#or before you know it i will be speaking in full on rich 1800s style

[mercerislandbooks]

Romantic Reads for Fall

It is not February, but love is in the air. I’m blaming it on myself. I have been walking around with my head in the clouds, narrowly avoiding car accidents, and staring off into space when I should be writing. Reader, I’m going to marry him, I repeat to myself because my longtime boyfriend and I have, in fact, decided to get married.

Although of little consequence to anyone other than us and our family, it sparked the idea for this blog post. All summer I devoured contemporary romance novels, preparing myself for what I knew and hoped was to come (a proposal) and getting into a festively romantic mindset. Once properly proposed to, I decided to do a scholarly investigation into the history of the romance novel that would deepen the appreciation I already have today.

A couple years ago, my mom gave me a beautiful copy of the book The Prisoner of Zenda, telling me it was one of the first books that inspired the modern romance novel. Other than Jane Austen and Charlotte/Emily Brontë and George Eliot (more on that later), Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda is a Ruritarian romance full of action and adventure. From this we think Cloud Atlas, The Great Race, North by Northwest, or The Princess Bride fantastic action-filled movies (and books) that wouldn’t know it, but found their start with the wild popularity of The Prisoner of Zenda. For this blog I decided to finally read it. and I was enchanted by our hero on page one. He’s sarcastic, witty, just a tiny bit pompous, and a complete doll. The story follows Rudolph Rassendyll, a man who has accomplished nothing in his life and thoroughly enjoyed the leisure afforded to him. On a whim, he takes a trip to Ruritania, where he is entangled in a plot to kill the king-to-be, who he looks exactly alike. He is convinced to take the place of the king at his coronation until the true king can be recovered. Hijinks and hilarious encounters ensue with a happy ending found by all (except the evil king-poisoner).

The Prisoner of Zenda came out post-Austen, actually influencing many dime novels of adventurous fiction. And though Austen is often lauded as creating the modern romantic story arc, I wondered if there was an agreed upon book in the western cannon that was the first romance novel. I stumbled upon Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740 (70 years before Jane published Sense & Sensibility). This is the first novel in the western cannon to take the point of view of a woman and focus on her needs, desires, and experiences, with a happy ending. It is also deemed the first romance novel because a woman’s needs and desires at that time were completely taken over by the need for a husband. I had intentions of reading this book, and was even drawn to the epistolary structure of the novel, but when it came down to flipping from page five to six of the novel, I couldn’t do it. Richardson’s portrayal of Pamela was helpless and simpering, an extreme contrast to the powerful women of the contemporary romance novels I read. It was so unappealing to me that I gave up. 

Unlike Richardson, many of the female authors of the 1800s brought to light the complexity of female desire into the marriage plot. Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice knows she needs to get married in order to not become penniless, but she is stubborn, independent, and judgmental so the thought of her marriage doesn’t take over every waking moment of her life (though her sister’s possible marriage does). Austen, Radcliffe, and the Brontë sisters all invested energy into the expression of women’s individual desires, turning their books into an ultimately escapist form of literature for the time in which they were published.

Today, the romance novel has boomed into a genre of its own. Despite its literary beginnings, it is often dismissed for its formulaic plots and bodice ripping covers. I believe the genre is in the middle of a renaissance, as authors all over the world are writing diverse, complicated, and thought-out characters. Today the romance genre is a billion dollar market, made up of specific plot points: a dominant love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. The style of covers is changing to hand drawn characters, moving away from Fabio. I decided to read a couple new contemporary love stories to recommend to you from this fall, two adult and two young adult.

My favorite of all of them was Talia Hibbert’s new novel Get a Life Chloe Brown. This adult romantic comedy was touching, adorable, and so darn funny. Chloe Brown experiences a near-death experience pushing her to realize that she must get a life. Diagnosed with fibromyalgia over the past five years, Chloe realizes that she has let her chronic illness and anxiety around it keep her from participating in the excitement of life around her. She also needs to find new friends who will understand her lifestyle and admit her attraction to the superintendent that lives across the courtyard. I loved Chloe’s voice, the realistic depiction of chronic pain, and the complex characters that fall in love so sweetly. This is my new favorite for anyone who reads or wants to read a romance.

Next, I read Christina Lauren’s new Twice in a Blue Moon. This novel takes place half in England 14 years prior and half in California. Tate Jones is the daughter of a world-renowned movie actor (think Brad Pitt), kept in the shadows from paparazzi and the public eye. She meets Sam Brandis in London during vacation, their whirlwind romance crashing down when he sells out her identity and disappears. While Tate is able to become an actress with just as much heft to her name as her father’s (her secret life goal), she is heart-broken and bitter about the way her rise to stardom came to be. Fourteen years later, she steps on to a movie set for the film that is going to catapult her into award season and sees none other than Sam. This book took me through the full range of emotions, making me laugh, making me angry, and making me very happy. While I didn’t find Sam to be the most convincing love interest, Tate made up for it in spades. I loved her confidence, strength, and fragility. I didn’t really care who Tate ended up with, as long as she was happy.

As for the YA romances, I read Color Outside the Lines and 10 Blind Dates. They are vastly different! Color Outside the Lines is a collection of short stories edited by Sangu Mandanna about mixed-race couples. The stories ranged through all different cultures, worlds, and times in history. I personally adored the story written by Lori M. Lee about a Hmong girl who falls in love with a fallen star. The creativity and array of conflicts and interactions between the characters was refreshing. A great read for those who love short stories, fantastical worlds, and representations of race that celebrate and revel in each of their beauty.

10 Blind Dates was probably my second favorite book of the four that I read. Ashley Elston writes about a senior in high school from a big Italian family living in Louisiana. Sophie is ecstatic for her winter break because her parents are leaving to visit her pregnant sister and Sophie gets to spend one-on-one time with her boyfriend, alone. But all that excitement is flushed down the drain when she overhears her boyfriend say that he think she’s no fun and wants to break up soon. Sophie, devastated, takes refuge at her grandparents’ house and begins to reconnect with her extended family who she hasn’t seen consistently since the beginning of high school. To help her get over her lousy ex-boyfriend, they decide to set her up on ten blind dates throughout the break. Despite the silly premise, I absolutely adored the bond between Sophie and her family. They showed so much love and support, and Elston wrote a rich and beautiful backstory to Sophie’s friendships and relationships with family. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to smile, loves loud and goofy families, or a sweet love story about loving yourself before knowing who you want to love.

I hope you can find one or two books that speak to you! I certainly loved all of them, and there are so many more romances I’ve read that I could talk about. Come in if you want more recommendations!

Next week, Lori will be talking about her favorite books of 2019 next week.

--Kelleen

#romance #fall romance #island books #kelleen #kelleen cummings #the prisoner of zenda #color outside the lines #10 blind dates #twice in a blue moon #get a life chloe brown

[sleeperwebserial]

SLEEPER PART I: “...And Something in Between” | Chapter I: “Remembering, With a Twist

“How does it feel to know who you are?”

I

The full event really happened within a few seconds. Bea, in her apartment, stared out the window, eagerly watching the woman bundled in a light flannel coat move onto her front steps. And then-lots of light, then no light at all, then no one on the doorstep. The noise- a horrible sound, a loud, mechanical discharge-forced her back, she threw herself onto the floor, gasping-maybe crying. She ran out to the doorstep, absent of shoes, coats or thought. The scene, horrific, bloodied, flashing with camera lights, forced her to slump further and further down in her thoughts, shaking away running ideas of what could’ve happened. But it was clear what had happened. And here’s what happened; a subject I am knowledgeable about, due to my arrival on the scene shortly after: Someone had shot Gwen. Several times. While the scene, normally, would have been horrific-it would’ve made someone sick, most likely- in actuality, it was tame, all things considered. There were three wounds, shot from across the street. The rounds were rather large, causing around inch-wide holes in her back and head. Two of the rounds hit her back, random, uncoordinated shots, one in her left shoulder and the other on the bottom-right hand side of her back, penetrating her liver. The final round hit her right at the bridge of her neck, where it met her skull, snapping both. Very little blood was exhumed from the body, at least at first, surely when Bea had gotten to the street. Her belongings, her phone, screen cracked and covered in blood, (and even through the blood, Bea could see Gwen’s background-a picture of the pair.) the pin she was holding, resting beside the base of Gwen’s wrist, and her backpack, the right hand side torn, and the left strap ripped off- thrown to the side. And as I walked off, Bea would look at me. She may have not seen me, but I was still there. And already more dead-eyed than she was when the night had started, Bea slumped beside the lifeless body of the only woman she’d ever loved-and she thought. Many thoughts ran across her mind that night; but three came to the forefront, or repeated, over and over the entire night. The first was a memory of a night spent with Gwen, the same night that her love was considering earlier that night. She remembered it significantly more vividly, however. 

Bea and Gwen had arrived at Bea’s family farmhouse, around ten at night. They were both drunk. Maybe they had arrived from a party at Pete’s place, or maybe they were just drunk because they were, neither could’ve told you at the time. And they laid on Bea’s bed, and they laughed, at nothing in particular. Occasionally, one of them would try to start a sentence; they’d say “Well, um,” or “hey did you know that,” and they wouldn’t finish the sentence-just drink some more and laugh some more. And at eleven, they both passed out. Incredibly drunk, maybe illegally at the time, they were in high school; they held each other, and they made a promise to keep living like this, as long as they were both here. (And then, more thoughts came racing: Well, you’re not here now, so what do I do? How do I keep living? How does this work out? And it kept on like that as she continued to remember, and remember more) And as Bea whispered into Gwen’s ear, “I promise,” They fell asleep, together, as one.

