Round-The-World Barstool Blues

HBH 270

2012-01-27T00:41:00.005Z

The nights become days,

The days all blur into one -

Fog of exhaustion.

Insomnia has been an intermittent curse of my life since childhood, but mercifully rare. And most of the time it is more a case of taking three or four hours to nod off or having a very broken night's sleep, rather than having no sleep at all. And instances of this have, I think, almost invariably been isolated: of course, after one crappy night's sleep, you're so run down that you sleep like a log the following night to recover.

But not this week. No, something very strange has happened to me this week: I managed barely a wink of sleep from Sunday through to Wednesday. I can't blame the fireworks. That has been an issue in years past, but this year people seem to be observing some sort of curfew and things have been remarkably quiet between about 1am and 7am. Unfortunately, I have been wide awake to appreciate how quiet it has been!

Now, I am wretchedly brainfogged and feel as though I probably need to spend the entire weekend in bed to try to catch up on my sleep deficit.

This week's drinking excuse

2012-01-26T02:38:00.014Z

The 26th January is Australia Day.

For the last few years this has been a welcome pretext for special over-indulgence at my favourite bar, the Aussie-owned 12 Square Metres.

I don't know what kind of a turnout we'll get down there this year. It is a particularly welcome distraction for foreigners during the drab Chinese Spring Festival holiday; but this year, more than ever before, almost everyone seems to have quit the city. And the party has gone rather better in the years when it's fallen just ahead of Chunjie rather than smack in the middle of it. Moreover, there used to be a bit of synergy with the other two Aussie bars in the neighbourhood - Ned's and MaoMaoChong together with 12SqM forming an Oz Triangle ideal for short-distance bar crawling. Ned's, alas, is now gone; and MMC has been keeping very irregular hours while owners Steve and Stef are on their long winter holiday this year. So, 12SqM will be flying the flag alone this time. Maybe having a monopoly on the Aussie custom will be a good thing; or maybe the event just won't gain a lot of momentum this year. Swings and roundabouts. We shall see.

The Coopers Ales are going to be a very tempting 20rmb each, and new laoban MB has managed to source some Australian beef pies for the day - for the first time in six months. And we should be tuning in via the Internet to favourite Aussie radio station Triple J's traditional holiday countdown of the 'Hottest 100' songs in Australia this past year, as selected by a listeners' poll (the only way I keep up with what the rest of world is listening to these days!).

Australians have their rough edges, but you have to admire their robust appetite for life, and particularly for drink. The nation's prodigious drinking abilities are epitomised in former Prime Minister Bob Hawke - an Oxford lao tongxue of mine, who was celebrated as holding the world speed record for downing a yard-of-ale (equivalent to around two-and-half pints, and very tricky to drink, because of the odd shape of the vessel) while he was a Rhodes Scholar there in the early 1950s. After all these years of happily believing the myth, I now find Wikipedia has pissed in my tankard by alleging that in fact he drank a comparable volume from a sconce pot (a large drinking bowl traditionally used for penalties and drinking challenges at formal college meals), and that his time of 11 seconds was equivalent to the then yard-of-ale record, but this mark has since been bettered. Oh, print the legend! [The Turf Tavern, a famous real ale pub in Oxford (and a favourite hangout of Colin Dexter's fictional detective Inspector Morse) has recently started advertising - quite mendaciously, I think - that the feat occurred there. In my day, the stories had it that it was either in The Bear or The White Horse; but Wikipedia - apparently following Bob's own memoirs - is adamant that it happened in the dining hall at University College.]

Bob, now 82, is still capable of opening his gullet to guzzle down the amber nectar at mindboggling speeds: just a few weeks ago he was filmed obligingly chugging a pint in one at the Australia v India Test Match in Sydney.

I've never been able to do that!

To cap today's celebration of Australian-ness, here's Colin Hay - founder of the great but sadly short-lived '80s band Men At Work - doing a great version of his signature hit Down Under in LA a few years ago with the Ringo Starr All-Star Band. [Lyrics here; it's also worth checking out this solo acoustic version.]

Elements of a memorable Chinese New Year's Eve

2012-01-24T03:27:00.007Z

I was grumping the other day about how little I enjoy the Chinese New Year celebrations (and would always quit the country at this time of year if I could only afford to); but I have, of course, had a few good times here during this holiday over the years. In particular, my very first Spring Festival Eve ended up being rather fun... in a bizarre and random sort of way.

