Vol. 3 - Patti Smith and Sticky Rice

Have I become a tea person?!

Hi friends!

Welcome to another volume of A Song and A Cup, a weekly newsletter where I dish about one song and one cup of something (usually coffee, but lately not) that inspired me in the last seven-ish days. Thanks for reading!

TLDR; Read Patti Smith’s books and visit your local tea house as soon as possible.

P.S. - if anything here inspires you, please leave a comment! It’s super weird to write into the ether. Much more fun if someone responds. Could be you. Could be your granddad. Please, anything but a bot! :-)

A Song - Redondo Beach, Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s M Train has been aesthetically displayed (read: collecting dust) on my nightstand for over a month now. I’m not exactly sure what inspired me to crack it open this week (I’m halfway through four other books right now. FOUR! It’s out of control, someone hold me back!) but it was a good move. The writing is sumptuous but not overdone (so far); it’s vivid, lyrical, and has all to do with songs, coffee, and dreams. After one chapter, I believe it’s the source material for my very existence.

Horses is known as one of the greatest albums of all time, though when I first heard it I didn’t understand why. To be fair, I was probably 17 or 18, and my tastes were calibrated more toward the Scrub’s soundtrack than 1970s punk rock. As the daughter of a diehard Springsteen fan, I knew Patti Smith only as the lady that sang “Because the Night”. I used to perform it in bars as a teenager (even though I never learned the bridge). Still, it was a fun song to belt at breweries and even more fun when old dudes would come up and kindly remind me I wasn’t old enough to know that song (I had no idea there was an age limit! I just found it on YouTube! Here’s my tip jar…). I digress.

Now that I am a (more or less) fully formed adult, I am of the opinion that Horses was revolutionary for its time. It’s hard to compare but easy to extract; Horses is singular, pivotal, and now, almost 50 years later, an artifact. It’s inspired so many artists I love including Blondie, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, No Doubt, Sleater-Kinney, and even Sharon van Etten.

“Redondo Beach” is the second track on the album. A seesawing reggae beat sets the scene for Smith’s guttural vocals, which are barely intelligible (but that’s beside the point). The power is in the delivery, which is unsweetened and pungent.

Late afternoon, dreaming hotel

We just had the quarrel that sent you away.

I was looking for you, are you gone, gone?

The song’s narrator walks down to the beach to find a crowd of people in shock. A young girl’s body has just washed up on the shore, presumably whoever the narrator was fighting with.

She was the victim of sweet suicide, Smith sings, not one for sugarcoating. It’s a pretty gruesome scene, but you wouldn’t know it by the arrangement alone. Two minutes in, a choir doubles down on some low ooh’s and aahs, doo-wop style, drifting further and further from the dead girl on Redondo Beach.

I was just standing with shock on my face.

The hearse pulled away, and the girl that had died, it was you.

You'll never return into my arms 'cause you were gone, gone.

Man, this is pretty freakin’ dark. Sorry, guys, but I have to be honest - sad songs that sound happy are kind of my jam. It feels like a secret treasure for those of us who actually listen to lyrics, even though the reward might leave a bitter aftertaste.

Graciously, the next track on Horses, “Birdland”, starts with a pleasant and soft piano, giving us some space to breathe before the curtain opens on another shadowy scene - but you’ll have to go down that road alone because I need to tell you about some sticky rice tea!

A Cup - Sticky Rice Shu Pu’er, West China Tea

There’s a little house on the I-35 Frontage Rd heading south that I pass a few times a week. It’s tucked between a motel and the turnoff for Airport Blvd, with a sign out front that reads “West China Tea”. I’ve always been curious, and this week, my friend Cinthia and I finally paid a visit to one of the best-kept secrets in Austin.

I pulled into the empty parking lot at 10:45 a.m., fifteen minutes early so I could snag a table and read M Train while I waited for Cinthia. I expected a tea house to be more or less like a cafe. Instead, I walked into a silent, light-soaked living room. The walls were lined with houseplants, brown bags of loose-leaf tea, and ceramic wares. In the center of the room, at a crescent-shaped cedar bar with five chairs, a small Chinese woman sat brewing tea.

“Hi,” she said. “Would you like to have tea with me?”

“Uh, sure,” I said hesitantly, feeling I had no other option, as we were very clearly the only two people around. “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Oh, well would you like to have tea with me while you wait for your friend?” she said.

“Okay,” the heels of my loafers echoed as I crossed the wood floor and stumbled into a chair, my hair a little wet, my jeans a little too tight.

Gong fu cha is the art of traditional Chinese tea preparation. The idea is to brew the best possible cup while remaining mindful in the present moment. The ceremony is an intricate display of the mastery of a skill, and Cinya, our teaist, was a pro.

She prepared a Chinese red tea in gong fu fashion. Laid out in front of her were a hot water spout and gooseneck kettle, a large draining pan (”cha pan”), a ceramic frog-ish thing (“tea pet”), a ceramic bowl with a lid (”gaiwan”), a clear glass pitcher (”cha hai”), and several tiny ceramic cups. She filled the gaiwan with dry tea leaves, poured water on top, steeped it for a few seconds, poured it into the cha hai, then dumped the tea all over the tea pet. Then, she passed the gaiwan of wet leaves to me like a poker dealer asking a player to cut the deck.

Smell, she was saying. They were fragrant, woody then slightly fruity. She swiped the gaiwan, added more water, and steeped the tea for another few seconds, decanted it into the cha hai, then into a teeny tiny little porcelain bowl on the wooden coaster in front of me.

Taste, she was saying. It was like honey, slightly metallic, and my mouth watered for more. With each steep, the flavor evolved into something sweeter, then softer, then dull.

When Cinthia arrived, Cinya and I were on our final steep of the first tea, a red tea, what we might call black tea in the west, but what the Chinese call “hong cha” (red tea). Having spent much of her life in Asia, Cinthia was unsurprisingly adept at the whole tea house thing. She kindly requested a rock tea - apparently a rare variety from a specific mountain town. We repeated the whole process together, smelling, tasting, steeping the tea four, five, six times over the course of an hour. In between steeps, Cinya pulled and read our I Ching oracle cards (I got #48 - The Well, which weirdly coincided with a dream I’d had the night before about a river and a boardwalk, which I was going to write about in this newsletter but there’s just too much to say and not enough time, so DM for details, if you must know).

Our final tea of the ceremony was a sticky rice shu pu’er, a ripe fermented tea from Yunnan scented with an herb that smells like cereal. The fragrance was like cooked sweet rice but also Elmer’s glue and cornflakes. When brewed, the aroma was more like steamed rice and browned butter. The tea felt dense and creamy, with a slight mineral taste that slicked the insides of my cheeks.

I bought a bag of sticky rice tea to try at home. As I write this, I’m heating water in a gooseneck kettle to 212F, as Cinya instructed. I’ve been pouring my water high onto the tea leaves just like her, swirling the vessel, decanting through a mesh filter, and into a coffee cup. The taste is familiar, but the experience (brewing late in the evening, in my pajamas, listening to Patti Smith, dancing back and forth from my computer to my kettle to my computer to finish this newsletter) is brand new.

I’ll definitely be back at West China Tea, preferably sooner than later. Who wants to join?