To Hell With Poverty!

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According to my AdSense account, I have officially earned $0.01 -- MY FIRST PENNY! -- from this blog. That is also worth .033 Romanian Lei or 2.23 Hungarian Forint! HELL YES LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL! GONNA BUY ME A DRANK!!!

CRITICAL INQUIRY: Beers of Transylvania: Stejar

In this series, which takes a judicious eye toward Current Events, I will be bringing attention to the many beers native to Transylvania, my temporary home. Romanian beer is too criminally inexpensive, and I too dangerously unoccupied, to overlook this Important Issue.

Let us proceed. First, however, a few remarks.

Moving to East-Central Europe demands certain alterations in the way one drinks beer. Most positively, volume rises and price enters a tailspin. While the 12oz. bottle does not leave the scene (in a slightly smaller .33l version, which also comes as a glass), especially not when ordering at a café or lounge, it can be argued that the basic unit of beer increases to a generous 500ml. In Romania, in fact, it is quite popular to buy 2-liter plastic bottles of low-end beer, often for a fraction of the by-volume cost of what comes in glass or aluminum. But then, this generally is a region where one can easily purchase alarming quantities of wine, beer, and spirits – such as a whole liter of moonshine for around $3 – and forget about their depressingly low individual share of GDP.

The main trade-off, as I see it, of living in this wonderland of cheap suds is that variety, even in the big cities, is generally not on par with what the spoiled American beer-drinker can access at his or her local supermarket. At bars, do not hope to see a phalanx of gleaming tap-heads; at the store, come prepared to buy something in any flavor – as long as it’s lager or pilsner. To be fair, a hypermarket like my local Auchan can supply you with stout (Guinness) or wheat (something German), or limed-up Mexican beer, if you are willing to pay a little more. But for the most part it is variations on two themes, and you had damn well better like the tune.

That said, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and of course the Czech Republic (these being so far the only places of which I can speak from experience) are all felicitous places to find oneself with a beer in one’s hand. Let us look closely at one of those beers now, together.

* * * * * * *

STEJAR

Type: Pilsner
ABV: 5.5%
Manufacturer: Ursus / SABMiller
Price: 1/19/09: 1.68 RON = $0.51 @ Auchan (500 ML can)

Bearing as its name the Romanian word for “oak,” Stejar proudly markets itself as a beer for manly men – presumably for those, in particular, who reckon their tumescent members recall the limbs of that eponymous tree. To quote the SABMiller promo page:

Stejar Pilsner has an intense taste and provides a refreshing sensation and a ‘thirst for adventure’. It’s a mainstream beer, created for men who want more, who enjoy having fun and who live their life to the full.

Indeed, the can promises INGREDIENTE SUPERIOARE, CARACTER MASCULIN, and GUST INTENS. It is clear that the fate of an entire constellation of gender norms rests in Stejar’s tawny depths. But once loosed from its reasonably butch-looking can, Stejar gallops enthusiastically towards ambivalence. The aroma, while not exactly precious, strikes me as more floral than hoppy; rather more like mowing the lawn than panther-clubbing when it comes to a “thirst for adventure.” With regard to color, on the other hand, I think it is fair to say that Stejar has a respectably nutty-golden tan, as though reflecting the dermal effects of many hours of outdoor drudgery familiar to its targeted consumers. As for flavor, gust masculin must have something to do with its relative bitterness – which I would not describe as “full-bodied” or “robust,” but instead as “feigning emotional impenetrability” or “cry on your own fucking shoulder, Steaua's on the teevee.” This is not a sensitive beer, but neither is it the stern cock-clocking advertised by the SABMiller marketing combine. Still, at fifty Yanqui cents a can, there’s nothing to complain about, especially when at that price it gives a beer like Natty Ice even more reason for self-loathing.

Humble Pie, à la Emergency Preparedness

Every time I look over those optimistically illustrated safety cards they have on airplanes, I smirk (in spite of my own peril) at the idea that a plummeting jetliner might ever wind up resting placidly on a body of water. But I guess all that flotation impedementia I had once mocked came in handy yesterday for 155 people on board U.S. Airways flight 1549, when some birds ruined both of the plane's engines and the pilots had to take her into the Hudson. Shows what the hell I know -- but I am very happily wrong.

P33$ 4 R TYME!!!

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In Post-Kleptocratic Romania, Joke Tell YOU

Last night over drinks my new Romanian pal Mihai told me a joke that I thought I would relate here, as faithfully as possible, so as to give a taste of how the kids this side of the Gazprom pipeline like to get their giggles. It inexplicably guest-stars Barack Obama, I guess because a little of the Hope rubbed off on folks here, too. Mihai tells me it accurately describes certain aspects of law enforcement in Romania; it's pretty savvy about the USA, in any case.

One day, Barack Obama held a contest to see which of the world's intelligence services was the best. He set free a rabbit in the woods and told the contestants that whichever agency caught the rabbit first would be the winner and receive the grand prize.

