ENSLAVED ARCHITECTS, MASTER BUILDERS & CARPENTERS

REDISCOVERING TWO SKILLED ARCHITECT- CARPENTERS  ENSLAVED ON AN 18TH CENTURY VIRGINIA PLANTATION BY GEORGE MASON 260 YEARS AGO.

When I walked into the ornately carved rooms of Gunston Hall Plantation I saw there what stood out as the distinctly fluid style of West African craftsmanship. Anyone who has studied African art would be able to recognize these familiar hallmarks wherever they appear. That day I identified a patently West African mannerism in the execution of the  architectural embellishments. It was an indelible sign left over 260 years ago by slaves interpreting mid-eighteenth century rococo motifs. Their enslaved creativity spoke across the ages. The story it told revealed the manufacture of a grandly conceived edifice with richly carven appointments. The owner of these brilliant men was non other than George Mason who refused to sign of the Constitution. Mason personally hired an inexperienced man to supervise  the construction of Gunston Hall by his slaves who were far more experienced and skilled architects and carpenters by comparison. Gunston Hall was intended to impress the landed gentry of Colonial Fairfax County Virginia by upscaling the existing residences. It would establish Mason as a man of refinement and impeccable taste, signifying that he had socially arrived at the top of the social food chain of landed gentry such as it existed in the bucolic hinterlands of Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century. At that time no credit would ever have been lavished on a slave as having been an architect or a creative force behind the buildings he constructed from foundation to finial. Mason imported a carpenter from England to make it seem as if the edifice had been the total concept of a man his slave owning peers could respect, it would not have been considered chic for such a pretentious undertaking to have been the product of a slave. In America, especially during the colonial period when the cities we now know were dense forests slave labor was the invisible force behind the transformation of wilderness into civilization, slaves felled the forests to clear acreage for farming the large plantations and opened streets for the towns that grew up around plantation life; no one understood this better than men who owned slaves like George Mason.

The visual connection between the technical imprint of Africa and the thematic adaptation of European design was unmistakable. The struggle to realise a unique architectural footprint in the new world defining the hybrid iconography of its sociopolitical soul would evolve into the Federal Style so eloquently charactarized by the architectural stylists Jefferson and Latrobe. The development of this new architectonic vocabulary was pioneered by plantations such as Gunston Hall that rejected the opulence of European taste if not more by necessity than artifice establishing a simplified standard for the American home.

These early and middle colonial period buildings were conceived in a world that was was technically incapable of replicating the scale of contemporary European architecture because there were no resources available to devote to their painstaking execution. The new colonies were busied with the basic tasks of building the first footholds of development and in response the architecture of that period was functional. The urban and agricultural infrastructure was built upon the backs of slaves simply because it was the least desirable work and slavery rendered it virtually cost-free! European colonials supervised the clearing of forests, the draining of swamps, the building of roads and the construction of the simple structures of the times all accomplished by slave labor. In the thousands of history books written on North America not one has ever honestly told revealed this true story of how America was built.

In struggling colonial America, on the frontiers of European settlement during the eighteenth-century there was little time to lavish on capricious beauty. In the major east coast port towns we find architecture that is truly style conscious and sophisticated.  Interestingly, the farther one is removed from cosmopolitan cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and New Orleans the more clearly one recognizes the softening of architectural sensibility to a more improvised, homemade brand informed by the natural design instincts of slaves. One might say the architecture begins to become more fascinating there. Slaves ultimately interpreted culturally unfamiliar classical motifs for the ordinary buildings used by colonial peoples. The deeper we delve into the prolific construction boom that took place between the early 1600’s when the first slaves began to be imported to North America in significant numbers and the mid nineteenth-century preceding the American Civil War the more magnanimous a picture we get regarding just how much of this nation was actually built by slaves, the concept alone is simply mind-boggling.

I already knew that wealthy colonial plantation owners considered skilled African slaves especially architects and construction experts to be highly valuable personnel in rural environments where such professionals were absolutely otherwise unavailable.  If you plan to visit this or any other plantation I recommend that you study period wood carvings, pottery and metal castings from mid-eighteenth century West Africa. Equipped with this practical knowledge it should be easy to connect the cultural dots… one, two, three, four….. a masterpiece!

We cannot continue to learn the story of the construction of Gunston Hall or any other structure built in America from the colonial period through the antebellum period without taking a candid look at the world that created it for they are intimately married. The people who ultimately realized the building of these edifices were typically slaves, they were the labor force of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A contemporary example might be the importation of laborers for the construction boom of the early twenty-first century but comparatively the importation of African slaves represented a much larger scale with billions of workers being enslaved over a duration of several centuries. When slavers stole entire families from their homes in Africa for sale in the slave markets of the Americas and the Caribbean  they kept an eye out for highly skilled craftsmen, mathematicians, physicians, engineers, artisans, statesmen and other professionals already possessing skills that would fetch a high price in the marketplace. Had these captives actually been completely unskilled they would hardly have been considered worth the effort. The myth that these men and women were ignorant, unskilled savages equal in stature to farm animals was manufactured by European and American slavers as propaganda to justify the brutal rape, murder and dehumanization of billions of people over the course of over three violent centuries. The conceptual buy-in of those who participated in and accepted  slavery including its premise of racial supremacy cannot be ignored today. We must reevaluate the character of those who saw fit to participate in the slave trade and not pretend they did not fully understand its implications. The men and women who owned slaves like George Mason, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew it was morally wrong but chose to justify it based on economics. We cannot idolize and celebrate such men and women any longer as icons of freedom and egalitarianism any more than Germans can place an olive Branch on the brow of Hitler. The practise of racial supremacy today is based on a technically bankrupt mythology originally manufactured then to bamboozle the poorer masses who, unaffected by the negative consequences of its inequities and too destitute to participate in its vast economic profits accepted the trend they were powerless to change.  In truth European peasants who had been enslaved in feudal serfdom for over a thousand years were all to eager to trade-off their enslavement if only conceptually because it appeared to give them the hope and appearance of socioeconomic advancement. The moral and humanitarian obligation that the slave trade rejected and villainously turned it’s back on over 300 hundred years ago has never ceased to be a current social issue. 

But something that had not occurred in all human history precipitated a universal abhorrence of slavery presaging it’s historical end in spite of its economic attraction. By the summer of July 4th 1776 most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence realized the awful mistake they had made by not clearly outlining a legally structured end to slavery. Although it is rumored that George Mason was sympathetic with the abolition of slavery but a slave owner himself, he made no effort to free his own slaves in life or even upon his death. It can be concluded that nay sense of abolition possessed by him was purely romantical since it was never evinced by a single action of his. It should therefore be assumed that he since he never left any tangible measurement of abolitionism he was in fact not the shining American figure we should hold in esteem, he was part of the problem.

