Some of you may be familiar with Dan Baum’s excellent book Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. It traces the true stories of nine New Orleanians from different parts of the city, vastly different circumstances and levels of New Orleans society and culture. Their stories begin 45 years ago with Hurricane Betsy and take them through the disaster of Katrina, the Federal Flood and beyond. It’s excellent, and I recommend it without reservation.

Some of you may also be fans of New Orleans singer and songwriter Paul Sanchez, who’s one of my very favorite musicians. Paul and his wife Shelly lost everything in the flood of nearly five years ago, but after having gone through the heartbreak and difficulties physical, emotional and financial have picked up and carried on with life in an amazing way. Paul’s life and singing are full of joy and love; he’s been making an amazing amount of music in the last five years, and it’s all terrific.

Let’s take a little musical interlude, shall we?

Paul’s been doing some writing with Los Angeles-based writer Colman DeKay over the last few years — they co-wrote the title track of Paul’s album Exit to Mystery Street and several other songs, and now they’re working on a project that’s got me very excited.

Colman and Paul have picked up the rights to adapt Nine Lives into a musical. I’ve heard several of the songs, and they are amazing. Truly amazing.

The first step is to make a CD of the songs, then … “all the way to Broadway,” as Threadhead Records founder Chris Joseph says. Let’s hear a bit more about the project from Chris and Paul:

In order to do this, they’re going to need some money.

Threadhead Records is perhaps the world’s first non-profit, volunteer-run record label. Their sole aim is to raise funding to help get great New Orleans musicians make records and get them out to the people. Threadhead needs our help with this one, folks — it’s a big project.

Fortunately they’re in line for a $50,000 grant from Pepsi’s “Refresh Project,” but in order for them to be eligible for the money, they need our votes! Go to this URL:

Register at the site. Don’t worry about spam — I’ve been participating in this for a while and I haven’t gotten any. Once you’re registered, vote for the Nine Lives Project. The important thing to remember is that once you click “vote for the project” you’ll be redirected to a login screen. Once you register and log in you will be redirected back to the main page, where you HAVE to click, “vote for the project” AGAIN in order for your vote to count. This is really important — a lot of votes went uncounted until people realized this!

It’s getting down to the wire; only the top ten get the cash and Nine Lives has been as low as #15. We’re up to #8 as of today, so we need to keep the momentum rolling.

UPDATE! Dan Baum himself visited the comments section (wow!) and said that you can vote TEN times a day, as long as you let an hour or so go between votes. So vote early and often! Vote now, and tomorrow, and every day until the end of the month. It’s legal! It’s not as if it were a congressional election in St. Bernard Parish or something.

If we’re successful you’ll be rewarded with a monumental work of New Orleans music, telling some great stories with some great songs. One of the things that’s helped people through the last five years in New Orleans is a ton of great music — mo’ music, mo’ betta!

If you’ve been attentding any of Paul’s recent shows you may well have heard versions of some of the songs. You can also preview one of the songs at Paul’s site — scroll through the music player at the bottom of the browser window until you get to one called “Feel Like A Lady,” with vocals by John Boutté (the song is based on the story of JoAnn from the book and captures one of the character’s pivotal scenes beautifully).

Thanks for helping out, y’all.

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The finals for the People’s Cocktail Contest will be held at Drago Centro, 525 S. Flower St. this Wednesday the 30th starting sometime after 6pm. I don’t have a hard start time, but that’s when they asked me to arrive. [UPDATE: Judging begins at 7pm!] I suspect there’ll be a certain amount of cat-herding involved to get everyone there, set up and ready to roll. They’ll also be unveiling their new summer cocktail menu at the event, so there’ll be plenty of good stuff to try.

This is going to be such a blast, especially because two of the other three finalists are friends of mine. I’m looking forward to meeting Jeni, week four’s finalist, too; her blog is full of gorgeous food photos.