The first to try their hand was the CIA. The Americans deployed their finest agents, who brought with them their best equipment. They scoured the forest floor for rabbit-prints, analyzed the forest air for rabbit pheromones, and kept vigil over the scene with their most advanced spy satellites. But after a week they could produce no results and declared that the rabbit just wasn't in the forest any longer.

Next up was the FSB (the successors of the KGB), and Obama released another rabbit into the forest. The Russian spies dressed up in tree costumes and erected carrot traps to lure the rabbit into their grasp. But despite their patience and discipline, a week passed and still they had found no rabbit. The prize would not be theirs.

Third and finally was the SRI (Serviciul Român de Informaţii), Romania's agency. Obama set a third rabbit free and told the SRI to succeed where the others had failed. The Romanian officers, wearing riot gear, spilled out of their paddy wagon. They swore and brandished their truncheons and shot tear gas wildly into the trees as they charged the forest. After three minutes a bear came running out, crying and waving his paws in surrender. "OK, OK, I admit it! I give up! I'm a rabbit -- I'M A RABBIT!!!"

The Seasons Don't Fear the Jenner

Being that, these days, I probably have more unclaimed time on my hands then since when I left the oral stage, I've become more intimate with the various blind alleys of the Internet in ways that I hadn't before. Laughing at misspelled birthday cakes, for instance. In days gone by I rarely, if ever, read the health columns of the New York Times, though maybe because I feared it would only increase my guilt for enjoying one drunken Kum-and-Go charbroil too many. But now endowed with greater liberty to follow idly whithersoever the little blue swatches of underlined text on the NYT may lead, whole new horizons of marginal knowledge have spread themselves wantonly before me.

Like today. After having wondered more than once to myself in the fall whether I should seek any additional vaccinations before setting up camp in Romania -- a needless, Othering concern, as it turns out -- I've learned now that more than a few Americans have decided that vaccines are to blame for their children's autism. Maybe it's the Black Ops neurotoxins in my MMR talking, but this whole time I had labored under the belief that maintaining the extinction of smallpox had some things going for it. After pressing the down-key a bunch of times while staring glazedly at this non-article from the august journal of medicine About.com, I remain unconvinced that my issue should not have to feel the kiss of the syringe, delivered by a lying son-of-a-bitch doctor ("This four-pronged bastard won't hurt!"), just like I did. 

Mostly, though, it strikes me that only in a dumbingly wealthy country like the United States could people take their immunity from epidemics for granted and demonize the very fucking thing that keeps their kids from going off to TB summer camp or living inside a goddamn space capsule. I have reason to suspect there is somewhat less hand-wringing of this kind in the good old "Global South."

(Non)Secrets of the Powerful, Part II

So I was going to post about finding what would have been my favorite Nixon moment yet, something more to nurture my enthusiasm for believing that Richard Milhous was the closest thing America has had to a Caesar -- somewhere between Tiberius and Nero, but less the "minnows" and plus a lot more carpet bombing. I had stumbled upon a blog post (here on the Fredösphere) about stretches of the White House Tapes in which Nixon exposes his inexplicable hatred of French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez and plots to use another French avant-gardist, Olivier Messiaen, as "a 'wedge' who could be used to divide and confuse his enemies." It was all too delightful and impossibly, fiendishly petty, and I thought sure I could make an interesting post out of it. 

But! Wanting to see the primary documents for myself, I looked in vain on the Nixon Library's site for mention of either Messiaen or Boulez. So I listened to audio excerpts of the White House Tapes from the precise days that Nixon was supposed to have made plans to break into the Darmstadt School, or mock Boulez with aide Charles Colson. And all I heard about was worthless George McGovern, because the author of the post that got me so excited had just substituted names and made up a phony context for the altered tape transcripts. Shenanigans called -- but well played, and I with an eggy face.

Oh well, dream deferred, but an object lesson in always checking your footnotes, even if there aren't any.

Secrets of the Powerful, Part I

Over the last eight years, the outgoing President and the (now all-but-vanished) coterie of his faithful have more than a few times offered up their misdeeds on the altar of History: "history will judge," "when the histories are written," and so on, in the usual hope that incompetence or wickedness today will be rewarded by ignorance tomorrow. It is a very convenient platitude. In addition to sitting at some temporal vanishing point of unknown but presumably sufficient distance -- that is, after the speaker has died and no longer capable of sensing judgment -- capital-H-history is a disembodied cosmic force. Its very abstraction implies no author but itself. But pace the Hegelians, History exists nowhere; historians, on the other hand, do. And I can tell you that there is nothing a historian likes better than a Bankers Box full of other people's paper. Despite its appeals to deific and self-writing History, the Bush administration has always known this.

Executive Order 13233, signed by the President in November, 2001, aimed to keep Presidential records out of the National Archives and safe from the prying eyes of historians. In sum, the Order allows Presidents and Vice-Presidents (this latter bit one of the Order's innovations) to withhold White House records in perpetuity. Previous regulations and Executive Orders, established after Watergate and during the Reagan era, laid out timelines for the release of records and placed constraints on the privileges of the Executive Branch to keep them obscure. It seems fair to assume that with this Order Bush, Cheney, and their advisers hoped not only to arrogate their deeds above the law of the present, but to deny any honest, damning evidence be presented in the future court of "History," whose hobbled verdict they hoped would acquit them. Not much of a surprise, perhaps, but a move painful in its simultaneous cowardice and conceit. 

