Certain Sips: The Weekend Brew
Five Hot Minutes ☕ March 16, 2025
A weekly cultural and political brief—Certain Sips: the Weekend Brew
What is Honor?
Is it something each of us enter the world with, fully loaded, that can be depleted over time like an A+ your high school Social Studies teacher incrementally downgrades throughout the semester? Is honor earned over time, the cumulative internal sensation and external image cultivated with each successive honorable act? What about honoring a person, place, or idea?
In choosing to honor those who came before, are there standards and requirements that dictate whether we’ve successfully lifted up their image or demeaned it? When 2024 GOP presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy shat the bed at Lose Yourself karaoke at the 2023 Iowa State Fair, the highly visible failure may have hurt Eminem’s heart more than the average botched karaoke fan favorite.
While karaoke is one thing, legit musicians covering each other broaches an entirely different realm of honor—and there are no stakes higher than covering the Beatles. Many have covered the Fab Four, but few have been able to truly elevate the work of the original masters.
Good Listening
Elliott Smith (1969-2003) did it best. Not only was Smith a generationally talented singer and guitarist, he also lived with a deeply broken heart on his sleeve. In a posthumous collection of value rivaled by only that of Tupac Shakur, Smith left us recordings of more than fifty British invasion songs that each ooze with more raw emotion and power than the next.
His original catalogue is also quite special, if painfully truncated by Smith’s early demise. This detail hits especially hard because my Uncle Henry first introduced me to Elliott Smith and Henry died at a young age himself from cancer just a few years ago. Listening to Elliott Smith is one way I honor Henry’s memory; the two will always be linked in my mind’s ear.
Henry was a wonderful man, incredibly talented and brutally funny. We were not related by blood, but in some ways he was closer to my parents than a brother. Last year Henry appeared to me in a dream. Shocked and overjoyed to reunite with my beloved dead uncle, I hugged him and said “I thought you were fucked up, in the worst way.” Dream Henry smiled wryly and replied: “No I am fucked up, but in the best way.”
That was his sense of humor. Henry Wolyniec’s loss is deeply felt; he would have turned 70 this summer. You can check out some of his work here.
I thought of Henry last night at work while offering a toast for a guest celebrating a milestone birthday. Friends and family had gathered from around the world to be with each other, and I took a moment to recognize how precious good health and meaningful relationships can be. Sometimes hospitality work is more rewarding than serving desserts.
That being said, desserts are important! Lately at work we have been blessed to offer an elevated Sanguinacco Dolce, a prodotto agroalimentare tradizionale (PAT) or certified traditional agricultural-food product. Sanguinacco is defined by the use of pig blood as a pasty binding alternative to historically elusive egg yolks. While we honor Italian history and culture with the presentation of this extraordinary dessert, given the rising price of eggs I won’t be surprised to see a more widespread adoption of pig blood and other creative culinary alternatives to eggs.
Good Eating
Frontline hospitality work is rewarding, but exhausting. I take great care to rest up on my days off, even indulging at times in more rest than feels necessary. In his immortal lyrics to “I’m Only Sleeping,” John Lennon wrote that staying in bed can feel better than any drug. Elliott Smith and I couldn’t agree more. I hope you had an honorific weekend, old sport. See you next time.
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Certain Sips: The Weekend Brew
Obama earned the right to run in a cakewalk general election by flexing formidable political skills against a heavyweight primary opponent in Hillary Clinton. Newsom, by contrast, will never seriously compete for his party’s nomination if in 2025 he doesn’t sense a hunger for someone willing to fight back. He should stick to governing.
Dreams of Destiny
Sobriety has also yielded clarity and focus, enthusiasm, mental and physical endurance, better humor, and the satisfaction found in maintaining a daily discipline. And I started dreaming again.
For the twenty-five years I smoked, dream recollection was exceedingly rare. And when I did recall a dream, it was at best only with a grasping haze. Now I remember dreams all the time, and with vivid clarity. They give me food for thought. They offer intense emotional framing for my waking life, from the genuinely joyful to the bizarre to the dark and disturbing.
Certain Sips: The Weekend Brew—Drake, Deb Haaland, and Peggy Flanagan
The song liberally samples Masego’s 2017 Najavo, which itself samples The Beatles’ Michelle from 1965’s Rubber Soul. Under any circumstance it takes chutzpah to sample the fab four, let alone one of their most beloved songs. But Masego pulls it off, and in turn Drake demonstrates his worthiness doing justice drawing on the classic in Champagne Poetry.