Here are the things that made it special:

1) Novelty

It was my first one. So, even the aspects of the holiday that aren't all that appealing to me (nearly all of them) at least had curiosity value. It didn't start to seem such a horrendous bore until I'd been here three or four years.

2) Being included in the party

Chinese friends are usually too preoccupied with fulfilling their family obligations (or spurning them, and fleeing the country for an overseas holiday!) to give much of a thought to us foreigners at this time of year. But in my first year here, several people - students, colleagues, new friends - made a point of inviting me to stuff. Such invitations haven't completely dried up, but in subsequent years I've probably tried to dodge them, since most of the traditional holiday activities - temple fairs, family dinners, watching the CCTV 'gala special', er... that's about it - are in fact a bit of an ordeal. But, as I say, in that first year they had novelty value. And I was particularly glad that LG, a musician I'd recently met, arranged a dinner gathering on Spring Festival Eve - almost exclusively for 'foreign friends', who he knew would have nothing else to do that night. The food I recall being fairly horrible, and the wine even worse (a comedy fake Chinese variety that appeared to have been manufactured from erguotou and cochineal); but it was a fun gathering, and I made several interesting new acquaintances there - including DD, who was eventually to become one of my closest friends here (although I didn't see her again for two or three years after this!).

3) Comparatively few fireworks

At that point there had been a ban on fireworks within the city limits of Beijing for several years, and it remained in place until 2006. It was widely ignored. There were actually quite a lot of fireworks being let off back in those days - but not the monstrous overkill we have to suffer today. Moreover, it was nearly all traditional firecrackers rather than the fancier mortars and rockets and volcanos and so on that we are now deluged with (and which become such a trial because they are often so poorly made, and almost invariably irresponsibly used: rockets tend to explode at a dangerously low height overhead, and often at ground level; fizzling misfires and delayed detonations are alarmingly common). Most of all, I think, it acquired an extra level of exhilaration from the fact that it was an outlaw activity, that kids were having to set them off furtively, while keeping a lookout for the armband-wearing neighbourhood monitors patrolling the hutongs to try to suppress this naughtiness.

4) A random flirtation

After the dinner, we adjourned to the foreigner bar street of Sanlitun Nanjie (demolished a couple of years later), which was about the only place where anything was open that night. Just as my party were decamping to another bar on the strip, an improbably gorgeous Scandinavian girl came in through the door - apparently lost and alone. What could I do? While not exactly a crash-and-burn, it was not one of my more successful chat-ups either - but we nattered pleasantly for half an hour or so. Romance was evidently never going to be a possibility here, but we are still friends 9 years on.

5) More randomness

The irresistible distraction of a gorgeous blonde had separated me from the rest of the group - and I couldn't find them again. At this point, I'd hardly ever been out on Nanjie; maybe once or twice before, at most (I couldn't afford to frequent foreigner bars in my first year or two here). So, I didn't know the bar they had said they were hitting up next. And I couldn't find it. Couldn't find them. And after briefly trying a couple of other bars on my own, and being severely unimpressed with them (I think that was one of only two occasions that I ever went in the notorious dive that was Pure Girl), I gave up on the evening and decided to head home. At least I had finally begun to familiarise myself with the Nanjie strip, an area that I would be starting to visit a little more often over the coming year.

6) A game of pool (or several)

However, it was barely 10pm, which did seem a little early to be calling it a day. And there were, of course, no cabs to be had, so I was likely to have to walk the whole 6 miles or so back to my college. I therefore decided to break my journey at the only foreigner bar I had developed any sort of 'regular' habit with at that point - Huxley's 2, a large-ish venue down by the south gate of the Workers' Stadium (it was a promising space, but suffered from a slightly out-of-the-way location and extremely patchy promotion; it lasted barely 6 months - eventually killed off by the SARS outbreak, although I don't think it would have survived much longer anyway). There was a young European guy there - Dutch or Belgian, I think, not sure now - who was supposed to be running a DJ night. But it probably hadn't been effectively advertised: there was no-one there - NO-ONE. The DJ was trying to remain upbeat about the prospects of people starting to show up around midnight - but no-one ever did. I bought him a drink to console him, and thrashed him on the pool table a couple of times. Then I started playing the staff - as I had before a number of times on slow nights (there were many slow nights in that place, so they'd all become quite good; Sammy the head barman was a formidable player, rather too good for me). That passed a very pleasant two or three hours. And then I decided to continue my journey home.