Happy news, though! As the National Coalition for History -- which has been challenging the Bush records policy for years -- reports, the first act of our new House of Representatives was to push through H.R. 35, a bill that sets out to overturn E.O. 13233. The New York Times recently urged President-Elect Obama to speed the process along with an Executive Order of his own.

Here's hoping, then, that the Senate, the new President, or both will set the tone of a new administration by demolishing E.O. 13233 as soon as possible -- before too many records get pulped in the Bush retreat. There will be little responsible historical judgment without a responsible foundation of paper.

The Lighter Side of Ethnic Struggle

Irredente: muses, as ever.

"However, Zoltán Várady, a Catholic priest who experienced his being Hungarian intensively, had a completely individual initiative. He developed a new form of greeting to deepen patriotic feelings, which he published in a special booklet in 1938. The detailed description, the adjoining poems and the included photograph tell us that in order to greet someone in an irredentist was the person must make a small step forward with his right foot, lift his right hand with the open palm turned inwards and with a friendly look say "Resurrection!" or "Justice!", to which the other person will answer with similar motions "May God grant it!". With this Várady wanted the irredentist idea to reach every Hungarian and "the flames in the souls" to burn "the indifference in the hearts and the obstacles of new and imaginary borders..."

[Zeidler, Miklós. "Irredentism in Everyday Life in Hungary During the Interwar Period." Regio: Minorities, Politics, Society. Vol. 2, No. 1 (2002), 71-88]

Goetta: Corpus Christi Cincinnatarum?

Before my situation develops into a hostage crisis, i.e. that The Summer fails to show proof of (my) life to receive its princely demands for attention, I thought I should issue some existential proof of my own. That proof relates to an old theological tussle known as the Reformation, one particularly contentious aspect of which had to do with whether in the Sacrament the wine and bread truly were the blood and body of Christ, or mere representations. In this case (and I do not shy from blasphemy), the question is to what extent goetta, whose character I shall explain soon, is truly Catholicism in Cincinnati, or merely its representation.


Goetta , shown above, is, like Greek-immigrant chili, one of the hallmarks of Cincinnati culture and cuisine. It is a robust blend of ground pork, steel-cut oats, Old World Gemütlichkeit, and a studied indifference to one's cardiopulmonary infrastructure. I personally think it is delicious, and excellent as part of a hard-core, balls-to-the-wall breakfast.

Goetta's natural habitats include breakfast plates and lists contracting what practices and beliefs indicate how "you know you're from Cincinnati when..." It is served at Great American Ballpark as surely as hamburgers; and I wouldn't doubt that somewhere it is dyed orange and given black stripes to further glorify the criminally-inclined Bengals ("Better to play in Cincinnati than to serve in Heaven"). There are not one, but two "fests" dedicated to the advancement of goetta. (One of them, the original, held on the MAINSTRAßE in Covington, KY, which this author attended, is a dismal and tiny affair. Half of it consists of a saddening Renaissance Fair, and the other half a row of stalls selling Goetta in a surprisingly limited range of forms.)


But this pervasiveness has been, in my experience, far subtler than the thorough (and sometimes spectacular) infiltration of Skyline (chili), Graeter's (ice cream), and the Bengals (warrior-felon cult). After all, I have never seen entire RVs painted in goetta colors, nor goetta tubes displayed as decals on other vehicles, much less as hats or fluffy tiger-tails attached to the bumpers of beat-up Chevys. Goetta, that is, cannot seem to rise above class the way that other of Cincinnati's institutions can.

The reason, I have found, is because goetta is utterly tied up with German Catholicism, historically the single greatest cultural influence on pre-war Cincinnati. It is an import, like the breweries and sausage production that used to flourish here; but it has the universal appeal of neither. Goetta occupies the peripheral refrigerated shelves at Kroger, sitting high up in tight enclaves near the southern-style sausage, the lard, and other slightly disreputable meats; it is a culinary subculture, and is even viewed by some to be a questionable lifestyle choice. But metts (bigger, fatter, juicier, redder hot dogs) and beer, while more conspicuously representing the German-Catholic immigrant heritage that seems surprisingly faded here, do not stand in for a unique culture the way that goetta's humble, unrefined greasiness does. Lager and sausages are as American, as accepted, as anything else. But goetta, as The Queen of Eyes has so astutely noted, is peasant food. It is swine and grain, cut into slabs and fried. It reeks of Swabia. There is nothing industrious or Protestant about it; it does not sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" or nail manifestos to cathedral doors. It IS superstitious; it DOES believe in saints; it IS nutrition for performing Good Works. It is, as I have known it, the very Host of Catholicism in Cincinnati.