(4pm) Deacon's Downfall in Radice Billiard

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Going to Lincoln tomorrow. I'll pack 4 pipes for the 7.5hr drive. Hope to find an apartment. Wish me luck.

Tinsky Cabernet Bulldog

 

(1pm) Hal O'The Wynd in Tinsky Cabernet Bulldog
(5pm) LNF in Tinsky Tanblast Rhodesian
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Based on a true story:

This is the most valued, valuable, and one of the few pipes I've received as a gift. It came by mail with an unsigned note attached that said only "Congratulations" in a careful, feminine script. The post mark located it coming from Wisconsin, but I couldn't think of anyone I knew who lived there. Odd. While I appreciated the gift and was excited about the pipe, I was a bit trepidatious. Very few people even knew I smoked a pipe, so who could this be?

An email arrived a few days later asking if I'd gotten the pipe. Love, Ilona.

I hadn't talked with Ilona since high school. In my senior year, her junior, she moved away with her family. It was kind of a crisis moment for her for a lot of reasons and we talked through some of it together. I thought of her rarely, but always with a certain sadness. She was a beautiful girl who hadn't known her own beauty, hadn't known how to wear it. She found no comfort in her own skin. Awkward and self-conscious. Full of undirected intense sexual energy. To me, she seemed young and morose. But she would mature and gain perspective on it all. So whenever I thought of her it was with mild curiosity, warm affection, and the pang of nostalgia. [An elided scene I regret of abandonment and a porch.]

So now I knew. But still...there were gaps in this story. How did she know about the pipe habit? It was an enormously generous gift just to say hello.

She had done some internet research and found my few comments on ASP, found out what I liked and commissioned a pipe from Mark. In an serendipitous coincidence, I had commissioned a set of rhodesians that were in the same Days Work and had already admired this pipe when I saw it there.

Shortly thereafter she came to town and we spent an evening out together. She is a stunning, sharp woman and we had a nice time. We have not talked for a couple years. But I am still grateful for her gift, which was/is a friendship unique, strange, and special. The pipe is a generous reminder of that. So thank you Ilona. I hope in this sketch I haven't misrepresented you too much, though I know I have altered a few details and left out many others.

Movie: Fog of War

 

I just finished watching The Fog of War. This documentary on Robert McNamara is an amazing piece of history and a compellingly told story. The film centers around interviews with the former Defense Secretary and allows his sense of narrative to structure the story. Consequently, its linearity is often circumscribed by digressions and asides as great tales often are. Though we often see him telling his story, contemporary footage and images intersperse and superimpose McNamara's words. The film also draws from recorded conversations with presidents that, when set against war footage, are hauntingly disembodied voices of the most powerful mouths of the time. McNamara's tale is not only historically and philosophically interesting, it is moving. The mentally acute octogenarian draws from deep and honest emotional reserves not to tell a story of regrets, but one of emotional significance. At one point, his eyelids red and slightly tear-brimmed, he firmly asks both rhetorically and with sincere interest in an answer, "How much evil must we do in this world to do good?" (Throughout, Glass' score wonderfully undergirds this emotional depth without making it maudlin.) The cogent mixture of the intellectual and emotional import of this film is best illustrated when McNamara quotes TS Eliot in the film's final chapter.

Though I had heard great things about it, I avoided The Fog of War because I never seemed to be in the mood for a documentary, especially about so heavy a subject as the Vietnam War. I was wrong about what I had anticipated the tone of this movie to be. Even with such a serious subject, it is thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking in an entirely stimulating way. No heavy-handedness here. Highly recommended.

Tinsky X-mas 2000

(6am) Deacon's Downfall in Tinsky X-mas2000
(8am) LNF in Cavicchi 4C Slug
(1pm) Deacon's Downfall in Stanwell Nordic
(9pm) Decon's Downfall in GRC Volcano

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A commemorative pipe, but 'twas not Christmas

Considering yesterday's anti-commemoration note, today's first smoke comes with a dollop of irony. This is the one pipe I have that has a strong association with an event in my life, though there is no moment in memory to which I attach it. It's more a long process that I went through that became complete at some point (that point seems so blurry, folds into some larger, amorphously and emotionally defined part of remembrance) rather than a commemorating event. When I pick up this pipe, I am reminded of a struggle and an accomplishment that entails no single moment in my history but rather a state of being that is important to the way I understand my past and identity. So along came a day, on an actually recordable hour and minute, that I celebrated my BA by firing up this pipe and forever linked it with a memory, but not the memory of that particular moment (I have long since forgotten). Though it was meant to coincide with graduation, it signifies what led up to it instead.
 

It's a beauty of a pipe. Tight grain all around with stunning birdseye heal. The ball shape sits comfortably in the hand and is a well-balanced clench. Though it's drilled a little high, it usually smokes dry to fine ash. I can't seem to find the perfect tobacco for it though. Don't get me wrong, it smokes everything well, but I have a feeling there's a tobacco it really makes sing. I wanted it to be a Va/per but think its going to be a latakia instead. I like my Va/per pipes to bring out a certain bright edge, and this seems to bring out the deeper tones that I like in my latakia blends. It doesn't look it, but this pipe is a bass-baritone without the extreme high or low registers of either.

Cavicchi 4C 

New Cavicchi

(8am) 2 American Spirits
(10am) PS Lux Navy Flake in Cavicchi 4C Slug
(2pm) PS Lux Navy Flake in Cavicchi 4C Slug
(10pm) 4 American Spirits

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Breaking 'em in

For the past few years I've broken in every pipe with Navy Flake. Though it's fairly uncomplex, I know the flake's nuances better than any other tobacco and it leaves no ghosts. With a simple and familiar tobacco like this, I feel that I can focus on getting to know the pipe's smoking characteristics and am more aware of any problems that may emerge during that critical and vulnerable period.

The new Cavicchi is a pipe I bought a while back from Skip Elliot at thebriary.com...or was it from Synjeco's? (I bought two Cavicchi pipes at around the same time and ain't sure which is which.) It's been sitting in my drawer waiting for a special occasion. Well, when a special occasion came about it really didn't seem that special, so I left the pipe in the drawer. I decided yesterday that since those moments tend to feel so routine, so anticlimactic when they fruit, that I might as well fire her up, break the briar hymen, and get on with life. Celebrate (if you'll allow an overstatement) without commemorating one damn thing.

God bless,
-Dizz