piquancy is hopelessly stuck in ambered limbo i.e.my raison d’être to confidently compare the two.
Normally I’ll read a book before I comment on any portion of it, but in this case, I have to mention a most revealing quote from the review (TLS 2.26.21), that when paraphrased, will raise a red flag to all those who write and read cigar reviews, or attempt to predict to like or dislike a particular blend without lighting up.
The book is by Guy Davenport, a well-known American writer, and was originally published by Harper Collins in 1989. Its title, “A Balthus Notebook,” is about the oft-misunderstood Polish-French artist, Balthasar Klosowski de Rola – known as Balthus.
It’s a short book of only 112 pages but covers an enormous amount of material about the painter.
At one point the reviewer, Harry Strawson, quotes Davenport, “The ‘arrogance of insisting’ (on an artwork’s meaning) ‘closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.’”
This latter paragraph can easily be paraphrased to read: “The arrogance of suggesting or meticulously attempting to describe a cigar blend’s flavor closes off ‘curiosity, perception, and the adventure of discovery.’”
And to wit – it’s the bloody truth.
So try ‘em all for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll never really know.
If cigar reviews were written as clear and concise as this article reproduced from the March 16th, 2020 New Yorker magazine – it would be interesting to see how the resultant critique would influence the sales of the brand. (Warning: The article refers to a time in world history that is considered one of humankind’s most shocking atrocities. If you can’t hande facts – scroll by.)
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The Dark Revelations of Gerhard Richter.
Though the artist was previously indirect in his references to the horrors of the Third Reich, he has reason to focus on them now, in a retrospective at the Met Breuer.
“Birkenau.”* The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of “Painting After All,” a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking (at) their awful inspiration.
“Richter’s “Birkenau” is a provocation—who dares take history’s ultimate obscenity as a theme, or even an allusion, for art?—but one that makes biographical sense. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter is haunted, like many of his German contemporaries, by memories and associations from the Third Reich and the Second World War. Previously indirect in his references to the horror, he has reason to focus on it now, for a show that comes late in his life, and which he says might be the last one of his six-decade career as a chameleon stylist and visual philosopher of painting. (He’s eighty-eight and, not well enough to travel, did not attend the opening.) The shock of “Birkenau” retroactively exposes a thread of sorrow and guilt through (sic) an art of invariably subtle, at times teasing, ambiguities. His photographic images transposed to canvas and painterly techniques that exploit chance have often seemed deliberately arbitrary as if to forswear feeling. He brings to everything an attitude of radical skepticism. But it has dawned on many of us, over the years, that plenty of emotion, like banked fire, underlies his restless ways.
“Heretofore, Richter’s only overt reference to the Holocaust was a suite of touching illustrations for an edition of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” picturing Frank’s face in a range of styles, which he made in 1957, while he was unhappily apprenticed as a Socialist Realist painter in East Germany. (The illustrations are not in the show.) Having glimpsed free-world art when he was permitted visits to exhibitions in the West, he fled via East Berlin in 1961, shortly before the Wall went up. He was soon in Düsseldorf, in the thick of an avant-garde that was both piqued and excited by Pop art and the traditions of Dada. “Capitalist Realism,” he and some new friends, including the brilliant Sigmar Polke, termed their response, which, among other things, degraded the glossiness of advertising material to matte grunge. Richter took to painting copies of banal black-and-white photographs, smearing the paint to emphasize the change of (the) medium. Among a number of these in the show are paintings from family snapshots that touch on Richter’s and Germany’s dire past.
