Prestige Ice, Beyoncé, & Glacial Catastrophe
Or, living at the end of the world
Ice sculptures have always struck with me as the pinnacle of misguided glitz. Like mirror balls or blue eyeshadow or nipple tassels, there is simply no way to make them less gauche, yet they are meant to communicate fanciness. They are aesthetic excess writ large; an object that much labor and cost has been poured into, yet there is never any real need for an ice sculpture. Its purpose, then, is purely symbolic: it lets you know the host of this event had money to burn. Or, rather, to melt.
Back in 2006, before The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ doomsday clock was still at seven minutes to midnight (it’s at ninety seconds now, for reference) and excess had less moral valence, I got to go to Taste of the Cape as an employment perk for working under the poverty line at a theater in Cape Cod. I think that’s what the event was called, but I’m not totally certain anymore. It was a bougie Kennedy-esque spectacle where I ate probably a thousand dollars worth of sole and crab francais and gambas al ajilo. Every table featured an ice sculpture of a hyacinth bush or sailboat or shellfish. I loved the ephemeral tribute to the crustaceans we were eating, the Hunger Games-like fetishization.
Here in 2024, as calls for FEMA to declare extreme heat a disaster state, it’s tough to feel dazzled by that kind of excess. Witnessing the economic divide feels dystopian when illustrated so vividly.
Last summer, I learned a decrease in diurnal temperature range (the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures within a day; in short, it’s hotter at night now) caused by global warming is especially hard on the bodies of the elderly and unhoused. There’s simply no relief. When a heatstroke victim is brought into the hospital, the solution is shockingly crude: they are submerged in a body-sized bag full of ice slurry until their core temperature drops.
In my own town, the demand for ice was so intense last summer that the hospital contracted with a gourmet grocery more known for burrata flown in from actual Italy and their instant wine chiller than, you know, humanitarian efforts. I found this out the same day that Glossier launched two new shades of their liquid blush, Cloud Paint, by posting a photo of ice cubes embedded with edible flowers and emblazoned with the Glossier “G”. This led me to the Instagram Discocubes, owned by the company who created the bespoke ice for Glossier.
Let me say blatantly: I love Discocubes. Their creations are the kitsch not cringe cousin of the ice sculpture swan. Obviously, the big difference here is the utility of the object. Bespoke ice cubes melt down and are consumed for hydration; they’re ephemeral but not excessive.
The poverty-privilege ice fetish continuum is a thing, though, and on the most extreme end are the climate disaster tourists who enthuse over cocktails made with glacier ice. You might remember Martha Stewart chiseled a piece of glacier in her booze while on a cruise around the coast of Greenland. “We actually captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight,” Stewart captioned cluelessly.
Martha’s misstep is just the tip of the proverbial…well, you know. Bon Appétit reports a company in Greenland is now shipping glacier ice from frozen fjords to cocktail bars in Dubai. The magazine explains,
Drinking glacier ice is a weird flex…but apparently it's about more than the prestige of drinking frozen fjord water — glacier ice doesn't have any bubbles in it because over millennia, all the air has been pressed out, which means it melts more slowly in your cocktail.
Nothing illuminates the thought process of climate tourism more than the mission statement of a company called Alaskan Glacial Ice, which sells exactly that. Founder Scott Lindquist’s origin story reads like a Rudyard Kipling colonizer fantasy:
Scott saw his first iceberg, in front of Columbia Glacier, in 1981 and was overcome by their purity and beauty. After requesting that the Captain steer closer, he had the opportunity to chip-off a chunk of iceberg. He was amazed at the density of such a small piece of ice. Holding the mini iceberg up to the sun, Scott looked through it and could see crystals, prisms, and small compressed air bubbles trapped inside the ice.
At that moment, Scott knew he had to share this precious commodity with the world.
The shift from awe to monetization in this story is head spinning. Imagine if that guy in Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above Sea Fog” had looked out and thought: let’s frack this sublimity.
