http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/12/opinion/12brooks.html?th&oref=login
Great article indicating the way our culture is. Just a little...
Saturday Night Lite
By DAVID BROOKS
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?"
--- --
Mr. Brooks ruminates over our compulsion to make everything safe, to make health habits more virtuous than 6 of the 10 commandments, to regulate, monitor, and to make everything boring.
Brooks ends with: But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine's, some of us headed across the street to a piano bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton's old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting out a song called "Ya Gotta Have Boobs."
It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe is always just one slippery step away.
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Lassiez les bon temps roulons. (Is that right Unclemick)
Great article indicating the way our culture is. Just a little...
Saturday Night Lite
By DAVID BROOKS
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?"
--- --
Mr. Brooks ruminates over our compulsion to make everything safe, to make health habits more virtuous than 6 of the 10 commandments, to regulate, monitor, and to make everything boring.
Brooks ends with: But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine's, some of us headed across the street to a piano bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton's old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting out a song called "Ya Gotta Have Boobs."
It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe is always just one slippery step away.
-----------
Lassiez les bon temps roulons. (Is that right Unclemick)