And then they woke up two hours later, feeling already a bit hungover, but mostly, just still drunk. Bea rolled over to where Gwen laid, and found she was awake, standing above Bea. and she said something like, “We oughtta go out to the lake,” or an equally unconvincing slur of words that sounded more like a vomit of syllables, but convinced the both of them it was best to go out to the lakehouse. Delicately, Gwen attempted to open the window, to little success; while Bea fished under her bed, her fingers sliding across tin boxes, lost socks, dust bunnies-before grasping a cigarette carton, and the lighter which had been duct-taped to it. Bea grabbed the carton, pulling it from its hiding place underneath her bed. She, carefully, joined Gwen by the window, and grabbed her hand. The pair giggled and snorted as they went from the narrow, baby-blue hallways of the third floor, to the basement, a cold, dilapidated room that supposedly used to be a wine cellar- (the farmhouse, while rather small, was built and, for a period owned, by an awfully rich family, sometime in the 1800’s. It was a plantation-style house, accompanied by vast farmland.)- but was now more akin to a storage facility. Bea stumbled to the door, with it’s three-panelled glass almost completely cracked-scanning the area surrounding the door through its tiny inches of clear glass. Grabbing Gwen’s hand, taking her from distraction by the old telephones and broken machinery (Bea’s father liked to repair old things, the kooky old man.) and lead her through the door, out to the warm summer air, that made everything feel damp-the weather was the kind of summer weather that appears after a short rain-humid, warm and wet covers the grass as steam levitates from the air around the warm spots on the ground-this was the weather that Bea and Gwen trudged through that night. The walk was long, and even longer seeing they were nearly blackout drunk, stumbling on the wet grass, hand-in hand. As they went from the basement door, out to the grass, (the path from the basement door started in a shed, and ended at the lakehouse.) and began walking. However, seeing as it was pitch black and neither had brought a flashlight, the pair simply wandered in the yard, pushed each other over, and rolled on the grass; a moment where, briefly, they relived a childhood they barely had. As kids, the both of them were more used to farmwork, than most anything else. And as they ran on the ground, fell, held each other, anything else- they were just glad to be together. And as they ran, losing track of where they were, they talked-and mostly, they listened. To each other. 

Bea sat on her front steps. Sirens were fast approaching. Think, she told herself. Think about that night. Distract yourself. She focused, not noticing the tears running down her face, wetting her burning cheeks, and she focused on that night.

What did Gwen say next? She forced herself to think of it, and it came to her, “What’re we gonna do, out at the lakehouse?” Bea thought of her voice, as she remembered it, and it comforted her. 

“I don’t know,” Bea hesitated, biting the words and considering if, maybe, this would’ve been going too far. “Fuck?” Gwen laughed, then, a high chuckle, that made Bea both in the moment, and now, some five years later, feel relieved. 

“Okay, maybe we should hold off a bit on that, missy,” Gwen had said, to both of their amusement. “Maybe we should get a little more drunk first.”

Bea, blushing in the hot summer night, conceded. And that was how the night had ended, really- the pair of them, hot in a small cabin without air conditioning, had gotten even more drunk, and had forgotten to sleep together- rather, they simply spent their time talking, discussing anything they thought of. And it occurred to Bea, on the doorstep, now, as the police hopped out of their cars, that she would never hear Gwen’s soft, honey-sweet voice ever again. They’d never be in the same bad, sleeping intertwined in a loving slumber ever again. And then, She cried. Not in a noticeable way, but tears certainly fell down her face, as she stared at the pudgy-faced, red-nosed and similarly colored hair detective Flynn stepped out of his car, accompanied by the brown-haired and by all accounts, relatively attractive detective Blake. And as they walked up to the hollow body of Gwen Stant, Bea was snapped from her mind. 

“Beatrice? Beatrice North?” The hollow voice of Detective Flynn rung through her head. He sounded like he smoked cigarettes by the dozen and drank at the same rate.

“Yes. That’s me.” Her voice was smaller and shaking. She hadn’t felt this way since the last time Gwen had said goodbye. 

“We’re gonna need you to answer some questions, alright?” Flynn asked her, his voice raspy. Bea couldn’t think straight. Questions? Could she even speak more than her own name? But she didn’t have any choice. 

“Yes. Of course.” her voice was still quiet, and distant. Everything was quiet and distant.

And then, she was in the detective’s car. In the back; Or maybe not in a car at all. She tried the door-it was locked. No unlock button, child locks? No, prisoner locks, must be, she’s in the back of a POLICE car. She asks where they’re going. Maybe either Flynn, or Blake tells her, but she doesn’t hear a thing. Everything’s so far and so distant, and- and- and something else, she doesn’t remember. The lights outside get dimmer. How long have they been driving? She can’t remember. And, vaguely, she slumps down in the back, and falls asleep-

And this will bring us to the second topic that crossed Bea’s mind that night. How she got to that exact moment. Bea was a schoolteacher, for a ninth grade English class at P.S 1201, ten steps up from her apartment. She’d had many partners in the intervening years between Gwen and her, but most nights all she could think about was Gwen, as she drifted off to sleep. So, on the evening she was supposed to retire from teaching, she wrote a letter to Gwen. all in the flowy handwriting that Gwen had adored so dearly, asking for her to return to her. And, surely, it would’ve succeeded, had Gwen not been killed that night. And who’s to really say, what would’ve happened, had Gwen not been killed that night. But Bea still thought, endlessly, about what would’ve happened. How she could’ve saved her, what she could’ve done. But of course, me being who I am, I can tell you what she could’ve done.

Nothing. Nothing could’ve stopped what happened there. And, though, it could have happened to anyone, and the citizens of Manhattan would come to know that, but it was destined to happen. All things are destined to happen, of course. But though Bea would think endlessly and try hundreds of things to stop it, they would all fail, as they always would, as they will. The world works in an established way. And nothing will ever happen outside of that.

And this brings us, of course, to our very last, thought that went through Bea’s mind. 

Revenge. Burning, white hot, palpable. Revenge is the only thing that she needed then. She thought. Pete’s an investigative journalist. She thought. He could help me find the killer. She thought still. Something’s gotta happen. I’ll try something, I have to try something. And that desire for revenge, would, ultimately, be her end. Though, for now, let’s not get into that. The detectives still had questions, after all.

And then, Bea was put into a little room that smelled of something dead in the vents. She had seen interrogation chambers on TV, or in movies, but it usually wasn’t ever like this. There were water stains on the rims of the walls, and the dead-thing smell was elevated whenever the AC was turned on. The chair she was sitting in had one loose leg, and was constantly on the edge of falling over, stopped only by Bea grabbing the metallic table. It was sticky, and smelled of sugary soda. Bea felt sick. She knew that in a few minutes, the detectives would come in and ask the stereotypical questions asked by fictional detectives in all those shows she loved. There was something about that system that really quite comforted her, that there were the ‘boys in blue’ always around the corner, ready to help. Of course, that would come to be untrue, at least to her. There was much that she was yet to learn, but still, there was something about the environment the police inhabited that frightened her, or rather, simply disturbed her. It was too clean, contrasted with things that were too dirty. Happy, calm officers clammed up next to people who have seen the very worst that Earth had to offer. It was what made her walk to the other side of the street whenever she’d see a cop coming towards her. Not because of any prejudice, but of an irrational and rather nonsensical fear that would prolong through much of her life. Until the end of it. She drew up her hands from the table with the slightest bit of effort to the sticky substance on the table, and ran her fingers through her hair. Some of this...just couldn’t be real, right? In for questioning, and her girlfriend was dead. What in the hell? Something had to be wrong, it had to be a dream. Somebody had told her once that you couldn’t read anything in dreams. She thought back to see if she had read anything today, a dumb excersice, a part of her acknowledged. But one she thought she needed to do. She searched through her memory. She read a book this morning. The Dead Zone. No, this was no dream.

The detectives entered. They sat down on the other side of the table, in perfect synchronicity. They put down their folders, and their files, all doing it perfectly in sync, and then leaned back in their chair. Flynn whispered to Blake without taking his eyes off of Bea. Blake nodded, and then opened his folder, twirling a pen in his left hand. And then he spoke, in a soft-spoken voice. Like he was trying to be sympathetic. 

“When did you last see the victim?” ‘the victim?’ she was a person, Bea thought. Not just another tally on a board.

Bea spoke. Her voice was firm. “Four years ago. That was the last time we talked.”

Flynn spoke next, raspy and grovelling. “Listen, we need to know if she was involved in anything shady. You know anything?”

“Nothing. She didn’t do anything. She was a fucking kid, she was twenty-four!”

“Detective Flynn wants to know if anything happened that would make someone wanna kill Miss Stantson. That’s all we’re trying to figure out.” “No, she really-” Bea stopped herself. She was going to cry. “She had enemies, everyone does. But no, she didn’t have anyone who’d want her dead and go through with it.”

“You sure about that?” Flynn seemed angry. Bea noticed, she was crying now, or maybe she’d been crying this whole time.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Okay. What was she coming to you for?” “I asked her to join me for a while, we hadn’t seen each other in, fuck, four years.” Bea was so, so tired. She just wanted to go home. 

“Four years, what was she doing in between then?” Flynn asked, rasping through his cigarette. Bea thought it was illegal to smoke in these rooms now…

“How should I know? I haven’t talked to her. In so fucking long.” Bea looked at herself in the one-way mirror. She looked distorted, her greenish eyes blending in with her pale face blending into her reddish hair. Something was wrong there. Something felt right about the wrong interpretation of her features. It felt like an inevitable change in her, after what had happened. And it was never going to change back. She drifted in and out of the reality in and out of the mirror, drifting from and back to the world behind it. She drifted back when Flynn slammed his pink fist on the metallic table of the interrogation room. It echoed like a scream through a cave, or like a bird screeching in a garage.  Cigarette smoke filled the air as Bea looked up and down, before reaching her conclusion. She asked for Flynn to repeat himself.

“I wanna know how you got her address, and where she was at.”

Bea was sweating. Was she a suspect? She thought, and squirmed on her chair. “I guess i just sent it to her old apartment. I didn’t think she had moved. She hadn’t.” Bea thought for a moment, trying to remember what Gwen’s address was. “She lived in an apartment right outside her college. Carolina University, or something like that.”

Blake nodded. Flynn grunted. The two exited the room. Almost as an afterthought, Blake looked back, and told Bea that they’d be right back. Bea sat down in her chair, and cleared the tears from her blushed cheeks. She took her jacket off, and ran her fingers through her hair, mumbling worried tones. She hadn’t done anything, and now she might be convicted for wanting to see her girlfriend. She swore.

††A SCENE FROM A POLICE PRECINCT HALLWAY††

~DETECTIVE BARRY FLYNN SITS IN A DIRTY CHAIR.~

~HE SPEAKS.~

~DETECTIVE ANGELO BLAKE SPEAKS BACK.~

~THEY COME TO A CONCLUSION WITHIN MINUTES.~

The detectives reentered the interrogation room. They didn’t even sit down, they looked at Bea, and Blake spoke. “We’ve asked all we can ask you. You’re free to go, Miss.” 

“With some paperwork of course, head down to the lobby. We’ll get you sorted,” Blake said, tired. 