Ironically, the only real good served, the only merit history can lay upon the brow of George Mason is that during his life he and his ancestors left us well documented evidence of the extraordinary skills many slaves possessed but we’re never credited for. We’re it not for their dutiful journal keeping which had every other intention but to preserve the legacy of their servants we might know nothing of the people who really made a plantation such as Gunston Hall successful.

On another front we must differentiate between whether we are alright considering a slave owner a hero, or a proper role model for the American way of life.  Following to the social movement occurring in our culture whereby the lives and actions of public and popular figures are being held under a powerful ethical and moral microscope we must now not fail to revisit history for the purpose of separating good men from bad ones. If we can arrest and convict a man for dogfighting surely we can remove undue honors from men who contributed to the brutal murder enslavement of billions of innocent men women and children in the culturally malevolent slave trade.

In the past and present it has sufficed to mention that a slave owner treated his slaves well to assuage the inevitable onslaught of ethical and moral criticism. Those times have changed!

HISTORY CANNOT ESCAPE THE SCRUTINY UNDER THE HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS WE UPHOLD TODAY!

Today as then we realize the vast wealth of knowledge owned by slaves that was usurped literally for free. We also know these slaves were not given any credit for their contributions, no acknowledgement has ever been made to affirm their ingenuity without which the America we know today could have come to be… Nearly every historian that has published data on American history has been unpardonably ignorant or deliberately negligent of the contribution black peoples have made especially during the colonial era. These charlatans have failed us and cheated us of the richness and complexity of the American experience.

I was at first overtaken by the absence of Black American visitors at this historic site naked Gunston Hall; I alone had come to pay homage to the ingenuity of my ancestors on that day. Though the legacy of slavery is painful revisiting sites where it played out is a healing soulful pilgrimage. 

I wanted to see if the tour guide had done his homework, if he knew that the planks which bore our weight were cut, dressed, polished and joined by black slaves so I asked him if he knew who the carpenters were. By his gesture I knew he didn’t. I surmised that he understood where I was going with my query. He responded that George Mason hired and imported Italian craftsmen a fabrication even he realised was embarrassingly unbelievable. For one thing the distinctly English brand of chinoiserie, and Gothic revival motifs were definitely not in vogue in aristocratic Italian homes of the time . A skilled and stylistically eloquent Italian craftsman of the 1750’s would have favored neoclassical motifs along the lines of Andrea Palladio. By 1750 French and Italian architecture was seriously neoclassical evoking eloquent interpretations  of Roman, Etruscan, Greek and Egyptian temples. In mid-eighteenth century colonial America the landed aristocracy of the Potomac river valley and Chesapeake region were, for the most part, out of the loop with regard to mainstream architectural trends in Europe. Thomas Jefferson was a rare exception and it is quite clear that his fashionable instinct attracted him to the neoclassical styles trending in France and Italy when he built Montpellier in 1764. It might be a stretch to include Mount Vernon built by George Washington in 1758 as an early example of neoclassical expressionism adding a second to the list. Without a doubt Gunston Hall was intended to evoke the spirit of a small English country house that would have been in vogue in the early 1700’s. It was conceived as a romantic but visually effusive English cottage evoking the feel of Gothic abbeys and parishes of the English countryside.

I set out thereafter to prove that the intricate woodwork had been hand-crafted by African slaves. So I began to thoroughly research the matter proving or disproving my theory. As you have read my research proved my instinct in full.

In 1755 George Mason indentured a young Englishman named William Buckland importing him across the sea from England to America to oversee the construction and embellishment of his Potomac river plantation known as Gunston Hall. The original contract still exists but the concept of indenturement has changed over the past 261 years. There were two very different types of indenturement in the American colonies. The classic indentureship ivolved criminals and other incarcerated Persons including the poor being sold into temporary slavery as a way to repay their debts. However based on the paperwork it is clear that  Buckland was a free man at the time he was hired so the term indenture in this instance would have had the same meaning in 1755 as the modern word, contractor. William Buckland was a contractor but it is also clear he was considered to be an indentured servant bound to a term of 4 years. At the time the carpentry and joining arts were a broadly defined trade and certainly could  have included the particular design and construction skills expected of an architect.

According to contemporary diaries and inventories of Masons son two slaves were already owned by Mason working as skilled carpenters. These black men were named Tom and Liberty. Tom and Liberty lived on a section of the plantation known as “Log Town” an encampment of log cabins and other structures in what was called the Occoquan Quarter of the plantation grounds. Log Town had a black overseer named Nace and the entire Occoquan Quarter had relative autonomy it was populated by other skilled slave craftsmen such as blacksmiths and tanners and their families. This should not serve to suggest that slavery was anywhere close to an idyllic existence at Gunston Hall the reality is that it was brutal and dehumanizing consistent with  slavery as a whole.

Masons son confidently praised the professional skills possessed by Liberty and Tom indicating that they were certainly more skilled and experienced at carpentry, and building construction than their indentured supervisor when he arrived on American soil. It can be safely assumed they were the architects and contractors for all the extant structures about the plantation. This leaves us to wonder why, given their superior skills, was a young contractor hired to supervise men with many times his skills and experience.

George Mason was a social climber. His residence at Gunston Hall was intended as a showplace to secure and affirm his status in colonial Virginia society. He avoided incurring the expense of hiring and importing an established, popular English architect, (I am certain it would have been an impossible task), and to be honest the bucolic farmers and plantation owners at the time would not have recognized the difference. It was a political keeping up of appearances at best implying that Mason had achieved a social status enabling him to “import” an English architect. To that end he was undoubtedly the “Hyacinth” of his sleepy agrarian community and a reminder that pretension is as old as time itself.

To add more realness to this diorama let’s examine the practical dynamics. Liberty and Tom were experienced contractor/builders and architects who certainly could have supervised and built Gunston Hall from the ground up by themselves. We do not know much about their education but the certainly had the ability to work from architectural plans and one must surmise they already possessed the skill to draw them. Based on written documents itvis quite clear that Liberty and Tom not only built the many domestic and agricultural structures on the plantation but that their skills were so high and demand so compelling in the region that they were given virtual autonomy in their own section of the plantation to oversee the daily maintenance of the entire plantation in addition to being contracted out to other plantations and work sites for maintenance and groundout architectural services. They were a complete design-build team.  During the eighteenth century it was quite common for plantation owners to purchase architectural plans and treatises published in Europe and have their skilled slaves transform them into buildings. Because the design coordination was often supervised by a white carpenter or architect such as Buckland the slaves who certainly became adept at copying and manufacturing architectural details were never given due credit for their work. As we begin to delve deeper into the socioeconomic and political structures of slavery these deliberate exceptions of black men from the history of our country will be uncovered.

