The Unquenchable Desire For Ice
You don’t know what you froze ‘til it’s gone
After everything went to hell, the thirst began.
—Not just any wet desire either, but the crying want for hard, cold, indisputable ice.
Popular culture is now awash in yearning for everything frozen. This year, two Oscar nominees who had nothing else in common, were devoted to the existential loss of ice.
They surely were inspired in previous years by documentary makers, who lyrically profiled a 69-year-old man in Ecuador, the last human being on earth to climb a fading glacier. “Hielero” Baltazar Ushca harvests the “sweetest ice in the world,” with his homemade pickaxe. His glacier, Mount Chimborazo is dying.
I guarantee you, many well-heeled viewers booked their tickets to Quito after they watched the “Hielero” video. Perhaps they’ll pay him what he’s due.
We all want to shake the hand of the last man to give a damn, but more than that, the world wants to taste that ice before we die. We crave it.
Pop culture doesn’t lie — according to the kitchenware mavens, the hottest fashion in hospitality is bespoke ice-cubes. Yes. If you aren’t making trades of teddy-bear cubes, or jewel-like clear ice globes with your monogram suspended in a frozen tableau— you are melting into mediocrity. You are nothing without ice.
Americans, as usual, are the worst. We pioneered modern ice-cube making and now, only our morning coffee is spared. In the 19th century, Mark Twain wrote, “There is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name ‘American.’ That is the national devotion to ice-water.”
Some Americans who’ve traveled the globe remember a time when you’d go into shock because a European waiter served you a warm Coke without ice. What kind of blasphemy was this?
But the rest of the world succumbed to our chill. They fell into the ice trap. And today, as we watch the Anthropocene unfold, its snow face is what we have fetishized. This is only the beginning.
Please enjoy the films below . . .
Ice Merchants (Director: João Gonzalez) was an Academy nominee for Best Animated Short, and is one of the most beautiful silent poems I’ve ever seen.
Hauling Out (Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev), nominated for Best Documentary Short. Critic Ty Burr aptly wrote, “. . . At exactly six minutes in, the film delivers one of the great reveals of any 2022 movie, short or feature.” Yes.
Many, many years ago, I was in Rome with my parents. It was very hot. I could not wait to sit and drink a Coke. The waiter brought it. It was a 70-degrees Coke.
My dad said not to ask for ice.
“There are no ice cubes in Rome,” he said.
Hot, tired, thirsty and frustrated, I retained my humor.
“What,” I said, “did they lose the formula?”
Americans have a jones for ice-cold drinks.