When the Cool of the Pond Makes You Drop Down on It.

~

well, in spite of the damp, grey, clammy indignity that this day has turned out to be, summer is here (i swear it is, i felt it just the other morning). which means spritely summer drinks, like pompiers, and Pimm’s cups, and whatever this was, and, if you’re feeling leery of getting daytime fuzzy, something like this: crème de cassis + pink grapefruit juice + soda water. boom.

despite the 19.5% alcohol of Cassis Monna & Filles (which i recommend; it captures the tightness and innate wineliness of black currents, without being so syrupy as a lot of other brands), this is for all intents and purposes a virgin drink. tweak the ratio to your taste, but i’ve just been covering the bottom of a rocks glass with crème de cassis, splashing in an ounce or so of grapefruit juice, and filling it up with soda water.

don’t let its russet opacity fool you. this shit is summer.

Aim Low, the Chariot May Swing to Meet Your Mark.

~

 

“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That’s the way with everything.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.”

. . .

“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?”

- Ernest Hemingway
“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

 

it’s funny, the above might well be the bleakest and most succinct expression of existential malaise of the whole damned Lost Gen,  but for all that it still hits a little close to the contemporary bone, i personally derive a significant amount of pleasure (existential, even) and affirmation from the trying of new drinks.¹ at least some of the time.

which may not say much for my spiritual health (i mean, i also like books and smiling dogs squinting in the sun), but it suggests at the least that i suffer little mauvaise foi² in my dilettance. at some point in the midst of my semi-intentional sabotage of my academic career and listless pursuit of literary recognition, it occurred to me that dilettant may well best describe my situation in, and relationship to, the world; a confusion of soft skills and partial knowledges, unified only by their status as what interests i have failed to pursue to expertise (and the possibly mistaken impression that they add to my charm). this could have been a disappointing revelation, given that dilettant probably hasn’t been used as a positive descriptor in the past two hundred and seventy five-odd years, but, like amateur, dilettante proves to have a kernel of etymological honesty in it.

roughly the same one, in fact. for where (as is fairly obvious) the root of amateur is love, and its essence to do something for the sake thereof (contrasted with the expert or professional), the root of dilettant is delectare - to delight. the dilettant, historically, delighted in art, specifically, but like the amateur was so-driven not by professional (read, problematically: “serious”) aims or strictures, but by the sheer delight of the thing. if “delight” seems like somewhat of a fluffy word, that is perhaps a good thing – the inability to pin down the qualities that make something delightful may be part of the charm (or is the charm the unpindownable?), and while “love” and “pleasure” are not far removed, both have the tendency to grow stiff and calcareous with the serious discourse that accretes around them. which is not to speak unilaterally ill of seriousness, indeed there is certainly something to be said for the gratifications of pleasures harder-won, but the love of pleasure and the love of love can be quite ponderous things absent delight.

 

in the early 18th century, the Society of Dilettanti was formed in London by a group of dukes and scholars and other professionally monied layabouts (NB: monied layabouts by profession, rather than professional classicists) to appreciate and promote the appreciation of Greek and Roman art, but equally to do so in a spirit of light-heartedness and considerable inebriation. Horace Walpole described them, i suppose disparagingly, as “a club for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk,” although this reeks somewhat of the triumphalist moderation that mistakes the result for the object and reduces everything else to mere pretext. the dilettant understands, contra Brillat-Savarin, that just because one has ended up sotted and distended and groaning with one’s take it does not mean one failed to truly appreciate what was put before them.³

but the world despises a dabbler, and the dilettant remains hated for loving, unwanted for wanting.

 

actually that may not be true.