I uncovered the actual 1775 contract of indenturement for William Buckland and this rare document told me virtually everything I needed to know. The question was who actually executed the physical carpentry work at Gunston Hall and specifically the delicate wood carving of the crown mouldings and finestral details such as the fiery chinoiserie valences. The endorsement made by Jorge Mason at the completion of the work stated that Buckland and I quote that he,

“Had the entire direction of the carpenters and joiners work”.

Translated into 21st century English this means that he acted in the capacity of a supervisor but given the social realities of the time it is doubtful that Buckland actually, physically carved any of the fine interior and exterior embellishments because he already had a team of skilled carpenters at his disposal. It is more probable that he drew or provided exemplary plans from which the slaves worked and that he provided printed generic architectural patterns allowing them to extrapolate the execution. Even during his four-year indenture Buckland could not and would not have single handedly manufactured all of the marvelously intricate woodwork we marvel at today. It was carved by slaves… so who gets the credit for actually  building Gunston Hall?

It’s is customary to attribute the building of a notable house to its owner because they were it’s financier, hence we say Gunston Hall was built by George Mason although he never contributed to its physical realization. Similarly, Buckland who went on to become a prominent architect in colonial Virginia was, like Thomas Jefferson a creative manager but one who left the messy, hard-core details of construction to the skilled expertise of slaves. This disparity in the transparency of the creative process has served to prevent skilled, enslaved artists from getting credit for their genius. This is one of the primary reasons why American history must be revised to reflect the contributions of black peoples.

Whilst reassigning due credit we must also revisit the “Hero-Srtucture” of this nation to reevaluate who should inherit the esteem of history moving forward from a platform of truth and fairness. When this has been judiciously managed black slaves will be resurrected from the abyss of ignorance and focused racism to assume their due status as builders of this nation…

FIN

Written by BIGDADDY BLUES

MARIAN ANDRESON'S SONG

MARIAN ANDERSON

Sound has never heard itself with such sound,

Sweet with a rolling sadness in muted ages found,

Greater than glory it bows... in humble faith,

Shaking tears from the meadows of happy years,

Waking promise from the residue of unhappy tears…

By Bigdaddy Blues 

THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF BEING SINGLE

THE ART OF BEING SINGLE

A 21ST CENTURY BACHELLOR 

 

CHAPTER ONE: THE AWAKENING OF WHAT WE ARE…

 

I am an artist whose primary medium for the past 40 or so years has been perfecting the art of being and remaining handsomely single. I aspire to be living proof that the phenomenon of social singularity or bachelorhood when expressed as a distinctive lifestyle may be cultivated and elevated to a fine art. To that end, I am an artist at being single.

 

For me bachelorhood has been a happy state of existence during those decisive periods in my life when I was not engaged in the brief but concentrated pursuit of monogamous bliss. Monogamy seems to have been forever dangled before me like the pastel-coloured stationary toys suspended from a baby’s playpen. No sooner had I become bored by operant journey they promised did I philosophically opt-out in order to pursue the more lustrous opportunity to manufacture and explore my own notions of happiness. Comparatively, I find that I have spent the majority of my adult life as a single man and at this age I am surprised to discover a vast, growing and largely uncelebrated world of men like me. Men who have fashioned their lives to explore the unselfish freedom of singularity. Such men defy the assumption that singularity is merely a transitional state along the road to monogamy. For men who have chosen the single life bachelorhood is our r'aison d'etre.

 

Traditionally bachelors and the single lives they live are qualified against the condition of being permanently hitched. The world measures single men against our opposite condition as if the ultimate and only state of mature human existence was marriage. Marriage is a paradigm rejected by men who envisage a different form of social expression for their lives that does not tie them down with traditional roles of manhood and family.  Bachelors courageously opt-in to a more comfortable and unfettered existence where they can delve deeply into the unfathomed possibilities of manhood and humanity the way a priest excludes the secular world to explore the spiritual. The simple fact of the matter is that every man is not suited to marriage and all the better if those men identify themselves early in the game. We are proud to be self-proclaimed bachelors. Our bragging rights are the same as our married counterparts. Bachelors celebrate the anniversary of their commitment to the single life the way married men celebrate their wedding anniversaries. Should I endeavor to initiate a tradition it should be that of the bachelors ring as a celebratory icon the antithetical counterpart of the wedding ring.  I fully expect every confirmed bachelor out there who does not celebrate the anniversary of their singularity to begin on this very day. And if you do not already know the exact date that you were born again unto singularity simply invent a date or choose one because it is long overdue… beginning now you should and after reading this article you must set aside a time each year to celebrate the anniversary of your bachelorhood.

 

If I could re-live certain portions of my life I would certainly not edit away every committed relationship I ever had instead to have remained a single man In spirit and body. I count myself fortunate to have realised my true nature at an age when I still had the lustiness to explore it. I realise such a poetic editing of “amour rate” is an impossibility and am thankful to be able to have learned from those honest explorations of humanity. Any mistakes that may have been made have resulted in invaluable lessons learned and bought me full-circle to the happily single man I am today. Being a bachelor does not mean that one is critical of and disrespectful to marriage and monogamy as the two are merely options in many ways as much equal as they are opposites.

