JdBLetter Vol. 2 - The Newsletter Strikes Back

Holy shit I actually wrote another one

Hi!

I’m just as shocked as anyone that I’m sticking with it for second week because I have wild swings in my capacity for self-discipline. 

No alcohol for all of 2020? Sure. 100 pushups per day? Easy. But check in with the unused gummi bear-making equipment that still sits in my kitchen after three years, or the 275 words of a post-collapse sci-fi retelling of The Winter’s Tale I have stuffed in some google doc somewhere and they will offer a differing viewpoint.  

A few people told me that my first newsletter was a bit too long and that it needed more pictures. Speaking of too long... Did you know that my first draft of Drink What You Want was almost 60,000 words? Yep, I ended up having to cut almost 19,000 words in order to get it down to a manageable length. i learned through the process that cuts don’t have to be deletions, so now i have a 55-page document with all the little bits and pieces that didn’t make it to the final draft that I get to share with you. Here’s a bit on shaking v. stirring cocktails:


”Shaken drinks are best enjoyed super fucking cold. I’ll talk more about this later, but one of the primary goals of shaking, as a technique, is to render a drink stingingly cold.

Shaken drinks are also intended to be quaffed quickly, so super-chilling them dulls the perception of alcohol, and lowers aromatic intensity, allowing you to toss it back in a few sips (gulps). I know this sounds like a super alcoholic-person thing to say, but bear with me, shaken drinks reach a state of aeration and chilling as a result of vigorous shaking and only remain that way for a brief time before settling into uninspiring mediocrity. One of my favorite quotes about cocktails comes from Harry Craddock, author of the legendary Savoy Cocktail book. He was asked the ‘best’ way to drink a cocktail. His response was: ‘Quickly, while it’s still laughing at you.’

            The same is not as true for stirred drinks. Stirring is a far less violent act than shaking, and it renders the drink less cold and less diluted. This invites you sip slowly and appreciate the cocktail’s aromatic complexity. With certain stirred drinks it is sometimes possible to get the drink “too cold” and it shuts down, others are not so vulnerable. Generally I find that drinks that are best served slightly less cold are brown-spirit-based drinks and drinks with a lot of complex aromatics and bitterness, like a Manhattan, Old Pal, Vieux Carré. Others, those usually made with un-aged spirits with less aromatics and less bitterness, do not suffer as much from being too cold. The prime example being a Martini.”

All Hail Merrie Cherry

I have a monthly drag interview series for Thrillist.This month I got to interview Brooklyn drag legend Merrie Cherry. She’s a contestant on this season of Dragula and is just an all-around awesome person. If you read the piece i linked to in last week’s newsletter about Bushwig (Merrie is a co-founder) you’ll know that there were some participants who called out the organizers for what they saw to be problematic practices. 

By design, these interviews are meant to be pretty light—I started doing them as a mid-pandemic check in with drag performers who had seen their worlds contract dramatically. This touched on relatively “real” subjects, such as the pay practices of a still-growing festival like Bushwig, and also what it’s like to film a TV show while mourning family. Read the interview HERE.

#PicklePlay drops today

One of the best things to happen to me in 2021 was getting connected to Food52 as their first-ever resident drinks expert. We have a monthly series called, of course, Drink What You Want, and each month is an escalation of what I can get away with. For instance, they let me completely bleach and re-dye my hair in between video shoots so they didn’t look like they were shot on the same day; I do many of the videos holding our cat Felix; I wore a shirt with Homer Simpson’s buttcheeks on it and no one batted an eye. 

And this month I made a series of dick jokes under the auspices of talking about how I like to ~play with pickles~ when making Gibsons. I’ll shut up now. Watch it here.

Now please familiarize yourself with these music videos:

  • Paradis - Garde le Pour Toi | I was acutely melancholy this week that I never saw this song performed live, and never will. My killer app for fully-immersive, plug-into-my-brainstem VR is recreating live music performances, and this is on my list. 

  • Kylie Minogue and Years & Years - A Second to Midnight | This is one of the best-edited and smartly-conceived music videos I’ve seen. Singlehandedly makes the case for music videos as an art form. (Hat tip to Julia Bainbridge for this gem.)

  • Bjork - Hidden Place | Every effort that i put into my skincare routine is so that i can have skin this good.

How Are You Feeling?

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the excellent Feeling Asian podcast (I was a guest on a couple months ago.), but did you also know that they have a side-splittingly hilarious live show? Well, now you do. Their most recent show which features me as, you guessed it, the token white guy. I show up at the 1hr 22min mark, but you should watch the whole thing.

Thanks for reading. Forward this to someone you think will like me. 

Love,

-JdB