Bea stood up, and walked down to the first floor. She had to fill out maybe seventy pages of paperwork and legalese before she could leave, and when she did, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything. She remembered how fast she’d recovered when a friend of hers was in a car crash. It wasn’t bad like this. All she could think of was Gwen, and how she had died. She was gone, for good. And nothing would bring her back. She touched the sheepskin on the inside of her topcoat, trying to warm up her hands to flag a taxi. Her phone began to buzz wildly, prolonged tones and ringtones. She saw them all. And she knew that soon it’d be in the news too. Probably not long, murders barely get any recognition anymore, but still. It’d be there. And if she was very lucky, Bea would be a footnote in the article. Nobody would seek her out. No, not if she was lucky, nobody is gonna seek her out. This was New York, not a small town, or even a smaller city. So she put her hand down, and instead of flagging a cab, decided to walk home. It would give her time to think. And time to think was something that Bea desperately needed. She needed time to think about what to do next, about how she was going to get her revenge. And she would get revenge, if it was the last thing she did. And it would be.

INTERLUDE: A KILLER’S IDEAL

The killer was real now. He was running, and he was happy. He thought of himself as the killer. I was there, in his mind, as he ran, with the rifle in the guitar case, he ran down the fire escape, and into the room of his ninth-ish victim. This was never what he intended to do, he thought, as he ran out of the room and down the stairs, out into the alley, and into the car. He was smiling. He backed out of the alley, enjoying watching, presumably, a friend of that girl’s, crying over her body. It was distant, unfamiliar, the smile. It wasn’t the killer’s. But still he smiled, as he drove past the body, past the crowd, past the police cruisers, and their sirens whining, and he thought to himself. How bad could it possibly get, if this was how he was going to be making money? And as he smiled, he knew that things were going to be good from now on. Very good. And he turned up the radio, smiling, and laughing to himself. This was the good life. 

II

Somewhere in New York, Olivia Melanie was going to quit her job. Olivia Melanie was a detective for the NYPD. was. 

Earlier that day, Olivia had been investigating something routine. A small bodega robbery. It had happened like all the others. But…something was different about this one. The robber’s hair was salt-and-pepper gray, mirroring Olivia’s own, his face covered by a pullover ski mask. The ski mask had been torn around the hair and forehead enough to show his wrinkling brow and the sparks of hair flowing from the holes in the mask. He wore a navy-blue leather jacket, which covered a gray sweater, his hands covered by black winter driving gloves. He wielded a snub-nose .36 pistol, and as Olivia and Her partner, Jonny, had arrived, pointed it forward at them. Jonny had drawn his gun first. It took seconds, in total- maybe a minute.

The burglar shouted something indistinct, and Olivia watched as Jonny cocked his gun, and rolled his finger to the trigger. Olivia ran, trying to push the gun out of Jonny’s hands, but time was already up, he had fired, narrowly missing the man’s heart and hitting below his ribs. As the bullet sent the man hurtling into the shelves of snacks, his gun fired, most likely accidentally, into the roof tiles.

Olivia was in shock. She had never heard anything as loud as that. Never. She hadn’t even used her own gun before, she got past the examinations for gun training in the academy. God, it was so loud. She had closed her eyes at the noise, and when she awoke, the scene was horrific. Olivia was a detective. She didn’t do much with her gun. And now the body of this man, (who would later be identified as Bryan Breiberg) was sat with a hole in his chest. The body, by all accounts, looked about the same, absent of a large maroon hole, with the maroon stain on his clothes growing in size, directly below his ribs. The man gasped for air, but all that came out was a gurgle of blood. Olivia ran over to him, tears streaming down her face. She had never met this guy before, yet she was still crying over him. She pondered over it, and it forced her to chuckle. The man removed his mask, showing a scarred, pocked face. He had stubble on his chin reaching up to his nose. His weak hand put the mask in Olivia’s jacket pocket.

“Pig,” he tried to shout, but all that came out was a weakened whisper. He spat blood onto her face, the red spurt making her pull back, disgusted.

Jonny came to kneel beside her, looking at the dying criminal. He stood up with Olivia, and patted her on the back. “First time seein’ a dead guy, Olivia?”

“No, just the first time being complicit,” She whispered in a monotone voice. 

“Complicit? I mean, he could’ve shot the store-owner. The gun was loaded.”

“Bad excuse for murder, Jonny.”

“Murder? He was a criminal.”

“He’s still dead.” Olivia sighed, and sat down on the bench outside. Her ears were still ringing. The day had been long and though her job had mostly desensitized her to the violence, it was being part of it -complicit- that had her scared. She took a cigarette from the pack inside her jacket pocket, and as she reached in, narrowly touched the rough cloth of the burglar’s mask. It startled her. Already the blood was beginning to dry and make the fabric tough and course, with globs of slowly thickening blood attaching themselves to her finger tips. She took her lighter out with the cigarette, lighting it while it was stuck between her lips. Jonny came out to sit beside her on the bench.

“You’re already well adjusted, huh?” He said, moving his hand in a motion indicating Olivia to give him a cigarette. 

Olivia handed him the pack and the lighter. “Yeah, well, growing up in New York. You get used to it. Just strange seeing it happen in front of me.”

Sirens were rapidly approaching, they’d probably arrive within seconds.

“I guess you grew up in the richer parts of the city then, eh?”

Olivia ashed and inhaled the cigarette. “Something like that.”

The cruiser braked right in front of the two of them, spraying dirty water from the dip in the street onto their shoes. Two beat cops came out, looking through the store. From just outside earshot, one of the beat cops said something.

“Poor guy.”

One way to describe it, she thought, angrily. There was something there, how anyone doing anything could be attacked. She acknowledged that this guy had been guilty. But that doesn’t mean he deserved to get shot, she thought, and she stood up. The other cops and ambulances would be arriving soon. She signaled Jonny to come with her.

“Where’re we going, Olive?”

Olivia hated the nickname Olive. “I’m dropping you and the car off at the station and then I’m going home.”

“I didn’t know this would affect you that much.” 

Olivia turned as she walked towards the car. “It didn’t. I just wanna get out of here.”

The pair flooded into the car and drove off. The ride was silent. Neither of them said a word until they reached the precinct. Jonny congratulated her, and then walked off towards the doors. He would probably get home and watch t.v until morning. Olivia on the other hand, had other plans.

She drove down to her tiny apartment on the lower east side and opened up the door, taking the mask out of her coat pocket and hanging the coat up. She put the mask down on her table, and took out her sewing kit. Many years ago it had belonged to her grandmother, long dead now, but she still took it out from time to time. She was good at sewing, but it had never really come up - until now. 

Olivia took out the needle and a spool of red thread - all she had left - (she had been repairing her own clothes with it for years, working as a cop in New York never gave way to good clothing) and began stitching it up. She couldn’t say why, she just felt compelled, like it was needed. An honor. 

She put in the last stitch, and moved to her bathroom to wash off the blood. It was caked onto the inside as well as the outside of the ski mask. Blood rushing into the sink reminded her…

††TWO SCENES FROM BLUEPORT, NEW YORK, 1998, & MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, 2007††

~OLIVIA MELANIE AND EDWARD MELANIE SIT BY THE BEACH.~ ~EDWARD STANDS.~

~EDWARD MELANIE HAS KILLED A MAN. HIS FAMILY WILL NEVER KNOW.~

She never saw her brother after that day in ‘98. Edward was a mystery. Sometimes he’d come up during family gatherings. Blueport hadn’t been her home for many, many years,  so her time there was mostly forgotten, but it wasn’t what she thought it was afterwards.

10 serial killers came out of Blueport, New York.

#fiction #web series #thriller

[johnboothus]

Next Round: Kasama Rum Explores the Spirits Asian Roots

Airing between regular episodes of the “VinePair Podcast,” “Next Round” explores the ideas and innovations that are helping drinks businesses adapt in a time of unprecedented change. As the coronavirus crisis continues and new challenges arise, VP Pro is in your corner, supporting the drinks community for all the rounds to come. If you have a story or perspective to share, email us at [email protected].

In this “Next Round” episode, Adam Teeter speaks with the creator of Kasama Rum, Alexandra Dorda, who is a second-generation spirits entrepreneur. Hailing from a family known for its vodka empires, Dorda decided to take a different route by producing a dark, barrel-aged rum with a light flavor profile. According to her, Kasama’s branding is revolutionary in distancing its aesthetic from the stereotypical pirate and sailor caricatures that are often associated with rum.

Kasama, which means “together” in Filipino, has managed to find success since its recent release, despite launching during a time when many people cannot physically be together with their loved ones. Even though bars nationwide face closures and the alcohol industry has taken a significant hit, Dorda is optimistic about the future of Kasama and is confident in the sipping rum’s quality, as well as the cultural pride of the Filipinos who are working to uplift it.

Listen Online

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Or Check Out the Conversation Here

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter, and this is a VinePair “Next Round” conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations between the regular “VinePair Podcast” in order to give a better picture about what’s going on in the world of alcoholic beverages. Today, I’m really lucky to be speaking with Alexandra Dorda, the founder of Kasama Rum. Alexandra, what’s going on?

Alexandra: Hi, Adam. So good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

A: Of course. My pleasure. So where do I find you in the world in early February? I’m in Brooklyn, and there’s snow all over the ground. But where are you?

AD: I’m currently in Los Angeles, California. This is where I grew up when I was very small. So it’s sort of like coming home, in a way.

A: As I’ve seen, the weather’s a lot nicer than it is here in New York.

AD: Yes, it’s beautiful. I’m going to make you really jealous. I’m looking out into a garden. It’s warm here and the birds are chirping. It’s really nice.

A: Well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I want to talk to you about a lot of things. Obviously, the rum being the primary focus of our conversation. Kasama Rum. When did you launch it? Can you tell me a little bit about it?

AD: Kasama Rum, I call it the Sunshine Spirit. It’s a 7-year-old rum from the Philippines. We soft-launched last year in September of 2020, but actually our official launch is tomorrow. People can now order the rum directly through the website. It’s obviously an incredibly strange time to launch a brand. I was a bit cautious, so we did a soft launch at the end of last year.

A: Some people who are listening to this podcast may be familiar with your last name. Others may not. You are not a rookie when it comes to launching alcohol brands. So can you talk to us a little bit about your background, and your family’s background in alcohol, and how you decided through that background to create Kasama? Because I think the story of Kasama is really interesting.

AD: Sure. So I’m 29, but I like to joke that I have 27 years of experience in the alcohol space. My dad launched two vodkas when I was just a toddler: Belvedere Vodka and Chopin Vodka. He is a pioneer in the vodka category; nobody was doing super-premium vodka at that time. We still own Chopin vodka, and we craft all of our vodka at our family owned distillery in eastern Poland. It’s really a beautiful operation. We even farm some of our own ingredients. I’ve really grown up in this industry, and through my father’s love of his craft, I really developed a love of craft spirits as well. When I was little, my dad would take me to restaurants. I remember being like 5 years old, and every time we go to a restaurant, he’d say, “Come on, Alex, we have to go to the bar. We have to meet the bartender. We have to read the cocktail menu. We have to see if our products are here.” So that was how I got my start in the industry, and it just progressed from there. It led to me launching this rum from the Philippines, which is where my mother is from. It feels very full-circle to have a family vodka from Poland where my dad is from, and now this rum from the Philippines.

