Posted on July 26, 2013
So I’ve paused sending out film while I’m out of work for the summer. But I do have some film that I already got back and haven’t posted. These are basically Rollei snapshots. All the children here have grown significantly, some of the couples have broken up and just everyone looks younger. So without further attempt to make this particularly deep or anything here are more heavily light leaked pics. These first ones are friends of mine in prospect park.
And this is my niece on one of her long ago birthdays
My stepsister
And my very littlest sister
Posted on July 6, 2013
The Brooklyn, the most elusive of the drinks named for the boroughs of my hometown. As a resident of Kings County for over 20 years, I had always planned to end on it. But it took quite a bit longer than I initially anticipated, and this is definitely the longest it’s ever taken me to plan and execute a cocktail, or cocktail post. I’ve approached all the drinks I blog about, to learn about cocktails from making ones from a classic period. And I try to get at least close to how there were originally made, I’m doing this to develop my own palate and skills, so I knew I would take on Brooklyn last of all the NYC cocktails. I wanted to build up my chops before hitting this one.
The Brooklyn relies on a french amara, Amer Picon, which you cannot get in the US. The other twist is if you do manage to acquire a bottle, they have changed the product somewhat since 1979. The original is 78 proof, and the current variety is 40 proof. If you go down an internet rabbit hole as I have, you will read all sorts of grumblings of other possible changes to the recipe, which seem to have less credibility, but booze bottles have no ingredient labels so you can go crazy imagining all this. Maybe all of this pondering clouded my brain enough that it didn’t occur to me to ask my family members to bring me one when they went to Paris a few months back. An error I still can’t stop kicking myself over.
Substitutions have been made all along in the history of cocktails, during prohibition the rest of the world couldn’t get the rye called for in this drink and had to go with Canadian Club, bourbon or some other whiskey. I did know going in that I was going to need to find a stand in, but I’m completely uneducated on the taste of amaras, and most bars I can think of couldn’t give me a taste tour either. They will have one if they have any. I had been fervently pouring through the eGullet cocktail forums, especially Erik Ellstad’s Stomping through the Savoy topic, (which he continued on his own blog, but the comments on the egullet thread are a gold mine of info) and found a post which mentioned that David Wondrich himself had tasted an older bottle of Picon against all the amaras in his collection and posted the result to eGullet. His verdict is Amaro CioCiaro. When I say rabbit hole, you can really go insane on reading about subs for Amer Picon, there are recipes to make your own. It is the kind of thing I do like to take on but I felt a bit out of my depth. Anyway, authenticity was part of my search, but I also just wanted a good drink I would like. I have been served a Brooklyn before in a bar, prior to doing this reading, and I did not like it especially. My hypothesis became that this was due to an inappropriate amara being used for the Picon. I guess I was determined to like a drink named after my home borough, and didn’t leave it there. (I never felt the same determination about the gem Amber, which I’m also not fond of, but there’s really no way to alter petrified tree resin to be more like how I think of myself)
If you are still following along with me, there was more bad news, sadly my delay didn’t end with the decision to use Amaro CioCiaro. It proved extremely difficult to acquire, though clearly not nigh impossible like the Picon. Here I was with the answer, and as a bonus, it’s one of the cheapest amaras you can buy at under $20, yet no one has it in any liquor store in my travels around town. I did not want to order it in the mail, and pay similar shipping. I found one store waaay far away from my apartment on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn that claimed to stock it on their website but I could not get over there, and I feared their website was lying anyway, perhaps they just occasionally stock it I’ve run into that before. If I lived near or ever was naturally in that neighborhood I would certainly check but I didn’t want to head out there and just be disappointed. My theory on why it is not carried is that customers for amaras are sophisticated and want the more expensive brands with deeper vegetal notes to sip. And I’m sure if a liquor store is going to stock something they barely sell, they want to make it worth their while for carrying it, and ring up $40 to $60 when someone bothers to buy this niche product. I just made that up, but I’m going with it.
I had started to move on to other drinks when my search for the amara became frustrating, I did go spontaneously into virtually any liquor store I was near for a while in a vain hope of finding it. In the meantime I picked up a wonderful rye made by a Brooklyn distillery (though it has Rosendale NY on the label), Widow Jane Rye. If you read my posts on the Bronx, the Queens and the pinnacle of them all the Manhattan, you know I tried to include spirits made in NYC. I did fudge it for NY State on the Manhattan, and this is sort of a fudge also, because it is perhaps made in the Catskills rather than Red Hook, but I really like it. It’s got spice, but it also finishes sweet, I have found that for many rye drinks which have other ingredients which are sweet, it’s nice to have the spicier notes counter those, so I don’t want to choose a rye which is super smooth. Widow Jane is also unfiltered which means you find little flakes of sediment in it sometimes, which I don’t mind.
Ultimately traveling to L.A. on vacation without a car brought an end to my search for Amaro CioCiaro. I spontaneously walked into a huge liquor store, as I had been doing futilely all over New York City. Boom! I saw it on the shelf, and not too much later it was in my luggage home. I then got in the door and poured a little taste. It is not especially bitter, it’s sweetish with bitter notes, it’s aromatic, it’s chocolaty, and definitely gives heat at the back of the throat, and I gather it’s not as citrusy as Amer Picon because it’s not particularly orange tasting.