“One, “Uncle Rudi” (1965), is of a relative—in uniform and smiling goofily—who died fighting in the war. Another, “Aunt Marianne” (painted in 1965 and rendered as a luminous digital print in 2018), shows a woman cradling baby Gerhard in her arms; she was adjudged schizophrenic, imprisoned, and then killed in a Nazi eugenics program. Keeping company with those poignancies is “Mr. Heyde” (1965), taken from a news photograph of the concentration-camp psychiatrist Werner Heyde being arrested, in 1959, after fourteen years of maintaining a false identity. (He hanged himself in prison in 1964.) Richter wouldn’t have expected viewers to recognize those subjects readily, and he was at no pains to explain them. Their meaning stayed personal, with roots in his boyhood, when he was enlisted in the junior auxiliary of the Hitler Youth and his father served in the Wehrmacht. Not until “Birkenau” would he palpate the wound again.
“It feels heavy-handed of me (though on this occasion Richter quite asks for it) to be zeroing in on some specific content of his art, which always shades subjects with undecidable intention. That goes for early images of tabloid sensations, such as yearbook-style portraits of eight nurses who were murdered on a single night in Chicago, in 1966, and forty-eight deadpan copies of photographs of famous artists and intellectuals. The latter served, perhaps, as marmoreal father figures for a largely fatherless generation. (It’s estimated that more than four million German men died in the war.) Uncertainty clings, as well, to later works, including jittery cityscapes that may be bombed ruins or simply indistinct views of an intact metropolis; landscapes that could be either sarcastic or sincere (sic) revisitations to German Romanticism (I vote for wistful); funereal paintings of candles and skulls; and ravishing photo-realist pictures, true to the hues of color film, of subjects including members of his family. One of these last, from 1988, portraying his daughter Betty from behind, seems to (sic) me the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the last (sic) half century. It is not in the present show. Nor is “October 18, 1977,” Richter’s famous series drawn from photographs of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, in life and, as suicides in prison, death. Those darkling images will always tug at our general assessments of Richter. Whatever his reason for taking on a subject that was charged, at the time, with conflicting political passions, I believe that the work asserts an artist’s license to transcend partisan judgment, independent of opinions that may even include his own.
“Irony blankets Richter’s career. He is a darling of the contemporary art market, with his works selling at auction for tens of millions of dollars. But his longtime best friend, and a co-curator of this show, is the critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, a hard-bitten apostle of Frankfurt School anti-capitalist, all but anti-aesthetic, political theory. In a notorious interview, in 1986, Buchloh insisted on interpreting Richter’s art as (sic) historical critique skewering the bourgeois decadence of painting, and Richter placidly declared his wholehearted allegiance to Western painting’s grand tradition. Richter said, “The reason I don’t argue in ‘socio-political terms’ is that I want to produce a picture and not an ideology.” He declines to claim any subversive intent, even for his occasional work in odd formats, such as stark charts of random colors and the use of transparent glass in place of (the) canvas—two predilections that came together in his successful commission, in 2007, of an immense stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral, proving that the experiments had been exploratory rather than tendentious. I like to imagine Buchloh as a negative conscience perched on Richter’s shoulder, amusingly scandalized as the artist hews again and yet again to ancient values of meaningfulness and pleasure.
“While never forsaking representation—as seen at the Met Breuer in portraits of his third wife, Sabine Moritz, and their three children, which radiate Titianesque color—Richter took up chromatic abstraction in the seventies, overlaying brushed, slathered, and scraped swaths of paint. I remember hating those on my first sight of them, circa 1980. They seemed to me sloppy travesties of Abstract Expressionism, and pointless: inferior coals to the Newcastle of Willem de Kooning. Gradually, I caught their drift as pragmatic explorations of painterly phenomena: ur-paintings. Not only condoning but soliciting accident, Richter attends to the multifarious effects of layered paint that has been repeatedly smashed and dragged, wet-in-wet. He appraises the results with an exercise of taste, deciding what to keep and what to efface. In this, his true predecessor is Jackson Pollock, who, dripping paint, collaborated with chance and monitored the results.