A: So how did you get the idea? I mean, obviously, OK, so you have a background in the spirits business with vodka. What caused you to say, I want to do a rum? Also, I’m curious, what was the rest of the family’s reaction to you wanting to do a rum?

AD: So the family has been very, very supportive. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, so I think that they’re very happy to see me on my own entrepreneurial journey. They’re super supportive, which I’m very grateful for. What caused me to do a rum? I’ve obviously been in this industry a long time and have really observed it very closely for a very long time. I saw a while back that the rum category was just a little bit weaker than all the other ones. There’s a distinct lack of interesting lifestyle brands in the category. I think that’s one of the reasons that the category has fallen behind some of the other spirits categories. Everyone keeps saying, “Rum is going to be next, rum is going to be the next bourbon or tequila,” and it hasn’t been so far. So I saw this gap in the market. I wondered why all the rum that I was seeing was pirate-themed, sailor-themed, or nautical-themed when that felt so irrelevant to me, and probably to a lot of other people out there. The impetus for me to actually launch Kasama Rum was that a couple of years ago I learned that the Philippines is actually one of the biggest rum producers in the world. I have to be honest, I didn’t know that. I think that a lot of people would be surprised to learn that.

A: I was surprised, too.

AD: The biggest rum brand in the world is not Bacardi. It’s a brand from the Philippines. But people don’t really hear about it because it’s mostly just consumed domestically. So I had this “aha” moment where I realized that I could fill this gap that I perceived in the market, while also celebrating the Filipino heritage that I’m so proud of.

A: I’m going to let you educate us about Filipino rum. In your journey to learn this, what did you discover? How long has rum been made in the Philippines? What can you teach us that we should know about Filipino rum?

AD: The Philippines is not new to the rum game, even though a lot of people are just learning about it right now. The Philippines was a Spanish colony for 333 years, and that’s where our rum history comes from — it’s from that period of colonization. We’ve been making rum for a very long time. Another thing that’s interesting to note that I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn, is that sugarcane is actually native to Southeast Asia. It’s originally from the Papua New Guinea area and came up through the Philippines to mainland Asia, over to Europe, and was only brought to the Caribbean later on, around the 1500s. We have very rich volcanic soil. The Philippines sits on the Ring of Fire; we have about 53 volcanoes, some of which are active. So this tropical climate that we have, this rich volcanic soil, and the fact that sugarcane is actually originally from this broader region means that we have some of the best rum in the world. That’s one of the stories that I’d really like to get out there to help put Filipino craft on the map in terms of rum and in other ways.

A: So was the rum being distilled for the same reason we hear about in the Caribbean? To supply the navies, the sailors, and things like that? Was it being distilled around the same time as it was coming to the Caribbean? Do you know if it was first or second? This is fascinating.

AD: You are really, really testing my history knowledge at the moment. It did come from the colonization period, which was up until the end of the 1800s, and 300 years before that. So around the 1500s.

A: Amazing. And what do you think is distinct about rum from the Philippines? We hear a lot from other rum producers that there is something that’s very distinctive about Jamaican rum compared to Nicaraguan rum, or Cuban, or Puerto Rican (obviously where Bacardi is from). We romanticize Jamaica as being the home of the pot still rums. What do you think is really distinct about Filipino rum? Are there characteristics that define all Filipino rums, or are they all different?

AD: There are different producers, of course, and everybody has their own style. I’m thinking about two major brands right now. I would say that their flavor profiles are completely different. But in the case of Kasama, it’s a very light rum — that’s what I think is something that we’re bringing to the category that’s new in terms of the flavor profile. It’s very light and very easy to sip. It has very beautiful tropical notes that come from the sugarcane and the climate that we have there. It’s a great rum for sipping. I think it’s also a great rum to help bring new people into the category. I get a lot of people who tell me, “Oh, I don’t really like rum. It’s very heavily spiced,” or “It’s really overly sweet.” I try to get them to try Kasama and many of them say, “Wow, I didn’t know that I would like this.” The Philippines is actually quite a large country. I don’t think I can say that there’s just one style of rum throughout the whole country. But Kasama itself is very light and delicious.

A: Are you distilling molasses? There’s the French agricole style becoming super trendy among bar circles. It’s really the juice that gets distilled from the sugarcane, and then there’s the classic styles. We know for Caribbean rum it’s the molasses. Is there one or the other that’s distilled in the Philippines?

AD: We do both in the Philippines. Kasama is distilled from freshly pressed noble sugarcane juice, but it doesn’t have that agricole taste to it. We are actually distilled in a column, and I think columns get a bad rap. For example, in Poland at our family distillery, we use a column and we love that. So to me, pot stills aren’t necessarily superior to column stills, but ours is distilled from freshly noble sugarcane juice, and I think that’s what contributes to having this very light, pleasant taste.

A: Oh, interesting. What type of barrels are you aging it in?

AD: They’re ex-bourbon American oak barrels. It’s not a spicy flavor profile, but bourbon does have that pepperiness to it, so you do get a little bit of pepper at the end. There’s also notes of vanilla, which I think comes from that bourbon as well.

A: Interesting. When you were going to create the brand, how many rums did you taste? How well did you educate yourself in the category? Obviously, we always talk about people who are entrepreneurs and founders really trying to try as many of their potential competitors as they can. How much did you try?

AD: I tasted dozens and dozens; I’d say over 100 probably in the process, just because, like you said, I wanted to see what was out there. When I was developing the brand, most of the time I was in Warsaw, Poland, and we have actually a great rum bar there that has hundreds of bottles. I would go there and I would just try different kinds and see what I liked. It was fascinating. There are different styles in different countries. I think most consumers haven’t explored the differences in rum. We know that in wine, that different types of grapes taste different, and we know that in whiskey as well. I think that in rum, that isn’t yet appreciated. There are so many different styles to be explored in the rum category.

A: So I think there’s two theories with rum, and I think both could be true. I’m interested in what your perspective is here. One is that the rum renaissance will come through bourbon — that it will be people discovering these sipping rums, of which Kasama is one. It’s a 7-year-old, well-aged dark spirit that will find appeal from people who may have gotten used to drinking bourbon, Cognac, things like that. The other theory some people have is that it will come through the light rums, the white rums, and cocktail culture, the Daiquiris, and things like that. Have you thought about that? Because obviously the first thing you put out as an entrepreneur is a dark aged rum. There’s another brand that I think you’re aware of, and we’re also fans of on the podcast: Ten To One. The first rum that Marc Farrell put out was a white rum. So I’m curious why you made the decision to do dark rum first. Obviously now he has a dark rum — you might have a light rum down the road. What was your decision about the first thing I’m doing is this 7-year-old aged, beautiful rum.

AD: So first of all, I just love the taste of it. So that’s what I wanted to bring to the world first. I would like to bring out an unaged rum, a white rum, or perhaps even an older rum down the line. As to this “rum renaissance” that you were saying we’re all waiting for, I think that it’s upon us as producers to bring that about. My theory as to why rum hasn’t had its renaissance yet is that the category, frankly, has been very tired. Rum should be a very exciting drink — it has everything going for it. It’s often aged, which people really like; they like to learn about the wood and the aging process. It naturally has a sweeter flavor profile, which is much more approachable than, perhaps, whiskey. It typically comes from a warm tropical place, and there are all these good connotations with vacation. Rum should be very popular, and I think that because it’s gotten so stuck in this nautical rut, that’s why it hasn’t really gained widespread appeal. That’s my theory, at least. I think that if there were more exciting stories being told in the category that weren’t about cartoon pirates and sailors, then there would be more people who would be interested to really learn about rum.

A: I think that’s a really good point, and one that I know you’ve spoken about with me before. Do you think the problem is that we just, like, the corporate world kind of whitewashed rum in a lot of ways?

AD: That’s what I think the problem is. I understand that pirates did drink rum, and there is a long history of a tie between rum and sailors and the nautical industry. But I just don’t think that’s all that rum has to offer the world. If you walk down an aisle at a liquor store, pretty much every single rum brand is focused on that one trope, which I think is really unfortunate because it pigeonholes rum. It’s for one very specific type of person. I don’t know why we fixated on that. That’s why I wanted to create a rum that was a celebration of the place that it’s from in a modern way, in a way that feels relevant to a modern consumer. I spent almost two years developing Kasama because first of all, I had a very demanding corporate job, and also because I was new to developing a brand of my own, and wasn’t always sure of what I was doing. During that time, I had a daily Google alert set for rum on my phone. Every morning I would wake up in horror, and I was like, “Today is the day that somebody has launched a similar rum brand.” The day never came, and I’m honestly surprised. I’m surprised that there aren’t more rum brands that are celebrating the genuine history of where they’re from.

A: So I want to talk about that because I think one of the things that’s really cool is how you designed the bottle, and who designed the bottle. Obviously, there’s a lot of brands that will go in, source from a place, but then make it their own when they bring it back to where they’re from. But you didn’t do that. So can you talk about what went into the design of the bottle and who designed it?

AD: Yes. So for the bottle, I partnered with a Manila-based creative agency called Serious Studio. They were absolutely fantastic. The founders are a husband-and-wife team who are around my age. I emailed them and I said, “Look, I really want to design a Filipino brand that has a global appeal.” I think that in the Philippines we know how amazing our country is, and we know how talented Filipinos are. We do a lot of talking to ourselves about it, which I think is a bit of a shame. So I emailed them and I said, “I really want to do a brand that’s proudly Filipino, but not just for Filipino Filipinos. I think that this should be something that’s really for anybody.” They felt very strongly about that mission as well. So I’m proud to say that the whole brand was designed by a team in Manila, and it was really about being proud of our heritage on the bottle. So you see on the neck we have a winking sun. It’s the sun that’s actually on the Philippine flag. We have stamps that show indigenous flora and fauna. The whole thing was really about celebrating our fantastic country. I’m glad that Serious Studio was able to really bring that to life.

A: Yeah, it’s very cool. I was talking to someone on the editorial team earlier today in Slack who knew that I was doing this interview, and she just received a bottle of Kasama. She was saying it has a really amazing design where you can tell it actually is true to the place, but it also feels very modern. I thought that was a really cool way for her to describe it. It feels like it’s totally in line with the way I think alcohol brands should move, in terms of that “premium look” that you have on your bar, where someone would walk over and say “What’s this?” But when you pick it up, it’s like, “oh, all of these things are actually representative of the place it’s from.”

