Waiting

May 5, 2008

Waiting room at dentist.

No serrated wordplay

can cut through the MPR

classical monotone of
rambling and forced

hospitality that makes this

room a perfectly acceptable

place to die.

Old Oil

I had the rare pleasure last night of drinking old oil from a metal keg.

And it was sublime.

No, my penchant for the drink hasn't led me to panhandling Jiffy Lubes. Not yet. "Old oil" is the translation of Ola Dubh, Harviestoun's Brewery's unique collaboration with Highland Park, Distiller of the Year. I commend Bulldog in Nordeast for having the moxie to purchase two firkins of the stuff and serving it gravity as part of their regular Wednesday tradition, "Firkin Night." On Wednesday's the bar taps a firkin of a random beer - could be Summit, could be a rare, oak-aged elixir - and serves it without the use of standard Carbon Dioxide. The beer flows from the firkin like Gatorade from a Gott cooler. This old-school process elicits more flavor from any brew, considering it has it to begin with. Many macros taste so god-awful, they are served ice-cold, guaranteed to numb the tongue and hide the evil. Use marketing to tell your customers that this is "the AMERICAN way to enjoy beer!" and you've vindicated the way you hide your imperfections. But I digress...

Ola Dubh 30 starts with the brewery's award-winning brew, Old Engine Oil and ages it in casks used to store Highland Park's 30-year single malt scotch. This is the first ale to be aged in malt whisky casks from a named distillery and, with tracable casks and numbered bottles, the first with genuine provenance. Bottles are available in limited supply in the state for around $30. When I heard that Bulldog was offering 10-oz. glasses for only $6 AND served gravity? It's no lie I almost lept out the window to get to the car.

To the eye Ola Dubh is infinite black with reddish-brown hints at the edge. You see at once that it is too thin to be a stout, though the head was as dense as the best Guinness. The nose is that of a restrained baltic porter, a dank but clean cellar floor whose surface has enjoyed a spill or two of good whisky. Upon the first sip the word is creamy. At 8% A.B.V. this simply couldn't be smoother. I actually had trouble distinguishing when the thick, quarter-inch head ended and the brew proper began. The second word is balanced. After the cream one senses the impending attack of high-grade alcohol, but it never comes. The heat pirouettes and disappears behind a cashmere curtain of half-bitter chocolate. Truffle oil steps forward and punches the air only to be hauled off by security guards of currant, raisin, and clove. These flavors mug for the camera, each enjoying fleeting moments of fame. The result is an undulating spectrum of autumn for the beer-loving palate. The viscous finish brings you back to the name, and you're lucky. The oil bonds the deep flavors to your tongue to make this the best tasting–and longest lasting–beer you'll have in a very long while.

Future incarnations of Ola Dubh, I understand, are to include aging in Highland Park's casks of 40 and even 50 year single malts. Let's hope the Bulldog can commandeer a couple of those as well. If so, I'll be there, sipping age and strength in rare combination.

Linkage:

The Bulldog Northeast
http://www.thebulldogmpls.com/ne_index.php

Harviestoun Brewery
http://www.harviestoun.com/

Review Online

"In 2004 Philip Dacey, English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University for 34 years, author of eight previous full-length collections of poetry and recipient of numerous fellowships, moved to Manhattan in a flight of retirement fancy..."

More in the latest issue of Whistling Shade: http://www.whistlingshade.com/0801/dacey.html

(2)

It comes to each of us, should we have had the double-edged good fortune of looking upon Grand Universals or Ideals, that age will ask us to prosecute them. Bliss. Infinity. The Northern Lights of our malignant speck will be summoned to defend themselves against the growing scrutiny of the present. For as we drift inexorably from the pinpoint of some original moment, the fabric of our culture fades and ravels out with an active imagination. Ideals compete more and more with the breeding multiplicities (entertaining us like toddlers), the latter boasting a stronger connection to reality. Bubble gum scandal. Entertainment that smacks more of violence than pleasure. Technological progress that advances our complacence not our insight. These are the facets that brag of reality? God competes with the money behind false idol worship as it approaches Nirvana.