If you can’t attend the final face-off you can still play along at home; make the cocktails and see which one’s your favorite. I posted the recipe for my cocktail entry in Week 1: Blueberry, the Bell’aspetto, last month. Here are the other three finalists’ cocktail recipes, pulled from Drago Centro’s Twitter feed (no pictures of the drinks, alas; I was too lazy):

Week 2: Fernet Branca
Finalist: Ron Dollete, lushangeles.com

TRAMONTANA

1 oz Fernet Branca
1 oz Krogstad Aquavit
1 oz Cointreau
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

 

Week 3: Gin (or genever)
Finalist: Matt Robold, rumdood.com

DUTCH ELM DISEASE

2 oz Bols Genever
1/2 oz Scotch
1/4 oz Simple Syrup
2 dashes Angostura Bitters.

Stir with ice for 30 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over ice. Garnish with a lemon twist.

 

Week 4: Lemon
Finalist: Jeni Afuso, Oishii Eats

MOMO RYE FIZZ

1/2 fresh peach
1 oz simple syrup
2 oz Rittenhouse 100 rye whiskey
1 oz lemon juice
Club soda

Muddle peach with simple syrup. Add rye and lemon juice. Shake with ice, strain into tall glass over ice, top with club soda.

Wish us luck! No matter who wins, it’s going to be a lot of fun. Join us if you can.

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Steve Zahn, actor (“Davis McAlary”): “It’s post-Katrina, but it’s really about life after, it’s not about Katrina. Katrina is the backdrop.”

John Goodman, actor and New Orleanian (“Creighton Bernette”): “[It's about] dealing with everyday things that just become insurmountable.”

David Mills, co-exec. producer (R.I.P.): “This show is an argument for what’s best about the American city — a city gets knocked down, but there’s that impulse to stand back up.”

FYYFF!

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NASA photo from the International Space Station, showing the giant oil slick approaching the Mississippi Delta (top right)

An aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, May 6, 2010.

Unemployed commercial fishermen and their families wait in line to receive charity handouts in Hopedale, La. (via the Boston Globe)

See all 40 photos at the Boston Globe.

As David Torkanowsky said on ‘OZ yesterday, this is to raise money to support people who, along with our musicians, are the mainstay of our culture — the people who provide our seafood. A lot of them are out of work right now, and we need to make sure they can feed their families — families that comprise multiple generations of fishermen from Texas to Florida. (Aside from that, we can hope and pray that there’ll still be safe seafood for them to catch after the disaster in the Gulf.) Beside the impacted seafood fishing families, the benefit is for the families of those who lost their lives in the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig, and also to provide for wetlands protection and restoration.

If you can’t attend the concert, you have two other things to do. First, donate online to the Gulf Relief Foundation — it’s important. Every single penny of your contribution will go to where it’s needed. Next, the entire concert will be broadcast on WWOZ, at 90.7 FM locally and online to the planet, from 12 noon to 10pm Central Time.

Here’s the lineup of musicians: Shamarr Allen & the Underdawgs, MyNameIsJohnMichael, Irvin Mayfield’s Playhouse Revue, Big Sam’s Funky Nation, Honey Island Swamp Band, Beausoleil, Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers with Jeremy Davenport, ReBirth Brass Band, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Soul Rebels Brass Band, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, Zachary Richard, Happy Jack Frequency, Allen Toussaint, Voices of the Wetlands All-Stars (featuring Tab Benoit, Dr. John, Cyril Neville, George Porter Jr., Waylon Thibodeaux, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Johnny Sansone, Johnny Vidacovich and Marcia Ball), Ani DiFranco, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Mos Def and Terence Blanchard, John Legend and Lenny Kravitz.

It’s amazing that this whole festival was planned and put together in about a week’s time — an awesome effort on the part of all concerned. Help make sure it succeeds and gets the job done. Go, donate and listen.

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You’re undoubtedly aware of the oil rig explosion that killed 11 people, sank an offshore rig and resulted in oil gushing from drill points on the gulf floor. This is being called an “oil spill,” which is a bit of a misnomer. What the Exxon Valdez did was spill oil; this is a runaway oil well, spewing petrolem from an 18,000 foot well that’s situated a mile below water. No matter what, it’s going to be an environmental disaster, we just don’t know how bad yet. Currently it’s spewing about 210,000 gallons of oil a day, with the remnants of the wellhead and kinked piping (like putting a kink in a garden hose) restricting the current flow to this level. A high-producing well in the Gulf can produce 30,000 barrels (or 1,260,000 gallons) a day, but that’s under control. Worst-case scenarios posit an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every nine or ten days, but we’re nowhere near that yet and we hope we never will be. The scary thing is that we just don’t know. No one knows how bad it’ll get, if the kinks will let go and increase the flow, if they’ll be able to get capping done or relief wells drilled fast enough. Lots of livelihoods are in limbo right now.