7) Mellow thoughts

I'd had a wretched Christmas that year, with my mother dying a couple of weeks before, huge strife with my employer, a temporary holiday job in Tibet falling through... I'd been a bit of an emotional basketcase for the preceding three or four weeks. But there are few things as good as a long solitary walk very late at night for clearing the cobwebs out of your head: very restful, meditative, restorative.

8) The spirit of ~~Christmas~~ Chunjie

When I finally got back to my college, the two teenage security guards in the sentry box at the front gate were looking particularly disconsolate. I imagine they'd tried to watch the traditional CCTV variety gala on their tiny black-and-white TV earlier; but now they were completely at a loose end, while all the rest of the city was revelling - and were probably desperately homesick, since they came from Shaanxi province, far to the west, and this was their first year working in the capital. On a sudden impulse of goodwill, I nipped up the street to a 24-hour convenience store to buy them a few beers and a bag of candy. The young lads almost wept with gratitude. I never again had any problems persuading them to open the gate for me 'after hours'.

Yep, I have very fond memories of that first Chunjie in China. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns has been operating particularly ruthlessly since then.

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-23T00:15:00.009Z

"Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."

W.C. Fields (1880-1946)

A welcome alternative

2012-01-22T15:28:00.006Z

I'm afraid I find the protracted celebrations of the Chinese New Year a colossal bore; and the constant risk of witnessing or suffering a serious injury through the attendant reckless use of fireworks wears on my fragile nerves.

The two Chinese New Years I've enjoyed most - out of the ten that have passed since I moved here - have been the two when I managed to escape from the country for a fortnight and avoid almost the whole thing. The third best was the one where I went up to the far north-eastern city of Harbin for the second half of the holiday (where the public revels somehow seem to have more genuine joie de vivre and less tiresome overkill than they do here in the capital).

But tonight, at least, I have a good reason to stay at home, and to try to ignore the tedious barrage outside. The English Football Association - with a wanton cultural insensitivity - has seen fit to schedule two of the most important matches in the Premiership season for this biggest of Chinese festival days: the 1st versus 3rd teams in the league, followed by the 2nd versus the 5th. And both are being shown live on local Beijing sports station BTV6.

On any other day, I would be tempted to trek across town to try and catch a game of such magnitude in a sports bar, with the benefit of an English commentary. But tonight.... it's arse-freezing cold, there are very few cabs, and there are people lobbing explosives into the middle of the sidewalk every few yards. I'm quite happy staying at home, thank you.

I just hope this insane firework mayhem quietens down decently early this year. Last year, it seemed to have pretty much burnt itself out by half past midnight; but it has been known to drag on until 2am or 3am. Sleep can be in short supply over the next two weeks.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

2012-01-22T06:08:00.014Z

Today is the eve of the new year in the Chinese lunar calendar. So, we are set to embark upon 16 days of almost relentless revelry to try to get this Year of the Dragon off to an auspicious start.

As a little China-themed holiday treat, I therefore give you.... the opening scene of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, wherein Kate Capshaw (as this movie's heroine, Shanghai nightclub singer Willie Stone) performs Cole Porter's Anything Goes in Mandarin Chinese. I just learned that Ms Capshaw really did sing this herself. Good job, Kate! [I wonder who her dialogue coach was. We never remember the really important people in the credits.]

Of course, there's also a Lego version (although the song's in English, for some reason).

I just posted a rather more traditional salutation over on Froogville.

Positive feedback

2012-01-20T08:30:00.006Z

Via yesterday's Irish Independent, I learn that Sega has just launched in Japan a series of urinal games.

Yes, video games to be played while answering the call of nature. Special urinals have multiple pressure sensors in them to measure the direction and force of your urine stream, and this data is used to control one of a number of simple games you can choose from a console screen on the wall in front of you: things like creating a wind to blow up a young girl's skirt (ah, Japan!), hosing graffiti off a wall, or just measuring the power of your jet against that of your predecessor at the stall.

I wonder how long before we see these technological wonders appearing here in China?

Of course, for the local market, we might have to make a few changes, produce some different games.

I suggest....

Merry-Go-Round - where you are rewarded for directing your cigarette stub in circles around the drain for as long as possible before it finally comes to rest and clogs it.

Flood - in which you win a prize for being the first person to make an obviously completely clogged urinal overflow.

Golden Showers - where the aim is to get all of your widdle directly on to the floor rather than into the urinal.

And...

The Underpant Sprint - where sensors in the floor in front of urinal time how long you take before and after pissing, as you wrestle with belt, trousers and fly-less underpants.

What larks.

