#the only up side is they casted an actual native american for Jacob

[green-tea-crow]

Twilight gets a remake set in 202x, they cast some popular actors who are ten years older than the characters and play them like every romantic drama MCs ever, it includes everything that's popular now, or has been like a year ago, clothing trends, tiktok whatevers, bad political references and the wanna-be "wokeness", all that terrible remake stuff. It's horrible, it flops, everyone hates it. But it still gets a second movie

[mccoyyy]

moving this to my new blog so I can pin it again lol

@stregoni-benefici you are completely correct but I just wanted to expand on this a little bit - also i’m putting this under a read more cause this got a lot longer than i originally thought it would be

sexism: smeyers treatment of female characters throughout the entire series is extremely problematic. like you don’t even need to read deep into the books to see that. the backstories of all her female characters all involve some form of trauma and are significantly more violent than the male vampires (Rosalie and Esme enduring physical/sexual assault meanwhile Edward dies of the flu and Emmett gets vibe checked by a bear).

she also creates the idea that a woman isn’t complete without children/being a mother. every female vampire in the series is desperate for children yet can’t, its mentioned in pretty much every book and extreme emphasis is placed on how tragic this is. a female character wanting children isn’t wrong or sexist at all but the way its written in twilight makes it seem like its something a woman has to do in order to be happy and smeyer pretty much cements this idea by making Bella suddenly desperate to have Renesmee despite showing no interest in children/audibly voicing her thoughts against having children in eclipse and the start of breaking dawn (i’m pretty sure Bella has a line of dialogue in the books where she says something like she didn’t realise it was something she wanted/needed until it happened bit I’m not sure I try not to read/think about breaking dawn)

there’s also the way she writes female characters, specifically Rosalie. its mentioned throughout the series that Rosalie has extreme mechanical skills and multiple degrees in STEM fields but its barely ever shown, and instead her characterisation focuses on being obsessed with her looks (first couple pages of this, written by smeyer for new moon), and being a ‘stereotypical bitch’. for the first three books most of her character/dialogue is based on being cold and rude to Bella. She is unnecessarily painted as the villain for having different views on Bella (quite literally) giving up her life and future to be with a man (which is a whole other can of worms). the same is done to the character of Leah in eclipse/breaking dawn. Leah is a woman in the Quileute Tribe, she has been severely affected by the Cullen’s presence in the area and is painted as a character that the reader is supposed to dislike simply because she doesn’t like Bella/the Cullen’s despite having extremely valid reasons not to

anti-Native - smeyers treatment of native tribes is horrendous. she has profited fr years off of of native american culture for years and has done so without any acknowledgements. furthermore, she also demonises native american teens (especially in new moon) by calling them wild, violent, dangerous and out of control and then uses these stereotypes to create a contrast between the self control and patience of the Cullen’s and make them seem more like the good guys, and the wolf pack being lesser. She does this again with the treatment of Jacobs character in new moon and especially eclipse.

Jacob starts off in new moon as Bella’s best friend. he helps Bella come out of a severe depression caused when Edward left at the start of the book. however in eclipse his character makes a complete flip and he becomes moody, temperamental, argumentative and disrespectful of Bella’s boundaries. his character becomes unrecognisable and despite smeyers claims of a love triangle, it is obvious what the outcome will be. I have seen countless instances of people on this site claiming they hate Jacob because he is a dick/disrespectful/just as unhealthy as Edward. this was done on purpose by smeyer as she uses Jacob to make Edward seem like the obvious and correct choice for Bella. if you need more proof of this, take the scene where Jacob kisses Bella without her consent and she breaks her hand when punching him, Edward swoops in and almost gets into a fight with Jacob for touching Bella without her consent. this is an obvious attempt to make Jacob seem like the villain and Edward the white saviour

there’s also the treatment of the native characters by the white characters in the books. multiple times in the series, the native characters are called/compared to dogs/brutes and have a distinct unpleasant smell. I don’t think I need to explain how this is racist. the pack also helps the Cullen’s/saves Bella’s lives and never receive any acknowledgement/are treated any better by the Cullen’s/anyone really. the pack are only ever used as a way to make the Cullen’s look better.

there’s also some pretty obvious similarities to colonisation with the Cullen’s entering Quiluete lands which then forces them to start phasing into wolves (and I’m pretty sure none of the pack actually want to start phasing). also, remember Leah? the only female member of the wolf pack? because of the change she effectively can’t have children? that has implications.

and to top it all off, after doing all that, smeyer has never once addressed this or even acknowledged the Quileute Tribe.

pedophilic - I mean even without mentioning breaking dawn its pretty awful. first of all you’ve got the blatant sexualisation of minors throughout the entire series. Edward is 17 throughout the series and smeyer is writing literal paragraphs about his chiselled abs. Jacob is 16/17 when she has him running about forks topless with a 6 pack. this is way more apparent in the movies but its still a huge issue in the books and lead to Taylor Lautner being confronted by adult fans trying to get him to sign their underwear, and being forced into being shirtless for most of the movies which made him extremely uncomfortable (Elizabeth Reaser (Esme) briefly talks about this in the ID10T podcast on spotify). and just as a reminder, Taylor was 16 when the first one was filmed and 17 for the second.

Breaking Dawn is a whole other can of worms. the glaringly obvious issue is Jacob imprinting on a literal newborn baby. now the concept of imprinting itself has racist elements to it, but its heavily implied in the series that imprinting will inevitably lead to a romantic relationship. Jacob imprinting on Renesmee and waiting until she is old enough to enter into a romantic relationship (never mind the fact that shes ‘old enough’ she will still technically be 5) is pretty much grooming. The same happens with Quil and his imprint, Claire (a two year old) where I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in breaking dawn where Jacob and Leah are watching Quil play with Claire and talking about how Quil isn’t going to date anyone because he and Claire are ‘pretty much inevitable’ (i might be wrong though, like I said I try not to read/think about breaking dawn)

smeyer has also written a spin off book (its like 250 odd pages) called the short second life of Bree Tanner (Bree is that newborn vampire killed after the battle in eclipse by the Volturi btw). In this book, Bree is 15 almost 16, and another character Diego is 18 which is definitely pushing the boundaries of ok. (also as a side note, funny how Bree and Jacob are literally the same age and smeyer states multiple times how Bree deserved better and is only a child (who straight up kills people), yet when it comes to Jacob he has to be a responsible adult and is vilified for every mistake he makes)

racist - smeyer refused to let Catherine Hardwicke (director of the first twilight) have a diverse cast because she ‘imagined them a certain way’ (white) and it was a fight to get Edi Gathegi cast as Laurent and had to compromise with smeyer to make Bella’s friend group more diverse. this woman straight up refused to hire more diverse actors and only agreed to when they were side characters/villains.

Also in the official companion book/guide to twilight, smeyer literally writes that vampire venom makes you white

‘the venom leeches all pigmentation from the skin into a more indestructable vampire form…regardless of original ethnicity a vampires skin will be exceptionally pale’ (official illustrated guide pg.69)

this is a whole lot of bullshit cause she is literally whitewashing characters, but when you pair this with the idea that vampires possess inhuman levels of beauty it becomes extremely problematic and implies that being pale/white is more beautiful than darker skin tones.

also, if we go back to Laurent’s character for a second. so Laurent is one of the only characters who isn’t described as white (in the books he is described as having a pale olive skin tone) and in the first book he comes across as pretty reasonable (warning carlisle about James/Victoria, travels up to Denali and tries out the veggie lifestyle) but in new moon, his characterisation pulls a 180° (sensing a theme here) and is suddenly trying to kill Bella as a favour to Victoria and is Evil™ despite in the first book he literally says to Carlisle he didn’t particularly like travelling with James/Victoria and was only really doing it for convenience. where did this undying loyalty come from? yet again, smeyer is completely disregarding established characterisation in POC characters specifically to villainise them.

and finally, we have Jasper. for some reason (that reason being that she is racist) smeyer decides to make Jasper a confederate soldier in his human life. if you don’t have a lot of knowledge on the american civil war, the confederacy were the side of the US that seceded from the union in order to keep their slaves. Jasper was a confederate soldier, and not just any soldier, but a major. Jasper was a major in an army that fought for 4 years to keep the existence of slavery (and don’t even try to say that slavery wasn’t the root cause of the civil war. states rights aye? states rights to do what). now there’s an argument out there made by certain fans that a lot of people joined the confederate army out of pride/were forced into it cause of conscription to try and head canon the racism away but like that doesn’t matter. there was literally no need to make jasper a confederate in the first place. if she was so desperate to have a civil war vampire then she could have made him a member of the union. its been common knowledge that the confederacy was racist for a long time now, smeyer has absolutely no excuses here.

a lot of these issues overlap and I have probably missed heaps of issues (so feel free to add on) but hope this helps explain why smeyer can *ahem* get tae absolute fuck

[haikyuuwaifu]

Also, recently found out something. You know when they are all at the beach and Bella is in the van and Jacob and his friends come up? The friend that’s standing closest to Bella was originally supposed to play Jacob but refused the role because Smeyer wanted him to cut his hair for it. They wanted him, a Native American man, to cut his hair for a role when they KNOW it’s culturally important to us. We only cut our hair when a loved one dies. They could’ve easily given him a short wig but NO. Instead they casted a white man, Taylor, to play Jacob. It infuriates me to no end.

I looked it up a few days ago, and according to Taylor Laurent; on mother’s side they’ve got “distant” ties to the Potawatomi and Odawa tribes.

I think MOST the actors cast for the Qulieute tribe and those that played the characters of the pack members were actually Native American.

The first film came out in 2008, so I’m gonna be honest and tell you I’m not entirely surprised that they overlooked something like that. Hollywood is only now making efforts to be more “culturally aware” and “accurate” but imagine how long it actually took them to get there?