AD: I’m so happy to hear that.

A: So now let’s talk about the nitty-gritty. Alexandra, what has it been like to sell this brand, and can you talk us through the process of what you’ve gone through over the past few months in order to make this thing a reality?

AD: Launching during a pandemic was not ideal in any sense. Honestly, in the beginning, I felt really worried — I thought all these bars and restaurants and stores, they’re just trying to stay alive. Are they going to want to take a chance on a new brand? That’s one of the reasons that we were so conservative at the beginning. I’m happy to say we were nationally aligned with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. They’ve been incredibly supportive of the brand, which I’m very grateful for. We just started slow. We started in South Florida because at the time, they were open, and also aesthetically, it really matches. Also, it’s a very big rum market. I’m happy to say that it’s been going really well. We’re currently in 250 accounts. We have about 300 that are lined up for spring. Some of these larger chains have long reset periods, so they tell you ahead of time. We’re going to be launching in BevMo in California in March or April, we’re in a few Total Wines in Florida. The reception has been really encouraging. I would have been encouraged anyway, but especially because it’s a pandemic, and I know how hard it is out there for people. I feel very happy that retailers have been willing to take a chance on us.

A: How do you, specifically as a brand, build yourself? I know traditionally, prior to the pandemic, one of the ways a lot of indie brands would think about building themselves was saying, “OK, we’re going to go immediately to the top bars in a given market. Even if we only sell a case in, we’ll hopefully get on the cocktail list because we sold a case in. And the bartender will explain the rum to consumers.” Now that that’s not happening, obviously, what do you have to do on your end in order to educate the population, and to make sure that now that you are in BevMo, someone walks in and buys it? Have you thought about that? If you have, what do those plans look like?

AD: I think that’s what everybody in the industry is thinking about right now. The normal tools that we had to launch a brand aren’t really there right now, which is typically on-premise. Obviously, we have a social media presence and we try to reach out to as many people as possible through social media. We try to get involved with different food events that are happening. For example, October is Filipino American History Month, and we were involved in a pop-up that managed to take place last October. It was a pretty small event, but Filipinos are very proud of their culture, and I think also we largely feel invisible within American culture. So when Filipinos find this brand, they are very supportive, and they’re very vocal about it. We get a lot of people who find out about us through social media and through people taking pictures of the brand and then sharing it with their communities. It’s also been a lot of door-to-door hand-selling, which I personally love. I actually love going from liquor store to liquor store with my bag of samples. I did some traveling around the country earlier this year between Florida and California, just literally going from liquor store to liquor store, trying to convince buyers that this is something that will sell. Luckily, as I said, people have been willing to take a chance on us. I think between the bottle being super eye-catching — it does really stand out on the shelf — and also this community that we’re building online, it’s been going pretty well so far.

A: That’s really cool. So when we do hopefully open up in the next six months, however long it takes as we get vaccines, have you thought about what activations might look like? Have you thought about programs? Or is that still just too early right now, given everything else that is going on in the world?

AD: I mean, I’m dreaming of it for sure. Like everybody else, I’m dreaming of just going to a bar and having a cocktail, like in normal times. I haven’t thought about it in depth because I just don’t want to get my hopes up and then have this pandemic last even longer than we expected. One of the things I would love to do is in the Philippines, we have this fantastic tradition called Kamayan dinners. So kamay in Filipino means “hand,” and there are these communal dinners where you eat on banana leaves with your hands. It’s a really, really fun thing to take part in. Obviously, it’s not at all Covid-friendly, so I never try to do it at this particular moment. But kasama actually means “together” in Filipino. To bring people together in that way, to share a communal meal that’s eaten with your hands, is something I would really love to do once the pandemic is hopefully behind us, and go to key markets and share that tradition with other people.

A: Amazing. Well, this has been such a great conversation. It’s been really interesting to learn more about the rum and about what you’re building. I hope that in six months to a year or so, we can have you back on. You can give us an update on how everything’s going. But in the meantime, I wish you great success with this thing. It’s a really cool product. And delicious. Thank you for sending me a bottle, it was very tasty. Good luck.

AD: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you had me on your podcast today.

Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair podcast. If you love this show as much as we love making it, then please give us a rating on review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever it is you get your Podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing, and loves to get the credit.

Also, I would love to give a special shoutout to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Next Round: Kasama Rum Explores the Spirit’s Asian Roots appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/kasama-alexandra-dorda/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/next-round-kasama-rum-explores-the-spirits-asian-roots

[t-baba]

D3 6.0, easy 3D text, Electron 10, and reimplementing promises

#503 — August 28, 2020

Unsubscribe  |  Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

ztext.js: A 3D Typography Effect for the Web — While it initially has a bit of a “WordArt” feel to it, this library actually adds a pretty neat effect to any text you can provide. This is also a good example of a project homepage, complete with demos and example code.

Bennett Feely

D3 6.0: The Data-Driven Document Library — The popular data visualization library (homepage) takes a step forward by switching out a few internal dependencies for better alternatives, adopts ES2015 (a.k.a. ES6) internally, and now passes events directly to listeners. Full list of changes. There’s also a 5.x to 6.0 migration guide for existing users.

Mike Bostock

Scout APM - A Developer’s Best Friend — Scout’s intuitive UI helps you quickly track down issues so you can get back to building your product. Rest easy knowing that Scout is tracking your app’s performance and hunting down small issues before they become large issues. Get started for free.

Scout APM sponsor

Danfo.js: A Pandas-like Library for JavaScript — An introduction to a new library (homepage) that provides high-performance, intuitive, and easy-to-use data structures for manipulating and processing structured data following a similar approach to Python’s Pandas library. GitHub repo.

Rising Odegua (Tensorflow)

Electron 10.0.0 Released — The popular cross-platform desktop app development framework reaches a big milestone, though despite hitting double digits, this isn’t really a feature packed released but more an evolution of an already winning formula. v10 steps up to Chromium 85, Node 12.1.3, and V8 8.5.

Electron Team

Debug Visualizer 2.0: Visualize Data Structures Live in VS Code — We first mentioned this a few months ago but it’s seen a lot of work and a v2.0 release since then. It provides rich visualizations of watched values and can be used to visualize ASTs, results tables, graphs, and more. VS Marketplace link.

Henning Dieterichs

💻 Jobs

Sr. Engineer @ Dutchie, Remote — Dutchie is the world's largest and fastest growing cannabis marketplace. Backed by Howard Schultz, Thrive, Gron & Casa Verde Capital.

DUTCHIE

Find a Job Through Vettery — Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

📚 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

Minimal React: Getting Started with the Frontend Library — Dr. Axel explains how to get started with React while using as few libraries as possible, including his state management approach.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

A Leap of Faith: Committing to Open Source — Babel maintainer Henry Zhu talks about how he left his role at Adobe to become a full-time open source maintainer, touching upon his faith, the humanity of such a role, and the finances of making it a reality.

The ReadME Project (GitHub)

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects - Try Buildkite ✅ — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

The Headless: Guides to Learning Puppeteer and Playwright — Puppeteer and Playwright are both fantastic high level browser control APIs you can use from Node, whether for testing, automating actions on the Web, scraping, or more. Code examples are always useful when working with such tools and these guides help a lot in this regard.

Checkly

How To Build Your Own Comment System Using Firebase — Runs through how to add a comments section to your blog with Firebase, while learning the basics of Firebase along the way.

Aman Thakur

A Guide to Six Commonly Used React Component Libraries

Max Rozen

Don't Trust Default Timeouts — “Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t.”

Roberto Vitillo

Guide: Get Started with OpenTelemetry in Node.js

Lightstep sponsor

Deno Built-in Tools: An Overview and Usage Guide

Craig Buckler

How I Contributed to Angular Components — A developer shares his experience as an Angular Component contributor.

Milko Venkov

🔧 Code & Tools

fastest-levenshtein: Performance Oriented Levenshtein Distance Implementation — Levenshtein distance is a metric for measuring the differences between two strings (usually). This claims to be the fastest JS implementation, but we’ll let benchmarks be the judge of that :-)

ka-weihe

Yarn 2.2 (The Package Manager and npm Alternative) Released — As well as being smaller and faster, a dedupe command has been added to deduplicate dependencies with overlapping ranges.

Maël Nison

Light Date ⏰: Fast and Lightweight Date Formatting for Node and Browser — Comes in at 157 bytes, is well-tested, compliant with Unicode standards on dates, and written in TypeScript.

Antoni Kepinski

Barebackups: Super-Simple Database Backups — We automatically backup your databases on a schedule. You can use our storage or bring your own S3 account for unlimited backup storage.

Barebackups sponsor

Carbonium: A 1KB Library for Easy DOM Manipulation — Edwin submitted this himself, so I’ll let him explain it in his own words: “It’s for people who don’t want to use a JavaScript framework, but want more than native DOM. It might remind you of jQuery, but this library is only around one kilobyte and only supports native DOM functionality.”

Edwin Martin

DNJS: A JavaScript Subset for Configuration Languages — You might think that JSON can already work as a configuration language but this goes a step further by allowing various other JavaScript features in order to be more dynamic. CUE and Dhall are other compelling options in this space.

Oliver Russell

FullCalendar: A Full Sized JavaScript Calendar Control — An interesting option if you want a Google Calendar style control for your own apps. Has connectors for React, Vue and Angular. The base version is MIT licensed, but there’s a ‘premium’ version too. v5.3.0 just came out.

Adam Shaw

file-type: Detect The File Type of a Buffer, Uint8Array, or ArrayBuffer — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG file. Usable from both Node and browser.

Sindre Sorhus

React-PDF: Display PDFs in a React App As Easily As If They Were Images

Wojciech Maj

Meteor 1.11 Released

Filipe Névola

🕰 ICYMI (Some older stuff that's worth checking out...)

Need to get a better understanding of arrow functions? This article from Tania Rascia will help.

Sure, strictly speaking a string in JavaScript is a sequence of UTF-16 code units... but there's more to it.

Zara Cooper explains how to take advantage of schematics in Angular Material and ng2-charts to substantially reduce the time and work that goes into building a dashboard

In this intro to memoizaition Hicham Benjelloun shares how you can optimize a function (by avoiding computing the same things several times).

by via JavaScript Weekly https://ift.tt/3jmo1hQ

#Javascript Branding #Javascript Weekly

[literatelobstersareliterate]

On Composing for Woodwind Quintet

by Zeke Hecker

This essay originally appeared in Consorting, newsletter of the Consortium of Vermont Composers.