HBH 269

2012-01-20T00:58:00.000Z

Music and whisky:

Most reliable of friends;

Late night indulgences.

I have been falling into bad habits during the last week or so. Having no cash in hand, and with few friends around to go out and play with anyway, I have been staying home a lot in the evenings. So far, so good: living quietly, drinking little or not at all, cooking for myself, catching up on DVDs I bought a year or more ago... The trouble is, quite often my home cinema session will end by 10.30 or 11pm (or 11.30 or 12...), which is much too early for me to go to bed. So... I start listening to music on my computer. And I have a nightcap. And I get rather caught up in the music. And have another nightcap. And I somehow start feeling not very sleepy at all. And I keep thinking to myself one more song, one more drink. And I don't manage to drag myself off to bed until 3am.

This is no way to live, I know. I'm going to impose a 2am curfew on myself.

A rocking anniversary (with its own drink?!)

2012-01-19T08:28:00.011Z

A year-and-a-bit ago, I posted some Janis Joplin songs in tribute to the 40th anniversary of her untimely death.

Today, I happened upon online drinking bible, Difford's Guide, which informed me that today's notable event was... Janis's birthday. She would have been 69 today, quite the grand old lady. It would have been nice to see how her voice and her style might have matured; many of her contemporaries (Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Janis Ian) are still singing gorgeously.

Difford's recommends a special cocktail for the event - the Southern Tea-Knee. (Knee??!! What's that all about? I don't object to shortening the name to Tini; or even using the jokey Tea-Ni, since it does have tea in it. But Tea-Knee seems ludicrous, jarring.) It's mostly Southern Comfort (a tipple Janis was notoriously fond - somewhat over-fond - of), but throws in half-shots of Bombay Sapphire, Apricot Brandy, and Banana Bols, and then tops up with cold Earl Grey tea to introduce some tannic bitterness. Sounds interesting. I think I'd be inclined to up the Southern Comfort proportion very slightly, to stop the fruit flavours dominating (or, better, to add some straight bourbon, to stop the sweetness getting out of hand).

With or without a drink in hand, let us once again enjoy Janis's finest hour - Me and Bobby McGee. [I learned just recently that the song was in fact written by Kris Kristofferson, and 'Bobbie', the travelling companion/lover who sang the blues so affectingly was originally a girl. This excellent blog post by Maud Newton, in analysing the lyrical genius of Hank Williams, quotes the country star Roger Miller (a key figure in my childhood!) as being particularly admiring of this song; in fact, he had been the first person to have a hit with it. I am curious to hear what that was like, but also somewhat afraid to go looking for it on YouTube; that song belongs to Janis now - anyone else's interpretation is going to sound like a bit of a travesty. I should probably add this song to the growing list of nominations on this recent 'Great Lyrics' post on fellow Beijing-ren Bucketoftongues' music blog.]

There's also a nice live version here, though, unfortunately, with jarringly mismatched video; and this enchanting rarity, supposedly her first-ever recording of the song.

Starting the Wish List early

2012-01-17T08:20:00.081Z

OK, it is fully 9 months till my birthday, and over 11 months until Christmas rolls around again, but...

... if any of my readers were thinking of buying me a little something for the imminent Chinese New Year, or just as a thank-you for all the spiffing blog content I've turned out for you over the past year...

... then you could do worse than this:

Yes, a set of shot glasses commemorating six of the world's greatest tippling literary figures: Byron, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, W.B. Yeats, and Dorothy Parker.

They are produced by the quite splendidly named Unemployed Philosophers' Guild (is there any other kind?).

These chaps do lots of other great stuff too - such as a finger puppet of Munch's Scream figure, a template for creating images of the Virgin Mary on slices of toast, a 'Relativity' wristwatch (the hands stay still while the numbers move), and Freudian slippers. All of your gift needs taken care of on one site!

New 'Competition' Idea - Literary Drinkers

I can't help thinking that their shot glass set has overlooked some significant boozing writers. The American greats of the early 20th Century provide a particularly rich vein: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, and of course Hemingway. Going just a little further back, we might add Jack London as well. And more recently, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles Bukowski. From British shores, we could mention Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Lowry, and Jeffrey Bernard. Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess were known to imbibe a fair bit too, I think. P.G. Wodehouse, although he was not himself a heavy drinker, as far as I know, certainly appreciated a drink. And of course, from the Emerald Isle, we must have my favourite drinking writer, Brian O'Nolan.

So, quite a few to be going on with there. Any personal favourites you would add, readers?