 

The best thing about being a single man in the twenty-first century is that I can be me without any need for pretense or fear of repercussion. Because of my stubbornness I can handle criticism. I am accepted both internally and externally as a bachelor and am processed and targeted for economic consumption in this modern cyclone of inexorable data like everyone else. What matters is that I have the intellectual savvy to out-wit the umbrella of lifestyle marketing combined with the intrinsic sensibility to understand who I would and should like to become as a man. I am an invention not a product. I use whatever is available at the time to manufacture a pathway to where I want to go taking time to ensure that path is ethically paved, morally roofed and walled wherever there is need of such stabilizing features. The built-in vulnerability which appears to go along with even the best-built human construct will keep me humble, focused and educated for the next challenge…

 

CHAPTER TWO: THE BACHELOR LIFE

 

In the summer of 2003, I began to contemplate again what had always been so compelling and I daresay so very alienating to me as a boy. It stood before me strangely familiar, forbidding, urgent, and intriguing. As a young child of 5 years, I expected and even dreamed of marrying a handsome, professional gentleman. At 40 I had scarcely imagined the spectre of what a “Male Spinster” might be but I began to cull references beginning from childhood that allowed me to finally define it. I remembered having eaves-dropped on my parents as a boy while they discussed a woman who was unmarried and seemingly without any of the necessary charms, interest or prospects to marry. My mother and father meant no malice by implying that she may have been a spinster. It was a common conclusion for grown folk to make in the reckoning of that time. Nonetheless, I stored the term in the backroom of my 1^st grade vocabulary where it remained until I developed the discernment to throw it away. It was a word that I had never been able to compare with others that my pre-pubescent ears overheard in conversations about mature, single men. There appeared to be no adjective that came close to describing a single man in the manner the term spinster rendered a woman although the same red flag unfurled and waved upon its utterance. Of course, that flag has ever been emblazoned with an unmarried warning sign. To that end I am living proof that children are detective time-bombs absorbing everything they hear to be processed at some undetermined time in the future. From my early listenings’ I deduced that men and women were expected to marry by a certain age although it made no difference to me whether anyone other than my parents was married or single. At that youthful time anyone older than 20 seemed inestimably old. Though the idea of a male spinster was not yet defined in my mind I continued cross-referencing those conversations about gentlemen of that ilk until I had manufactured a rather cheeky caricature to match the mood. It was to become the fateful archetype of an unfamiliar species now known as the male-spinster a character so closely resembling modern man’s dilemma with social and sexual evolution. That concept now indelibly coined as a male spinster became the embodiment of all my fears as a young man secretly struggling to escape being single, lonely, passionate and vulnerable. Unfortunately, I had completely mis-understood him by desperately trying not to become him. A true male spinster might have courageously embraced his singularity as an expression of his freedom and even perhaps as a deliberate act of civil disobedience. In fact, a true male spinster would never attach himself to that label nor allow others to do so. The entire idea of a male spinster is ridiculous, an absurdly vacuous attempt to simplify a phenomenon that deserved but had not been given proper thought. With this realization I forever discarded the spurious persona of the male spinster. He never was and could never truly exist beyond the ghostly whisp of a rapidly disintegrating mirage composed of insecurity, fear and ignorance. For me, that spectre had never so inextricably revealed itself than when I entered a gay bar for the first time observing a lugubrious row forty-some gentlemen having cocktails alone. Do not mistake my digression, I am not attempting to claim bachelorhood and singularity as a gay thing. To the contrary they are as much a part of the common human experience as life itself. My personal experiences as a gay man have shaped the way I have come to understand them, it is from that perspective that this story is being told and the realness from which it has earned its relevance. Looking through the waters between then and now I realize my failure to appreciate the phenomenon of male singularity was tied to the greater inability of society to understand the nature of bachelorhood. It like so many other blind-spots in the streaming of human progress challenges the very wit of humanity to refine and perfect itself. That stream and the momentum it will achieve once liberated from a male-defined parallax should presently expect to gaze upon its inevitable deconstruction in the holistic mindfulness of the present and future. Rest assured that that is indeed a good thing if not only because it will lead us all to contemplate and legitimately build a more intelligent understanding of that which has heretofore eluded us.

 

It is no irony that our discussion of twenty-first century bachelorhood should begin with single women.  In many ways greater attention has always been paid to the situation of single women in modern, Edwardian and Victorian culture for the simple reason that it openly challenged the status quo. The genre of the “Single Woman” has had many names throughout history. In hip mid-century modern lingo, it was, “Bachelorette”.  The antique terms “Spinster” or “Old Maid were used to reference unwed Victorian/Edwardian women. Men and surprisingly women have always resented these powerful ladies who refused to marry as an act of civil disobedience. For that reason alone the term spinster should be wiped from our lips and replaced with something closer to heroine or pioneer. Prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s singularity in women was considered to be an oddity, a social anomaly and was either criticized or exploited by men and by women who chose to see the world only through the prejudiced lenses of men. Single women of today aren’t much different from their male counterparts save for their sex. We can no longer condemn them to a shelf of obsolescence kept for spinsters or display young, nubile bachelorettes on a chauvinist pedestal for beatific adoration. One of the first steps toward honoring single women is to stop defining them by male standards. That said it would clearly be problematic to define men by female standards. So the flawed prism of spinster realness is in the end incapable of illuminating either sex, it is a bankrupt concept altogether. Bringing this discussion full circle requires us to admit that the lives of single men have eluded our study whilst we were otherwise keenly focused on suppressing the enfranchisement of single women. We have never stopped punishing single women for being successful mothers and professionals in spite of the fact that they were unmarried. Suffrage is incontrovertibly linked to bachelorhood both symbolically and ideologically and I believe that in order understand either one we need to dig deeper utilizing the proper tools. Those tools are necessary to open the valve of understanding, to release the pressure built up by millennia of bias. Those tools bring about inclusion and tolerance and that is also what they are made of.  I find that one of the best tools is definition/clarification so the next two paragraphs will be spent making critical clarifications. Clarification is the mightiest of tools. Since we are now, (and no pun is intended), gathered together to discuss singularity and bachelorhood let us begin to define them.

 

SINGILARITY: The term “Singularity” has been poetically and strategically dispersed throughout the chapters of this article. Please do allow me to personally explain what is meant when I use it. I use the words singularity and bachelorhood interchangeably. Singularity is another one of those English words that has many different implications depending on the context to which it is being applied including the ability to have absolutely nothing in common with any established definition. One good example is when it is the product of pure artifice or invention as with slang or as poetic expression. The English language never grew so prolifically as it did during the time once called the Postmodern Era when House, Rap and Hip-Hop culture literally redefined it. With respect to the term singularity the simplest of its meanings is the state or condition of being single. After that its litany of its definitions begin to venture into a dizzying reticulation of Greek philosophy, metaphysics and other mathematical protuberances. So, in the interest of simplicity let’s say that singularity is a term I have poetically borrowed from scientists to describe the state or condition when humans do not aspire to be traditionally partnered or married. Singularity may include people who live alone and are what we call loners’ but it more typically describes those who simply do not marry. These unmarried “Singulars” may live communally with friends, family, lovers, etc. or not. The term singularity is not meant to imply a hermitic, antisocial lifestyle but I can see how it would be an infinitesimally minute subset of the collective albeit at the very extreme of the spectrum. My point is only that singularity is perfectly normal, it is common to the human experience. It is neither gay nor straight. It is my opinion that singularity is a lifestyle that lends itself to a healthy exploration of the infinite permutations of mature, human relationships.