 

for what has the age of the internet, lifestyle entrepreneurship, and gutted pensions brought us but the exaltation of the non-professional expert and the professional dabbler? an author-turned-publisher-turned-cabinetmaker friend of mine pointed out that there’s probably not a barber, bartender, or business-owner under 37 in any urban centre who doesn’t have a creative writing degree and a stack of unsold hardcore band records clogging up their crawlspace. a valid argument! it demands a modification of my own, that might proceed by forcing a distinction between the dilettante and the amateur. i think that passion, driving passion in particular, is importantly absent from the portrait of the dilettant: if we are surrounded by affirming messages exhorting us  to “Find the one thing you love more than anything else and do it for the rest of your life“, we less often hear the call to “Find a thing that is interesting and pursue it until your interest is exhausted, duuuude.” (if there was a little more mingling of these messages we might have a very different romantic culture, to boot)

there is something to be said, i think, for being compelled in a pursuit not by passion per se, or profession, but appreciation; to be comfortable with something less than mastery of an art or the all-consuming fire of devotion. to quote Philip Gilbert Hamerton against his own prickish grain, “If the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered dilettants.” in fact, when i first read that it took me a moment to realize that he was shit-talking educated people, rather than attempting to make peace with the imperfect.

 

all of which to say, i think i might try making my own vermouth.

 

 

 

¹ recently, Joe Beef’s take on the “Roman Coke”, which contains grappa, chinotto, and fernet branca, and tastes somehow like chocolate.

² i cannot get out of my head the suspicion that Sartre’s mauvaise foi (“bad faith”) was a pun on mauvais foie (“bad liver”), given that both French and English share a historical belief in the liver as the source of courage (see “lily-livered”; “avoir les foies blanc“), and bad faith by way of some oversimplification amounts basically to intellectual/existential cowardice. also, i like to make drinking related jokes about mauvaise foi, as one might expect.

³ i assert, in rough contradiction to what i have claimed elsewhere.

I Mean, It’s Basically an Economic Fuck You As Well…

 

hey, apparently i wrote a thing for Vice:

 

“Montreal Food Truck Plan Basically a Symbolic Fuck You to Poor People and Immigrants”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Embittered V: Just Wait, Something Will Come To Me.

~

i stumbled upon this guy at an LCBO in Toronto, compelled by the allure of “everything that is wrong with this”: 11.95$ price tag, plastic screw-top, the nigh-certainty that it would be somehow worse than Jagermeister; how could one go wrong? but as it turns out, it is not worse than Jagermeister.

well, maybe it is? it is syrupy, certainly, and sweet, yet somehow – maybe it’s just the fresh spring breeze blowing cool across piles of filthy snow, making me all soft-eyed – i’ve really warmed up to it, the way it warms one up. it is like a poor, bumbling brother to the refined orange peel and spice of Amaro Nonino (also known as the handsomest bottle in time, although itself a little too sweet).

i assume it will destroy me.

it calls to mind the wealth of sweet, middling, German bitters that i drank when i was in Berlin last year, in particular the little vaguely coffin-shaped bottles of Kuemmerling that were served straight out of the freezer, still opaque with frost. if it would be inaccurate to claim that i clearly remember the taste of those, which we would ritually whack against the bar, crack open and dispense with in a decreasingly strict choreography, i certainly remember walking into the bar, staffed by charged-hair 50-year-old überpunken, as Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves began to play in what would prove to be its entirety. and i remember an argument with a German translator about Benjamin and proviral genetics (respectively) for which i was woefully underprovisioned.

but discrete and well-characterized memories are not, in any case, of the essence. the essence is in fact the effect, the effect of the blur – this was my Berlin baptism, under the wing of my chef friend Jean-Philippe, who as per his rôle seemed to know everybody everywhere, never pay for drinks, and be filled to bursting with bad good ideas. it was one of those looping, spiralling nights of well-meaning debauchery that at some point is even forced to run itself in reverse, because JP realizes he has forgotten a backpack full of knives* at one of the bars through which we’ve stormed in our Go-like hypersociality (as if walking into a bar to “Maxwell Murder” was not teen movie enough), and resolves itself eventually with us at a turkish restaurant (to where i am informed we had taxi’d in search of skewered testicles) as the grey German sun comes up, devouring lamb’s brain soup and ayran like a couple of hepped-up maniacs.

the “next” morning, predictably, was all moon-boots** and deep, laboured, breaths. coffees that do little more than wring the insides. over breakfast – habanero bloody marys and buttermilk pancakes, for which JP has bullied the proprietors to import Québec maple syrup at what i understand is an outrageous price – conversation trips along; hazy recollections, literature, perambulation, mutual acquaintances.

