Book sip #1: A hard look at origin stories

(This is the first in an occasional series that will pair books with beverages: a literary-libation pairing, if you will, much like a food-wine pairing.  This doesn't mean I drank the particular selection while reading the book.  It simply means, as you will see, that the refreshment in question pairs well with the themes of the text.  I'm experimenting with this form because I think it has potential to make book reviews even more enticing than they already are. We'll see how it goes...)

Book: A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook,  W.W. Norton, March 2013
Drink: Hangar One vodka, straight up with a twist of lemon

Origin stories are to cultures as advertising is to products. Origin stories provide a foundational identity that shapes a place and its people, reaching back into the mists of time to offer reasons why our world looks like it does today.  Like advertising, origin stories rarely do more than tip their hats to the truth, yet their sticking power is awesome to behold.  As the years pass, it becomes impossible to separate fact from fiction.  Or maybe not impossible but irrelevant.  The fiction has become fact simply because so many people believe it to be true.

Daniel Brook's highly readable and fascinating new book A History of Future Cities delves into the factual origins of four cities: St. Petersberg, Mumbai/Bombay, Shanghai and Dubai and incisively teases apart myth from reality, self-perception from statistics and data.  What unites these cities in history is their intentional creation as showpieces of modernity and freedom by autocractic regimes or colonial overlords with something to prove.  What points the way to their roles in the "future" mentioned in the title is the way these cities have grown and stretched (as well as retracted) in ways their creators could never have imagined or desired.  As such, they point the way to one possible future for urbanity, one mired in deep economic and political disparities and supported by a vast, unstable workforce of rural transplants. It's a recipe for revolution, and it's happened before.  One only need to look back 300 years at the creation of St. Petersberg, Tsar Peter the Great's "instant" city on the banks of the Neva, backward Russia's "window to the West."  Peter wanted a city like Amsterdam: beautiful, sophisticated and worldly.  He just didn't want any of the pesky democratic ideas and freedoms that came with it.  His successor Catherine continued the tradition, even to the point of requiring her nobility to hold French-style salons  where any topic of discussion was officially allowed (*though only for that evening).  It worked for awhile but, as Brook points out again and again, people can be exposed to openness and liberal thought only so long before they want to try it out themselves.  Catherine's successors, the Romanovs, know best how the story could end, in a pillaged dacha just outside of Peter's "window" to modernity.  As someone who spent two years living in the shadow of Dubai, just the latest "instant" global city built by autocrats by impoverished workers, I have seen this future in action and didn't pass a bus (non-air conditioned even in the heat of summer) full of workers, or a building site bristling with construction cranes without wondering how long any of it could last. 

Russia is where it started, which is where the vodka comes in, but only a little.  Hangar One vodka made by St. George's Spirits, is a Bay Area success story.  It was founded (and still operates partially) in an old airplane hangar on the decommisioned Alameda Naval Air Station.  The company makes vodka and a variety of other spirits, including whiskey and absinthe.  The Hangar One website includes multiple testimonies to the company's small-batch, handcrafted philosophy.  What it doesn't mention remotely as prominently is that the brand has been acquired by Proximo Spirits, a multinational importer based in New Jersey.

I cast no aspersions on Hangar One vodka as a beverage (it's delicious) or St. George's as a distillery, which still makes an array of truly local spirits. But there is a striking contrast between Hangar One's marketing slant (grounded in its origin story) and the reality of its place as a small piece of a larger corporate pie.  This seems to pair quite well with Brook's in-depth examination of the issues
that lurk behind appealingly marketed facades, whether they be brand names or global showpieces.

Which is why, paired with this book, I recommend Hangar One vodka straight up with a twist of lemon, but with nothing to truly disguise what you are getting.  For some, a refined beverage with a quick payoff.  For others, a bitter--and potent- drink to swallow.