So now all the players are in finally on the field. This left me to finally mix it up and try it. I looked up recipes for the Brooklyn cocktail and found this eGullet page which presented a whole new set of issues, but those I could resolve in my own apartment by consuming several alcoholic beverages. This is the kind of problem I enjoy. I tasted most of these and and came up with my own proportions as well, and I’ll share two recipes I like.
The recipe by Ted Haigh is:
2 oz rye (Widow Jane)
3/4 oz dry vermouth (Noilly Prat)
2 teaspoons Amer Picon (Amaro CioCiaro)
2 teaspoons maraschino liqueur (Luxardo)
(adding orange bitters is optional and a good idea because that is supposed to be how the CioCiaro falls short in similarity to Picon)
BTW when I measure 2 teaspoons it comes out to 1/4 oz so you can just measure that out if you have a trusty 1/4 ounce measure.
Shake or stir with ice (many folks stir vermouth drinks, I like the cloudiness and ice chips from shaking) and strain into a glass.
Once I tasted it I thought “This is very like a Manhattan, but a bit different.” And I like that. The drinks are truly sisters, similar but definitely individuals. If you include a Luxardo cherry in your Manhattan as I do, they become even more aligned. I like that the Bronx and Queens are smilar to each other as well. In these proportions I can really taste the vermouth, which you should in a drink in this family, yet many of the other notes pop out too, and it’s a bit sweeter than a Manhattan. However it was a bit disappointing to me that the maraschino is more strongly detected than the amara. This was possibly because I’m more accustomed to drinking cocktails that use it so it is easy for me to recognize. It was not disappointing because I disliked the drink, but because I went out of my mind to get the amara and it wasn’t the strongest note. And I felt I wanted to find a way to separate out the sisters from each other. I had the same issues in other words, as the participants in the egullet thread I linked above. However all the traditional recipes out there for the Brooklyn pair up the proportions of Picon and maraschino, they are greater or less, but they are equal to each other.
Here is my favorite variation, though I’ve gone between it and the one above numerous times and I like each for different reasons, in different moods. My variation ups the amaro and pairs it in proportion to the vermouth instead, though reducing the amount of vermouth and maraschino.
2 oz rye
1/2 oz dry vermouth (I actually tried 3/4 as on that egullet thread and didn’t like it as well)
1/2 oz Amaro CioCiaro
1/4 oz maraschino
This whole thing got me thinking about separating these two borough cocktails. After I took my picture, I decided that I might switch my cherry use and only put it in a Brooklyn, where it seems more natural to be since there is already maraschino liqueur. Neither drink originally called for the garnish, but a cherry has persisted in the Manhattan as it is usually served, but now I feel it might be more misplaced there. Or maybe when I want to feel the two cocktails are closely related I will dunk it in my Manhattan, and when I want the drinks to have very discrete tastes I will not. If anything has become clear to me, is a Brooklyn offers more options to play around with than the Manhattan, which I never vary, and I think I’m still playing with it. That’s definitely fun.
Posted on June 20, 2013
So I’ve some more old film from my Rollei here. I’m just putting it all together. I do have another package I haven’t even opened because I’m just not caught up, and I believe that has the very last from Italy in it. Bye Italy, hope to see you again soon. I still have over 30 rolls left. It’s taking longer than I hoped but this is the first new years resolution I have ever made that was still seeing any traction in June. So I’m happy to have gone this far even though the schedule I planned to keep is out the window. According to the original schedule I should be nearly done by now, not half way. But on to the photos.
The photo above is from Venice and I really like it. This one…I was working on it trying to remove some of it’s flaws and realized it’s interesting how one can’t leave an image alone. Because someone would probably love to put something through hipstamatic and instagram and get this result. I didn’t fully leave it alone but I’m happy with it, even though it’s not a great photo or anything.
San Marco
That’s all for Venice. Let’s go to New Orleans for two frames. These are portraits of Guitar Lightnin’ Lee in front of the Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge. He was really giving my friend Margaret a hard time flirting with her and she nearly killed me after this incident, because she put up with it for me.
And lastly here’s some NYC beaches, which I hope to visit soon this season.
Riis Park
Coney/Brighton
Posted on June 19, 2013
I went to L.A. in May, and though I took my DSLR I mostly did not use it. I went to the beach with my brother Brendan, shortly after I hit town, and it was pretty glorious. We didn’t really know what beach we were on but it was north of Malibu and south of Oxnard, and when we left I read the sign as Point Mugu.
I did take my big camera, and felt the need to shoot, but most of what I shot was pretty perfunctory. We saw a pair of dolphins swimming together, we looked at rocks, waded up to our hips. I finally started to feel something and took a few pictures that I liked. then I looked down after we left and realized I had accidentally switched my camera to manual and the pictures were eight stops over exposed. I was so bummed out because they were the only pictures I felt at all good about when I was taking them.
They ended up being far more interesting to me than anything I exposed properly.