Like they casted Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese woman in the live-action Ghost in the Shell. Avatar the last air bender was absolute trash, and I dunno WHY they chose to split the nations into actual races. The death note live-action. That shit is still happening and it’s wild to me that they just keep getting away with it.

ON TOP OF THAT:

Stephanie Meyer is just…I dunno, but to me she’s funky 😤

[geniejackman]

Recasting Twilight

Okay everyone, buckle yourselves in. It’s quarantine and I have absolutely nothing better to do, so here we are! I decided to re-read Twilight for the first time in years, and it got me thinking about who could potentially be cast in the various roles if the book were remade as a film/mini-series today! (well, you know, not TODAY today, because corona). 

Just a disclaimer- I won’t be casting any of the Forks High Students or the Volturi guard as I believe those should be opportunities for unknown actors. Same goes for Jacob and the Quileutes. Those roles should absolutely go to actors of Native American ancestry.

Please keep in mind that these are just my opinions, I’m in no way trying to infer that the original cast is bad. This is just something that I’ve been toying with in order to keep myself entertained, and for the general amusement of the 3 of you that follow me. I’ll continue on with the other books in separate posts if I feel like I have it in me after finishing this one up. Here we go! 

Bella Swan - Anya Taylor-Joy

I’ve been fascinated by her ever since the one-two punch of The Witch and Split. She definitely has the capacity to get across the emotions of the character through facial expressions alone. She also has an understated beauty and charm that just seems very Bella.

Edward Cullen - KJ Apa

It’s all about the jawline baby...

Oh, okay, I guess I should actually list a few legitimate reasons.

Edward is described as having bronze colored hair in the book, which KJ definitely pulls off better than any real human should be able to. He’s also got the tense, sometimes overly-serious attitude of Edward down, while still having a killer smile and a great sense of humor.

Alice Cullen - Lana Condor

I know what you’re thinking, an Asian Alice?

Hear me out: Alice is petite, quirky, and full of energy and fun. Lana Condor fits that description to a T. She’s also dazzling, and would look great with the pixie hairdo. Also, like, all the Cullen kids are adopted, and the entire town of Forks knows they’re adopted, so there’s no need to make them all defacto white just because the parents are. Plus, look at her! She’s so darn cute! But she could also play the scenes where she needs to be scary and intimidating very well.

Rosalie Cullen - Dianna Agron

I know I’m about to fully out myself as a Glee stan (seasons 1-3 anyway), but Dianna has always been what comes to my mind when I think of breathtaking blondes. Rosalie is described in the books as the most beautiful person Bella has ever seen, almost too perfect. Diana is definitely that. She can play the mean girl, but she can also be snarky and bad-ass. She’s a little older than the rest of the cast playing the teens, but have you seen pics of her lately? The woman never ages. Almost like she’s a real vam... no... it couldn’t be...

Emmett Cullen - Noah Centineo

So I know Emmett isn’t a HUGE role, and Noah is a pretty big Hollywood heart-throb these days, but maybe he wouldn’t mind having a smaller role in what would definitely be a big-budget film/series. He’s a cutie and handsome as hell, but he’s also playful and tough like Emmett. I’m sure he’d also have a lot of fun in the fight scenes.

Jasper Cullen - Dacre Montgomery

After Stranger Things, I’m sure we’re all eager to see Dacre take on more high-profile roles. I think he could do a lot with Jasper both in the early films when he’s supposed to be slightly more demure and apart from the others, and then later when his leadership skills are called on. Plus, he and Lana would be adorable!!!

Carlisle Cullen - Matthew Goode

I’m taking a slightly different approach from the films with the casting for the parents from the original film, we’re going younger with Carlisle and Esme this time around in order to stay more accurate to the source material. In the books, Carlisle was 23 when you was changed, so if you think about it Matthew Goode is actually pretty old for the part (42). However, he can definitely appear younger than he is, all while giving the feeling that he’s lived hundreds of years. Plus, this is the guy that’s supposedly even more handsome than Edward, and Matthew definitely has the looks and the charm to pull that off. 

Esme Cullen - Michelle Cockery 

Esme is described by Bella as having a heart-shaped face with Silent Movie Star looks. Michelle literally looks like she’s stepped off an Old Hollywood set, and she’s so classically beautiful. Also, it would be interesting seeing her play a sweeter, kinder figure than we’re used to seeing on Downton Abbey. She has well-established chemistry with Matthew Goode from working with him on Downton, so they’d be very believable as the Cullens Mom & Dad. 

Charlie Swan - Dylan McDermott 

Yes, it’s the “20 Dollars? What do you need 10 Dollars for?” dad from Perks of Being a Wallflower. Dylan has experience playing dads, but he’s also played romantic figures, so you can see what would make 18-year-old Renee leave the big city. 

Renee - Melanie Lynskey 

Not only does Melanie really look like Anya, but she also NEVER. AGES. So she definitely can pull off the young-mom look. She’s also got this naive sweetness in all the characters she plays that is perfect for Renee. 

James - Jonathan Groff

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Not my sweet innocent Groffsauce, not my happy-go-lucky King George/Kristoff/Jesse St. James. Hear me out though- despite the ‘nice’ characters he plays, I feel like there’s a dark side to Jonathan that would be perfect for James. Also, aside from some snarls and dirty looks when the bad guys first meet the Cullens in the baseball field, James isn’t all that outlandishly evil. Bella notes that his voice is fairly ordinary, almost soothing. Jonathan definitely has that, and he’d have a lot of fun with the snarky lines and the ironic nature of the character. 

Victoria - Mary Kate Wiles

Mary Kate is more of an Indie Actress, but I think she would bring something really unique to this big-budget-extravaganza. She can play seductive, sassy, and high-energy in the baseball field scene, and then she can transform into the vengeful, focused, crazed-killer in the later portions. Plus, it’s about time MK got some high-profile roles! 

Laurent - Louis Garrel 

Just what we need to finish off this first post, a seductive Frenchmen! Louis has the perfect look and a great accent for Laurent, and I think he would be amazing in the scene with Bella in ‘New Moon’. Honestly, after ‘Little Women’, I just need to see more of him in main-stream Hollywood. 

That’s all for now! Like I said, we’ll see if I can work up the energy to cast ‘New Moon’, ‘Eclipse’, and ‘Breaking Dawn’! Let me know what you think of my choices. Who’s your dream cast?? 

[pastorralffriedrichs]

9 Examples of Thanksgiving in the Bible

With promises of really great deals on Black Friday littered between college football timeouts, the meaning of Thanksgiving sometimes gets missed. We pause to give thanks for the food, family members and friends gathered around the table in the midst of preparing elaborate meals and navigating family relations. But giving thanks isn’t a practice reserved for a single day each year. It has deeper spiritual significance and benefits that ring true long after the leftovers are consumed.

Gratitude is a heart tenderizer. It keeps our eyes focused on God, the source of all good gifts. It keeps our hearts open, and with open hearts, the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control—have ample room to grow.

Here are nine examples of thanksgiving in the Bible that have nothing to do with pilgrims or Native Americans, turkey, or touchdowns:

1. Thanksgiving When Something Big Happens

The Red Sea just parted. Pharaoh’s army disappeared in its waves. And the Israelites stand in awe on the other side of slavery — free at last, free at last. Moses and his sister, Miriam sing a song (the “song of the sea”) about the victory, including these lines from Exodus 15:2 (NIV):

The Lord is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

The song of the sea is one of the oldest surviving texts describing the Exodus, possibly written as many as three thousand years ago. When something significant happens in our lives, it seems embedded in our DNA to celebrate with song. Songs become landmarks in our memory, resurrecting decades later and returning delight to our eyes, thanksgiving to our hearts.

The Song of Moses and Miriam

Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD: “I will sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea. “The LORD is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he has hurled into the sea. The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea. The deep waters have covered them; they sank to the depths like a stone. Your right hand, LORD, was majestic in power. Your right hand, LORD, shattered the enemy. “In the greatness of your majesty you threw down those who opposed you. You unleashed your burning anger; it consumed them like stubble. By the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up. The surging waters stood up like a wall; the deep waters congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy boasted, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake them. I will divide the spoils; I will gorge myself on them. I will draw my sword and my hand will destroy them.’ But you blew with your breath, and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who among the gods is like you, LORD? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders? “You stretch out your right hand, and the earth swallows your enemies. In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling. The nations will hear and tremble; anguish will grip the people of Philistia. The chiefs of Edom will be terrified, the leaders of Moab will be seized with trembling, the people of Canaan will melt away; terror and dread will fall on them. By the power of your arm they will be as still as a stone— until your people pass by, LORD, until the people you bought pass by. You will bring them in and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance— the place, LORD, you made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, Lord, your hands established. “The LORD reigns for ever and ever.” When Pharaoh’s horses, chariots and horsemen went into the sea, the LORD brought the waters of the sea back over them, but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground. Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.”

2. Thanksgiving in the Face of the Unknown

In times of uncertainty, it may seem strange to turn to gratitude, but think about it: when else do we need to rely on God most except when faced with the unknown? Mary’s song, recorded after her encounter with her cousin Elizabeth, is a perfect example of the kind of praise we can give when the future looks uncertain. For being pregnant out of wedlock, Mary could have been shunned. Mary could have been cast out by her family. Mary could have been condemned to death. And yet Mary gives thanks for this new thing, this unexpected gift. You can read her song in Luke 1:46-55.

Mary’s Song

And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me — holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.” Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home.

3. Thanksgiving in Lament

Over and over again, the psalms show us what it means to be thankful, even in times of fear, sadness, and grief. Gratitude draws our eyes away from the pain, terror, and anxiety of loss and helps us focus on the gifts of this world, moving us forward along the healing process.