One thing people are scared about is the impact to Louisiana seafood, not only to the livelihoods of fishermen but to our seafood-eating way of life in Louisiana. The good news so far is that there’s no need to panic. Seafood is currently safe and plentiful, and while a certain number of oyster beds have been closed east of the mouth of the Mississippi as a precautionary measure, most of the oyster beds and seafood producing regions are west of the Mississippi, and they’re not being affected.

Chef Brian Landry of Galatoire’s restaurant released the following facts via a Tales of the Cocktail newsletter:

Guests at Galatoire’s and other restaurants in New Orleans can continue to enjoy local seafood for the foreseeable future.

Safeguards are in place to know where our fresh fish and shellfish are caught and harvested along the Louisiana coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. As we have for 100+ years, our chef and waiters are happy to suggest the freshest seafood that we have available and answer any questions our guests have.

Galatoire’s requires all of our seafood purveyors to provide a “trip ticket” identify the geographic areas where all of our seafood is caught, in accordance with the Louisiana Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries’ guidelines. These requirements increase the accountability that our fishermen and other purveyors have with us and with the state of Louisiana.

Nearly 80 percent of Louisiana’s seafood comes from hundreds of miles of coastline west of the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away from the affected areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

Galatoire’s is working around the clock with our seafood producers to ensure that we provide our guests with the freshest fish, shrimp, crawfish and crabs available. We will be able to serve our guests their favorite dishes as we have for decades.

Fish and shellfish migrate away from water hazards. As a result, these species will move toward cleaner waters and safety.

New Orleans is located more than 100 miles inland from the Louisiana coast. We are enjoying one of the busiest weekends of the year. Anyone with plans to visit our great city and restaurant should keep those plans and come see us.

After reports that some oyster beds were being closed, long lines formed at the raw oyster bar in the Grandstand at Jazzfest, with people thinking that it might be their last chance for a while. Then there was a little flap in which an employee at Parkway Bakery and Tavern (hands down my favorite po-boy joint in the world) put up a sign that oysters were being taken off the menu due to the oil spill. That was a temporary price move rather than a safety move — owner Jay Nix sees the price of oysters spiking, doesn’t want to charge more than the current $13 for a large oyster po-boy and doesn ‘t want to have to short his customers by putting fewer oysters on a sandwich. The sign that went up was both poorly worded and unauthorized. It still makes me sad that Jay isn’t serving oysters right now — I’d be happy to pay a little extra for a while, me. In fact, we had a fantastic fried oyster po-boy at Parkway just last week. But there’s certainly a lot of concern over what’s happening.

Here’s the deal with oysters right now, from one of the best and best-known purveyors of oyster dishes in the city — Tommy Cvitanovich, of Drago’s Restaurant. He had this to say:

Louisiana has 7,721 miles of tidal coastline. The area east of the Mississippi River which is closed is where 23% of the state’s total seafood is harvests are landed. The west side of the river remains safe and open is where 77% of the harvests are landed. With 77% of our waters untouched, we are still able to serve Louisiana Seafood that are clean and unaffected by the BP oil spill.

Louisiana produces 33% of the nations seafood (excluding Alaska and Hawaii)

Louisiana is the nation’s number one producer of oysters, shrimp, crawfish and blue crab.

Oyster beds are located at least 25 – 50 miles inland from the Louisiana coast. For east bank oyster beds to be affected, the oil has to travel thru miles of bayous, canals and bays

Currently only 22% of Louisiana’s oyster beds are closed as a precaution. This is a good proactive move.

No oyster beds are currently being tainted by the oil.

These beds will not be reopened till it is determined that environmental conditions are within requirements specified by the National Shellfish Sanitation Program.

Only 30% of Louisiana’s oyster beds are east of the Mississippi River. Which means 70% of our oyster beds, which are to the west of the Mississippi River are safe and open.

NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) has said at this point that they do not expect the oil to affect Louisiana coastline west of the Mississippi river. This is GREAT NEWS!!!

90% of Louisiana shrimp come from parts west of the Mississippi River

Shrimp, crabs, and most fin fish swim away from danger – a scent of oil in the water is considered a danger. At this point these fisheries should be fine.

We’ve been eating seafood like crazy for the last two weeks — plump shrimp and fat juicy oysters and Gargantuan crawfish and astonishing soft shell crabs — and it’s all been fantastic.

Get out there and eat some great Louisiana seafood. And keep your fingers crossed that they cap that well as soon as possible.

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Walking into Topline Wine and Spirits in Glendale today, I saw something I hadn’t seen in many months — bottles of Angostura Bitters on the shelf. And there was much rejoicing.

If you’re even the slightest bit of a cocktailian, you’ve noticed the Worldwide Shortage Of Angostura which started kicking in last fall. Rumors flew — the recession killed the company, they were going out of business, we’d never see Angostura again (which would be a horrendous blow to the world of cocktails).

Rachel Maddow, proving once again how she is made of awesome, is a dedicated cocktailian and regularly devotes a portion of her program to cocktails and cocktail issues (tip of the hat to my sister Melissa). She recently featured Angostura on her program, taught the Teeming Masses how to make Champagne Cocktails and Manhattans (I prefer a 2:1 Manhattan ratio myself, especially as I tend to use higher proof whiskey) and not quite so much Ango. To each his or her own tastes, however.

Rachel also had an extensive interview with a couple of nice ladies from Angostura Ltd. who flew in from Trinidad to answer questions about the situation. Here’s the whole segment from The Rachel Maddow Show:

So, the official PR line is … they ran out of bottles and couldn’t get any more from their supplier. Hm.

I’ve read a variety of other stories. According to this Guardian article, Angostura Ltd. (which has been around since 1824) was once owned by Bacardi but was sold in 1997:

The firm is [now] owned by CL Financial, a Caribbean conglomerate hit by a liquidity crisis, prompting an emergency bailout earlier this year by the government of Trinidad and Tobago. CL leveraged Angostura’s profits against a series of acquisitions including a deal to buy control of a Jamaican industrial company, Lascelles deMercado. It was reportedly left with a TT$600m (£57m/US$87.5m) hole in its balance sheet.

Not good.

Interestingly, the PR line seems to be that it was only the bottles, and that production never stopped. However, a representative from Angostura USA was quoted last year as saying that production had actually stopped in June, and it would take a while to resume; you can’t just flip a switch and suddenly make bitters appear.

Whatever the real reason, let us rejoice that Ango is finally back on our shelves. Shall we celebrate with an Old Fashioned?

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Let’s watch the “Making of Treme” featurette and some clips — this first trailer actually made my scalp tingle:

If this is good as I think it’ll be, it’ll wipe the stain of “The Big Easy” from onscreen portrayals of New Orleans culture — that movie had me almost physically transforming into Ignatius Reilly at the Prytania, standing up and shrieking, “What degenerate produced this abortion?!” They’ve got local actors and local writers working on it. They got John Boutté’s “Treme Song” as the show’s theme song (which I knew was an absolute must from the moment I heard about the project; either my thought beams went out into the ether, or those folks really know what they’re doing), which means a lot of national exposure for the best singer in the city. John Goodman’s character is partially based on the late, great Ashley Morris in his passionate railing against the injustice of the greatest engineering disaster in American history. They really seem to be doing it right.

That they’re even going be mentioning, plus actually depicting and portraying, the Mardi Gras Indian culture and doing it with respect and a fair amount of accuracy is astonishing. There was a great interview on NPR this morning with David Simon actor Clarke Peters, who portrays an Indian big chief named Albert Lambreaux, in which they amusingly recount how some Indian traditions are so secret and sacred that their local paid advisors from some of the Indian gangs would keep some things close: “Oh sorry, we can’t tell you that.”

We get a feature-length premiere this Sunday. You simply must tune in.