“At last I saw, as I still see, Richter’s abstractions as miraculously, often staggeringly, beautiful, with an air of having come into being through a will of their own, happening to—rather than issuing from—their creator. They provide the chief pleasures of the show, which excludes the more brazen of his subjects—there are none of his early borrowings from pornography, for example—and the most seductive of his color-photograph transformations, including floral still-lifes. The selection favors eerie minor keys, as seems appropriate for being a retrospective bathed in the terrible resonance of “Birkenau.” ♦
Sitting in the garage in my favorite chair, I’m smoking an Isabela Serpentine. My eyelids are barely open. The roofers about two houses down are replacing the shingles. My God how this day is dragging. I can only make so many calls, send out so many texts and emails before I hit the wall. Damn virus. Suddenly I am shaken back from my somnambulist state with a notification “ding” from my phone, which prompts me to start reading a Times Literary Supplement book review by Ira Bashkow about the new work by Charles King that centers around the life of anthropologist, Franz Boas. The subhead explains its contents quite succinctly. “A story of race, sex, gender, and the discovery of culture.” Or better yet, “The man who opened up anthropology in America.” An apropos subject, I thought to myself. Culture. My eyelids begin to flutter shut. But with the cigar in hand, I dare not succumb to my natural instincts and continue to concentrate on the review. The cigar’s aroma fills the garage with an alluring bouquet of slowly burning tobacco as I notice my eyes turn to the subhead again and again, “Race, sex, gender . . . .” Three hot topics in today’s world of change. Or is culture the enemy? I can hear the muffled shots of nails being buried into the freshly revealed plywood that was simultaneously being covered over with felt weatherproofing paper. The sound of the nails piercing the wood is becoming louder and with the pace quickening, the resulting noise is beginning to wear on my nerves. I take a long draw of the Serpentine producing a rapid spicy sensation on my tongue. The weather outside the garage is warm – hot, I’m sure – for the roofers. Plus I have been smoking the cigar long before my tolerance for virtual visits began to wane so the concentration of nicotine begins to affect my perception of the flavors coming from the burning cigar. However, in this case, as with the line of Isabela cigars, the balance of nicotine, lush flavors, spice, and undefinable essences only complement the experience. It’s as if I were being hypnotized and wooed into the rhythm of the nail guns. A Glass-like symphony of smoke and sound. Rhythmically repetitive. I lean back in my chair, allowing the thick cloud of smoke just produced to drift back toward my face and into my nostrils. I further draw in the fragrant particles and for some reason begin thinking of a thick mango slurpy mixed with mature pineapple and guava. I tap off the ash – forgive me fellow aficionados, thus revealing a perfect conical shape of a glowing ember. The spice becomes intense on my tongue as the surfaces of my papillae begin to figuratively swerve back and forth duly accepting the fermented flavors of tobacco I am forcing upon them. My Serpentine is getting shorter and my sleepiness is beginning to abate. Johnny makes a tremendous line of cigars and in this case, his expertise has allowed me to soften my fixation on those three little words, “Race, sex, gender” and concentrate on the fullness of his hard work when blending. A small part of the wrapper lifts off this Nicaraguan delight. Maybe it’s making a statement of some kind. Making a point? I continue to read about Franz Boas. Was my experience insignificant when compared to the discoveries of this so-called “Father of Anthropology.” Hardly, I mused. And then I read this one paragraph written by the reviewer, Bashkow, “To understand others, Boas taught, would require more than casual observation and reliance on second-hand reports by colonial travellers (sic) and missionaries. It would need first-hand acquaintance, competence in the language the people spoke, immersion in their environment, and adapting one’s ‘own mind, so far as is feasible’, to ‘follow [their] lines of thought’ and ‘participate in [their] emotions.’” We don’t do that. We fight!! I continue to smoke my cigar. A fly is buzzing around seemingly trying to compete with the noise being made by the roofers’ automatic hammers. It only wants to land. Rest – be in a safe place. A few last long draws and I begin to feel like the fly. The taste of a fine cigar could cure cultural chaos. I only want to land. Rest – be in a safe place.
IrvCigarBroker 