After he loses his family, his wife, his property, and his health, Job, the sufferer of sufferers, cries out, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” (Job 1:21, NIV)

Psalms that demonstrate this include Psalm 22 (which is what Jesus quoted from the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and Psalm 69.

Psalm 22 starts in anguish and suffering, but takes a turn toward the end when David writes,

"I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you. You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel! For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help."

Psalm 69:29-36 reads:

"But as for me, afflicted and in pain— may your salvation, God, protect me. I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving. This will please the LORD more than an ox, more than a bull with its horns and hooves. The poor will see and be glad— you who seek God, may your hearts live! The LORD hears the needy and does not despise his captive people. Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and all that move in them, for God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah. Then people will settle there and possess it; the children of his servants will inherit it, and those who love his name will dwell there."

4. Thanksgiving When You Don’t Feel Like It

Sometimes God feels distant or silent. When this happens in my life, the full emotions of joy, empathy, grief, and anger seem to level out to monotony, routine, and boredom. If God seems distant, the desire to praise him and give thanks for the routine just isn’t as exciting as the other seasons, when things are good, life is full, joy is easy.

Yet again, the Bible shows us thanksgiving as a response to God, even when he’s silent, even when we don’t feel like it. This sacrifice of thanksgiving — and it is a sacrifice, mustering up the habit of praise if your heart isn’t in it — drags you, step by step, back into the presence of the Lord.

Read Psalm 13 if you’re feeling distant from God.

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise, for he has been good to me.

5. Thanksgiving in Contrast to Our Current Circumstances

There are also times when life just doesn’t seem like a season for gratitude. Maybe you have a chronic illness. Maybe you’re caring for an elderly parent or a special needs child. Thankfulness for these circumstances - even when each day brings fresh challenges — helps us to find hope and meaning. Paul writes to the church in Rome, “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

Similarly in Philippians 1:12-21 Paul wrote from prison,

Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear. It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and God’s provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is

Christ and die to gain

6. Thanksgiving as a Community

Gratitude collectively as a family or a community is a tremendous equalizer — when differences of political or religious or cultural opinion and stance are present, gratitude helps us to focus on the areas of our relationships that matter the most. It’s hard to be grateful for each other and still wield our theological, political, and cultural weapons.

The Jewish tradition includes several feasts as a form of remembrance. The Passover meal with Jesus and his apostles, the Feast of Tabernacles, and more are all examples in Scripture of the community of believers coming together to remember the past and respond in gratitude to God. Read about the Last Supper in Mark 14:

The Last Supper

On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?” So he sent two of his disciples, telling them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. Say to the owner of the house he enters, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.” The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. When evening came, Jesus arrived with the Twelve. While they were reclining at the table eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me—one who is eating with me.” They were saddened, and one by one they said to him, “Surely you don’t mean me?” “It is one of the Twelve,” he replied, “one who dips bread into the bowl with me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.” While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. “Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

7. Thanksgiving for Others

At the start of each of the letters from Paul sent throughout the first century following Jesus’ resurrection, Paul expresses his thanks for the people. “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world,” Paul writes in Romans 1:8. “I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus,” he writes to the church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 1:4. “I thank my God every time I remember you,” he tells the church in Philippi in Philippians 1:3. “I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your love for all his holy people and your faith in the Lord Jesus,” he says to the folks addressed in Philemon 1:4-5.

There’s something about expressing your gratitude for a person — not just saying thank you when they do something, but saying thank you for just being — that forms a bond of trust in your relationship. It acknowledges a particular characteristic about a person that raises their esteem in the way Paul says we ought to encourage one another or build one another up. Gratitude for another person may be one of the most impactful and practical ways we can build one another up.

8. Thanksgiving Rituals and Touchstones

After Joshua and the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground, Joshua instructed the chief priests of the 12 tribes of Israel to gather up 12 stones from the Jordan. They set up these stones at Gilgal. Then Joshua told the Israelites, “In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over” (Joshua 4:21-23).

The traditions we enact with friends and family are perhaps one of the most obvious forms of thanksgiving. Traditions performed together spotlight seasons of our lives in which we’ve seen God active and present in our lives. They hold the record of years past, when the children were younger, when we all were together, when great-grandpa was alive, and so on. They provide opportunities to reminisce.

When we “always” do this particular act (praying together before a Thanksgiving meal, eating together at Aunt Sue’s, stating what we’re grateful for, making the traditional turkey meal or partaking in grandma’s passed down recipe for pumpkin pie), we create a spirit of unity, one that connects us to the past and manifests thankfulness.

9. Thanksgiving in God’s Presence

And then there’s Sunday morning. Then there are the times we gather together as a community of believers. Then there are the times we walk in the woods, wander along the coast, stare into the sky, watch the leaves shift in the trees, and wonder, awe, and joy bubble up. Wherever you find yourself deeply connected to God — in nature, in a chapel, in your backyard, in silent meditation — is an opportunity for gratitude.

When the Ark of the Covenant is brought back to Jerusalem, the whole population of Israel sings its thanks. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever.” (1 Chronicles 16:34). When we are in alignment with God, walking in the Way, it’s a time to give thanks. Life is full, life is good, and his love endures forever.

Revelation 7:9-12 points forward,

The Great Multitude in White Robes

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying:

“Amen!

Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!”

#takeyourlifebacktodayshow

[theliterateape]

From the Archives: Unpacking Branson: A Thanksgiving Improbability

By Don Hall

For Thanksgiving in 2012, I was single and Mom decided that I should come out to my step-sister's place in Branson, Missouri for a good old-fashioned country Thanksgiving. The carrot was family. The stick was Missouri.

In the late 1960s it was pretty much a tiny city in the Ozarks known for roadside stands peddling wares that proliferated the hillbilly stereotype. And, sure enough, there are still today roadside stands that exist only to continue to make fun of that stereotype. It's an odd thing to walk into a business in the middle of the Ozarks that sells you the stereotype it tries to escape from. Like buying a taxi cab medallion from an East Indian store or an “I’m a Wetback” T-shirt in a store that sells Mexican merchandise.

It is said you cannot judge a book by its cover.

This is true most of the time, but there are some things you can judge immediately by its cover and pretty much know what your getting.

An Ann Coulter book. Sean Hannity. A FOX News broadcast. Great America. Applebee's.

I assumed that Branson, Missouri would fall into this latter category. I was right and wrong. And the complexities made it a real trip to remember.

Branson is where the Beverly Hillbillies came from before moving to California.

A winding series of roads littered with signs and theaters and restaurants. Lots of bumper stickers that declare “I’d Rather Be Dead Than SOCIALIST” and random tributes to past GOP glory. In the three days we trucked around the city, I counted perhaps one hundred people of color the entire time — I didn't start the trip by calculating this but after a bit, it was hard to escape. Thousands of old white people with canes and wheelchairs abounded but that doesn't really look that much different than Navy Pier or the audience at Chicago Shakes — old white people like to be tourists and Branson is, after all, a haven of tourism.

My step-sister, Hannah, tells me that the crack business booms among the residents of Branson and there is evidence around if you’re looking for it. The place is slightly schizophrenic in its place as a home to rednecks and hillbillies while trying desperately to distance itself from that by appealing to the tourist trade. There are places that stink of what one expects in Ozarks — a biker bar called the Hawg Trough that even my pro-GOP brother-in-law avoids and a Smoke Shop that doesn't sell cigarettes and has a pit bull guarding the door. But there are surprises that popped up during my three-day Thanksgiving vacation that defied my pre-judged expectations.

The surprises came in weird ways. When I arrived, we ate at a place called the Rowdy Beaver — a place with T-shirts that trumpeted “I Like Bald Beaver” and “That's A Mighty Nice Beaver” and had washboard walls. The thing that surprised was that the food was out of this world. It was delicious and well prepared and not at all what I expected. “Our chef prepares everything from fresh ingredients,” trumpeted our waitress who seemed completely fine with her job at a place filled with such juvenile innuendo.

The Hollywood Wax Museum was fun but the wax figures left me a bit wanting — a frequent refrain of our visit was my niece saying “Who's that?” and me doing my best to figure it out. I tried to convince my family to go to Silver Dollar City so I could find and steal a urinal cake but it was $60 per person and even I couldn't argue that $300 was reasonable for me to complete a toilet cookie tale. We had tickets to a magic show billed as the World's Largest (by the way, every attraction in Branson is billed as “Show of the Year,” “The Most Amazing in the World,” and “Mindblowing”) but the show was cancelled due to illness. Turns out Kirby VanBurch’s greatest trick is to take your money and disappear.

Our replacement show for the afternoon was going to be either Jim Stafford (I desperately wanted to see this) or SIX (the nieces had heard it was awesome). Stafford only did an 8 p.m. show, so SIX at the Mickey Gilley Theater it was.

SIX is six middle-aged brothers who debuted on the Donnie and Marie Show and have fashioned themselves as sort of an older version of an a cappella boy band. As soon as they started with a cheeseball version of Don’t Stop Believin’, Hannah and I turned to each other with a look of pained resignation. These guys had pretty good voices and the arrangements were fine but the self-consciously hip pose and cornball attempts at cool banter was unbearable. I learned that wanting to see an awful Branson show and actually sitting through one are two different things. I also learned that I will never, as a middle-aged white guy, ever use the words “homie” or “peeps” ever again. To be fair, the second act was better — a selection of Christmas songs and a tribute to their dead mother. Apparently this tiny woman had ten children, all boys, and I suspect she isn't dead but just got the fuck out of there before having to bear an eleventh kid. But the damage of the first act left me scarred and a little terrified of that evening’s show — Legends at the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater.