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Tonight will be a fairly special one, however, as one of our own — Blair Reynolds, a.k.a. Trader Tiki — has burst upon the cocktail ingredients scene with his own line of flavoring syrups for tiki cocktails and beyond.

Let’s taste.

I was very happy when the Tiki Fairy brought these earlier this week, because (among other reasons) I’d been wanting to make orgeat for ages but have been too frakking lazy. Blair’s orgeat is complex, with a rich almond flavor and a bit of tannin and bitterness, where I’m tasting the almond skins as well. Apricot kernels are included in the formula as well, providing that lovely bitter almond flavor in the background without any of the annoying hydrogen cyanide that bitter almonds bring to the table. This is much more complex than the cloudy white brands you see from Monin and the like, and the sweetness is kept in check. Blair favors the original French recipe, calling for rose and orange flower water in the mix. I can’t wait to try this in a Mai Tai, plus classic non-tropical cocktails like the Japanese, and one I found that fascinates me, called the Alligator (time to make some eau de melisse, looks like).

The cinnamon syrup is thick and sweet, flavored with two kinds of cinnamon — the spicy, sweet and strong cassia, and the slightly more mellow Ceylon cinnamon, with a complex, fruity, citrusy flavor (I love sprinkling Ceylon cinnamon on fruit). Perfect for some of the more famous tiki drinks (like a Jet Pilot, mmm) and whatever you can concoct.

The vanilla syrup is just as thick and sweet, with a lovely vanilla bean flavor and would be just as lovely on pancakes as it would in your drinks.

Perhaps the most fascinating flavor he’s released is Don’x Mix, named after Don the Beachcomber (aka Ernest Beaumont Gantt), who in Los Angeles in the 1930s invented the exotic tropical cocktail as we know it. “Don’s Mix” was one of his secret ingredients, mixed and bottled away from the bar and provided to the bartenders so that if one or more of them left to work for a competitor they wouldn’t be able to take his drink recipes with them. A recipe isn’t much use if one of the ingredients is listed as “Mix #6.”

In this case, though, we now know that Don’s Mix was 2 parts grapefruit juice and 1 part cinnamon syrup, used to flavor Donga Punch, Zombies and other tropical drinks. If you don’t want to make your own, this is the perfect solution. Lighter than the regular cinnamon syrup, less sweet and with a really nice tang of grapefruit, this is the one I want to get creative with. I’ve got a couple of ideas for TDN tonight and I’m going to focus on this one. Here’s hoping my drink tastes as good in the glass as it does in my head. (Then again, it might suck, but then we go back to the drawing board.)

So! Needless to say, order some syrup and get your tiki on!

Jeez, I got busy … Thursday Drink Night starts in five minutes!

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The running total so far: 315 cocktail recipes in the index, plus 49 51 more that are multiples within a single post. We haven’t yet figured how to get the AZIndex plugin to create two separate index entries that point to one post; Marleigh’s waiting to hear from the developer. When we do figure it out, that’ll bring the cocktail index up to 364 listed recipes. New cocktail recipe posts will be automatically added to the index.

Despite the tedium I really did enjoy going through all those old posts again, and there are some drinks I forgot about that we’ll now revisit — that’ll be fun. Enjoy randomly clicking through them, as there are tons of things you won’t find in cocktail guides, like original recipes by our bartender friends near and far. (Oh, and there’s one joke in there, but it’s pretty obvious.)

I truly apologize for the barrage in your RSS feeds. I thought that backdated posts wouldn’t show up in the feed as new, but of course, WordPress had to make me look like a jackass and feed them anyway. I’ve gotten some good feedback, that some of you enjoyed seeing them go by, at least. I hope it wasn’t too bad for the rest of you. Posting will now resume at its previous intermittent rate (i.e., when I feel like it and when Wesly finally gets around to another one).

Wow … I think this weblog transition is actually kinda almost done.

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Now that we’ve had our break, Wesly and I hope to charge into 2010 (or “oh-ten,” as we’ve heard some people say, to our mocking delight). With Marleigh’s help I’ve gotten started on another new feature. Note that there’s a new link up in the header that says Cocktails — it’s a work in progress at the moment, and when complete will be a compendium of every cocktail recipe I’ve ever posted on Looka!, going back to 1999.