The rest of Alaskan Glacial Ice’s website is equally unhinged. It includes a timeline of major events such as the first time the founder saw a glacier (title: “my first iceberg,” 1992), The New York Times’ first mention of marketing ice (1988), and the Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), which is described with a Trumpian disregard for articles, as “Biggest oil-spill in America at the time. Devalued Alaska fish prices for many years to follow.” The rhetoric here consistently contextualizes the climate crisis exclusively in terms of its economic impact, a framework which blatantly exploits current catastrophe. Another fascinating paradox of the glacial ice enthusiasts mindset is their fetish for “the trapped, historic” air released as the ice melts, the paradox being their willingness to degrade the quality of current air in the pursuit of ancient air. In fact, Alaskan Glacial Ice’s website features ASMR style videos of the “many-voiced sizzling” the ice makes while melting.
Dr. Amy Brady, author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks, a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, remarked to Vanity Fair that
[Ice is] this thing to strive for. It’s like it’s imbued with this sense of aspiration. There aren’t many other places in the world that have that upward class mobility — or at least that illusion of upward class mobility — and so many people are always striving to reach the next social class, which is what ice represents.
As Brady details in her book, ice has a long history of exclusivity simply because it is difficult to keep and therefore represents one’s ability to acquire space and land.
There is something about the desire to go to extreme measures to obtain the purest, least tainted ice that feels adjacent to the gourmand perfume trend I wrote about last summer. Both hint at a radical capitalist assertion that the highest echelon of status is to actually consume the marker of that status; to make it part of you. In the case of glacial ice, the rhetoric is that it is an elite privilege to consume “ice sheets [which] have not been in contact with any soils or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities.” The processes necessary to obtain this super pure ice, however, deeply undercuts any real benefit other than its significance as an aesthetic marker of class supremacy.
It’s a vampiric logic in which the very human activities that have sullied our water are employed to harvest the last virginal drops of it. In a final hyperbolic twist, that pure water is harvested to be mixed with alcohol, a neurotoxin.
The frivolity is staggering. And yet – this is a newsletter celebrating frivolity.
I did not fully anticipate how difficult it would be to process highly aesthetic objects or cultural phenomena within the fraught social, cultural, and political contexts they exist within. I’ve written about Britney Spears, but found it impossible not to address inherited trauma. I’ve written about bows, but found it impossible not to address the inherently predatory ambiance that contextualizes girlhood. I started this newsletter to write about cultural stuff that brings me joy! More and more, I realize discussing style and joy and culture in a neo-capitalist country is a constant exercise in thinking through end times.
We live in abundance suicidally obtained. But we live.
It actually makes me think of this year’s big Beyoncé hit, “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM.” (I bet you didn’t expect this to swerve Beyoncé, but here we are.) Beyoncé frequently threads climate disasters' impact on Black communities into the backdrops of her songs. Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., President of Hip Hop Caucus, recently discussed her work as “evolving” not only in response to climate change, but “climate anxiety.”
In “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM,” she describes a town that takes shelter during a tornado.
Hit the basement, that shit ain't pretty
Rugged whiskey 'cause we survivin'
Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passin' time, yeah
Like many of the songs from Cowboy Carter, “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” picks up on themes common to the gospel tradition, operating simultaneously as a message about survival and as the sound of survival. To put this differently: this is literally a song about waiting out a storm that makes you remember why you want to be alive. The lyric that really struck me the first and millionth time I heard “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” was, “I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you.” This moment alludes to segregation and the defiance required to keep not just living, but to keep loving living in times of increasing precarity.
So, this month, in an effort to live ethically but still, you know, have fun, I have two Camp Recs.
1.) Bon Appétit’s Delicious or Distressing feature, which covers food and drink trends that have taken a turn from the extravagant to excessive.
And 2.) Discocubes botanical ice creation inspiration, which can be DIY-ed at home with farmer’s market edible flowers and this YouTube, “The LAZIEST Way To Make CLEAR ICE, nobody talks about.”
Thank you so much for reading this newsletter. If you liked it, please screenshot, share, or find the person in your life with the worst, gauchest, tackiest taste and tell them all about it.