Legends is a show that debuted in Vegas and moved to Branson. It is a rotating cast of celebrity impersonators ranging from Barry White, Marilynn Monroe and Tim McGraw to the staples of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Our bill was George Strait, Whitney Houston, the Blues Brothers, Liberace and Elvis. As we entered and sat down, once again surrounded by octogenarians, I steeled myself. This was going to be fucking awful.

And it wasn’t.

Really. In fact, it was a blast. The Whitney Houston knocked it out of the park, Liberace was funny but completely inappropriate in a callback to the dark days of The Gay Closet and the Elvis impersonator was so fucking good, if we had been sitting in the nose bleeds it would’ve been like actually seeing Elvis live. My mom, a huge Elvis fan from when he was alive, commented that he was the best Elvis impersonator she had ever seen. Hell, even my teenaged nieces enjoyed the show.

But we saved the best, most Branson-y show for Saturday. Yakov Smirnoff. Holy shit. I couldn’t wait. I was absolutely certain it would embody everything I expected Branson to be — cheesy, cloying, the very portrait of a has-been celebrity stretching out his 15 minutes of fame as paper thin as he could in the heart of the Vegas of the Ozarks. We were greeted by a giant Yakov head making awful jokes about... the size of his head! Inside, it turned out that Yakov was a painter and had his paintings for sale!

The beginning of the show was the longest version of the national anthem I’ve ever heard (who know there were, like, nine verses?) and then I was hit with another fucking surprise. On the video screens came an old Paul Harvey “The Rest of the Story” about a painter known as Jacob who painted and commissioned a painting in tribute to the fallen at Ground Zero in NYC following the Attacks of 9/11.  Painted on the side of a building overlooking the rubble, it was the backdrop to the first anniversary of the attacks. The painter was an anonymous Yakov Smirnoff. He paid for the commission out of his own pocket.

Some of his show was what I expected: a revisitation of his “What a Country!” schtick from the ’80s—a sketch of him as the president answering questions from the audience, and he actually quoted the Lee Greenwood God Bless the U.S.A. as a closer. But other parts were not at all what I anticipated. Turns out that Yakov went out and got a Master's Degree in psychology and decided that his show could also serve as a relationship counseling session as well. Sort of like Defending the Caveman meets a less arrogant Dr. Phill with the takeaway being that we begin relationships laughing and giving each other little gifts and that, if we simply return to giving each other gifts and finding laughter in our relationships, we’ll be happier, healthier people.

Was it a great show? Not really. The dancers were cheesy and only there to fill time, the jokes were funny in a “Yeah, I remember that one” sort of way, the political stuff was tame (although at one point, Yakov asked the audience who was happy with the results of the latest election — a smattering of applause that included my mother and I enthusiastically cheering — and who was ticked off by it — a thundering, slightly ugly ovation — with the Russian comic commenting “Yeah, that's about even...”) and the recurring pro-America stuff was hard to hear after a while. But the thing is... I liked him.

I mean, I really liked the guy. He was so overwhelmingly sincere and genuine. Christ, I wanted to hug him. And, while his show is corny and inoffensive and gentle and perfect for the Branson tourist crowd, this is a guy who lives in Branson, Missouri suggesting that people spend time laughing and loving one another instead of being shitbags.

Prejudice is a funny thing. Judging books by their covers is what we do as people. I imagine it’s a hard drive instinct. But, as I am often heard saying, while we are all unique and precious snowflakes and each of us is completely distinct, we are all made of fucking snow. We all are simply people trying our best to get along in the world. Yes, that means that our baser, uglier instincts come to play like ordinary people rioting in a Walmart on Black Friday to get a discount on a portable DVD player. It also means that our better, more generous nature comes into play, and sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even in Red State Hell, Yakov Smirnoff is telling thousands of people every week to just be fucking nicer to each other.

On Thanksgiving, the point is to be with friends or family and celebrate those things in our lives we are (or should be) thankful for. Sure, the holiday is laden with cultural markers that include the genocide of the Native Americans and our national quest to bequeath every American with diabetes but the point is gratitude. Gratitude can come from a lot of places and I’m thankful to remember the lessons I learned in Branson. 

[ageeksnerdyworld]

I can’t fucking stand when somebody claims whitewashing when nothing of the sort happened. I literally just saw a series of posts where somebody did this and they might’ve been also claiming that it was racist but I’m not sure.

Bitch listen up!

LISTEN THE FUCK UP!!

Whitewashing is when a non-white ie Black, Asian, Hispanic, etc, etc character is portrayed by a white actor. Or when a non-white character is drawn & colored to be white. That is indeed whitewashing and should be complained about.

BUT!!!

Whitewashing is not, I repeat is not, when a character is drawn and colored exactly the same way they are in canon JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR FUCKING HEADCANNON!!

I saw a post calling out a specific comicbook company, no names shall be named for either parties involved, for whitewashing a character in their animated films. But the character in question has the exact same skin color, hair color, and eye color that they do in the comics. Skin is slightly tan in the comics. And? Slightly tan in the film. Eyes are green in the comics. And? Green in the film. Hair is black in the comics. And? Black in the film.

Where is the whitewashing?

Oh I forgot to mention… The character is part Arab. (Technically speaking Arabic people are in fact Caucasian, white for some of y'all, since there’s actually only three races. Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid. But I digress.)

Arabic and Middle Eastern people can fit that above description. Many of them do actually. My uncle, his wife and kids, on my dad’s side do; they’re all tan with light eyes. Even though there’s this image of Arabs as all being tan, brown-eyed, and black haired we don’t all fit that description. I’m half-Arab and half-Italian and I kinda fit the stereotype; hair’s medium brown. But my point still stands. Not everybody fits the stereotypes, ok?

Also this character’s father and mother have blue and green eyes respectively. Both genes are recessive but the color green is more dominate than blue. The way DNA works green eyes would win out every time. Every. Fucking. Time. And thus it makes sense that the character in question has green eyes.

And yet this person chose to claim that the character was whitewashed in the animated film. This person even went so far as to edit screenshots from scenes from the animated films that included the character in question to prove their point.

Newsflash, buddy! That doesn’t mean it’s whitewashing.

Making a black character white is whitewashing. Making a Native American character white is whitewashing. So is making an Asian character white. So is making a Mexican character white. It’s called whitewashing for a reason dude. But…

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

Let me repeat that real quick.

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

Some real examples of whitewashing:

The Harry Potter films

J.K. Rowling explicitly describes Hermione Granger as having brown eyes and frizzy hair. Something that is very common amongst black people. The author herself even confirmed this via tweet when a black woman was cast as Hermione in the stage production of The Cursed Child:

“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair, and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.”

Explicitly stating that she wasn’t white, and saying that she loves a black version of the character, kinda solidifies it. The films whitewashed her.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Mr. Yunioshi was portrayed by white actor Mickey Rooney.

Mickey Rooney does not only play an Asian man. Rooney wears yellow face for his portrayal and does an overdone accent. He plays a racist stereotype of an Asian man.

So not only is that white-washing but it’s also racist.

21

The movie about card counting was actually based on a real life event. A group of Asian-American students from MIT, Harvard, and Princeton among others, rip off casinos by counting cards. This happened in the 70sThere were a lot of changes from real-life to movie as there always is but the most important is the race changes.

Our lead characters are Jeff Ma, Mike Aponte, and John Chang. Who played the leads in this film?

Jim Sturgess. Jacob Pitts. Kevin Spacey.

Not a single Asian actor played a lead role.

30 Days of Night

That vampire horror flick set in Alaska. This movie is based off a comic mini series btw. Inuit sheriff, who is Inuit in the comic, Eben Oleson is our main character. He’s the sherrif of the town that gets over run by vamps during it’s month-long polar night.

Wait. What was that?

The main character is Inuit.

And who plays him in the movie? Josh Hartnett.

Aloha!

The Hawaiian set rom-com has virtually no Hawaiian people. But the island state has a population that’s 70% non-white. Funny right?

But Emma Stone plays the main character.

A main character who is described as being one-third Hawaiian, one-third Chinese and half Swedish. And Emma Stone? Fits just the Swedish part of that and only by one-fifth.

Death Note

The 2017 upcoming live-action Netflix adaptation of the manga of the same name. (Not an adaptation of the anime… if that makes any difference.) The entire cast of this movie is made up of white actors. All of the characters are Japanese!!

But that’s not all…

The setting is moved to goddamn Seattle, Washington. The main character’s name is changed. In the manga his name is Light Yagami. His last name is one of the most white last names ever; Turner.

That just a few by the way.

And each of those aforementioned movies do in fact whitewash thier characters. But the character I spoke of was never whitewashed. Never once in continuity was this character paled in complexion. His hair was never lightened to be more white. The shape of his eyes was never changed to fit the shape of eyes that white people have. Neither was the shape of his face.

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

[samanthasroberts]

A Brief, But Not Too Brief, History of the Italian-American Cocktail

When Italians first began coming to this country in numbers, back in the 1880s and 1890s, many of them did what Irish and German and other immigrants did before them and went into business serving the food and drink of the old country to their fellow immigrants. Italian food and drinkways, being rather more alien to the prevailing American standard than either German or Irish ones were, took extra work. Things had to be imported. Good, dense pasta asciutta in all its myriad shapes, olive oil, the essential cheeses and cured meats, so on and so forth. After all, you can’t make a saltimbocca alla Romana without prosciutto or a stracciatella without well-aged parmigiano, and life without saltimbocca or stracciatella is no kind of life at all.