I’ll be importing the old cocktail recipe posts into WordPress and backdating them so that the index can add them, and for the most part I’ll be leaving them more or less intact. This means that I’ll be keeping in the embarrassing shit like “I’m not a big fan of gin” and “I don’t like vermouth” in posts from 10+ years ago, plus embarrassing drinks like the Velvet Hammer. I will be updating recipes for clarity and accuracy, however, plus fixing dead URLs as I can and throwing in an annotation here and there. All original posts (plus the rest of the old content) will still be there in the stone-knives-and-bearskins section of the archive.

So far I’m about halfway into 2002, and I’ve got along way to go. It’ll likely take a couple of weeks, but by the time I’m done importing we’ll have a very handy and convenient index of cocktail recipes here on the ol’ blawg, and future cocktail recipe posts will be automatically added to the index.

Whoever of y’all that have been nagging me to do this for years (Barry? Chris?) … good things come to those who wait!

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Oh, and I’m one of the competing mixologists. Hoo!

Click to enlarge

(...)
Read the rest of L.A. folks, come drink some punch! (102 words)

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled weblog. Don’t let this distract you from reading “Go forth and conquer,” Wesly’s first Looka! post, if you haven’t already.

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Repeal Day is December 5, and celebrates the anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition, the “Noble Experiment” that was anything but. Prohibition brought about myriad ill effects to the country and the world, including the loss of every job in the brewery, winery, distillery and hospitality industry that relied on making and serving alcoholic beverages, the criminalization of millions of Americans who simply enjoyed having a drink, and the wide expansion of a criminal underclass to provide liquor to the masses (without caring too much about whether or not that liquor would poison you).

Getting rid of and recovering from all those ills (and to this day we’re still recovering from the ill-effects of Prohibtion) and having the freedom to have and enjoy a drink is well worth celebrating, don’t you think? We have our friend Jeffrey Morgenthaler to thank for coming up with the idea to make this a widely-celebrated national holiday, and it’s getting more and more well-known every year.

A bit of history, shall we?

(...)
Read the rest of Happy Repeal Day! (256 words)

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So, after much suggesting, wheedling, cajoling, pleading, coaxing, flattering, obsequity, bewitching, bothering, alluring, urging, perseverence, ass-kissing and just plain nagging (“Ahh, ya will … go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, GO ON!!!”), Wesly Moore has agreed to become a (semi-)regular author and contributor to Looka!, when he feels like it.

He’ll be writing about … well, whatever tickles his fancy, be it cocktails or food or travel or whatever.  Now that I’ve publicly put him on the spot, I suspect he’ll have to come up with something soon.

Please make him feel welcome.  And of course, Team Chuck ‘n Wes means more free content!

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Well, yeah.

So, Looka! is likely to be rather unattended for the next two weeks. I may try to make a few brief posts via the WordPress iPhone app, but I certainly can’t guarantee that.

As we’re still figuring out how the new digs work around here, strange things might happen, like legitimate comments to posts getting caught as spam. For that reason I highly encourage to you register for this site as a subscriber if you plan to be a regular participant in the comments (and I hope you do!). Go to the link on the right-hand sidebar under “Looka!dministration” (yeah, I know, it’s silly and I’ll probably change it) and click the “Register” link. You’ll be prompted to enter a username and email address, and a temporary password will be mailed to you. You can change it when you log in, set how you want your name to be displayed, etc. By registering you’re telling the system that your email address is legit and you’re not a scumbag spammer, fit only to be boiled in a vat of molten chewing gum (which is actually too good for spammers).

So … where the hell are we going? (Oh right!)

This evening Wes and I are taking off for a two-week trip to Europe — London, Shropshire in rural western England, then on to Paris for a few days, finally ending up in Barcelona for four days. We got amazingly cheap flights and are staying with friends for the first 2/3 of the trip, which is the way to travel and keep it affordable. Ah yes, the patented Chuck-’n-Wes-mooch-off-your-friends-as-much-as-possible method.