    Since I first played oboe in a woodwind quintet at about age 13, I've been a fan. I love the richness of five distinct, heterogeneous voices that blend in innumerable ways, so unlike the insistent unity of the string quartet. (Only two of the quintet instruments share the same sound-producing mechanism, and even those two don't sound much alike. The oboe and bassoon are both double reeds; the clarinet is a single reed; the flute has a sound-hole; the horn isn't even a woodwind, but just wandered in from sheer curiosity, and stayed for 200 years.)

    I have played through much of the regular repertory in ad hoc groups, for fun, and I've been in one or two longer-lived quintets. I first wrote for woodwind quintet in the mid-1970's, and since have composed about 90 minutes' worth of quintet music, in addition to doing some transcriptions (yes, there are always transcriptions). The point is that I'm an admirer, not an expert. What follows are some observations, some half-baked truths, some principles I try to follow but often can't.

    The standard woodwind quintet -- flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon -- first appeared in the late 18th century. It flourished briefly around 1800, all but disappeared until the late 19th century, and made a triumphant reappearance in the 20th. The very qualities which left the Romantics cold have recommended it to modern composers: precision, clarity, lightness, wit. Since 19th-century values and repertory still dominate concert life, the woodwind quintet has never achieved the status with audiences that its tireless and passionate sister, the string quartet, enjoys. Permanently constituted touring woodwind quintets appeared only in the 1950's (the Philadelphia group was perhaps the first great one), but in recent decades they have proliferated as part of the chamber music boomlet. Amateur quintets abound. The repertory, overwhelmingly 20th century, has been enriched by hundreds of composers, including some of the most eminent.

    The first things to consider when composing for this medium are the capabilities and limitations of the individual instruments. I won't say much about that here. You should know their ranges (if you don't, keep a chart on your piano rack); you should know what to avoid in the clarinet's throat register; you should know which fingerings drive bassoonists crazy.

    But don't think primarily in terms of limitations. The refinements in design and construction of woodwind instruments (achieved mostly by 19th century French builders), combined with the increasing demands made on players by 20th century composers, have produced astonishing results. Wind players can do much more than is customarily required of them. The virtuoso potential, especially of the treble instruments, is tremendous; players often have great flexibility in rapid passages. The expressive potential is no less powerful. Modern woodwind tone is rich and sensuous, with phrasing influenced by subtle uses of vibrato and inflection. We are a long way from the village band.

    The players usually sit in a semicircle: from audience left, it's flute, oboe, horn, bassoon, clarinet; sometimes horn and bassoon are switched; no array is sacrosanct. In score the order from top down is flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon. I do the score at written, not sounding, pitch, since it's mainly for the players' use: flute, oboe, and bassoon in C, horn in F, clarinet in A or Bb depending on the key orientation of the piece, if any. Each player is usually given only the appropriate part, not the full score, to play from, the score being reserved for study and consultation.

    Here, then, in only a vague semblance of sequence, are some suggestions:

Woodwind players must breathe. Unlike a viola, a clarinet can't keep up an unbroken Alberti-bass-type figure for 32 measures, but needs a 16th note rest every few bars. This is not to say that woodwinds can't sustain long phrases; they can. To gauge breathing intervals, think in terms of the human voice. Make breathing part of the music's essence.

Woodwind players must also rest. The muscular effort of forming the embouchure requires periodic, and fairly protracted, relaxation. A woodwind part should not appear on the page the way the first violin part of a Beethoven quartet does, nearly solid black. Rests ought to occur frequently, and at least some should last measures instead of just beats. After a particularly strenuous passage, give the player 10 or 15 seconds to recover. Before a demanding passage, give some time to prepare the embouchure.

The temptation in quintet writing is to take the traditional "pastoral" approach: sighing zephyrs, rippling watery effects, bouncy folk-style tunes. Certainly, if that's what you had in mind when you chose the medium, go ahead. I've done it myself. But be aware that the combination is capable of more than that, of more serious, less predictable modes of expression. (John Harbison, in his recent and much admired quintet, delibarately avoided the pastoral, with impressive results.)

Don't think of the instruments as a fixed heirarchy, with the flute invariably soaring on top, followed in score order down to the bassoon lurking on the bottom. That way boredom lies. Juggle instruments vertically. Use the clarinet's chalumeau register as bass to another instrument. Put the horn on top, or the bassoon. Try the flute on the bottom.

To make such tactics work, give your vertical writing space. Write chords in open position, wide open. Winds are rich in overtones, which will fill in the spaces if you deploy your forces cleverly. Example: if you want to hear the low-register flute as a bass, put the melody 1 1/2 octaves above in the oboe.

Don't make the sound bottom heavy. Avoid thickness in the tenor region. Get the horn and clarinet, in particular, up on the staff. It'll sound better, and you won't bore the players.

Avoid purely triadic thinking. You've got as many as five notes to sound simultaneously, which means the richness of "color" chords: 6ths, 9ths, 11ths, and beyond. (If the technical language is opaque to you, as it mostly is to me, all I mean is that you can add interesting notes to the common chord for expressive purpose.)

But don't use all five instruments all the time. Make permutations and combinations: create a kaleidoscopic effect, instead of a monotonous one. The great virtue of the woodwind quintet is color, so mix your palette. (To give some idea of the range of options, David Van Vactor's Music for Woodwinds consists of pieces using every possible combination of the quintet instruments from one to five, ending with double quintet. There are over thirty of them.)

Think, too, of variation in texture. Straight homophonic writing (sustained hymn-like chords, or melody with chordal accompaniment) works fine for a while, but does not show off this ensemble to best advantage if carried on too long. Try a more contrapuntal approach. These instruments like to move, not just hang on to notes, even in slow music.

Speaking of color, you can achieve some startling and wonderful blends. High bassoon and low flute can be virtually indistinguishable. Horn and bassoon together, in parallel motion at consonant intervals, sound like a pair of hunting horns. Above the staff, the three trebles begin to sound very much alike. Using these and other combinations, you can create an almost orchestral effect.

Don't be casual about doublings. Treat them more as colors, less as ways of manipulating balance or volume. Horn and bassoon in unison make hardly more noise than either alone. Octave doublings can be effective, but use the cliche ones (flute above oboe, for instance) sparingly. I'd rather double high flute with low bassoon, four octaves down, and stick some contrasting material in the middle. But mostly I try to steer clear of doubling. Why waste your resources in redundancy?

And then consider extreme contrasts: a zippy flute, in rapid staccato motion, against a lazy legato horn figure, or a lugubrious low-reister oboe fighting off a jaunty bassoon. Use the group to invent various simultaneous "musics".

...which further suggests that you avoid excessive uniform legato. These instruments offer a vast menu of non-legato possibilities, from nasty accented staccatissimo to gentle pulsation. Make horizontal space as well as vertical. Silence is essential in wind music.

More about attacks: don't demand unobtrusive entrances in, say, the oboe's low register or the flute's high one. Extreme registers require extreme discretion from the composer, because that's where the player will most likely experience technical difficulties.

But use those extreme registers. Get away from Middle C.

Think of dynamics as part of the meat, not just the sprig of parsley. You can do a lot with woodwind dynamics (as Elliot Carter shows in his Eight Etudes for Woodwind Quartet, a demonstration piece well worth your study). The horn can purr, or blast the audience out of the room. The flute gets louder as it gets higher; the oboe does the reverse. The clarinet is more capable of immense crescendi and diminuendi than are the flute, oboe, and bassoon. Use these and other dynamic capabilities of the group to your advantage. Get away from the constricted mezzo-piano-to-mezzo-forte range caused by too much composing at the keyboard.

Since the bulk of woodwind repertory is modern, players are skillful at counting, and can negotiate tricky time signatures and frequent metrical changes. (My string playing colleagues often envy us our sightreading abilities in contemporary music; but hell, if you're a wind player, what else is there?) Don't stick to unchanging 4/4 or 6/8. Play around with rhythm and metre.

Finding intervals on wind instruments is much easier than on strings, since all we do is push buttons to get our pitch (or pretty near it). Passagework thus doesn't have to be as predictable, as key- or scale-oriented, as string players are accustomed to. Tuning chords is obviously easier, too, so non-traditional (and non-consonant) harmonies work out more easily than they do in string groups. Take advantage of that.

Wind players are good at handling wide leapps, especially articulated (that is, not slurred), and at moderate tempi.

The wind bag is full of new tricks: microtones, bending and sliding pitches, flutter tonguing, key clicking, muting, blowing into detached mouthpieces or instruments without mouthpieces, and so on. The horn can do elephant calls and harmonic glissandi. Use these, of couse, but again be cautious: it's easy to be seduced by them. Don't fool yourself into thinking they will mask a lack of musical substance. Multiphonics are the most recent major development in woodwind virtuosity, but they are beyond the competence of many players, and are somewhat difficult to notate and unpredictable in practice. (Check out Lukas Foss's Cave of the Winds for a wild ride through Multiphonia.)

Most flutists play piccolo; many oboists play English horn; some clarinettists play bass clarinet. You can widen your color range with these, or go even farther: alto or bass flute, oboe d'amore, Eb or alto clarinet, contrabassoon. I've dreamed of writing a movement for the lowest member of each instrument family: bass flute, Heckelphone, contrabass clarinet, contrabassoon and low horn or Wagner tuba. But a dream is what it should probably remain. Practically, unless you know the arsenal of your players, you ought to stay with the basic combination. Many players don't like to fool around with switching axes in mid-swing, anyway.

    I wish I actually practiced half of what I've been preaching here. Usually what happens is that, after a shaky start, I get rolling on a piece and slide into a groove, like a bowling ball in its gutter, with results that lack the variety I was aiming for. And then it occurs to me how presumptuous this has all been, anyway.

    Most of it has undoubtedly been said, and better, in textbooks, or else contradicted by same with unchallengeable authority, and many of you reading it are in a better position to hold forth on the subject than I am, having actually read and even taught from those same textbooks. And further: Can you really learn how to compose by reading about it, in authoritative textbooks or presumptuous articles? And futher still: I can't say that this article is truly about composing at all. It's more like musical cosmetics. The way you ompose for woodwind quintet is, I assume, pretty much the way you compose for anything else; it has something to do with the incarnation of an impulse, a thought, a shape, a mood; of couse the Word must be made flesh, but what good is the flesh if there's no Word behind it? Ives wasn't being merely truculent when he asked what music has to do with sound, anyway.