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-16T00:48:00.014Z

"Say what you mean and act how you feel,

because those who matter don't mind,

and those who mind don't matter."

Theodor 'Dr Seuss' Geisel (1904-1991)

I've never really read any Dr Seuss (he's not such a big thing in England); but now I discover that he encapsulated the motto of my life!

A musical youth

2012-01-14T03:25:00.019Z

We weren't exactly a 'musical family': nobody played an instrument - although my mother used to sing a lot around the house, and I had a favourite cousin who played acoustic guitar for a bit in his teens. But there was not really any live music in my home environment. However, my parents had been busy acquirers of records at a certain stage of their lives: they had some hundreds of 45 rpm singles (very middle-of-the-road stuff, for the most part), and a few dozen albums (mostly film musical soundtracks - the entire Rodgers & Hammerstein songbook is probably hardwired into a remote corner of my brain). They seemed to have got out of this stage by the time I achieved consciousness: it was nearly all 1960s stuff. I hardly recall them buying anything in the 1970s; I used to buy them records.

I obviously had some affinity for music from an early age. When I was about 2 or 3 years old, we lived for a while with one of my grandmothers (the English one rather than the German one) who had an old upright piano in her parlour: I would 'play' that for hours at a time. HOURS. It must have sounded bloody awful, but I think I have probably never tasted such a pure and perfect happiness in my life since.

Within another couple of years, I had mastered the operation of my parents' big Pye Radiogram, and would spend whole afternoons working my way through their record collection (and getting my first taste of building playlists, since there was a stack-and-play feature which enabled you to pile 6 or 8 discs on the spindle at once, to be dropped on to the turntable in succession).

I was also fortunate, I suppose, to have a brother who was nearly 7 years older than me. That gave me some access to contemporary music that my parents would never bother with, and that would ordinarily have been outside the consciousness of someone so young. I disliked most of it at the time - or pretended to, to maintain the required levels of sibling antagonism. But I found a lot of it growing on me through repeated exposure, and after a while I began secretly playing some of my favourites from among his albums whenever he was out of the house. He it was who gave me my first taste of Queen, Pink Floyd, and Deep Purple. The strangely discomforting tinted pyramid poster from Dark Side Of The Moon was on his bedroom wall for several years (a bedroom that I shared with him for a year or two). I also remember being deeply disturbed by the burning man photograph on the inner sleeve art for Wish You Were Here (I was only 7 or 8 at the time). The bro had broader - and better tastes - than most kids his age, I think. He ignored most of the pop and rock fads of the early '70s, and concentrated on heavy rock. He even delved back a little into the past, collecting some classic late-60s stuff that he would have been just a bit too young for when it first came out: Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival were two of his other most important introductions to me.

But I didn't fully 'get' rock music for quite a while. It was an intermittent, and somewhat shamefaced pleasure - since my parents strongly disapproved, and none of my friends at school seemed to have any interest in it either. Punk happened just a bit too early - and too far away - for me. I admired the energy and iconoclasm of The Sex Pistols, but didn't really grasp their context or significance. (It took us 4 or 5 years to catch up: in the early '80s, I played the Malcolm McLaren role to a bunch of fellow 6th Formers, goading them into forming a band called Ded Lemming, and writing a number of songs for them [The only ones I remember now were called Tortoise In My Head and Don't Put Kitty In The Microwave - they might be worth a little post of their own at some point!]. It was a short-lived venture. By that time, punk was pretty much dead, and its memory being drowned in the first waves of synth-pop.) Jazz I knew only a little from TV, mostly from old movies (I think my parents had a token album or two of Louis Armstrong, and some Acker Bilk - a British jazz clarinetist who had broken through to 'easy listening' fame in the 1960s). Blues - destined to become my favourite thing - I'd hardly heard at all in my childhood.

No, the soundtrack of my schooldays was almost exclusively classical music. I used to wake up every morning with BBC Radio 3 (nothing knocks the drowsiness out of you quite like the William Tell Overture... which I'm sure was on the early morning show at least once almost every week!). And when I joined a mail order record club in the 6th Form, it was exclusively classical LPs that I bought; my 'introductory offer' purchase being the Tchaikovsky and Mendelsohn violin concertos, Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite, Bizet's Suites from Carmen and L'Arlesienne, and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. I bought myself a boxed set of Beethoven symphonies (Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic) for my 18th birthday, and "prepared" for my Oxford admission interviews by lying on my back in the living room and staring at the ceiling in a trance for hours at a time, while I listened to all 9 of them back to back... every day for about a week. (It seemed to work!)