“It’s about walking,” says Jean-Philippe, “it’s about the total annihilation of time and space. . .Hey. You know that guy can suck his own dick?”

so yeah, maybe it reminds me of that.

* chef’s knives. we’re not circus people, for god’s sake.
** “moon-boots” is the phrase we adopted on tour to describe the state of hanged-overness wherein one feels so deeply and physiologically addled that maintaining purchase on the surface of the planet and not toddling off into the vacuum of space may no longer be taken as a fait accompli. like wearing moon-shoes on the bottom of the sea. it is typically accompanied by deep, careful, breaths; not the kind where you’re afraid you might barf, but where you must take care lest you accidentally exhale your entire soul and subjectivity. the phrase vomitself comes to mind, which i assume is a clumsy translation of something German and more or les jarring.

Next Things.

~

Anna Leventhal (who rules) recently tagged me and some other people who actually write books as part of this literary-self-reflection-chain-letter, wherein one answers a set of questions about what one is working on and then tags 5 writers whom one admires, the do the same, and then we are all magically connected by networks of reference and presumably in the end i finally get a house with a gas range and at least one crenellated turret and that diamond as big as the Ritz i’ve always wanted*.

i have been sort of resisting participating, mostly because thinking about it highlights the dissonance i feel between the (semi)public perception that exists of me as an “author” and my own complete failure to inhabit that role in my own mind, but also because i haven’t seriously been working on my writing for some time. nevertheless, i -am- going to participate because i think that there is value in rethinking what that means – to “be an author”, to have something that can be referred to as “one’s work”, and our various comfort levels with what qualifies as  ”creative output” and “creative process.”

consequently, the answers i am capable of giving make a poor fit for many of the questions, and many of the people i am tagging below i am tagging because i think they are awesome, and think that anyone who is paying attention to me should also be paying attention to them. as such, while for the sake of the form i am retaining these book-emphasis of the questions, i am really more interested in using this as a What are you thinking about / What do you wish you were writing a book about right now? sort of project.

What is the working title of your book?

i don’t have a book. but in an application for a grant i didn’t get, to write this book that doesn’t exist, my working title up until the very last minute was Into The Bloodstorm. some day i will actually call something that.

What genre does your book fall under?

food literature? creative non fiction?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

there are two ideas that have been haunting me, that i have yet to flesh out to the extent they require – one has to do with investigating how culture-bound is the memory-work that is done by potato chip flavours. specifically BBQ, a flavour that strangely does not refer to an actual food item but rather a method of cooking, and so in a sense is a flavour based less in mimicry or correspondence to a real thing-in-the-word, and more a set of associations organized around a non-existent object, an absent centre. the inspiration for this line of thought came from two places, 1) how in the current vague/vogue of expanded chip flavours, most of them still taste like variations on shitty BBQ chips, and 2) in my European travels, the comparative scarcity of “BBQ” chips (maybe because BBQ per se is an American culinary tradition?), and the absence of this phenomenon of most chip flavours just tasting like BBQ variations.

the second has to do with the history of butchery traditions in different countries and cultures. inspired by realizing there are not only names of cuts that can not be translated across languages, but that the cuts themselves often to not cross linguistic boundaries – while looking for poire de boeuf as an inexpensive substitute for tenderloin to make tartare, i discovered that the French cut appears not to exist in American or English butchery, and is uncommon even in Québecois butchery. drawing a parallel with the historicization of objectivity and histories of scientific ways of seeing, this got me wondering about the extent to which these different butchery traditions could be seen not merely as local interpretations of a fixed, universal, anatomy of meat animals, but as bound up with the production of local anatomies, in the way that how bodies are put together and of what they are made have been historically quite variable. it seems to me that butchery might offer an interesting vantage point for thinking about the non-deterministic (handi)work that is involved in making up organisms.