It is an organic reconciliation, I suppose. A sort of passing of a Platonic torch. The speeding wine of youth consumed by its own consumption of everything now and faster. That which comes before just doesn't have the same bling. So has it always been. So it is now. At the same time I realize the vanity of this ramble and its necessity. The great ideals, like their human counterparts, somewhere in their vast innards, must find the patience for these flashes in the pantheon. Ready to smile should these newborn blips one day open their eyes.

Nor am I above it all, the way a diatribe of this tone would imply. On the contrary, it is only on particular sunny mornings that I am able to see the mirages I do. But as a blip myself I am moved to scream my thoughts into the void, in hopes that some small vibration might find the right fork and cause another. Nothing more than a pause for thought seeking out its kin.

from Dots and Lines
(a book that does not exist)

Exposed, again

New review of the Tequila Chronicles and interview with me over at RUMPOT MAGAZINE (www.rumpotmagazine.com).

m.

(3)

And when does it occur to you? Three-quarters into a weighty conversation with that old, but estranged friend? Between the covers, perhaps, of that ancient novel you finally decided to enter. Calling it a question of language and you begin to stalk it. Vocabulary - too easy. Syntax - too cold. Culture. Warmer. Jauss with his diachronic and synchronic cross-sections...ouch. Abort.

The term poetry. What it admits to carrying in its marrow. The very justification for its skeletal structure. Eloquence. Now we're getting somewhere. Is the very attempt an admission of something seen as lofty and out of touch? Choice of words and sentence structure. Subject matter. Tone and voice. Every creative writer feels the pull of the reigns while constructing pieces for the body. Will an arm too long or muscular draw attention away from the beauty of subtle movements? Will a countenance too piercing disrupt the function and motivation? Does even the use of a metaphor turn a face sour, too far from the suface, constituting a breach of contract with what is empirical by the simplest of equations?

But then that has always been the case, no? Context and timing left to carry a thing from its opaque realm and into a part of us waiting to be touched? And that part, growing smaller through age into an ever more informal future? Smaller, but maybe more intense. A diminishing in the face of the growing complexity of everyday life, does it need to be satiated by an inverse proportion? Poetry as amino acid for the aged. Literature as vitamin-infused sustenance for the emotional and pituitary self?

But do not think - or feel - for a second that I am overlooking the issue of what constitutes eloquence. It is quite topical, coming up recently in my context (and those much greater and more numerous). Discussions of new formalism, freedom of expression, quality, anachronism, the anxiety of influence and more. Eloquence. The successful expression of a thought beyond the level of everyday speech? A new twist on that speech? As our culture embraces, with increasing passion, a more populist paradigm (a term, of course, which sprials out to other discussions, and rightfully so) how strange it appears when a more concerted tongue is used to express our ideas in older sense of direct, but more symbolic, certainty.

from Dots and Lines
(a book that does not exist)

Ritual

It was, when allowing himself to think from this perspective, the most responsible thing to do. Vets in the old country were no stranger to it, nor were medieval charlatans posing as holy men of medicine. How something so old brings with it, into the present, a very natural aura of propriety, of old testament rightness rooted in ancient, simple sense.

A leech, perhaps, strategically placed

A cut along a tainted path of vein

Interception of the problem at the dangerous source, as if to remove a poisoned dermis from the face of a child. But no one time treatment for some. No. For some it is a chronic addition to purity. Daily, had he his way. Bleed himself of the rue of life deemed spoiled somehow in its passing from anticipation to forgetting. Itching behind eyes and scalp, he would self-impose treatment wherever, whenever. Get it out, pin it down to anything that would soak up the black desire.

Some volunteer for pain and sweat for the sake of a better physique.

Others prefer to keep a ripped soul, abs be damned.