 

As an observer of the human condition, I only bother to write about things that have been overlooked by others. One might say that I actually take my own writing seriously so if I am writing about anything it is a serious matter.  Now it may be folly to ever take oneself too seriously however, I do believe I do not cross that line. I have always believed that good writing is also entertaining. That is to say that we writers must be able to poke fun at ourselves and at our subject not to detract from it but in order to humanize it. It was once said by a very wise friend that “Human beings are nothing if not humorous and also because we are imperfect, I am sure that after god created men he quickly realized he needed a sense of humor in order to love and understand them”. In the past bachelorhood has been treated as a social pandoras box. It’s actually not that serious… the funny thing is how the hopes dreams and aspirations of single men are so similar to those of married men. I suppose it all hearkens back to some primordial instinct for self-preservation or something. In my adulthood I was finally able to quantify the missing connections between the way I was socialized to marry and the way I chose to remain single. In that moment of clarity I smiled realizing the humorous similarity between singularity and marriage is that while married men strive to protect and defend their marriage single men strive to protect and defend their singularity. Amen!

 

BACHELOR: The term bachelor has many nuances but its foundation is and has always been defined as an unmarried man who has elected to remain single and who has cultivated a distinct lifestyle around his singularity. Bachelors include all races and ethnicities all religions. Bachelors come in all shapes and sizes so the one thing which unifies them is that they have chosen a singular life. A bachelor can be a young or mature man but I believe that the bachelor lifestyle is especially well suited for a gentleman of any age.

 

Modernity has ushered in a new social order that that has pleasantly updated the very nature of gentility. The result is that a man from any socioeconomic echelon can become a gentleman. The art of gentlemanliness is not a dying art, it is an evolving one. Bachelorhood can be a crown on the head of a gentleman or any man who aspires to be gentlemen. I like to believe that it is our gentility which fuels mankind’s evolution toward a more civilized species.

 

Singularity and Bachelorhood can be as simple or complex as you make them. Hopefully there is an underlying reason why a man decides to live a single life beyond mere circumstance. If not, there is still plenty of room for understanding in this great world of ours. What really matters is that a man is happy with his choice and that his choice is accepted and supported by others. It is important that single men do not allow themselves to be placed in an ivory tower they should be comfortable at ground level with their lifestyle and must assert themselves with dignity to establish their niche in modern society. Bachelors have led quiet lives over the centuries so there is so much that is unknown about them. It may be that a conservative existence is the secret of their success but one wonders how long the quiet will last as their numbers continue to grow.

 

Why is the number of single men growing? Does it represent the breakdown of family values or does it mark their evolution? Are bachelors’ men who simply failed at becoming husbands?  Are single men single because they are fundamentally unattractive or lack some essential element required to establish and cultivate a monogamous relationship or a family?  Are bachelors’ sex-crazed maniacs adopting a lifestyle that allows unbridled pursuit of their decadent sexual appetites? The answer is of course no. Americans are legendarily adept at cooking their fears and ignorance into a generalized pot and then calling out the stew of their imagination as evil. Singularity should not be treated as the erosion of family values it is merely one of its permutations. Dismantling our fear of singularity builds positive change such as the reversal of centuries of institutionalized racism against Black Americans. In my opinion there is a general fear associated with an increase in the number of single men and women and with it comes a distinct prejudice that extends into every spectrum of their lives. Prejudices against single persons exists in our tax structure, financing of residential and other investments, retail, hotel and eating/drinking establishment accommodations. Single men and women have generally accepted these improprieties as if it is okay for them to be penalized for being single. Contemporary American culture is hard-wired in favor of monogamy and its ultimate consummation… marriage. There are many factors contributing to the increase in single men and now more than ever it raises the question of whether the economic and human contributions of single American citizens are as important as those made by married citizens. What is most important is that the growing number of single men understand their responsibility to ensure their rights are supported in every aspect of American public and private life and by its hallowed institutions.

 

Modern men are exploring the freedoms of the sexual revolution that release them from the expectation to marry and parent children. These men are opting to refocus energies once devoted to the traditional pursuit and maintenance of spouses, children and family life in new directions but that does not mean they are exempt from contributing to a healthy and functional reorganization of family and community. America is challenged with the problem of creating good incentives to shepherd this change. Singularity is a private choice it must not be punished by prejudice as an attempt to discourage it. At the end of the day its all about respecting freedom of choice from a respectable distance! Modern Americans are slow to evolve that higher-order of maturity and gentility allowing other civilized cultures to observe, understand and respect privacy from a distance…

 

Modern men who elect a lifestyle of singularity are not freaks or failures they are simply people who have thoughtfully chosen not to opt-in to a traditional monogamous life. I do not believe that any judgement or prejudice can effectively diminish the power of a man’s choice to pursue a life of singularity when it has been purposefully made. That is to say that singularity is not the consolation prize for secular happiness and success. For those who pursue singularity happiness and success are its goal and objective. Men may enter a life of singularity due to innumerable circumstances but even if singularity is not a man’s first choice if it represents where he is and therefore it must be respected. No matter how he enters singularity once a man understands where he is and decides he would like to remain single most of the hard work has been done. Since the movement toward regimented family values during the 1980’s single people have lost whatever gains they may have made in the 60’s and 70’s. Today single men have to work hard to update institutions that fail to cater to their unique needs.

 

Strip away the playboy image of bachelor-hedonist, remove the odd-couple image suggesting social anomaly and replace it with the updated brand of a single man with purpose. Bachelorhood is the science and art of masculine self-expression. It bears social weight including ethical responsibility to community and humanity. Bachelors, singular by nature share common characteristics with the world. Once America gets on-board with this unstoppable movement it will glean true progress. The principles of singularity as it relates specifically to unmarried men are no different from those of married men or men with families. The new single man must own his responsibility to uphold and shepherd those aspects of civilized life that unify and move us forward as human beings. If bachelorhood can be idealized it would be personified by the modern gentleman bachelor. American culture must evolve to embrace and support singularity.

 

Thank you for taking time to participate in the second of an ongoing series of articles that I intend to share with you. Many of the topics briefly touched-on will be fully explored in upcoming chapters. I hope you have enjoyed our time and please do look out for the next chapter.       

