Covenger + Kester

Thanks to ZBS for reminding me of the Correspondence, with all its bookish charms. For elaboration, we now turn to Fort Defiance’s St. John Frizell, the creator of the cocktail in question:

Somehow, whiskey seemed an obvious choice for base spirit, and the whiskey would be rye. I can’t elaborate on how I made this decision; it was just always apparent to me and remains so today. “Correspondences” is not a simple, neat book; it’s a chaotic, gregarious, jumbly work-in-progress; therefore the drink would not be a clean, elegant drink served up like a Martini, it would be on the rocks. O.K., I thought, now we’re getting somewhere. Something not too strong or too serious or aggressive—something you could pick up and put down and come back to later, and be surprised by again. Something punchy, spicy, fun but a little dark. Something you could drink in the nineteen-seventies, in a Tudorbethan hotel bar in a strange city, recommended to you by the old couple who are talking about retirement and if they should get that motor home; something you drink while you flirt with the bartender, fingering the postcards in your jacket pocket; something that inspires reminiscence. I started playing around. What came out was kind of a Manhattan punch or a dolled-up whiskey sour; I call it a “wintry Pimm’s Cup” on the menu. The ingredients are commonly available, except maybe the grenadine, which I make myself, and which is a pomegranate syrup spiced with star anise, cinnamon, clove, and allspice, but it’s a minor player in the whole. Here’s the recipe:

1 1/2 oz. rye whiskey
3/4 oz. sweet vermouth
3/4 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. homemade grenadine
Dash of Angostura bitters

Shake ingredients over ice; pour into a highball glass over ice. Top with soda. Garnish with an orange slice, and a maraschino cherry if that suits you.

My Friday night just got a little more jumbly.

Hopi Slip Decorated Pot (c. 1940).

Metalux storage stands by Joos Teders (1958). Trying to figure out if these things would work as bedside “tables”…

Wanted: Quoddy chukka boot, brown suede with brick sole. Available at South Willard.

Postcards 1968-1974, Joseph Beuys (1974). Edition of 120.

“Autopsy Theater, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, DC” by Christopher Payne. From Asylum, a series of photographs of abandoned mental institutions. I wonder what it says about (upscale, brownstone) Brooklyn c. 2010 that this image so neatly mirrors the borough’s dominant aesthetic.

Via ATtG.

I picked up this copy of Perspectives USA last weekend in Philadelphia purely on the basis of the cover design (C + K favorite Alvin Lustig had a hand in it). But it turns out that the journal has quite an interesting history. Launched in 1952 by New Directions guru James Laughlin with funding from the Ford Foundation, Perspectives USA was one of the United States’ (and the C.I.A.’s) major volleys in what came to be known as the Cultural Cold War. Greg Londe explains:

In a 1962 editorial, Paul Blackburn, poet and then literary editor of The Nation, described a change in international letters after WWII, a change largely conditioned, by modernists such as “Pound, Yeats, and Dr. Williams.” These poets’ preoccupation with the processes and errors of translation had “grown into a climate of opinion and now [express] a real need. Now that colonialism has become an anachronism politically […] it is as though we are witnessing the sack of world literature […] by the American publishing business.”  Put differently, imperialism and the Spanish Civil War were yesterday’s headlines: Americans were finding a new way to be international, even a new way to be imperial, by bringing it all back home.

A decade earlier, in April of 1952, the Ford Foundation had announced the launch of a quarterly magazine of the arts designed, as Time magazine put it, “to show people outside the U.S. that ‘Americans can think as well as chew gum’.”  Perspectives USA—proposed and headed by globetrotting New Directions Press publisher James Laughlin— occupied newsstands in England, France, Germany, Italy and America in October, appearing simultaneously in the respective languages of each nation. Time’s description of the pilot issue further asserted that the journal gives “the flavor of a ‘little magazine’s’ fragile view of American culture, blown up to Ford-plant size.”

Of course, one needs a heap of financial support to create an industrial-strength “little magazine”: the Ford Foundation was among the favorite laundering sources for the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” a front organization for massive investments of CIA dollars. In the post-War period, the CIA had a strategic interest in funding cultural initiatives that would either proclaim Western cultural superiority outright, or that would operate as a kind of paradoxical propaganda: art that embodied American “freedom of expression” by dint of its non-representational, seemingly non-ideological surface. In opposition to official Soviet socialist realism, the CIA bankrolled foreign exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting and made an earlier mode of modernist lyricism diplomatically useful almost in spite of itself.  William Carlos Williams’s verse from the teens and ‘20s takes up a fifth of Perspectives’s inaugural issue. As such, a form that had been the preferred mode of distribution for poets like Pound, Moore and Dr. Williams thirty years prior—little magazines such as The Dial and Contact—offered a surprising design for mid-century literary expansionism.

After 16 issues, “the Ford Foundation cut off funding, asserting that PERSPECTIVES had limited impact.” But as an artifact, it pretty much hits all my sweet spots: U.S. history, modern literature and midcentury design. Contributors to my copy (Issue No. 10) include Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Freund. Lustig and Paul Rand were both among Laughlin’s stable of cover designers.

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful collection.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010.

One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on—some on, some still off—I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour’s technique, or trying to—his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy’s—and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles.

Wanted: 1965 Volkswagen Squareback. Saw one of these for the first time (in person) over the weekend. It looks like a hearse, but adorable. The images above and below were taken from a contemporaneous Japanese brochure…

New in house: Forces in Modern British Literature 1885-1956 by William York Tindall (1956). Cover by Paul Rand.