    Enough, already, of the metaphysical digression. Let's wrap this up, earthbound.

Woodwind quintet, which really is a sort of miniature wind band, works nicely in combination with other forces. I particularly like voice(s) and quintet. The group goes well with piano, especially if the keyboard writing is percussive and motoric, to match the winds' attack. Add solo strings to the basic quintet, and you have a miniature orchestra, as Piston and Martinu, among others, have demonstrated. Some composers have successfully woven electronics into the quintet texture. And then there is Janacek's Mladi (Youth) sextet, where the addition of bass clarinet seems to open new sonic worlds. Unfortunately, quintets don't often get a chance to expand beyond the conventional unit, the concert world being what it is.

To test the waters, try transcribing something. Arguments about the aesthetic validity of transcription always rage noisily, but you won't hurt beloved old Johann, or your local flutist, or your own technique by perpetrating an arrangement or two. The repertory has been fertilized by some excellent transcriptions; they were vital in the decades before a substantial original body of work emerged. Some works have lent themselve beautifully to the medium, ranging from the French baroque to Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" (in several versions, notably by Philadelphia hornist Mason Jones and hornist-plus-everything-else Gunther Schuller). You'll probably succeed better with keyboard music than with music originally conceived for strings, for reasons suggested earlier.

Listen to reams of quintet music. The big names from the classic era are Danzi and Reicha, both estimable advocates of the medium. Two persuasive late Romantic works, by Klughardt and Foerster, are worth attention. Acknowledged masterpieces of the repertory include everybody's favorite, the Nielsen, and Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik Op. 24, No. 2. Schoenberg's formidable quintet, his strictest twelve-tone work, is seldom dared by either players or listeners. The French have predictably excelled: Milhaud's Cheminée du Roi René, Ibert's Trois Pièces Brèves, and dozens of others. Barber's Summer Music is one of his loveliest, most engaging creations, and other major American composers (such as Fine, Piston, Druckman, Carter, Dlugoszewski, Persichetti, and Alec Wilder) have made notable contributions.

    So too in Britain and Eastern Europe (Hungarian Györgi Ligeti wrote two superb works). These few hardly suggest the extent of the repetory. Consortium member Don Stewart's group, the Boehm Quintette, has programmed something like 100 works covering all eras, including some transcriptions and numerous commissions, and there are lots of other groups functioning on a similarly ambitious level. Consortium members who have written quintets include Don, Lou Calabro (IsoNova, a nifty piece), Gwyneth Walker (Braintree Quintet), Jim Grant, Nick Humez, Allen Shawn, and probably about two dozen I don't know about.

    Make friends with a quintet (approach confidently but slowly, without showing fear; they can sense that) and watch them rehearse. You'll discover more in one session than from having read this whole discourse.

(via Zeke Hecker: On Composing for Woodwind Quintet)

[wineanddinosaur]

Next Round: Kasama Rum Explores the Spirit’s Asian Roots

Airing between regular episodes of the “VinePair Podcast,” “Next Round” explores the ideas and innovations that are helping drinks businesses adapt in a time of unprecedented change. As the coronavirus crisis continues and new challenges arise, VP Pro is in your corner, supporting the drinks community for all the rounds to come. If you have a story or perspective to share, email us at [email protected].

In this “Next Round” episode, Adam Teeter speaks with the creator of Kasama Rum, Alexandra Dorda, who is a second-generation spirits entrepreneur. Hailing from a family known for its vodka empires, Dorda decided to take a different route by producing a dark, barrel-aged rum with a light flavor profile. According to her, Kasama’s branding is revolutionary in distancing its aesthetic from the stereotypical pirate and sailor caricatures that are often associated with rum.

Kasama, which means “together” in Filipino, has managed to find success since its recent release, despite launching during a time when many people cannot physically be together with their loved ones. Even though bars nationwide face closures and the alcohol industry has taken a significant hit, Dorda is optimistic about the future of Kasama and is confident in the sipping rum’s quality, as well as the cultural pride of the Filipinos who are working to uplift it.

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Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter, and this is a VinePair “Next Round” conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations between the regular “VinePair Podcast” in order to give a better picture about what’s going on in the world of alcoholic beverages. Today, I’m really lucky to be speaking with Alexandra Dorda, the founder of Kasama Rum. Alexandra, what’s going on?

Alexandra: Hi, Adam. So good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

A: Of course. My pleasure. So where do I find you in the world in early February? I’m in Brooklyn, and there’s snow all over the ground. But where are you?

AD: I’m currently in Los Angeles, California. This is where I grew up when I was very small. So it’s sort of like coming home, in a way.

A: As I’ve seen, the weather’s a lot nicer than it is here in New York.

AD: Yes, it’s beautiful. I’m going to make you really jealous. I’m looking out into a garden. It’s warm here and the birds are chirping. It’s really nice.

A: Well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I want to talk to you about a lot of things. Obviously, the rum being the primary focus of our conversation. Kasama Rum. When did you launch it? Can you tell me a little bit about it?

AD: Kasama Rum, I call it the Sunshine Spirit. It’s a 7-year-old rum from the Philippines. We soft-launched last year in September of 2020, but actually our official launch is tomorrow. People can now order the rum directly through the website. It’s obviously an incredibly strange time to launch a brand. I was a bit cautious, so we did a soft launch at the end of last year.

A: Some people who are listening to this podcast may be familiar with your last name. Others may not. You are not a rookie when it comes to launching alcohol brands. So can you talk to us a little bit about your background, and your family’s background in alcohol, and how you decided through that background to create Kasama? Because I think the story of Kasama is really interesting.

AD: Sure. So I’m 29, but I like to joke that I have 27 years of experience in the alcohol space. My dad launched two vodkas when I was just a toddler: Belvedere Vodka and Chopin Vodka. He is a pioneer in the vodka category; nobody was doing super-premium vodka at that time. We still own Chopin vodka, and we craft all of our vodka at our family owned distillery in eastern Poland. It’s really a beautiful operation. We even farm some of our own ingredients. I’ve really grown up in this industry, and through my father’s love of his craft, I really developed a love of craft spirits as well. When I was little, my dad would take me to restaurants. I remember being like 5 years old, and every time we go to a restaurant, he’d say, “Come on, Alex, we have to go to the bar. We have to meet the bartender. We have to read the cocktail menu. We have to see if our products are here.” So that was how I got my start in the industry, and it just progressed from there. It led to me launching this rum from the Philippines, which is where my mother is from. It feels very full-circle to have a family vodka from Poland where my dad is from, and now this rum from the Philippines.

A: So how did you get the idea? I mean, obviously, OK, so you have a background in the spirits business with vodka. What caused you to say, I want to do a rum? Also, I’m curious, what was the rest of the family’s reaction to you wanting to do a rum?

AD: So the family has been very, very supportive. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, so I think that they’re very happy to see me on my own entrepreneurial journey. They’re super supportive, which I’m very grateful for. What caused me to do a rum? I’ve obviously been in this industry a long time and have really observed it very closely for a very long time. I saw a while back that the rum category was just a little bit weaker than all the other ones. There’s a distinct lack of interesting lifestyle brands in the category. I think that’s one of the reasons that the category has fallen behind some of the other spirits categories. Everyone keeps saying, “Rum is going to be next, rum is going to be the next bourbon or tequila,” and it hasn’t been so far. So I saw this gap in the market. I wondered why all the rum that I was seeing was pirate-themed, sailor-themed, or nautical-themed when that felt so irrelevant to me, and probably to a lot of other people out there. The impetus for me to actually launch Kasama Rum was that a couple of years ago I learned that the Philippines is actually one of the biggest rum producers in the world. I have to be honest, I didn’t know that. I think that a lot of people would be surprised to learn that.

A: I was surprised, too.

AD: The biggest rum brand in the world is not Bacardi. It’s a brand from the Philippines. But people don’t really hear about it because it’s mostly just consumed domestically. So I had this “aha” moment where I realized that I could fill this gap that I perceived in the market, while also celebrating the Filipino heritage that I’m so proud of.

A: I’m going to let you educate us about Filipino rum. In your journey to learn this, what did you discover? How long has rum been made in the Philippines? What can you teach us that we should know about Filipino rum?

AD: The Philippines is not new to the rum game, even though a lot of people are just learning about it right now. The Philippines was a Spanish colony for 333 years, and that’s where our rum history comes from — it’s from that period of colonization. We’ve been making rum for a very long time. Another thing that’s interesting to note that I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn, is that sugarcane is actually native to Southeast Asia. It’s originally from the Papua New Guinea area and came up through the Philippines to mainland Asia, over to Europe, and was only brought to the Caribbean later on, around the 1500s. We have very rich volcanic soil. The Philippines sits on the Ring of Fire; we have about 53 volcanoes, some of which are active. So this tropical climate that we have, this rich volcanic soil, and the fact that sugarcane is actually originally from this broader region means that we have some of the best rum in the world. That’s one of the stories that I’d really like to get out there to help put Filipino craft on the map in terms of rum and in other ways.

A: So was the rum being distilled for the same reason we hear about in the Caribbean? To supply the navies, the sailors, and things like that? Was it being distilled around the same time as it was coming to the Caribbean? Do you know if it was first or second? This is fascinating.

AD: You are really, really testing my history knowledge at the moment. It did come from the colonization period, which was up until the end of the 1800s, and 300 years before that. So around the 1500s.

A: Amazing. And what do you think is distinct about rum from the Philippines? We hear a lot from other rum producers that there is something that’s very distinctive about Jamaican rum compared to Nicaraguan rum, or Cuban, or Puerto Rican (obviously where Bacardi is from). We romanticize Jamaica as being the home of the pot still rums. What do you think is really distinct about Filipino rum? Are there characteristics that define all Filipino rums, or are they all different?

AD: There are different producers, of course, and everybody has their own style. I’m thinking about two major brands right now. I would say that their flavor profiles are completely different. But in the case of Kasama, it’s a very light rum — that’s what I think is something that we’re bringing to the category that’s new in terms of the flavor profile. It’s very light and very easy to sip. It has very beautiful tropical notes that come from the sugarcane and the climate that we have there. It’s a great rum for sipping. I think it’s also a great rum to help bring new people into the category. I get a lot of people who tell me, “Oh, I don’t really like rum. It’s very heavily spiced,” or “It’s really overly sweet.” I try to get them to try Kasama and many of them say, “Wow, I didn’t know that I would like this.” The Philippines is actually quite a large country. I don’t think I can say that there’s just one style of rum throughout the whole country. But Kasama itself is very light and delicious.