Which actors would you choose to play you characters in a movie adaptation?

no comment.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

i’m not sure, but i’m pretty sure one could be strung together with the phrases “food”, “literary pretences”, “impenetrable fog of jargon,” and a string of ellipses.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

uhhhhh….. no comment.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

this is exactly why i didn’t want to do this interview.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

i am having a difficult time separating out conceptual problems from sensual enjoyment. this is how i try to work these things out, -not- separate them out. some times we eat our emotions, some times we think our food. i don’t think either are irrelevant to pleasure.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

i promise that inside: no one will find in food the hidden meaning or purpose in their life, or reconnect with timeless traditions, or come to understand the true meaning of hospitality,  in the simple gestures of preparing food. no one will get their groove back. there will be only uncomfortableness, and blood. possibly jokes.

The five (six, in fact!) writers I’m tagging:

Joey Comeau
John Semley
Drew Nelles
Laura Broadbent
Nicola Twilley
Tim Maly

* funny aside – what I am actually devoting the majority of my time to is someone else’s book. since last spring, when i got back from touring singing for someone else’s metal band, i’ve been working as a research assistant for two different professors; one writing a history of state and international chronic disease programming in the 20th century, the other putting together a book on Cold War psychiatry, the role of the Intelligence community in the development of the behavioural sciences, and the covert CIA funding of some harsh experiments conducted at McGill in the 1950s. in the course of which i learned that in ’51 there was a perhaps pivotal meeting between representatives from Canada’s Defence Research Board, the British Ministry of Defence, the CIA, and some luminaries of the Canadian psychology world about the potentials of brainwashing research at the Ritz-Carlton in Montréal, which building i walk by on a weekly basis and think to myself “That looks like a really nice cocktail bar.”

Three Things of Which In Themselves I am a Great Fan, But Which Abstracted As Flavours I Avoid:

 

1. lemons. in many forms: fresh, preserved, seared, zested. but lemony, no thanks. associations with cleaning product inevitably prevail.

2. almonds. almond paste and marzipan equally distasteful. amaretto all the worse. notable exceptions – danish frøsnapper.

3. bananas. for which i have been suffering an unaccountable craving of late  (that i gratify based on a rumour i heard that we [the world] will be running out of bananas soon, so i may as well get ‘em while i can) due less to any great affection for their taste than what i assume is an underlying potassium deficiency, or the state of nigh-perpetual hangover that seems to attend my waking hours regardless of how recently or copiously i drank. possibly it is of neurasthenic or glandular origin. notable exceptions – banana bread, and Salers Gentiane, which does not taste like, nor does it bear any relation to, bananas, and in the rest of the world outside of Canada is not even yellow.

 

 

it appears the unifying theme is dessert, to which it may be objected that one is commonly subjected to bad imitations of lemon, almond, and banana flavours in the candy/dessert world, but i have found that even the best and truest of such desserts leave me cold.

A Rosy, Shit-Eating Grin (more tour fragments).

~

a woman in Copenhagen, biking while eating a sandwich with one hand*, catches our eye(s) and gives us a wide, winning, smile – the kind of open, morale-boosting 
smile that makes one feel as if it is, however precarious, not only 
possible, but laudable, to strike and maintain a certain balance.
 we’re doing alright, and may just continue to be alright. or will at least fall on our 
faces doing what we love.

from a scrap of paper found in my vest. context: day off in Copenhagen before continuing on to play a total of 2 1/2 shows over the course of  1 week in Sweden and Norway (aka The Most Expensive Place Ever). already €450 in debt. not, however, a sandwich as pictured above, the famous smørrebrød, which are themselves beautiful and awesome as was that smile, but even harder to eat on a bicycle.