 

Written By:

BIGDADDY BLUES

DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

A Renewd Optomism In The American Way Of Life...

Let's compare Trump’s political defeat to the virtual demise of the wicked witch of the east or west! The parallel is clear in spite of the artificially clueless and deliberately murky manner of twenty-first century American culture. Notwithstanding, so many Americans and dreamers mark November 6, 2020 as the first time in four years they could stop living in fear of an omnipresent evil. To these good people a new optimism emerged when the Trump administration died due to causes of the popular and electoral vote… 

When The Wizard of Oz premiered 81 years ago on August 25, 1939 its messages of safety and danger ran concurrently with the rise fascism.  The Nazi party was rising in Germany. The evil regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain spearheaded the expansion of fascism in Europe. Millions of people would die in a second world war in order to set humankind back on a path to freedom. In comparative contrast Trumps presidency shows an incontrovertible likeness to the popular rise of Hitler and the deadly, fascist regimes of his time.  Many believe that Trump has wittingly spirited into life the likes of an old American evil not seen since the heyday of the Klu Klux Klan… his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again" is encrypted with divisive and hate-mongering allusions to racial superiority, systemic disenfranchisement and oppression.

As the news that Biden had been declared President-Elect broadcast over the innumerable streams of social media I heard a solid hour of urban revelry in the streets… fireworks, singing, shouting, horn-blowing, dancing, cheering and the like. I quickly summoned my friends to join me for a long awaited cocktail party and we Cheersed-In the historic occasion in my garden on the unseasonably warm night of November 6, 2020…

Reveling that night we borrowed a familiar tune from The Wizard Of Oz making it our theme.  We felt safer in the moment but each of us understood that certain danger lay ahead and as we had done with our votes committed to face and challenge our fears head on. That an evil so profound could have grown to power right before our eyes was a bitter wake up call. That evil I'd put in check for the moment. In the ensuing months and years we understood that we would be called upon to rise up to defeat that challenge! But in the moment…  it was ever so fulfilling to sing the words…

 “DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!”.

BY BIDADDY BLUES

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS: An Examination Of Resilience And Courage In The Face Of The Unknown...

18th Century Microscope

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS

Sunday brunch found me reveling o'er the handsome libations of the moment. Those sacred sips spirited our conversant mood during that hallowed celebration dutifully spicing the sensory effects of a well-earned buzz… but that heady euphoria had been jealously competing with the sobering perspective of the weekdays ahead. Clearly the former won! That we brunched at all became so sinfully tinctured with the lustiness of blind-determination I easily permitted myself to succumb to the rapture of irrevocably dalliant optimism. I could not help but call it a scandalous flirt and encouraged it to more decadent heights... I applauded our willingness to challenge the depressingly hermetic range of options yawning before us. For they all appeared fundamentally sensible but ultimately lost the comparative test between what men call practical and what artists call sublime! I recall its magic personified as a day about town ever-refreshed by a handsomely plentiful spill of well-crafted and chilled cocktails! O' and that was certainly the first thing upon which we agreed. The second was that we enjoyed being free to be out amidst other human beings whether or not they were as equally cocktailed as us. The preferred combination of drink and circus gave us all inspiration to do the good thing. And we did. As a matter of fact my friends let us all pause and raise a glass to “drinking with the masses" as opposed to self-medicating at home and alone!

CHEERS!

Microscope and Case Circa 1750

Understand me… I get my fair share of quiet and contemplative time… but a city-boy like me needs to get his regular dose of public frolic and romp in! To me it’s all circus! To me the world is a disco and I just want to get in an occasional Latin hustle! Like John Travolta stepping his way through the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever I proclaim my passion to go forth living, loving and dreaming without fear of what unforeseen fate may lay ahead!

In the previous paragraphs I’ve managed merely to allude to the very thing which actually inspired this discussion. Those of you who’ve concluded the subject to be cocktails should take penance. Hopefully my metaphoric suppression of its identity has been unsuccessful at concealing that this entire article is a commentary on the social effects of COVID-19 and not the effects of alcohol. I could but will not qualify the mention of a mere virus as ineffable as if this were a gothic melodrama. As a thoroughly modern man I acknowledge the necessity that I invoke the harsh banality of life as a naked truth. Although I now struggle to compare what the naked truth might be as compared to a fully-clothed version. Naked immediately sounds more appealing… The truth is that this pandemic could shake humanity to its knees… it has no sense of who we are. COVID-19 is a thing without any intelligence it does not know what it is… it cannot love or hate it is a dispassionate, inanimate, diminutive mass. It can be likened to a corrupted computer program acting out its instructions with dumb but lethal precision. As is our custom humans need to ascribe some tangible personality to abstract things that move us emotionally. So, it is a smart therapeutic exercise to humanize our fears, dressing them up for combat in armor that shows weaknesses giving them the appearance of vulnerability. It is only after we define our fears that we can attack them head on.

However poetic I have attempted to create a platform… a vantage point… a parallax from and through which to critique an otherwise invisible phenomenon. In my estimate COVID-19 is the very antithesis of life as perceived from the circus of a discotheque, (home-base and vantage point),… as viewed through the lens of a discophile, (the parallax). I am that discophile visualizing the entire enterprise from a happy place… the discotheque. Poised from the vantage of the dance floor I expect there is virtually nothing I cannot accomplish whilst sheathed in the  spangled armour of a disco ball… Y'all. To do so successfully I’ll need to set a more detailed atmosphere.

Every successful video game has a lavishly detailed landscape recreating the mood for mortal combat. Oddly enough there are no trendy cocktails that sufficiently capture COVID-19 ‘s ominous energy. No hot pulsing beats or piercing lyrics fierce enough to weave the equivalent of a virtual ligature around the neck of human society. No party-favors recalcitrant or stealthy enough to imitate its sudden and captivating explosion within the context of global culture. Perhaps the discotheque was not such a good setting or perhaps I was correct by noting COVID-19 is an almost alien phenomenon so far beyond the reckoning of what has been the human experience. It is a phenomenon that demands a new realness!

Its signature style is a reflection of humanities reaction to it.  It is become a tacky pret a porter video clip bewildering the runway with the likes of hospital masks and latex gloves… hardly the handsome hallmarks of an impeccably-dressed gentleman. But should there exist more fashionable ways to experience COVID-19 on the disco floor I fear I should still cancel the date! There are no redeeming qualities in COVID-19. But the question we must ask is should we fear this diminutive villain at all or brush it off as nothing more than a sadly-dressed charlatan?