A: Are you distilling molasses? There’s the French agricole style becoming super trendy among bar circles. It’s really the juice that gets distilled from the sugarcane, and then there’s the classic styles. We know for Caribbean rum it’s the molasses. Is there one or the other that’s distilled in the Philippines?

AD: We do both in the Philippines. Kasama is distilled from freshly pressed noble sugarcane juice, but it doesn’t have that agricole taste to it. We are actually distilled in a column, and I think columns get a bad rap. For example, in Poland at our family distillery, we use a column and we love that. So to me, pot stills aren’t necessarily superior to column stills, but ours is distilled from freshly noble sugarcane juice, and I think that’s what contributes to having this very light, pleasant taste.

A: Oh, interesting. What type of barrels are you aging it in?

AD: They’re ex-bourbon American oak barrels. It’s not a spicy flavor profile, but bourbon does have that pepperiness to it, so you do get a little bit of pepper at the end. There’s also notes of vanilla, which I think comes from that bourbon as well.

A: Interesting. When you were going to create the brand, how many rums did you taste? How well did you educate yourself in the category? Obviously, we always talk about people who are entrepreneurs and founders really trying to try as many of their potential competitors as they can. How much did you try?

AD: I tasted dozens and dozens; I’d say over 100 probably in the process, just because, like you said, I wanted to see what was out there. When I was developing the brand, most of the time I was in Warsaw, Poland, and we have actually a great rum bar there that has hundreds of bottles. I would go there and I would just try different kinds and see what I liked. It was fascinating. There are different styles in different countries. I think most consumers haven’t explored the differences in rum. We know that in wine, that different types of grapes taste different, and we know that in whiskey as well. I think that in rum, that isn’t yet appreciated. There are so many different styles to be explored in the rum category.

A: So I think there’s two theories with rum, and I think both could be true. I’m interested in what your perspective is here. One is that the rum renaissance will come through bourbon — that it will be people discovering these sipping rums, of which Kasama is one. It’s a 7-year-old, well-aged dark spirit that will find appeal from people who may have gotten used to drinking bourbon, Cognac, things like that. The other theory some people have is that it will come through the light rums, the white rums, and cocktail culture, the Daiquiris, and things like that. Have you thought about that? Because obviously the first thing you put out as an entrepreneur is a dark aged rum. There’s another brand that I think you’re aware of, and we’re also fans of on the podcast: Ten To One. The first rum that Marc Farrell put out was a white rum. So I’m curious why you made the decision to do dark rum first. Obviously now he has a dark rum — you might have a light rum down the road. What was your decision about the first thing I’m doing is this 7-year-old aged, beautiful rum.

AD: So first of all, I just love the taste of it. So that’s what I wanted to bring to the world first. I would like to bring out an unaged rum, a white rum, or perhaps even an older rum down the line. As to this “rum renaissance” that you were saying we’re all waiting for, I think that it’s upon us as producers to bring that about. My theory as to why rum hasn’t had its renaissance yet is that the category, frankly, has been very tired. Rum should be a very exciting drink — it has everything going for it. It’s often aged, which people really like; they like to learn about the wood and the aging process. It naturally has a sweeter flavor profile, which is much more approachable than, perhaps, whiskey. It typically comes from a warm tropical place, and there are all these good connotations with vacation. Rum should be very popular, and I think that because it’s gotten so stuck in this nautical rut, that’s why it hasn’t really gained widespread appeal. That’s my theory, at least. I think that if there were more exciting stories being told in the category that weren’t about cartoon pirates and sailors, then there would be more people who would be interested to really learn about rum.

A: I think that’s a really good point, and one that I know you’ve spoken about with me before. Do you think the problem is that we just, like, the corporate world kind of whitewashed rum in a lot of ways?

AD: That’s what I think the problem is. I understand that pirates did drink rum, and there is a long history of a tie between rum and sailors and the nautical industry. But I just don’t think that’s all that rum has to offer the world. If you walk down an aisle at a liquor store, pretty much every single rum brand is focused on that one trope, which I think is really unfortunate because it pigeonholes rum. It’s for one very specific type of person. I don’t know why we fixated on that. That’s why I wanted to create a rum that was a celebration of the place that it’s from in a modern way, in a way that feels relevant to a modern consumer. I spent almost two years developing Kasama because first of all, I had a very demanding corporate job, and also because I was new to developing a brand of my own, and wasn’t always sure of what I was doing. During that time, I had a daily Google alert set for rum on my phone. Every morning I would wake up in horror, and I was like, “Today is the day that somebody has launched a similar rum brand.” The day never came, and I’m honestly surprised. I’m surprised that there aren’t more rum brands that are celebrating the genuine history of where they’re from.

A: So I want to talk about that because I think one of the things that’s really cool is how you designed the bottle, and who designed the bottle. Obviously, there’s a lot of brands that will go in, source from a place, but then make it their own when they bring it back to where they’re from. But you didn’t do that. So can you talk about what went into the design of the bottle and who designed it?

AD: Yes. So for the bottle, I partnered with a Manila-based creative agency called Serious Studio. They were absolutely fantastic. The founders are a husband-and-wife team who are around my age. I emailed them and I said, “Look, I really want to design a Filipino brand that has a global appeal.” I think that in the Philippines we know how amazing our country is, and we know how talented Filipinos are. We do a lot of talking to ourselves about it, which I think is a bit of a shame. So I emailed them and I said, “I really want to do a brand that’s proudly Filipino, but not just for Filipino Filipinos. I think that this should be something that’s really for anybody.” They felt very strongly about that mission as well. So I’m proud to say that the whole brand was designed by a team in Manila, and it was really about being proud of our heritage on the bottle. So you see on the neck we have a winking sun. It’s the sun that’s actually on the Philippine flag. We have stamps that show indigenous flora and fauna. The whole thing was really about celebrating our fantastic country. I’m glad that Serious Studio was able to really bring that to life.

A: Yeah, it’s very cool. I was talking to someone on the editorial team earlier today in Slack who knew that I was doing this interview, and she just received a bottle of Kasama. She was saying it has a really amazing design where you can tell it actually is true to the place, but it also feels very modern. I thought that was a really cool way for her to describe it. It feels like it’s totally in line with the way I think alcohol brands should move, in terms of that “premium look” that you have on your bar, where someone would walk over and say “What’s this?” But when you pick it up, it’s like, “oh, all of these things are actually representative of the place it’s from.”

AD: I’m so happy to hear that.

A: So now let’s talk about the nitty-gritty. Alexandra, what has it been like to sell this brand, and can you talk us through the process of what you’ve gone through over the past few months in order to make this thing a reality?

AD: Launching during a pandemic was not ideal in any sense. Honestly, in the beginning, I felt really worried — I thought all these bars and restaurants and stores, they’re just trying to stay alive. Are they going to want to take a chance on a new brand? That’s one of the reasons that we were so conservative at the beginning. I’m happy to say we were nationally aligned with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. They’ve been incredibly supportive of the brand, which I’m very grateful for. We just started slow. We started in South Florida because at the time, they were open, and also aesthetically, it really matches. Also, it’s a very big rum market. I’m happy to say that it’s been going really well. We’re currently in 250 accounts. We have about 300 that are lined up for spring. Some of these larger chains have long reset periods, so they tell you ahead of time. We’re going to be launching in BevMo in California in March or April, we’re in a few Total Wines in Florida. The reception has been really encouraging. I would have been encouraged anyway, but especially because it’s a pandemic, and I know how hard it is out there for people. I feel very happy that retailers have been willing to take a chance on us.

A: How do you, specifically as a brand, build yourself? I know traditionally, prior to the pandemic, one of the ways a lot of indie brands would think about building themselves was saying, “OK, we’re going to go immediately to the top bars in a given market. Even if we only sell a case in, we’ll hopefully get on the cocktail list because we sold a case in. And the bartender will explain the rum to consumers.” Now that that’s not happening, obviously, what do you have to do on your end in order to educate the population, and to make sure that now that you are in BevMo, someone walks in and buys it? Have you thought about that? If you have, what do those plans look like?

AD: I think that’s what everybody in the industry is thinking about right now. The normal tools that we had to launch a brand aren’t really there right now, which is typically on-premise. Obviously, we have a social media presence and we try to reach out to as many people as possible through social media. We try to get involved with different food events that are happening. For example, October is Filipino American History Month, and we were involved in a pop-up that managed to take place last October. It was a pretty small event, but Filipinos are very proud of their culture, and I think also we largely feel invisible within American culture. So when Filipinos find this brand, they are very supportive, and they’re very vocal about it. We get a lot of people who find out about us through social media and through people taking pictures of the brand and then sharing it with their communities. It’s also been a lot of door-to-door hand-selling, which I personally love. I actually love going from liquor store to liquor store with my bag of samples. I did some traveling around the country earlier this year between Florida and California, just literally going from liquor store to liquor store, trying to convince buyers that this is something that will sell. Luckily, as I said, people have been willing to take a chance on us. I think between the bottle being super eye-catching — it does really stand out on the shelf — and also this community that we’re building online, it’s been going pretty well so far.

A: That’s really cool. So when we do hopefully open up in the next six months, however long it takes as we get vaccines, have you thought about what activations might look like? Have you thought about programs? Or is that still just too early right now, given everything else that is going on in the world?

AD: I mean, I’m dreaming of it for sure. Like everybody else, I’m dreaming of just going to a bar and having a cocktail, like in normal times. I haven’t thought about it in depth because I just don’t want to get my hopes up and then have this pandemic last even longer than we expected. One of the things I would love to do is in the Philippines, we have this fantastic tradition called Kamayan dinners. So kamay in Filipino means “hand,” and there are these communal dinners where you eat on banana leaves with your hands. It’s a really, really fun thing to take part in. Obviously, it’s not at all Covid-friendly, so I never try to do it at this particular moment. But kasama actually means “together” in Filipino. To bring people together in that way, to share a communal meal that’s eaten with your hands, is something I would really love to do once the pandemic is hopefully behind us, and go to key markets and share that tradition with other people.

A: Amazing. Well, this has been such a great conversation. It’s been really interesting to learn more about the rum and about what you’re building. I hope that in six months to a year or so, we can have you back on. You can give us an update on how everything’s going. But in the meantime, I wish you great success with this thing. It’s a really cool product. And delicious. Thank you for sending me a bottle, it was very tasty. Good luck.

AD: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you had me on your podcast today.

Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair podcast. If you love this show as much as we love making it, then please give us a rating on review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever it is you get your Podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing, and loves to get the credit.

Also, I would love to give a special shoutout to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Next Round: Kasama Rum Explores the Spirit’s Asian Roots appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/kasama-alexandra-dorda/