Still Questing the Ununhexium After All These Years…

~

i am not typically a fan of “strong beers”¹, which is unfortunate both because Québec is a real shangri-la of such things², and because once you start really getting into beer, you inevitably run up against the reality that a lot of -good- beers are also -strong- beers, and that people who make beer or care about beer are going to want to share their good strong beers with you; and matters of personal taste aside, one does not want to come across as a fool, ingrate, or philistine.

that said, i like dark, terrifying beers. cryptic and opaque and impenetrable beers, even. and sometimes these are also strong beers. so when i came across ISSEKI NICHÓ, Dieu du Ciel’s “Imperial Dark Saison”, despite its 9.5% abv and my first reaction being WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?, i decided to pick it up. apparently isseki nichó is a japanese expression meaning something equivalent to “two birds with one stone,” and the beer is made roughly stout fashion, but using saison yeasts and hops grown in Shiga Kougen, Japan. it is the product of a collaboration between DDC and Shiga Kougen brewery, and is pretty much as international as fuck as you can get (Japanese + QC brewers making a British/Belgian hybrid). luckily is is also pretty good, and does not taste like an ill-advised and incoherent mish-mash of styles, which is often what i find with some of the wilder experiments of the brewing world (let’s not even talk about Dogfish Head’s Ta Henket za’atar beer).

while it’s certainly a rich, dark, malt-driven beer, with a burnt caramel thing going on, it’s surprisingly dry at the same time, and there’s a good bitterness (which is absolutely essential to my enjoying a beer like this) that cuts through, and even a bit of funky saison rankness in there somewhere. like sour fruit lurking underneath it all. it reminds me in a way of that incomparable (apparently quite comparable, as i am comparing it right now) bitter-sweetness of a short, thick espresso corretto with some kind of booze that is not in itself sweet, but which appears all the more so for those notes being thrown into sharper relief by the blackness of the coffee.

 

 

in the interest of comparison (yes, comparison; it is purely professionalism that is compelling me to drink alone at home on a sunday evening), i opened a bottle of DDC’s Pénombre Black IPA, which i have thoroughly enjoyed on tap, but is as i understand it is new to the bottled line. in a way, although far less sweet and substantially hoppier than the Isseki Nichó, the Pénombre tastes a little less balanced – and perhaps suffers a little from the perils (quite considerable in my opinion) of being a 6.5% IPA, the malt and bitterness not quite finding the best way to play off or with one another, resulting in a beer that is just a little too aggressive, but an aggression born of uncertainty, even anxiety. i don’t know whether this is due to the immediate contrast with the Isseki Nichó, or has to do with the exigencies of bottling, but i definitely prefer the Pénombre on tap.

 

in any case, it is winter, and these are some winter beers, which reminds me that i am long overdue for a good solid drink & hang at Dieu du Ciel, particularly given my dissatisfaction with the direction Cheval Blanc‘s brewing appears to have taken since the summer. and looking at DDC’s current tap menu, there is much to explore, and what better way to take advantage of the upcoming sheer-visceral-panic inducing frigidity that Montréal winters are so adept at providing?

 

file these under Beers That Taste Like 2:26min On Of Immortal’s “Rise of Darkness”.

 

 

 

 

 

¹in fact, the discovery of tart, weird, low-alcohol beers, such as Bellwoods‘ muggleweisse sour brown, and various farmhouse saisons, was unquestionably the high point of my (beer) drinking life in 2012. (Bellwoods brewery in Toronto is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting microbreweries in Canada right now. more on them in the future, i hope.)

² i mean, it’s also a real stinking tire-fire of such things. i remain staunch in my opinion that 80% of the beer Unibroue makes just tastes like barley malt, molasses and old bomber jackets.