The answer could be life-changing. We not only struggle to imagine life with this potentially virulent spectre but even more difficult is our capacity to envisage life after it. This is largely because the virus remains ever so distant and threatening to so many people. The climate it has brewed is so similar to the advent of AIDS. Ultimately, we wonder who will be marked by this silent horror as it begins to move-in unseen among us? Has it whisped by us innumerable times before after a random breath, sneeze or cough? How many such times shall we elude its poison mist! How long will its sojourn be and shall we ultimately survive it? Pandemics humble humanity because they defy our personal sense of strength and confidence. Our education, popularity, sexual prowess, piety or compassion are factors which have no power against a virus! This phenomenon will take Americans to places they have not been in the twenty-first century. That is why rather than stocking-up on canned food, water and toilet paper I’ve opted for whiskey and cigars! I recall hearing someone say, “There’s alcohol in alcohol!", and I smiled thinking they were certainly correct bless them because there is plenty of alcohol in liqour… but better to be tasted than used as a hand-wash. Actually I plan to stock up on liqour and cigars they are first on my list! Next upon my list of quarantine necessities is amazing sex!

It occurred to me that… should quarantines be imposed upon the cities of this country I should like to be sequestered with someone with whom I could enjoy cosmic sex! Interstellar-quality sex would certainly help pass the time like nothing else interspersed with great whiskey and excellent cigars!

If I ever feared that COVID-19 may have affected the way humans feel about sex I was right but who’d have known that it would send the human libido into overdrive? More sex is a manageable if not self-prescribed penance. I’ve not had so many sext-vitations in years! So that is the one redeeming quality of COVID-19… it may go down in history as having scared us humans into having better and more frequent sex!

One thing is certain… while we manage the mental and physical dynamics of COVID-19 the simple but essential comforts such as good food, conversation, libations, smoke and sex will sustain us. That is essentially why rather than living a life of fear I choose a lustier life o'er cocktails…

CHEERS!

WRITTEN BY BIGDADDY BLUES

WHEN A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE

Antique Coffee Grinder Circa 1900

A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE AS SERVED IN THE MAN-CAVE: 

A Taste For Bitter Rethinks A Sweet-Coffee Culture…

Antique Cigar Vending Machine Cica 1890

Whilst enjoying the morning and my coffee the serenity of my garden and the heady smoke of my cigar whirling about me moved me to contemplate the gentlemanly virtues of coffee. And having to ask myself what exactly that might mean how I might quantify and embody each manly ground became its own self-prophesized answer. So I ran with it enjoying how handsomely  the flora, the coffee and the cigar welcomed me into the new day… it was kismet. I listened as is my habit while the morning waxed… the industrial bustle which quickly began to overrun the outside-world was still buffered by my quiet little street and of course by my little garden. The only clamour was that of the many animals and insects awakening all around me. By these I mean the bees, the birds, the crickets and grasshoppers, the spiders,  mantises and the ants… all of them getting it in early as is their custom... In my garden little else goes on save the incessant weeding, raking and pruning, planting and such including the pollinating, feeding, playing and mating of the thousands of critters populating every corner. The garden finite as it is… remains quite a realm of its own. The insects, animals and I have learned to quietly share its small boundaries.  They tolerate me in our little garden unaware perhaps of how I have slowly designed and built its handsomely-vegetated world just for them. It is a home to all of us… and a refuge too... My coffee and cigar are but incidental ornaments in the landscape… transient modifiers of my own garden-self… seasoning the lens through which I experience it at different times of the night and day... Likewise, my garden and its inhabitants creatures and plants alike who remain there in my absence must surely wonder at my comings and goings and I wonder if they remark of my prudent pufferations! The term “pufferation” is the most gentlemanly coinage of a locally famous cigar aficionado by the name of Van Landingham. It immediately struck me as the personification of the entire experience of inhaling, exhaling and the olfactory enjoyment of a fine cigars bouquet and smoke-aroma.

Antique Coffee/Spice Grinder Circa 1790

You might say I created a garden for critters, coffee and cigars but it was not originally conceived that way. That is how things turned out. I built the garden as a meditative space. It was intended to force the eye to look inward excluding the outside. So I moved forward evolving it as an ornamental garden intended to evoke the soul as a contemplative place, somewhere to escape the rat-race of the world… someplace to relax. Fewer twenty-first century men have or seek such places and many who do underutilize them. So I’ve kept my garden as an active landscape year round… no less full of color and life in winter than in summer. It is intended to be a place for contemplative resolve.

Antique Mahogany Cigar Vending Machine Late 1800's 

I only drink coffee and smoke my cigar or tobacco pipe when I have time to relax. These pastimes define a special place in my day and psyche. Over the course of time my garden included places where I could enjoy coffee and cigars. Both have an earthy bitterness… (my coffee and my cigar ), and a manliness that makes my DNA whistle and humm because it is an extension of what you might call “man-cave realness”. That is to say when a gentleman such as me takes his coffee the experience speaks from the depths of his manhood. So I  opine on coffee this morning hoping to convey something of solid relevance to the men who read my writings. It is not such a tall glass to fill and I intend to flood the entire vessel. The whole point is to celebrate manhood by exploring its many rivers. By mapping them right down to the smallest water molecule and pebble. I welcome you to travel with me along this small rivulet so feel free to light up your cigar, pour a coffee, a draught of whiskey… a spirit of choice and let us gentlemen proceed…

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1850

Thankfully there are still men who quietly understand and enjoy being men and who continue to cultivate the gentlemanly arts. It is healthy to define ones manhood as “other than" womanhood. All the more reason why men need time to just do man-stuff, to think and say man-things, to inflect their entire psychical experience and explicate it in the vernacular of manliness. Gentlemen of these times will be challenged to rethink the culture of masculinity on every level and that may be a very good thing indeed because I am certain it is long overdue topic to be rethought. I like to periodically  cut away the fluff and get down to the nitty-gritty. Manhood can be obscured by a plethora of decorative themes. A gentleman understands where manhood truly begins and ends. He does not parade mahood as a symbolic statement… but exudes it as a comfortably intrinsic energy… what we see (or imagine that we see) is flux. For those men who like myself truly enjoy the art of being a man nothing about manhood can be too deep or taboo to explore. This means that nothing is too sacred to be revised or discarded. After all being proper gentlemen is what we do so it must be correct! Interestingly the evolving culture of cigars and even coffee have radically redefined long-established mores and folkways associated with manliness. Twenty-first century men who cultivate the gentlemanly arts must contemplate them however arbitrary or trite they may appear. There will always be some cultural backlash  from men poised to resist natural change. But let us ask if it is ethical to perpetuate a genuinely obsolete version of gender-specific culture. And let us consider the wisdom and prudence of resistance in todays obsessively paranoid and myopic world? There are those happy and care-free times when men may socialize alone and with the blessings of our womenfolk. O' the hythe of the gentleman’s coffee and cigar lounge which may never be his alone! Indeed, I believe there is judicial tolerance for the man cave. We gentlemen have a unique and civilised set of folkways with which to smoke our tobacco pipes, take coffee, smoke cigars, converse, etc., and there is certainly room enough in this wide world to celebrate those traditions amidst those of our kind... that is the menfolk…