The same held true for Italian drinks. At home, Italians drank wine with their meals, perhaps preceded by a light, bitter amaro aperitivo and followed by a heavy, bitter amaro digestivo or perhaps a spot of grappa. That was civilized. Americans drank whiskey and cocktails and that lager beer that the Germans had brought over a few years back, and if they used bitters at all it was dashed into their whiskey. True, Italian vermouth was widely available due to its popularity in the Manhattan and the Martini, but those amari and that wine needed special importing.

Once supplied with the necessary stuff, the first Italian immigrants to open restaurants and bars kept things largely in the community; the only Americans you’d be likely to see in an Italian restaurant were the foodies of their day or Bohemians on a budget. In general, restaurants were preferred; what Italian bars that existed were more along the lines of cafes and social clubs than American-style brass-rail, knock-’em-back joints. Neither the bars nor the restaurants were famous for their cocktails.

There were exceptions. Victor Baracca’s restaurant on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan employed the talented Jacob “Jack” Grohusko as bartender. Grohusko, of Russian Jewish extraction, nonetheless introduced drinks such as the “Baracca’s Cocktail,” three parts Italian vermouth to one part Fernet-Branca, up. This was nothing more than the Italian, on-the-fly way of making an aperitivo—take vermouth and splash in a digestivo—in cocktail dress. There were several other Fernet drinks in his 1908 Jack’s Manual, all of them variations on the same thing.

Fernet-Branca appears in a few other cocktail books of the day, used pretty much as Grohusko did. One also finds Ferro-China Bisleri, another Italian amaro, perhaps even more extreme in flavor (it had a blood-like tang of iron), used the same way, but this sort of first-stage Italian cocktail did not catch on. It was too bitter, too intense, too Italian. Its component ingredients fared little better: Fernet and the small handful of other amari that were imported remained ethnic specialty products, and as for grappa—well, when Broadway casting director Jonathan Briscoe tried it at Vincenzo and Eugenia Sardi’s restaurant in New York he dubbed it “Fourth of July” because it was like a fireworks show on his palate.

That was in 1922, during Prohibition. With the passing of the Volstead Act, the legion of small Italian restaurants that dotted parts of New York and San Francisco and Chicago and New Orleans and wherever else Italians settled in numbers faced a dilemma. An Italian would not want to eat without wine, and selling wine was illegal. With gastronomy in one pan of the scale and the law in the other, the sensible side of the scale won out and a great many of these places suddenly found themselves in the speakeasy business. And once they were selling wine and food, they might as well sell a little liquor, too, right? And not just that weird Italian stuff. Bacardi. White Horse. Canadian Club, like that—or “Bacardi,” “White Horse” and “Canadian Club.” You never knew really what you were getting, particularly when the old, rough, secretive Sicilian and Calabrian networks for evading the authorities came into the business.

Men like Domenico “Nick Martini” Setteducati in New York, Amelio Pacini in San Francisco, and Adolfo Renucci and Agostino “Gus” Sciacqua in Chicago went from waiters, cooks and busboys to bartenders and hosts overnight. But speakeasies couldn’t be run like the old our-thing Italian restaurants. Speakeasies were for everybody—they had to be: if you wanted to stay in business, you had to pay a lot of people. That meant that the drinks were no longer from the old country. You couldn’t get the wine, anyway, and while you could get some of the bitters—allowed in by Prohibition law as medicines—you couldn’t persuade people to drink them.

When repeal came, most of these speakeasies reopened not as bars, but as restaurants, and Italian ones at that. But the cocktails they sold at the bar were the same thoroughly American things they sold during Prohibition, now made with reputable booze. Truth be told, the food was no longer as Italian as it had been back in the 1910s, either. Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.

This process of Americanization was greatly accelerated by the war years. From 1940, when shipping lanes closed down, there were no Italian imports until 1947 or 1948, when a devastated Europe was able to begin shipping things to America again. By the 1950s, places such as Sardi’s in New York, Amelio’s in San Francisco, and Renucci’s and Gus’s in Chicago were American institutions: places where you could down a Manhattan or an Old-Fashioned at the bar, drink Scotch Highballs with your steak, salad and baked potato, and end the meal with a Stinger or a Brandy Alexander. You could also have linguine with white clam sauce and veal Marsala, accompanied by a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and tamped down with a pony-glass of Strega or Galliano, the two most popular of the very limited field of available Italian liqueurs, but that path was strictly optional

“Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.”

Then came the 1960s, with all its consciousness-raising, diversity-celebrating, and ethnic-cheerleading. Assimilation was out, Italian-American pride was in. Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, The Godfather, was on the best-seller lists for 67 weeks, becoming for a time the most widely sold book ever. Sure, it presented a picture of the Italian experience in America that was somewhat … complicated. But if you can overlook all the felonies and criminal conspiracies and adultery and whatnot, its characters were a lively bunch and for every Italian-American, as they were now calling themselves, who thought the book and the instant-classic 1972 movie that followed it were making his or her people look bad, there was one who thought any publicity was good publicity.

This renewed sense of identity highlighted a need: all those spaghetti & steak joints suddenly noticed that there wasn’t much going out from the bar that said “this establishment is proud to be Italian.” One of the consequences was that, in the Disco Drink-era of the 1970s, among all the candy-sweet, suggestively named alcoholic confections that were in style, one often found the Negroni being offered.

Now, this was a legitimately Italian drink, even though its creator only thought to splash gin in his vermouth-and-Campari Americano because he had spent years as a fencing instructor and gambler in New York. As such, it was plenty sweet, but also plenty bitter. Italians like bitterness. Americans at the time, not so much. That meant that most of the spirits Italians actually drank back home in Italy were unlikely to fill the bill. There were a couple, though, that just might work.

Galliano, for one. This 80-proof, lightly-herbal, vanilla-forward liqueur from the gritty naval port of Livorno, in Tuscany, was nowhere near a national brand in Italy; it’s not even mentioned in Italian Wines and Liquors, the guide the Italian Federation of Producers of Wines, Liquors and the Like published in 1953 to show that the industry was back in business for export after the war, nor is it found in Gino Neri’s 1960 I Liquori Italiani. But it had been in America before Prohibition, come back after Repeal, and was the key ingredient in the widely-popular Harvey Wallbanger.

It didn’t take long for Dominic “Duke Antone” Paolantonio, the Wallbanger’s self-claimed inventor and proprietor of a mixology school in Hartford, Connecticut, to come out with the Italian Fascination: an ounce each of Galliano and heavy cream, half an ounce of Kahlua and a quarter triple sec, shaken with ice and strained into a Champagne flute. He also had a flaming “Coffee Nero” with the stuff. He may also have had a hand in the “Italian Heather,” which was nothing more than a Rusty Nail with Galliano instead of Drambuie.

While those drinks got around some, helped in large part by Galliano’s importer papering the country with a 1970 recipe booklet featuring them and other concoctions, none of them really caught the public’s imagination. It fell to another company to crack the market wide open. In 1968 or thereabouts, I.L.L.V.A. (I won’t spell out the acronym), a family-owned distilling firm from Lombardy, found an importer for Amaretto Di Saronno, another liqueur very little known in its native land. The family had been making this 56-proof extract of apricot pits since the early part of the century. Tasting like almonds (closely related to apricots) sweet and nutty and not at all herbal, medicinal or bitter. In 1972, either I.L.L.V.A. or its representatives did what Duke Antone should have and plucked the most obvious name going for their own version of the Rusty Nail. The Godfather—Scotch and Amaretto di Saronno on the rocks—was an instant success, as were its two spinoffs, the Godmother (with “feminine” vodka instead of the “masculine” Scotch) and the Godchild, the same with cream.

The Godfather led to the Amaretto Sour, originally just Amaretto and lemon juice but made in mediocre bars from coast to coast with sour mix, and, for those who found that too challenging, the Bocce Ball (spelled variously), which was basically a Harvey Wallbanger with Amaretto instead of both the Galliano and the vodka. That one was so innocuous that it was served onboard the TWA charter jet that flew Pope John-Paul II around America in 1979.

There were a couple of other Italian liqueurs that found their way into American bars. Sambucca, another little-known cordial, this one anise-flavored, was used in some drinks, although its real niche was as a part of after-dinner service, where it was put in a little shot glass, garnished with a coffee bean or three and set on fire. In the early 1980s, it was joined by limoncello, a tooth-grindingly sweet regional specialty from the Amalfi coast.

By then, though, the culinary revolution was underway. There was a new generation of Italian restaurants, more adventurous and less Americanized. These were places where they would list their grappas and their amari on the menu, with the full expectation that their clientele would order them. This led in turn to the cocktail revolution, where the bartenders, when they weren’t doing shots of Fernet-Branca with their friends, saw no problem using it in their cocktails. Suddenly, American bartenders and their customers were using formerly-challenging Italian drinks—amari, aperitivi, what have you—to make drinks that were even more challenging than what you’d find in Italy. Rhubarb amaro would find itself mixed with mezcal, funky old sherry and a few drops of yuzu juice. Grappa would be worked into an Old-Fashioned, topped off with a float of navy rum.

Now, in the final twist of the knife, this 21st-century extreme mixology has found its way back to Italy, where bars such as the Jerry Thomas Project in Rome, Nottingham Forest in Milano and the Antica Café Torinese in Trieste are making the same kind of intense, modern cocktails that one finds in New York or San Francisco. At the same time, bartenders in the US are perversely looking back in nostalgia at the Godfather and the Amaretto Sour and suchlike confections. It’s a funny old world. If somebody tries to serve me an Italian Fascination they’re gonna get punched, though.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/a-brief-but-not-too-brief-history-of-the-italian-american-cocktail/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/a-brief-but-not-too-brief-history-of-the-italian-american-cocktail/

[adambstingus]

A Brief, But Not Too Brief, History of the Italian-American Cocktail

When Italians first began coming to this country in numbers, back in the 1880s and 1890s, many of them did what Irish and German and other immigrants did before them and went into business serving the food and drink of the old country to their fellow immigrants. Italian food and drinkways, being rather more alien to the prevailing American standard than either German or Irish ones were, took extra work. Things had to be imported. Good, dense pasta asciutta in all its myriad shapes, olive oil, the essential cheeses and cured meats, so on and so forth. After all, you can’t make a saltimbocca alla Romana without prosciutto or a stracciatella without well-aged parmigiano, and life without saltimbocca or stracciatella is no kind of life at all.