In the bright sun I couldn’t really see my LED screen when I took each shot so I went obliviously on, shooting insanely overexposed frames.
Anyway..I like these, even though they are entirely erroneous in technique. And I had fun in LA, and with my brother, and you can sort of tell if you look at my instagram feed because I mostly shot with my phone and just enjoyed myself.
Posted on June 5, 2013
A couple more things I want to mention before I’m done talking about Citibike for now. One is that if you want to check how long your trips are, at least how long they are billed for, you can go to the web page, not the phone app, and log into your accounts and see that info under the trips window. A couple of these with zeros in front lead me to imagine it’s when I couldn’t get a bike. They clearly haven’t worked on the milage aspect of it yet, because it’s all zeros. Anyway it’s a good way to confirm you haven’t gone over time or find out when you have. I’ve noticed quite a few of my trips take just a hair over 30 minutes. I am not being careful or anything, but I think this is interesting, possibly pushing people toward memberships.
Another thing is that they really have not responded to customer service issues very well via twitter. The website and twitter feed is very sunny without any helpful information, but I glean from the very few responses on twitter that phone calls are what they had been prepared to deal with, until their phones went down. The blog has stats for usage, without any info on outages, problem stations, things that the MTA might have for subway outages. All my tweets reporting station problems have never received a single “we’re working on it” type auto response tweet.
I’ve sent numerous tweets now about the station at 51st street and 6th ave, having problems I’ve not seen at the handful of other stations I’ve been at. Times of the day it just goes down, no one can get a bike out, the docks fill up and you can’t leave a bike. Even when it’s working it takes 30 seconds for the green light to come on so you can get the bike out. Yesterday in a new twist bikes were sitting there with green lights on but locked and couldn’t be removed. Then I finally sent an email, I received no response but tonight was the first night that I left work to do an errand at 6pm, and nearly all the bikes were gone. It was actually a great sight to see. Also the bike I chose released fairly quickly, so I hope even though they never said a thing the station is fixed, at least for now. Really that’s not such a long wait. We are just over a week into the program.
I do love it, I can’t wait for it to expand in Brooklyn. One thing which is interesting is people are still asking me a lot of questions about it, not just in the station. Other users when you run into them, you might to talk to each other. It’s like when something bizarre happens on the subway, everyone all of a sudden has permission to speak to one another. I know this will go away, but it’s fun for now.
It was more interesting in the first couple days though, now mostly it’s the same questions, and they often are asked right after I’ve taken the bike out and am on the clock. Its really interesting how many tourists and casual users cannot get the idea that the rides are timed. That it’s 30 minutes at a time for a daily price of $10, a weekly price of $25, annual price of $95 (plus tax) and that membership gives you 45 minutes each ride plus the convenient key. Every casual street questioner thinks you get the bike all day. The reason the system works is because it’s timed, if they gave them to you all day, you would need a lock, and the bikes would be stolen. I can’t even believe they have kickstands. The whole purpose of all the stations is to take a bike and leave a bike on every leg of whatever trip or errand you are doing etc. The ubiquity of the docks allows for that in Manhattan at least. It’s very hard to give people a satisfying short answer to explain this, yet I do want to be a cheerful ambassador.
Someone who talked to me for a while from the seat of his own bike asked me more knowledgable questions but also was possibly chatting me up I’m not sure. He did say the bike stores are worried. I hope this ends up being good for them and not bad. At any rate I used my coupon and bought a new helmet at a Manhattan shop, which is actually going to be my helmet to keep home and use with my own bike mostly and I’m wearing it in this pic. And I used the spare pads to rehab the old one a bit to leave at work mostly. I brought my own bike into my local shop for a new rack this week. I hope the program creates more riders who wish to own their own bikes, but it’s probably more likely to enfranchise riders who don’t want to, or really can’t own bikes. Tight apartments preventing one from keeping a bike inside, justified fear of leaving one outside, and four floor walkups are all real barriers to owning a bike. I fully hope that a greater fleet of bikes on the street will cause more people to look out for us, that’s the theory anyway. But it is New York.
Posted on June 2, 2013
Here’s where there are three very different things going on. First I have some more cemetery pics, which are maybe less interesting than the really good batch, so I played around with the contrast a little more than usual.
So here are a couple frames of my cousins son, Nicholas, at the funeral of his grandmother, my great aunt. This is in Virginia, in Madison county. Our family relationships are complicated. But Nicholas is cute, though he’s really much older now than in these.
This is actually a terrible photo of the inimitable Joyce, neighbor to my family down there and just an unforgettable person. I don’t have any other pictures of Joyce. Maybe another roll will reveal one. I’m glad I have a picture of Joyce.
So these photos were taken in Queens, when I was working at a launching photo agency at PhotoShelter. There was a need for a stock image of a sleeping commuter, so we all went and tried to shoot one and we all failed to take something that worked for the client. I shot most of what I did digital, with a DSLR that I borrowed I believe, but apparently I ran a roll through the Rollei, which I had not remembered. I’m a bit amused by these. This is a friend named Chandra who dressed up, agreed to pose and signed a release for these.
He looks good even if nothing came of it. Thanks Chan.
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