Antique Wall-Mounted Coffee Grinder Circa 1890

Coffee is an ancient libation the root traditions of which have spread from Ethiopia to every corner of the planet. However, in the late twentieth-century many American men have orphaned coffee taken black or with plain cream adopting a heavily marketed litter of artificially sweetened and  modified designer coffees. It could be argued that the gentrification of coffee was in fact a feminization of whatever manly virtues it may have been believed to possess but that argument is not for me to undertake. I should be remiss to ignore it. I just like strong, bitter coffee and that is what I intend to discuss. Gone are the days of the clear, watery stuff found lurking in an institutional pyrex beaker… or the thick, black acidic brew of the espresso machine. America has re-invented those primeval draughts I lovingly called coffee and I think with no semblance to its former self save in name. But what exactly did and does this mean within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American culture and more specifically how might it have impacted the gentlemanly arts? Coffee has become nothing  less than an entire social movement and it seems that I had reached that conclusion some 30 years ago. Looking back now and forward again I find clear confirmation. I can say with complete confidence that I prefer coffee as it was; simple, clean, rustically manly and uncomplicated.

Antique Coffee Grinder 

Having planted that seed I digress now because I must… because every great storyteller does so in order to give his story something of a soul…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Three decades ago I was just beginning to seriously explore traditional southern Black American cuisine. It was a bittersweet revelation. Ironically while soul food evolved as a direct product of oppression its reprise has always been its undeniably good taste. Soul Food fueled the hearts of folk who learned to cook with what little they were given combined with what the earth freely afforded, what others did not want, or did not want to know about… That was the culinary science I sought to master. I learned that real soul food  was not vegan, not gluten free and not militantly vegetarian, anti-pork and anti-beef. It was none of those things.  Soul food was about survival! It taught the lesson that something intended or expected to be distasteful, (actually and ideologically), could be made good… I discovered a culinary tradition that many modern Black Americans increasingly frowned upon rather than preserve as a sacred rite of passage. The point being that as with soul food in order to truly understand the nature of coffee I had to divest of its politicizations and prettifications going directly to its source.

Antique Coffee Bean Roaster

Coffee will probably never be the same as it was because it is no longer just about the redeeming qualities of a burnt and boiled bean. Americans did not know in the late 1990’s that they were watching the last essence of twentieth-century culture evanesce… it was the end of an era of rustic coffee and perhaps of soul food too…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

I watched the transmogrification of coffee from a bitter but practical, morning or late-night concoction to a frothy, sugary libation scarcely resembling the thing it had been. It was the victim of the infamous postmodern genre, “The Makeover”!. Had I known I should have emerged therewith as the self-proclaimed high priest and savior of the venerable brew. My followers would cultivate the arts of coffeeism elevating it to a gentlemanly art form adapted to cure the manic pace of modernity. Coffee served at the altar of my virtually-conceived  chapel of earthly culinary delights would be dark, heavy, bitter, pleasantly nutty and marvelously acidic. Votaries of the coffee bean coffeeists practicing coffeeism would either consume it in its raw visceral form perhaps with chicory or cleverly cut with a rich, decadent dose of heavy dairy cream. My followers and I should have then saved the rustic manliness of coffee from an unseemly decoration.  For to sweeten the masculine earthiness of a strong, aromatic brew (other than with half a cube of sugar) is in my opinion…. sheer culinary villainy! I say this without malice, with an understanding towards change but a fealty to simplicity.

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1840

 

I have always imagined coffee as a distinctly manly drink. Its dark-woodsy colour, its intensely aggressive flavour, and its density do not at all suggest anything but a truly masculine libation nearly tantamount to a beefy-dark beer save for the alcohol. I acknowledge that my attachment of masculine characteristics to a mere drink is unscientific, fanciful, completely arbitrary… an artistic interpretation licensed thereby… its intent being to explore its aesthetic attributes from a masculine persuasion…

Antique Coffee Grinder

So this article might as easily be entitled, “Serving Coffee In The Man-Cave". As a matter of fact this will be its subtitle. We gentlemen do have our own etiquette now and to redefine where lines have blurred it let it serve as a creative threshold not as a bible…

Coffee Grinder Circa 1700's

For that reason I have always aspired to perfect a coffee that is markedly over-burnt having been reduced from multiple  brewing’s for a patently robust flavour and aroma. Yes… this manly etiquette for making coffee preempts the mere consumption of coffee- flavored water or o’er-sweetened confections all of which effectively neutralize the manly taste I crave…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Burning the bean adds a distinct  smokiness as when food is grilled over an open fire or like a good full-bodied cigar. One must not be afraid to scorch the bean a second, third or sixth time as it brews for this amplifies its bitterness. In many cultures there are foods and drink beloved for their inherent bitterness and coffee happens to be one of them. If one’s point at taking coffee is to be awakened then why not shock ones consciousness into sublime wakefulness through sippings of an ancient and bitter brew.

Antique Cigar Vending Machine

Multiple brewing’s of a strong, regional cache of exquisite coffee beans enriches the flavor, by thickening its texture and amplifying its intensity. For that reason I re-brew my coffee at least 6 times using an antique percolator thereby releasing every drop of the essential oils and minerals locked into the crushed beans.

Antique Wall Mounted Coffee Grinder Late 1800's

Concentrating the essential oils of the coffee bean releases its emboldened olfaction. I cannot describe the heady sensation I get whilst inhaling that heavy, cloud of flavour that fills any room in which a proper pot of coffee is being brewed.

I raise my bitter cup of coffee to you gentlemen encouraging a revival of the ancient ways. Next time take your coffee black or with fresh, heavy dairy cream… relish each manly  draught and be redeemed!

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Written by Bigdaddy Blues

Antique Coffee Grinder