Destroy Nature Before it Destroys Us

Mr. Homegrown
Back to the Garden
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As philosopher Slavoj Žižek so wisely reminds us, we don’t spend enough time thinking about the ideology behind our assumptions and vocabulary. This is especially true with our vague and ill defined concept of “nature.” I really don’t think that we’ve all really thought through what we mean when we use this word.

Conner Habib takes a look at “nature” in this thought provoking episode of his podcast, Against Everyone with Conner Habib. Habib calls our concept of nature “fatally flawed” and connects it to Sigmund Freud’s notion of a death drive in the sense of something that we think is separate from ourselves that generates a feeling of longing that can never be fulfilled. Paradoxically, we revel in this state of separation, in a never ending spiral of longing that explains not only our twisted relationship to the environment but also things like gambling, smart phones and drugs. I’m not going to summarize Habib’s profound thoughts on the meaning of “nature” but let’s just say that he says that we need to destroy our concept of nature in order to save it. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Pegu Club: The Perfect Summer Cocktail

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
1 Comment

Don’t you hate those internet recipes with the book length introductions? So let’s get straight to the point. It’s hot, there’s a lot too worry about in this world and you need a cocktail. You need to make the Pegu Club your official summer libation.

Pegu Club Cocktail
1 1/2 ounces gin
3/4 ounce orange curaçao (or Triple Sec if you’re cheap like me)
1 teaspoon lime juice
Dash bitters

Shake with crushed ice, strain and serve in a martini glass with a slice of lime. The Angostura bitters will give the drink a pleasant, pink tinge and a flavor reminiscent of grapefruit.

Yes we’ve blogged about this vintage cocktail before. But I’ll repeat the backstory now that you’ve proved yourself to be one of the freaks who like to read verbose internet recipes. This was the house cocktail in the 1920s at Burma’s Pegu Club, a gentleman’s establishment for British Army officers and government officials. The cocktail faded into obscurity only to be revived during the heady early years of the vintage cocktail revival of the aughts. The cocktail went viral and even inspired a new Pegu Club in New York.

Now, really, put down your phone and go mix one.

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Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean. Winner of the 2014 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award for Best New Cocktail/Bartending Book, Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean strains five centuries of West Indian history through a cocktail shaker, serving up 77 vintage Caribbean drink recipes – 16 of them lost recipes that have never before been published anywhere in any form, and another 19 that have never been published in book form.

Sweet Tweet Feat

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
8 Comments

As I mentioned in a blog post, I’m taking a break from Twitter for month so no Saturday Tweets today. I’m thinking I will bring a link feature back but without using Twitter for a few reasons:

  • Some people have trouble viewing my Twitter re-posts.
  • If Twitter ever goes out of business or I get “deplatformed” for some reason I’ll lose all the posts that I’ve put up.
  • Twitter has devolved into shouting and makes me want to shout too, so I’m going to reduce my use of it and, perhaps, only follow a few folks whose work I admire.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of our cat Buck in his usual demented mode.

Hey New York Times Let’s Dump the Wheels Column

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Transportation
4 Comments

“Sacrifices to the Modern Moloch” a cartoon in the New York Times published January 1922.

Dear New York Times editors, you need to retire your “Wheels” column. At the very least you need to insert, in all automobile coverage, a disclaimer that cars cause climate change, asthma, lung cancer and over 1.2 million deaths around the world every year due to “accidents.” The ghost of your fellow New Yorker Jane Jacobs would also add ugliness and the death of communities, thanks to the insatiable hunger for space cars claim in our urban spaces. Failing to point out these objective facts makes your auto columns little more propaganda.

Where is your bike column? Where is your transit advice column? Where is your walk-ability coverage? Sure, you touch on these issues elsewhere but these subjects have no dedicated column like “Wheels.” Perhaps it’s time to start treating cars the way you might treat cigarettes. NYT editors, would you have a weekly column devoted to reviewing cigarettes? One could easily imagine such a column. I’m sure some cigarettes taste better than others. You’d also have a lot of vape devices (the Teslas of smoking) to review. But I’m guessing you won’t debut a “Smokes” column in the near future.

Taking the cigarette analogy further, your hypothetical “Smokes” column would be wise not to blame smokers for their addiction. Just like those tobacco CEOs, there are real villains in the auto addiction story. While I bike and take public transit I live in a city (Los Angeles) that yoked its future to the automobile in the 1920s. Mostly out of fear for my safety, I’m forced to drive more than I would like by the way the city is designed. So I don’t buy the “we’re all at fault” argument. As Hannah Arendt said, “When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”

German diplomats awarding The Grand Cross of the German Eagle to Henry Ford, Detroit, 1938.

If we’re looking for who to blame we might begin with Henry Ford. Adolf Hitler kept a framed portrait of Ford on his wall and mentions him by name in Mein Kampf, “Every year makes them [American Jews] more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions . . . Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.” Ford returned the favor by publishing a virulently racist and anti-Semitic newspaper that, among other editorial atrocities, serialized a set of articles entitled “The International Jew.” And the Nazi leadership’s ideology was inspired by the worst aspects of Fordism: the alienation of workers and the suppression of unions and democracy.

Speaking of Nazis, you’ve spent the past week breathlessly covering the pre-auction and post auction-kerfufle of the first Porsche. If I were the editor I would have insisted on a paragraph detailing the fact that the Porsche company went on to use Polish slave labor during WWII. Those laborers had a “P” sewn on their uniforms and that “P” stood for “Poland” not Porsche. And would it be snarky to include a paragraph about the tackiness of today’s oligarchs bidding millions on a Nazi car?

I have a proposal. How about a livable cities column? We have a terrific writer here in LA who covers alternative transportation named Alissa Walker. You should hire her and put your auto columnists on a bike in LA to see how it feels. I have an extra bike and helmet . . .

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