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Are You Fascinating?

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Well, are you, punk?

Or are you boring as hell?

How, furthermore, can you tell?

How can you tell if you’re an inveterate bore, or if you’re just in a kind of long-term funk?

Much of what we hear about commanding attention and the power to fascinate is theoretical and abstract, a sort of psychological jargon: fascination triggers, hotspots, personality tests and the like.

Let us, for once, get concrete.

Here are 7 differences between the fascinating person and the boring piece of meat:

1. Fascinating people have many activities they enjoy and become good at, which gives them a greater wealth of material to mine.

Boring people have one or perhaps two.

Diversify, therefore, your activity portfolio.

2. Fascinating people communicate what most others can’t — or communicate it in ways most others don’t.

Words, contrary to popular belief, are not primarily for communicating — which is their secondary function. Their primary function is for clarity of thought.

Before one can communicate clearly, one must have something to communicate clearly.

Language brings about this process.

The desire for clarity presupposes the desire to be understood, and this is why the ability to communicate clearly — in writing or in speech — is one of the surest signs of intelligence there is.

And intelligence, as you know, is always fascinating.

3. Fascinating people aren’t afraid to try new things — which means:

They’re not only willing to break out of their comfort zone but also motivated to do so. Why?

Because they know that comfort breeds complacency.

Interesting people, understand, are, to one degree or another, adventurous. They like to get out and explore.

Life is largely an adventure — provided you treat it as such.

4. Fascinating people are au courant.

They keep up-to-date on at least some news.

Which is why as a bartender you often find yourself charmed by those customers who have a certain knowledge of pop culture: because this, too, shows that an effort is being made to stay informed.

Thus:

5. Fascinating people are knowledgable.

Boring people are poorly informed — and so they’re unable to hold up their end of the conversation.

Being poorly informed, let it be noted, is entirely within each person’s control.

The better you’re informed, the more you have to talk about.

The more you have to talk about, the more fascinating you are.

Which is not to imply that fascinating people blast through one conversational subject after another.

It means, rather, that the deeper down your knowledge goes, the greater your conversational pow-uh.

6. Fascinating people don’t conform

Independent thinking is non-conformity.

Conformity is about as boring and banal as it gets.

Fascinating people have the confidence to think for themselves.

Boring people do not.

Fascinating people like variety.

Boring people prefer the same old.

Conformity is the same old.

It is also the opposite of courage. It takes courage to respond to non-thought — which is to say, conformity — as it takes courage to break away from the pack.

It takes courage to think for oneself.

If you’re one of those rare courageous people, the world will be riveted by you.

7. Fascinating people are driven and disciplined.

Boring people are passive.

Discipline is habit, and habit is a choice.

This is precisely why no one is fated to be boring — not even close.

How, then, does one go about expunging inveterate vapidity?

Studies show that you can bore people in two fundamental ways: both in what you say and in how you say it.

Being boring, in other words, can be a matter of style or a matter of subject. Combine those two things into one and it’s downright deadly.

The qualities that make someone fascinating, or beguiling, or hypnotizing, or mesmerizing are — and this is important — a side-effect. They are a by-product: specifically, a by-product of a life lived well, a life lived interestingly.

The real insight into the power of fascination is this:

The fascinating person is not living her life to be fascinating: she’s living her life, rather, in a way that cultivates her living potential, and that’s why age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

Make no mistake, there are in the universe an infinite variety of fascinating things upon which you may fix your attention.

To be fascinating, therefore, you must come to recognize life as the adventure it is, and you must then proceed accordingly.

You must crave new experiences and desire a deeper understanding of the world.

Decide what you want and figure out how to get it.

Boring people don’t have big dreams. They actually believe it when they’re told, as we all are at one time or another, that they probably can’t do it.

Fascinating people, upon the other hand, believe no such thing.

Fascinating people shoot for the stars — and often reach them. If they don’t reach them, they become incontrovertibly more fascinating just in their singleminded striving.

Fascinating people picture their lives as they want their lives to be, and then they focus their energy on shaping their lives in that way.

Don’t let others decide your future for you. Don’t give people that kind of control over you. This is not only NOT fascinating: it’s fatal.

Be the master of your own fate. Be the captain of your own soul.

Because, in the final analysis, fascinating people are the shapers of their own soul.

And that is why they seem to others not fractured but whole.




Excerpted from my forthcoming book Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously


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Whiskey Wisdom: How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

(The following is excerpted from Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously)


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You can spot her from a mile away, the smartest person in the bar — or, if not quite from a mile away, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart.

Still, her brain is carefully crafted — self-crafted and stylized — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle.

She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone.

Her smile glows like expensive stone.

You do not quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an overbearing style.

She has a sense of humor.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of dignity in loneliness. She doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments gracefully, can be strong and assertive, quick to stick up for herself, but she can also speak of her shortcomings and accomplishments with an equal ease which you envy.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent — never, of course, in any way aggressive or violent.

What’s her trick?

What’s the secret?

The secret is this:

First, develop a total disregard for where you think your abilities end.

You must aim beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do.

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

The discipline to follow through is next. It is also the most difficult.

Why?

Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second — unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering — drop out of college immediately.

College stunts the mind.

It’s a breeding ground of mindlessness and unoriginality, and an exercise in non-thought. It’s a snake-infested swamp of dogma — and, like all dogma, it will corrupt you and scar your soul irreparably.

College is conformity.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of your living potential.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a purpose around which you can construct your life.