We’re particularly excited to visit our friends John and Fiona, namesakes of the Hoskins Cocktail (who, sad to say, never actually met gaz regan), who’ll be taking us around London for a couple of days and then whisking us off to their home in rural Shropshire and stuffing us full of pork.  (Mmmm, bacon butties …) Also part of the plan while we’re in London is to meet up with our friend Jay Hepburn of Oh Gosh! and hit a few of his favorite London cocktail bars. (Rumor has it that Morgenthaler will be there too … hoo!)

Then off to see our old friend Dule in Paris, where fantastic food, wine, cocktails, art and everything that is the City of Light awaits.  Finally Barcelona — Gaudí, tapas and … well, everything!  I’m still kind of overwhelmed by the prospect of it all, and I really wish we had more than two weeks to do this.  (Limited vacation days and not being independently wealthy, sigh.)

There should be tons of food and drink porn when we get back.

Cheerio, au revoir y hasta la vista!  See y’all the first week in November.

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As of today, we’ve got the basic look of the blog down.  The theme is based on the free Vesper theme by Valen Designs, which had the kind of layout we were looking for, if not so much the exact look.  (I wasn’t really down wit’ da urnge.)

The custom Looka! theme was designed by my friend Marleigh Riggins Miller of SLOSHED! fame.  Not only is she a terrific cocktails and spirits writer and drink-maker, she’s a very talented graphic designer — the kind of stuff she does for a living — and she did a really lovely job.  It’s still a work-in-progress, and over the next few days or week or two we’ll roll out other features, including navigation along the header with links to full archives, an about page, a list of cocktail recipes (i.e., the old “Cocktail of the Day” feature, which I will gradually import into WordPress going as far back as I can), a page of links (instead of that really long frakkin’ sidebar) and maybe some more.  We’ll see!

I also want to thank my friend Jay Hepburn of Oh Gosh! (the UK’s premier cocktail and spirits weblog, in my humble opinion) for his preliminary work in helping get this place ported to WordPress.  He’s meeting Wesly and me at the Connaught Bar in London next Thursday, and I think there’ll be a drink or three there with his name on ‘em.

Onward and upstairs!

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Changes are afoot, kids!  I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and convert this weblog into one that is powered by WordPress (which you’ve probably noticed, and which probably made you say something like, “What the f…?”).

This horribly ugly and plain page using a basic, off-the-shelf WordPress template is merely a placeholder until we get some codeslinging done.  I have to confess, it’s going to take time.  My dear friend Marleigh Riggins Miller is building a custom template (which will retain as much of the look and feel of good ol’ Looka! while “moving it a bit into Web 2.0,” as she says) and doing the conversion for me, but it’s on her own time so it might be a bit before we get started.  Plus, I’ll be in Europe for 2 weeks starting in the 3rd week of October, so that’ll slow posting down a tad. This temporary template up now will at the very least allow me to get posts up. They’ll be ugly, but readable.

In the meantime, to backtrack and access the archived Looka! weblog for September 2009 (its final month as a dinosaur-like hand-coded weblog) and to read the final post if you followed this from the Networked Blogs link, visit this link:

http://looka.gumbopages.com/archive/2009-09.html

You can scroll down the right-hand sidebar and read any of the archives over the last 10 years as well.

To complicate matters, I’m changing the URL of the weblog! (Couldn’t you just strangle me?)

From now on, please update all links to this weblog to:

http://looka.gumbopages.com/

The old URL, http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/ should still work, but will redirect to this one.  All old links to that URL should still work.  (*fingers crossed*) If the old URL link includes “index.html” after the trailing slash (i.e., “http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/index.html”), it WILL NOT WORK.  I had to throw that one under the bus, but I don’t think too many inbound links are formatted that way.

UPDATE: The RSS feed is changing to http://looka.gumbopages.com/feed/, which I was able to fix from the one I posted earlier … ignore the one I mentioned in the previous incarnation(s) of this post.  I’ve rewritten it about ten times while I tried to tweak everything, broke everything horribly and somehow managed to get it all fixed so that, unbelievably, everything seems to work, and

Sigh.  This WordPress thing is gonna be good in the long run, but it’s a huge pain to set up.  (“The famous five-minute installation,” my fishbelly white Irish ass.)

This’ll be exciting! Stay tuned.

xo

Chuck

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