Part I. Silver Lake Gangsta
Music surrounded me from an early age, mostly piping from my father's massive collection of Jazz LPs, but I didn't really embrace it as my own until I truly coveted one album in particular. By covet I refer to my admittedly masturbatory fetishism for cataloguing, collecting, and pedantically ruminating upon the items I'm most passionate about. I'm ok with calling it what it is and being done with it. The object to which I refer was artfully swiped from my brother's moldering pile of teenage armpit stink covered albums, by yours truly, circa 1991. The cassette: N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton. I'm aware (and maybe a little proud) of the irony and absurdity of an eleven year old Jewish kid from an upper middle class Los Angeles family chanting "Fuck tha police coming straight from the underground/A young n#$*a got it bad cuz I'm brown." But those harsh words and G-funked rhythms grabbed me. They still do. I'm sure there was, and is, some youthful rebellion to blame for my interest in hip hop culture, but those vehemently spat street poems draped over chopped drum samples key directly into something swaying within me. I feel strangely connected, and in a sincere way, to those sounds. Since then, the scope of my fetishistic ways has broadened and now includes any number of tonal and rhythmic reference points. I'm equally enamored by the frenetic squawkings of Gang of Four as I am with the loose jointed folk rock of early 70's Dylan or the electronically altered wanderings of the Flaming Lips. At bottom, I love to be taken off guard. I look to be confronted by sounds that are at once unexpected, indefinably familiar, and challenging. And I still listen to the occasional NWA track when the mood strikes. Fuck the police indeed.
2. Cool Blue
There's a shard of a slice of a splinter of a memory that still leaves a distinct flavor on my tongue when I think about it. High school drunkenness induced by an evening at the Chabad house in Seattle's University district, where, if you promised the tipsy rabbis that you'd attend Friday night services and bring a friend, they would gladly tilt their jug of Beefeater or Jim Beam in the direction of your plastic cup and offer you a sizable pour of high holiday festiveness. That part I remember quite well. The juniper swimming around my mouth and nose while the world jostled out of focus is less defined, but nonetheless redolent of sensory enrichment. Whatever happened subsequently may or may not have involved a greasy hamburger, seeking refuge from a gang of inexplicably aggressive fraternity members, and lengthy hours spent studying the cold enamel of my parent's toilet bowl. Fast forward ten years, past hundreds of sickly sweet Cape Codders, bucketfuls of ass puckering margaritas, and cringe inducing tequila shots, and you'll find me living in Brooklyn, studying the law, and eschewing the rise of hipsterism. As far as imbibing was concerned, I would describe myself then as utterly ignorant of most spiritous indulgences, fervently anti-gin, adamantly pro-microbrew and old world wine, and generally intolerant of the $10 (or more) mixed drink. Yes, I balked at the Milk & Honeys and Pegu Clubs that this fair city had to offer. And yet somehow, on a quiet October evening, I found myself sitting at the Clover Club's reclaimed wood bar, sipping from an icy glass of what appeared to be a slice of sky cut from its moorings and made to taste of sharp citrus, freshly cut flowers, a bewildering array of herbal notes, and nuts. Seriously, I thought, are there nuts in here? This was my first Aviation and it changed me as much as that first listen to "Straight Outta Compton." I could hardly comprehend the layers of flavor and how each seemed to stimulate alternating portions of my palette, but I certainly felt compelled to try. I went home, Googled "Aviation cocktail" and fell into a sphere of blogolandia that I had never known. I found that the history, science, and, obviously, the flavors of mixology offered the same sense of familiarity contrasted with the blunt force of discovery that I craved in music. For the past two years I have been a consistent observer, occasional commenter, and tireless booster of this blogging subset, but now I will ever-so-cautiously enter the fray and venture to offer something that hopefully entertains, educates, and, at the least, amuses with my unabashed amateurishness and enthusiasm.
Thus, the conceit of this blog is as follows:
My duel interests, the music and the cocktail, commonly dwell on two distinct planes (if we are to visualize my neuroses as a ven diagram), but I would aver that they must overlap in some regard. And if they do not organically touch one another, then I will force the two worlds into collision. I will pair each recipe with some aural accompaniment. Every sip will have its soundtrack. A voice to sing its flavors. Put differently, every song has its connotations and so does every taste. I will ever so subjectively free-associate the two and see what happens. Lofty, I know. Tenuous, probably. Ripe for your parody and derision, well, we'll see.
A have a few other projects in the hopper as well, which will hopefully add some dimension to this blog: (1) absurdist musings on local bars that I frequent (2) a column for the frugal imbiber, where I will break a drink down by the cost of its constituent elements and (3) a chronicling of my attempts and failures at batching homemade ingredients and my impressions of the store bought options.
Drink responsibly, but with purpose.
Salud!