Fragments of A Tour Journal. (day 24)

~

i was looking rather forward to the bag of Lay’s Barbecue Ham chips that i picked up at a night market in Liège a few weeks back. so much so that i carted them across four countries, squirreled away in the recess under the van’s passenger seat, that they might be safe from being fallen upon by any of my bandmates in a fit of drunken chip-lust (or for that matter, loss of balance). i had vaguely entertained the notion of carrying them all the way back to Canada with me, but if i am to be honest with myself, i must admit that it was to simple lack of desire that they owed their continued existence, born of an already carbohydrate-heavy diet of road food that left me all too dense and gummy to subject them to any nobler fate than being eaten out of sheer boredom.

and they deserved better than that, i thought.

 

that i decided to finally crack into them in the passport-control waiting area of the Milano-Linate airport was due less to gastronomical curiosity than my unwillingness to continue goddamn worrying about such an unwieldy and immanently crushable addition to my carry-on luggage. as it turns out, it is for the best that i decided to do so in such inauspicious conditions. because they’re not very good. there is a discernible hammishness to them, but it lacks all the potency that earned Barcelona’s Jamón Ruffles* and the Jambon Fumée Lay’s of Marseille so dear a place in my heart. i had hoped that Belgium’s cultural and geographical propinquity to France might assure some similarity, but i see now the family resemblance is faint. it is the curve of the ear, if anything. so far removed one from the other that no scandal could be aroused by what nocturnal fumblings lie buried in their adolescence.

 

too late i recognize the warning signs that had earlier escaped me, writ plain across the face of the bag: the flavour already in English, the unmistakable picnic roast that we are to believe has been BBQ’d, along with the sheer unlikelihood that “BBQ HAM” is something that any Belgian has eaten often enough to confidently and faithfully reproduce using only the 200 variations of MSG and food colouring that comprise the traditional palette of the potato chip flavour scientist. upon investigating the ingredients, i can find no evidence of even a synthetic ‘condiment’ – they read: potatoes, sunflower oil, “barbecue ham flavour”.  this latter consisting of “sugar, flavour enhancers (MSG, DSG, disodium inosiate), flavouring (contains milk ingredients), salt.” not that i don’t trust flavour enhancers (i don’t, actually. WHY WOULD I?), but i would wager that there being “flavour enhancers” in greater quantity than “flavourings” probably goes a long way to explaining the banality of these chips.

and yet here i sit, in the Milano airport, grossly and mechanically covering myself in chip crumbs, growing steadily denser while feebly trying to wish away my steadily depreciating contraband. contemplating the shapeless abyss of BBQ. waiting for the one that will take me home.

 

 

* although at the time (2008) i was still too timorously post-vegan to try the famed jamón ibérico that was ubiquitous in the local bars, i did fall dizzily in love with Ruffles’ homage to it. so much so that on my last, nightmarish, morning as i vomited my way through the Barcelona underground, i paused for a moment in front of a vending machine, just long enough to contemplate the feasibility of fitting four bags of the chips into my stowed luggage. i didn’t come away with any in the end, but did find a carefully folded empty bag in the breast pocket of my leather jacket, that i used to open up and smell sometimes. you know, like a maniac.

Kristevan Death?

okay, as a postscript to that bit on cannibalism, misogyny, and the grotesque in death metal; can someone pleeeease start a psychoanalysis-themed death metal band?

Klein emphasized that the girl represses vaginal awareness because she fears her aggressive impulses towards the mother (which take the form of wanting to devour the latter’s insides) will invite the mother to retaliate against the contents of the girl’s own body.

- Nellie Thompson (2003). “Marie Bonaparte’s Theory of
Female Sexuality: Fantasy and Biology”

it could even be a feminist-psychoanalysis-in-conversation-with-its-own-history band. first album: (S)laugh(ter) of the Medusa?

anyone? no?