Passion is largely willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows, so that after time your passion for that thing develops and spreads like a gorgeous soft surge of water-ripples.

Third, whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

What, after all, does it mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to be intelligent — like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed — why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, recalcitrant. And it’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire and activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and beautiful, and rather difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort — or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice.

Thought requires work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action.

It’s not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which is, when you think about it, massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, but in a highly unorthodox way, they say, hard to pinpoint why: bookish but not book-smart, introspective, certainly, and everything she does — yes, everything — she does with all her heart.


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Gin, The Martinez, And The Origins Of The Martini



In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini.

A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, somewhat grudgingly, accepted in the place of gin.

Gin is a strange and fascinating spirit, with a long and diverse history. It is in essence an admixture of grain alcohol and juniper-berry oil and was invented by a 17th Century Dutch medical professor named Francois de Boe Sylvius, who created it to relieve kidney disorders and, he said, “to purify the blood.”

Sylvius called his confection “Genever,” which is the Dutch word for juniper.

Gin is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and, in large part for this reason, it took England by complete storm.

Vermouth today — whether sweet or dry — is an entirely different deal from the vermouth that existed back in the days of Francois de Boe Sylvius. Back then, you see, Vermouth was a sweet(ish) digestif made from a myriad of things, such as: orange peels and flowers, juniper and nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, marjoram, brandy, white wine, tree bark, and that’s not even the half of it. Today, however, vermouth is mediocre wine, usually white, with herbal-and-spice infusions and alcohol fortification. Sugar is often added.

The true origins of the gin martini are murky, though many stories do exist. Some, for example, say that back in 1912, a legendary New York bartender by the name of Martini invented the drink. Others believe it was first concocted much earlier and in prototypical fashion, back in 1850, in San Francisco, by Professor Jerry Thomas, who purportedly made it for a miner on the way to Martinez, California. The result: the Martinez cocktail, which is a gin-vermouth-maraschino drink, slightly different from the martini, but a venerable drink nevertheless, which still exists to this day. Yet the citizens of Martinez, California say that the martini originated right there, in 1870, and the bartender who first built it was a man named Julio Richelieu.

One thing that’s known for certain: The Martinez cocktail first appeared in The Bartenders Guide in 1887.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a usually impeccable source, tells us — incorrectly — that the martini was invented in 1871, but this was a full twenty years after Jerry Thomas’s drink came into existence.

The English, on the other hand, say that because of its kick, the martini comes from a strong British rifle called a Martini & Henry.

Many New Yorker’s would have us believe that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel — one Martini di Arma di Taggia — invented the drink in 1911 for John David Rockefeller, who, by the way, took his martini with London Dry Gin, dry vermouth, bitters, lemon peel and a single olive.

But, whatever.

About the shape of the glass there is little dispute.
The ritual is really the thing,
holding the stem of the chalice to the light,
somewhat to bless the dying day.
But ever you are ready to begin,
Be extra careful not to bruise the gin.



Posted on

Gin And The Origins Of The Martini



In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini.

A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, somewhat grudgingly, accepted in the place of gin.

Gin is a strange and fascinating spirit, with a long and diverse history. It is in essence an admixture of grain alcohol and juniper-berry oil and was invented by a 17th Century Dutch medical professor named Francois de Boe Sylvius, who created it to relieve kidney disorders and, he said, “to purify the blood.”

Sylvius called his confection “Genever,” which is the Dutch word for juniper.

Gin is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and, in large part for this reason, it took England by complete storm.

Vermouth today — whether sweet or dry — is an entirely different deal from the vermouth that existed back in the days of Francois de Boe Sylvius. Back then, you see, Vermouth was a sweet(ish) digestif made from a myriad of things, such as: orange peels and flowers, juniper and nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, marjoram, brandy, white wine, tree bark, and that’s not even the half of it. Today, however, vermouth is mediocre wine, usually white, with herbal-and-spice infusions and alcohol fortification. Sugar is often added.

The true origins of the gin martini are murky, though many stories do exist. Some, for example, say that back in 1912, a legendary New York bartender by the name of Martini invented the drink. Others believe it was first concocted much earlier and in prototypical fashion, back in 1850, in San Francisco, by Professor Jerry Thomas, who purportedly made it for a miner on the way to Martinez, California. The result: the Martinez cocktail, which is a gin-vermouth-maraschino drink, slightly different from the martini, but a venerable drink nevertheless, which still exists to this day. Yet the citizens of Martinez, California say that the martini originated right there, in 1870, and the bartender who first built it was a man named Julio Richelieu.

One thing that’s known for certain: The Martinez cocktail first appeared in The Bartenders Guide in 1887.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a usually impeccable source, tells us — incorrectly — that the martini was invented in 1871, but this was a full twenty years after Jerry Thomas’s drink came into existence.

The English, on the other hand, say that because of its kick, the martini comes from a strong British rifle called a Martini & Henry.

Many New Yorker’s would have us believe that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel — one Martini di Arma di Taggia — invented the drink in 1911 for John David Rockefeller, who, by the way, took his martini with London Dry Gin, dry vermouth, bitters, lemon peel and a single olive.

But, whatever.

About the shape of the glass there is little dispute.
The ritual is really the thing,
holding the stem of the chalice to the light,
somewhat to bless the dying day.
But ever you are ready to begin,
Be extra careful not to bruise the gin.

Said the poet Karl Shapiro.