The same held true for Italian drinks. At home, Italians drank wine with their meals, perhaps preceded by a light, bitter amaro aperitivo and followed by a heavy, bitter amaro digestivo or perhaps a spot of grappa. That was civilized. Americans drank whiskey and cocktails and that lager beer that the Germans had brought over a few years back, and if they used bitters at all it was dashed into their whiskey. True, Italian vermouth was widely available due to its popularity in the Manhattan and the Martini, but those amari and that wine needed special importing.

Once supplied with the necessary stuff, the first Italian immigrants to open restaurants and bars kept things largely in the community; the only Americans you’d be likely to see in an Italian restaurant were the foodies of their day or Bohemians on a budget. In general, restaurants were preferred; what Italian bars that existed were more along the lines of cafes and social clubs than American-style brass-rail, knock-’em-back joints. Neither the bars nor the restaurants were famous for their cocktails.

There were exceptions. Victor Baracca’s restaurant on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan employed the talented Jacob “Jack” Grohusko as bartender. Grohusko, of Russian Jewish extraction, nonetheless introduced drinks such as the “Baracca’s Cocktail,” three parts Italian vermouth to one part Fernet-Branca, up. This was nothing more than the Italian, on-the-fly way of making an aperitivo—take vermouth and splash in a digestivo—in cocktail dress. There were several other Fernet drinks in his 1908 Jack’s Manual, all of them variations on the same thing.

Fernet-Branca appears in a few other cocktail books of the day, used pretty much as Grohusko did. One also finds Ferro-China Bisleri, another Italian amaro, perhaps even more extreme in flavor (it had a blood-like tang of iron), used the same way, but this sort of first-stage Italian cocktail did not catch on. It was too bitter, too intense, too Italian. Its component ingredients fared little better: Fernet and the small handful of other amari that were imported remained ethnic specialty products, and as for grappa—well, when Broadway casting director Jonathan Briscoe tried it at Vincenzo and Eugenia Sardi’s restaurant in New York he dubbed it “Fourth of July” because it was like a fireworks show on his palate.

That was in 1922, during Prohibition. With the passing of the Volstead Act, the legion of small Italian restaurants that dotted parts of New York and San Francisco and Chicago and New Orleans and wherever else Italians settled in numbers faced a dilemma. An Italian would not want to eat without wine, and selling wine was illegal. With gastronomy in one pan of the scale and the law in the other, the sensible side of the scale won out and a great many of these places suddenly found themselves in the speakeasy business. And once they were selling wine and food, they might as well sell a little liquor, too, right? And not just that weird Italian stuff. Bacardi. White Horse. Canadian Club, like that—or “Bacardi,” “White Horse” and “Canadian Club.” You never knew really what you were getting, particularly when the old, rough, secretive Sicilian and Calabrian networks for evading the authorities came into the business.

Men like Domenico “Nick Martini” Setteducati in New York, Amelio Pacini in San Francisco, and Adolfo Renucci and Agostino “Gus” Sciacqua in Chicago went from waiters, cooks and busboys to bartenders and hosts overnight. But speakeasies couldn’t be run like the old our-thing Italian restaurants. Speakeasies were for everybody—they had to be: if you wanted to stay in business, you had to pay a lot of people. That meant that the drinks were no longer from the old country. You couldn’t get the wine, anyway, and while you could get some of the bitters—allowed in by Prohibition law as medicines—you couldn’t persuade people to drink them.

When repeal came, most of these speakeasies reopened not as bars, but as restaurants, and Italian ones at that. But the cocktails they sold at the bar were the same thoroughly American things they sold during Prohibition, now made with reputable booze. Truth be told, the food was no longer as Italian as it had been back in the 1910s, either. Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.

This process of Americanization was greatly accelerated by the war years. From 1940, when shipping lanes closed down, there were no Italian imports until 1947 or 1948, when a devastated Europe was able to begin shipping things to America again. By the 1950s, places such as Sardi’s in New York, Amelio’s in San Francisco, and Renucci’s and Gus’s in Chicago were American institutions: places where you could down a Manhattan or an Old-Fashioned at the bar, drink Scotch Highballs with your steak, salad and baked potato, and end the meal with a Stinger or a Brandy Alexander. You could also have linguine with white clam sauce and veal Marsala, accompanied by a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and tamped down with a pony-glass of Strega or Galliano, the two most popular of the very limited field of available Italian liqueurs, but that path was strictly optional

“Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.”

Then came the 1960s, with all its consciousness-raising, diversity-celebrating, and ethnic-cheerleading. Assimilation was out, Italian-American pride was in. Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, The Godfather, was on the best-seller lists for 67 weeks, becoming for a time the most widely sold book ever. Sure, it presented a picture of the Italian experience in America that was somewhat … complicated. But if you can overlook all the felonies and criminal conspiracies and adultery and whatnot, its characters were a lively bunch and for every Italian-American, as they were now calling themselves, who thought the book and the instant-classic 1972 movie that followed it were making his or her people look bad, there was one who thought any publicity was good publicity.

This renewed sense of identity highlighted a need: all those spaghetti & steak joints suddenly noticed that there wasn’t much going out from the bar that said “this establishment is proud to be Italian.” One of the consequences was that, in the Disco Drink-era of the 1970s, among all the candy-sweet, suggestively named alcoholic confections that were in style, one often found the Negroni being offered.

Now, this was a legitimately Italian drink, even though its creator only thought to splash gin in his vermouth-and-Campari Americano because he had spent years as a fencing instructor and gambler in New York. As such, it was plenty sweet, but also plenty bitter. Italians like bitterness. Americans at the time, not so much. That meant that most of the spirits Italians actually drank back home in Italy were unlikely to fill the bill. There were a couple, though, that just might work.

Galliano, for one. This 80-proof, lightly-herbal, vanilla-forward liqueur from the gritty naval port of Livorno, in Tuscany, was nowhere near a national brand in Italy; it’s not even mentioned in Italian Wines and Liquors, the guide the Italian Federation of Producers of Wines, Liquors and the Like published in 1953 to show that the industry was back in business for export after the war, nor is it found in Gino Neri’s 1960 I Liquori Italiani. But it had been in America before Prohibition, come back after Repeal, and was the key ingredient in the widely-popular Harvey Wallbanger.

It didn’t take long for Dominic “Duke Antone” Paolantonio, the Wallbanger’s self-claimed inventor and proprietor of a mixology school in Hartford, Connecticut, to come out with the Italian Fascination: an ounce each of Galliano and heavy cream, half an ounce of Kahlua and a quarter triple sec, shaken with ice and strained into a Champagne flute. He also had a flaming “Coffee Nero” with the stuff. He may also have had a hand in the “Italian Heather,” which was nothing more than a Rusty Nail with Galliano instead of Drambuie.

While those drinks got around some, helped in large part by Galliano’s importer papering the country with a 1970 recipe booklet featuring them and other concoctions, none of them really caught the public’s imagination. It fell to another company to crack the market wide open. In 1968 or thereabouts, I.L.L.V.A. (I won’t spell out the acronym), a family-owned distilling firm from Lombardy, found an importer for Amaretto Di Saronno, another liqueur very little known in its native land. The family had been making this 56-proof extract of apricot pits since the early part of the century. Tasting like almonds (closely related to apricots) sweet and nutty and not at all herbal, medicinal or bitter. In 1972, either I.L.L.V.A. or its representatives did what Duke Antone should have and plucked the most obvious name going for their own version of the Rusty Nail. The Godfather—Scotch and Amaretto di Saronno on the rocks—was an instant success, as were its two spinoffs, the Godmother (with “feminine” vodka instead of the “masculine” Scotch) and the Godchild, the same with cream.

The Godfather led to the Amaretto Sour, originally just Amaretto and lemon juice but made in mediocre bars from coast to coast with sour mix, and, for those who found that too challenging, the Bocce Ball (spelled variously), which was basically a Harvey Wallbanger with Amaretto instead of both the Galliano and the vodka. That one was so innocuous that it was served onboard the TWA charter jet that flew Pope John-Paul II around America in 1979.

There were a couple of other Italian liqueurs that found their way into American bars. Sambucca, another little-known cordial, this one anise-flavored, was used in some drinks, although its real niche was as a part of after-dinner service, where it was put in a little shot glass, garnished with a coffee bean or three and set on fire. In the early 1980s, it was joined by limoncello, a tooth-grindingly sweet regional specialty from the Amalfi coast.

By then, though, the culinary revolution was underway. There was a new generation of Italian restaurants, more adventurous and less Americanized. These were places where they would list their grappas and their amari on the menu, with the full expectation that their clientele would order them. This led in turn to the cocktail revolution, where the bartenders, when they weren’t doing shots of Fernet-Branca with their friends, saw no problem using it in their cocktails. Suddenly, American bartenders and their customers were using formerly-challenging Italian drinks—amari, aperitivi, what have you—to make drinks that were even more challenging than what you’d find in Italy. Rhubarb amaro would find itself mixed with mezcal, funky old sherry and a few drops of yuzu juice. Grappa would be worked into an Old-Fashioned, topped off with a float of navy rum.

