*wince*

At the distance of a few weeks, my first posts already make me blanch. Apparently, at some point - probably late at night and not on my best game - I came up with a grand concept for this blog that looked like some kind of misshapen and ill-conceived love child of HL Mencken and Ferdinand de Saussure.

We can do better than this, Hamilton. The posts stay, of course, as a cruel but crucial reminder of the constant need for humility and self-improvement - the same way we all secretly hope that someone still makes Dustin Hoffman watch Ishtar at least once a year. But if you ever catch me abruptly turning pale, steadying myself on my desk, and compulsively making the motion of smoking a phantom cigarette, you'll immediately know that I just scrolled down a little farther than I intended.

Adventures in gookum liquor (Part the First)

I have made Swedish Punsch.

... he declares in the same voice a primitive Neanderthal once used to announce he'd just inadvertently lit grass on fire with two dry sticks. Imagine tones of excitement and elation, inflected by uncomprehending shock, and tempered by agitation at the thought of having just lit one's own loin cloth on fire. The poor, laborious hominid... what else could he have accomplished in the same time if he'd had just one Djeep lighter? He might have discovered trigonometry a few millenia early. By the same logic, what, I wonder, could I have got done in the afternoons I've spent sniffing around the bottom shelves of the back aisles of dim liquor stores around town, looking for alcoholic oddities with names I have to spell for the staff. To keep the implications of that question from hounding me,  I have to keep telling myself that if the same caveman had had a bunch of random spices, citrus fruit, and, oh, say, a bottle of historical Indonesian booze lying around, he'd have used it all to make an obscure cocktail ingredient too. Naturally!

Swedish Punsch is a sort of pine smoke-flavored, quasi-rum-based concoction. It's based on some stuff called Batavia Arrack, which is more or less a rum spliced with a sake. From what I read, a lot of Dutch sailors used to call it breakfast; four centuries later, I call it a rough remedy for sinus infections. Not to be imbibed straight, for fear of needing a new hard palate - but like so many orphan elements that are awkward and off-putting in isolation, it has great potential in combinations!

To whit, the aforementioned SP. To make it, you get arrack, nutmeg, cardamom, a shitload of sugar, lapsang souchong tea, and lemon zest together in a bowl, mix it all up, and let it steep for a while. After a day or so, you strain it and - if you're me - you dump it into a leftover Vitamin Water 0 bottle. No matter how you present it, though, you wind up with something that looks like a rain puddle in baseball dirt and smells like a burning Christmas wreath that someone put out with Five-Alive.

But lo - though so humble and contorted, yet so divine. Mine eyes have seen the glory - and mine tongue has savored it too. Don't be deceived by the incongruous makeup: it's like kisses from a lusty tropical Valkyrie. Stay tuned for lo-down on our first vigorous make-out session.

I'm occasionally to be caught mixing things up.

This applies most directly to my penchant for occasionally wandering back and forth between thinking about writing about playing, while drinking, and thinking about playing at drinking, while writing.

The results are actually less predictable than you might think - and sometimes pretty delicious. I find it's especially productive when applied to classics - either musical or alcoholic. For instance, tonight's twist on a cocktail classic:

1 oz Campari
1 oz Bonal. Thanks to a certain infamous Mr. Langer, sweet vermouth simply won't do anymore.
1.5 oz genever. Venerable Old Boomsma does the trick. Sure, spend the money on Bols. My fellow marketing professionals will thank you.

I find genever to be a bit less robust and pungent than its Briton grandchild, so I upped the dose a touch from what's called for in the classic Negroni recipe. Plus, a little something extra never hurt anyone on either side of the Channel - to my knowledge at least.

In honor of the drink's Walloonian connotations, I think I'll call it The Negroonje. How clever I am.

It's funny, you know, the things you notice.

I  just looked up from my keyboard and realized that it's surrounded by a representative sample of every single kind of glassware I own - highball, lowball, up glass, coupe glass, rocks glass, pint glass, coffee mug, and a random mason jar. Clearly, I need to a) do my dishes, b) buy more coasters, c) check into a clinic somewhere, and d) stop watching Californication. I leave it to my readers (all three of you lonely, pathetic bastards - call me) to suggest orders of priority.

So, about that whole "learning" thing, Seamus...

Okay, okay. So it’s not completely impossible to make neat, convenient analogies that involve music and musicians. Put the pitchforks and torches away for a just a sec.

Ever tried to learn a new language? If you have, you’ve probably heard that fluency means being able to not only speak in your new language, but think in it too. When you can think in a language, you can form thoughts it directly, and then turn those thoughts directly into words – with none of the pesky pauses for conjugation and declension that native speakers never need. Well, by the same token, you can think of a musician as someone who has learned to speak fluent tunes: someone whose thoughts come to them in notes, which can be turned more or less straightaway into melody, sans stopping to reach for a calculator to figure out what meter their in. 

Notes, chords, and melody are the musician’s words, thoughts, and sentences. He puts together a song or a symphony in much the same way I write a paragraph in English: by building patterns out of bytes, structures out of patterns, concepts out of structures, etc., all according to internalized rules. Depending on how much formal training he’s had, a musician may or may not understand those rules, may or may not consciously manipulate them, and may or may not even be aware of them. Fortunately you don’t need to know how to diagram sentences in order to write taught English, any more than you need to be able to recognize a semiquaver to play one. The musician simply thinks in melody, without having to mentally translate thoughts, emotions, and concepts into tunes note by note.

Caveat, though: it’s nowhere near as simple as I’ve tried to make it sound… just like writing this post is hardly as simply as stringing together a few nouns and verbs and calling it a night. My own cozy analogy comes up short pretty quickly. Music is a natural voice to those who use it, just like language is; but it is also acquired, like language… and all the complexity, all the oddity, all the quixotic what-the-fuckness, that all gets mixed in during the process of acquisition. I don’t speak or think in English, after all: I’m fluent in American vernacular, with a “woaaaaah”-addled vocabulary from Southern California, leftover strands of a Texan accent, and the occasional “r”-omitting affectations of someone who’s bought too much coffee at Dunkin Donuts. And by the same token, any musician who ever learned jazz, classical, Tuvan throat-singing, or the Egyptian oud, found their new voice in a particular set of personal, cultural, and geographic circumstances – and that’s where the fun really starts.

See, those circumstances stand a decent chances of being just as mixed up, tangled, and paradoxical as the ones that gave me the habit of saying, “Dude, I’m fixin’ to get me some fish tacos.” And chances are equally good – as anyone who’s ever asked for a “ride home” in Ireland can attest – the outcome will be equal parts terrifying, hilarious, and fascinating.

But I’ll tackle them next time… or maybe the time after that. In the mean time, if anyone else knows a doppelganger of mine who learned nyckelharpa in Vietnam, tell him to give me a call. I lost his number.