Now, in the final twist of the knife, this 21st-century extreme mixology has found its way back to Italy, where bars such as the Jerry Thomas Project in Rome, Nottingham Forest in Milano and the Antica Café Torinese in Trieste are making the same kind of intense, modern cocktails that one finds in New York or San Francisco. At the same time, bartenders in the US are perversely looking back in nostalgia at the Godfather and the Amaretto Sour and suchlike confections. It’s a funny old world. If somebody tries to serve me an Italian Fascination they’re gonna get punched, though.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/a-brief-but-not-too-brief-history-of-the-italian-american-cocktail/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/181916749782

[allofbeercom]

A Brief, But Not Too Brief, History of the Italian-American Cocktail

When Italians first began coming to this country in numbers, back in the 1880s and 1890s, many of them did what Irish and German and other immigrants did before them and went into business serving the food and drink of the old country to their fellow immigrants. Italian food and drinkways, being rather more alien to the prevailing American standard than either German or Irish ones were, took extra work. Things had to be imported. Good, dense pasta asciutta in all its myriad shapes, olive oil, the essential cheeses and cured meats, so on and so forth. After all, you can’t make a saltimbocca alla Romana without prosciutto or a stracciatella without well-aged parmigiano, and life without saltimbocca or stracciatella is no kind of life at all.

The same held true for Italian drinks. At home, Italians drank wine with their meals, perhaps preceded by a light, bitter amaro aperitivo and followed by a heavy, bitter amaro digestivo or perhaps a spot of grappa. That was civilized. Americans drank whiskey and cocktails and that lager beer that the Germans had brought over a few years back, and if they used bitters at all it was dashed into their whiskey. True, Italian vermouth was widely available due to its popularity in the Manhattan and the Martini, but those amari and that wine needed special importing.

Once supplied with the necessary stuff, the first Italian immigrants to open restaurants and bars kept things largely in the community; the only Americans you’d be likely to see in an Italian restaurant were the foodies of their day or Bohemians on a budget. In general, restaurants were preferred; what Italian bars that existed were more along the lines of cafes and social clubs than American-style brass-rail, knock-’em-back joints. Neither the bars nor the restaurants were famous for their cocktails.

There were exceptions. Victor Baracca’s restaurant on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan employed the talented Jacob “Jack” Grohusko as bartender. Grohusko, of Russian Jewish extraction, nonetheless introduced drinks such as the “Baracca’s Cocktail,” three parts Italian vermouth to one part Fernet-Branca, up. This was nothing more than the Italian, on-the-fly way of making an aperitivo—take vermouth and splash in a digestivo—in cocktail dress. There were several other Fernet drinks in his 1908 Jack’s Manual, all of them variations on the same thing.

Fernet-Branca appears in a few other cocktail books of the day, used pretty much as Grohusko did. One also finds Ferro-China Bisleri, another Italian amaro, perhaps even more extreme in flavor (it had a blood-like tang of iron), used the same way, but this sort of first-stage Italian cocktail did not catch on. It was too bitter, too intense, too Italian. Its component ingredients fared little better: Fernet and the small handful of other amari that were imported remained ethnic specialty products, and as for grappa—well, when Broadway casting director Jonathan Briscoe tried it at Vincenzo and Eugenia Sardi’s restaurant in New York he dubbed it “Fourth of July” because it was like a fireworks show on his palate.

That was in 1922, during Prohibition. With the passing of the Volstead Act, the legion of small Italian restaurants that dotted parts of New York and San Francisco and Chicago and New Orleans and wherever else Italians settled in numbers faced a dilemma. An Italian would not want to eat without wine, and selling wine was illegal. With gastronomy in one pan of the scale and the law in the other, the sensible side of the scale won out and a great many of these places suddenly found themselves in the speakeasy business. And once they were selling wine and food, they might as well sell a little liquor, too, right? And not just that weird Italian stuff. Bacardi. White Horse. Canadian Club, like that—or “Bacardi,” “White Horse” and “Canadian Club.” You never knew really what you were getting, particularly when the old, rough, secretive Sicilian and Calabrian networks for evading the authorities came into the business.

Men like Domenico “Nick Martini” Setteducati in New York, Amelio Pacini in San Francisco, and Adolfo Renucci and Agostino “Gus” Sciacqua in Chicago went from waiters, cooks and busboys to bartenders and hosts overnight. But speakeasies couldn’t be run like the old our-thing Italian restaurants. Speakeasies were for everybody—they had to be: if you wanted to stay in business, you had to pay a lot of people. That meant that the drinks were no longer from the old country. You couldn’t get the wine, anyway, and while you could get some of the bitters—allowed in by Prohibition law as medicines—you couldn’t persuade people to drink them.

When repeal came, most of these speakeasies reopened not as bars, but as restaurants, and Italian ones at that. But the cocktails they sold at the bar were the same thoroughly American things they sold during Prohibition, now made with reputable booze. Truth be told, the food was no longer as Italian as it had been back in the 1910s, either. Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.

This process of Americanization was greatly accelerated by the war years. From 1940, when shipping lanes closed down, there were no Italian imports until 1947 or 1948, when a devastated Europe was able to begin shipping things to America again. By the 1950s, places such as Sardi’s in New York, Amelio’s in San Francisco, and Renucci’s and Gus’s in Chicago were American institutions: places where you could down a Manhattan or an Old-Fashioned at the bar, drink Scotch Highballs with your steak, salad and baked potato, and end the meal with a Stinger or a Brandy Alexander. You could also have linguine with white clam sauce and veal Marsala, accompanied by a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and tamped down with a pony-glass of Strega or Galliano, the two most popular of the very limited field of available Italian liqueurs, but that path was strictly optional

“Italian food was becoming Italian-American food. There were big, thick steaks, there was cheese on everything. Portions were bigger, the quirky, odd edges of Italian cuisine were rounded off and regional differences ignored, with dishes from northern Lombardy squatting on menus next to ones from Sicily.”

Then came the 1960s, with all its consciousness-raising, diversity-celebrating, and ethnic-cheerleading. Assimilation was out, Italian-American pride was in. Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, The Godfather, was on the best-seller lists for 67 weeks, becoming for a time the most widely sold book ever. Sure, it presented a picture of the Italian experience in America that was somewhat … complicated. But if you can overlook all the felonies and criminal conspiracies and adultery and whatnot, its characters were a lively bunch and for every Italian-American, as they were now calling themselves, who thought the book and the instant-classic 1972 movie that followed it were making his or her people look bad, there was one who thought any publicity was good publicity.

This renewed sense of identity highlighted a need: all those spaghetti & steak joints suddenly noticed that there wasn’t much going out from the bar that said “this establishment is proud to be Italian.” One of the consequences was that, in the Disco Drink-era of the 1970s, among all the candy-sweet, suggestively named alcoholic confections that were in style, one often found the Negroni being offered.

Now, this was a legitimately Italian drink, even though its creator only thought to splash gin in his vermouth-and-Campari Americano because he had spent years as a fencing instructor and gambler in New York. As such, it was plenty sweet, but also plenty bitter. Italians like bitterness. Americans at the time, not so much. That meant that most of the spirits Italians actually drank back home in Italy were unlikely to fill the bill. There were a couple, though, that just might work.

Galliano, for one. This 80-proof, lightly-herbal, vanilla-forward liqueur from the gritty naval port of Livorno, in Tuscany, was nowhere near a national brand in Italy; it’s not even mentioned in Italian Wines and Liquors, the guide the Italian Federation of Producers of Wines, Liquors and the Like published in 1953 to show that the industry was back in business for export after the war, nor is it found in Gino Neri’s 1960 I Liquori Italiani. But it had been in America before Prohibition, come back after Repeal, and was the key ingredient in the widely-popular Harvey Wallbanger.

It didn’t take long for Dominic “Duke Antone” Paolantonio, the Wallbanger’s self-claimed inventor and proprietor of a mixology school in Hartford, Connecticut, to come out with the Italian Fascination: an ounce each of Galliano and heavy cream, half an ounce of Kahlua and a quarter triple sec, shaken with ice and strained into a Champagne flute. He also had a flaming “Coffee Nero” with the stuff. He may also have had a hand in the “Italian Heather,” which was nothing more than a Rusty Nail with Galliano instead of Drambuie.

While those drinks got around some, helped in large part by Galliano’s importer papering the country with a 1970 recipe booklet featuring them and other concoctions, none of them really caught the public’s imagination. It fell to another company to crack the market wide open. In 1968 or thereabouts, I.L.L.V.A. (I won’t spell out the acronym), a family-owned distilling firm from Lombardy, found an importer for Amaretto Di Saronno, another liqueur very little known in its native land. The family had been making this 56-proof extract of apricot pits since the early part of the century. Tasting like almonds (closely related to apricots) sweet and nutty and not at all herbal, medicinal or bitter. In 1972, either I.L.L.V.A. or its representatives did what Duke Antone should have and plucked the most obvious name going for their own version of the Rusty Nail. The Godfather—Scotch and Amaretto di Saronno on the rocks—was an instant success, as were its two spinoffs, the Godmother (with “feminine” vodka instead of the “masculine” Scotch) and the Godchild, the same with cream.

The Godfather led to the Amaretto Sour, originally just Amaretto and lemon juice but made in mediocre bars from coast to coast with sour mix, and, for those who found that too challenging, the Bocce Ball (spelled variously), which was basically a Harvey Wallbanger with Amaretto instead of both the Galliano and the vodka. That one was so innocuous that it was served onboard the TWA charter jet that flew Pope John-Paul II around America in 1979.

There were a couple of other Italian liqueurs that found their way into American bars. Sambucca, another little-known cordial, this one anise-flavored, was used in some drinks, although its real niche was as a part of after-dinner service, where it was put in a little shot glass, garnished with a coffee bean or three and set on fire. In the early 1980s, it was joined by limoncello, a tooth-grindingly sweet regional specialty from the Amalfi coast.

By then, though, the culinary revolution was underway. There was a new generation of Italian restaurants, more adventurous and less Americanized. These were places where they would list their grappas and their amari on the menu, with the full expectation that their clientele would order them. This led in turn to the cocktail revolution, where the bartenders, when they weren’t doing shots of Fernet-Branca with their friends, saw no problem using it in their cocktails. Suddenly, American bartenders and their customers were using formerly-challenging Italian drinks—amari, aperitivi, what have you—to make drinks that were even more challenging than what you’d find in Italy. Rhubarb amaro would find itself mixed with mezcal, funky old sherry and a few drops of yuzu juice. Grappa would be worked into an Old-Fashioned, topped off with a float of navy rum.

Now, in the final twist of the knife, this 21st-century extreme mixology has found its way back to Italy, where bars such as the Jerry Thomas Project in Rome, Nottingham Forest in Milano and the Antica Café Torinese in Trieste are making the same kind of intense, modern cocktails that one finds in New York or San Francisco. At the same time, bartenders in the US are perversely looking back in nostalgia at the Godfather and the Amaretto Sour and suchlike confections. It’s a funny old world. If somebody tries to serve me an Italian Fascination they’re gonna get punched, though.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/a-brief-but-not-too-brief-history-of-the-italian-american-cocktail/

[theliterateape]

Unpacking Branson: A Thanksgiving Improbability

By Don Hall

For Thanksgiving in 2012, I was single and Mom decided that I should come out to my step-sister's place in Branson, Missouri for a good old-fashioned country Thanksgiving. The carrot was family. The stick was Missouri.

In the late 1960s it was pretty much a tiny city in the Ozarks known for roadside stands peddling wares that proliferated the hillbilly stereotype. And, sure enough, there are still today roadside stands that exist only to continue to make fun of that stereotype. It's an odd thing to walk into a business in the middle of the Ozarks that sells you the stereotype it tries to escape from. Like buying a taxi cab medallion from an East Indian store or an "I'm a Wetback" t-shirt in a store that sells Mexican merchandise.

It is said you cannot judge a book by its cover.

This is true most of the time, but there are some things you can judge immediately by its cover and pretty much know what your getting.

An Ann Coulter book. Sean Hannity. A FOX News broadcast. Great America. Applebee's.

I assumed that Branson, Missouri would fall into this latter category. I was right and wrong. And the complexities made it a real trip to remember.

Branson is where the Beverly Hillbillies came from before moving to California.

A winding series of roads littered with signs and theaters and restaurants. Lots of bumper stickers that declare "I'd Rather Be Dead Than SOCIALIST" and random tributes to past GOP glory. In the three days we trucked around the city, I counted perhaps one hundred people of color the entire time—I didn't start the trip by calculating this but after a bit, it was hard to escape. Thousands of old white people with canes and wheelchairs abounded but that doesn't really look that much different than Navy Pier or the audience at Chicago Shakes—old white people like to be tourists and Branson is, after all, a haven of tourism.

My step-sister, Hannah, tells me that the crack business booms among the residents of Branson and there is evidence around if you're looking for it. The place is slightly schizophrenic in its place as a home to rednecks and hillbillies while trying desperately to distance itself from that by appealing to the tourist trade. There are places that stink of what one expects in Ozarks—a biker bar called the Hawg Trough that even my pro-GOP brother-in-law avoids and a Smoke Shop that doesn't sell cigarettes and has a pit bull guarding the door. But there are surprises that popped up during my three-day Thanksgiving vacation that defied my pre-judged expectations.

The surprises came in weird ways. When I arrived, we ate at a place called the Rowdy Beaver—a place with t-shirts that trumpeted "I Like Bald Beaver" and "That's A Mighty Nice Beaver" and had washboard walls. The thing that surprised was that the food was out of this world. It was delicious and well prepared and not at all what I expected. "Our chef prepares everything from fresh ingredients," trumpeted our waitress who seemed completely fine with her job at a place filled with such juvenile innuendo.

The Hollywood Wax Museum was fun but the wax figures left me a bit wanting—a frequent refrain of our visit was my niece saying "Who's that?" and me doing my best to figure it out. I tried to convince my family to go to Silver Dollar City so I could find and steal a urinal cake but it was $60 per person and even I couldn't argue that $300 was reasonable for me to complete a toilet cookie tale. We had tickets to a magic show billed as the World's Largest (by the way, every attraction in Branson is billed as "Show of the Year," "The Most Amazing in the World," and "Mindblowing") but the show was cancelled due to illness. Turns out Kirby VanBurch's greatest trick is to take your money and disappear.

Our replacement show for the afternoon was going to be either Jim Stafford (I desperately wanted to see this) or SIX (the nieces had heard it was awesome). Stafford only did an 8 p.m. show, so SIX at the Mickey Gilley Theater it was.

SIX is six middle-aged brothers who debuted on the Donnie and Marie Show and have fashioned themselves as sort of an older version of an a cappella boy band. As soon as they started with a cheeseball version of Don't Stop Believin', Hannah and I turned to each other with a look of pained resignation. These guys had pretty good voices and the arrangements were fine but the self-consciously hip pose and cornball attempts at cool banter was unbearable. I learned that wanting to see an awful Branson show and actually sitting through one are two different things. I also learned that I will never, as a middle-aged white guy, ever use the words "homie" or "peeps" ever again. To be fair, the second act was better—a selection of Christmas songs and a tribute to their dead mother. Apparently this tiny woman had ten children, all boys, and I suspect she isn't dead but just got the fuck out of there before having to bear an eleventh kid. But the damage of the first act left me scarred and a little terrified of that evening's show—Legends at the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater.

Legends is a show that debuted in Vegas and moved to Branson. It is a rotating cast of celebrity impersonators ranging from Barry White, Marilynn Monroe and Tim McGraw to the staples of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Our bill was George Strait, Whitney Houston, the Blues Brothers, Liberace and Elvis. As we entered and sat down, once again surrounded by octogenarians, I steeled myself. This was going to be fucking awful.

And it wasn't.

Really. In fact, it was a blast. The Whitney Houston knocked it out of the park, Liberace was funny but completely inappropriate in a callback to the dark days of The Gay Closet and the Elvis impersonator was so fucking good, if we had been sitting in the nose bleeds it would've been like actually seeing Elvis live. My mom, a huge Elvis fan from when he was alive, commented that he was the best Elvis impersonator she had ever seen. Hell, even my teenaged nieces enjoyed the show.

But we saved the best, most Branson-y show for Saturday. Yakov Smirnoff. Holy shit. I couldn't wait. I was absolutely certain it would embody everything I expected Branson to be—cheesy, cloying, the very portrait of a has-been celebrity stretching out his 15 minutes of fame as paper thin as he could in the heart of the Vegas of the Ozarks. We were greeted by a giant Yakov head making awful jokes about... the size of his head! Inside, it turned out that Yakov was a painter and had his paintings for sale!

The beginning of the show was the longest version of the national anthem I've ever heard (who know there were, like, nine verses?) and then I was hit with another fucking surprise. On the video screens came an old Paul Harvey "The Rest of the Story" about a painter known as Jacob who painted and commissioned a painting in tribute to the fallen at Ground Zero in NYC following the Attacks of 9/11.  Painted on the side of a building overlooking the rubble, it was the backdrop to the first anniversary of the attacks. The painter was an anonymous Yakov Smirnoff. He paid for the commission out of his own pocket.

Some of his show was what I expected: a revisitation of his "What a Country!" schtick from the '80s—a sketch of him as the president answering questions from the audience, and he actually quoted the Lee Greenwood God Bless the U.S.A. as a closer. But other parts were not at all what I anticipated. Turns out that Yakov went out and got a Master's Degree in psychology and decided that his show could also serve as a relationship counseling session as well. Sort of like Defending the Caveman meets a less arrogant Dr. Phill with the takeaway being that we begin relationships laughing and giving each other little gifts and that, if we simply return to giving each other gifts and finding laughter in our relationships, we'll be happier, healthier people.

Was it a great show? Not really. The dancers were cheesy and only there to fill time, the jokes were funny in a "Yeah, I remember that one" sort of way, the political stuff was tame (although at one point, Yakov asked the audience who was happy with the results of the latest election—a smattering of applause that included my mother and I enthusiastically cheering—and who was ticked off by it—a thundering, slightly ugly ovation—with the Russian comic commenting "Yeah, that's about even...") and the recurring pro-America stuff was hard to hear after a while. But the thing is... I liked him.

I mean, I really liked the guy. He was so overwhelmingly sincere and genuine. Christ, I wanted to hug him. And, while his show is corny and inoffensive and gentle and perfect for the Branson tourist crowd, this is a guy who lives in Branson, Missouri suggesting that people spend time laughing and loving one another instead of being shitbags.

Prejudice is a funny thing. Judging books by their covers is what we do as people. I imagine it's a hard drive instinct. But, as I am often heard saying, while we are all unique and precious snowflakes and each of us is completely distinct, we are all made of fucking snow. We all are simply people trying our best to get along in the world. Yes, that means that our baser, uglier instincts come to play like ordinary people rioting in a Walmart on Black Friday to get a discount on a portable DVD player. It also means that our better, more generous nature comes into play, and sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even in Red State Hell, Yakov Smirnoff is telling thousands of people every week to just be fucking nicer to each other.

On Thanksgiving, the point is to be with friends or family and celebrate those things in our lives we are (or should be) thankful for. Sure, the holiday is laden with cultural markers that include the genocide of the Native Americans and our national quest to bequeath every American with diabetes but the point is gratitude. Gratitude can come from a lot of places and I’m thankful to remember the lessons I learned in Branson.