I listened to a lot of Radio 4 as well (I think radio used to play a bigger part in our lives than TV back in the 1970s and early 1980s; I wonder if that's been lost now, with the explosion of digital music and the Internet?), and had encountered Tom Lehrer through the wonderful comedy anthology show Frank Muir Goes Into... He soon became another of my great enthusiasms. As did Instant Sunshine, a British comedy quartet who produced some fantastically witty and jaunty songs, and had their own Radio 4 series for a number of years. (Still going strong today, although one of the original members dropped out a decade or so ago.) The first book order I placed at Blackwell's, the venerable and rather stuffy university bookshop at Oxford, was for The Instant Sunshine Book (With Hints For Struggling Supergroups). I wonder if I still have that somewhere.

And then on TV, there was Neil Innes, whose spoof Beatles rockumentary The Rutles (All You Need Is Cash) is the 'Lost Ark' of television comedy (the music has all been reissued on CD, but, as far as I know, the film only ever aired once, and has not been released on DVD). Much the same fate befell The Innes Book of Records, a brilliant series of song pastiches accompanied by often surreal videos (was there not one of Frankenstein's monster in traditional Scottish dress doing a tippy-toe dance over crossed swordfish in a cave beside the sea? or did I just imagine that??). Two six-part series were made in the late '70s, and it was one of the great joys of my childhood; but it has rarely been seen since, as a result of a bitter rights dispute between Innes and the BBC.

In the 6th Form, my musical tastes had just started to branch out a little, tentatively, sporadically. A few of my friends had begun to unearth more 'obscure' stuff from the past few years: we'd play these new discoveries to each other in our studies, and share taped copies (home taping supported live music, you fools!!). The early ZZ Top albums were the one find that I remember from that phase, though; the song Fool For Your Stockings lodged in my brain particularly persistently. I suppose this - and occasional doses of Dr Feelgood - was my first sustained exposure to the blues; although I probably didn't realise that's what it was at the time.

Of course, it was only when I went up to university that things really exploded. It was only then that... a) I first met a whole bunch of people who were very nearly as musically omnivorous as I was, and b) I acquired a record-player of my own for the first time. Thereafter, mainly thanks to the miracle of the 'bargain bin', I was for a few years purchasing well over 100 albums a year.

And THAT is how my music tastes came to be as eclectic and diverse as this (a discussion of 'obscure gems' on another blog), and this (today's Song Lyrics Quiz on Froogville).

There is one further key element in the development of my enthusiasm for music: I was born in Hereford and grew up in Monmouth. Only a handful of musicians and music nerds are likely to grasp the significance of that. I think it deserves another post all of its own; so, I'll keep you in suspense for a little while. Be patient.

A student of history

2012-01-13T06:25:00.051Z

One of my journo chums is having a (slightly premature) birthday get-together today.

Casting around for some grander pretext to have a party TODAY, he came upon a Wikipedia article which suggested that the 'Great Fire of New Orleans' occurred on this day in 1830. Having visited NO a few times, I have absorbed a certain amount of information about its history - and I had never heard of this 1830 fire. Indeed, neither has Wikipedia: there is no separate article on this alleged conflagration. The two most famous fires in N'Awlins history, occurring just a few years apart, and both commonly known as 'The Great New Orleans Fire', were much earlier - in 1788 and 1794. I still haven't got to the bottom of that 1830 reference.

Searching for a more secure historical event we could tie our revels to, I turned up an interesting - and seemingly exhaustive - list of suggestions here. I particularly liked the publication of Zola's "J'accuse!" in 1898, the first commercial production of the Frisbee in 1957, and Pope Honorius II recognising the Templars as an 'Army of God' in 1128 as possible pretexts to raise a glass or several.

Our host has pointed out that it was also on this day - in 1968 - that Johnny Cash performed his famous Folsom Prison concerts. Which seems like a good excuse for a song, as well as a drink....

There doesn't seem to be any film footage of the Folsom shows, but you can listen to a recording here. This clip is from his San Quentin concert the following year - Folsom Prison Blues.

HBH 268

2012-01-13T00:57:00.013Z

Month of no drinking.

Poverty, not principle:

Home the pauper's jail.

I'm trying to survive through to the other side of Chunjie - the whole of January and the first week of February - on a paltry 4,000 kuai. I just might do it.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

2012-01-12T08:19:00.004Z

In recent ambles down Andingmennei (now becoming a fairly regular event, as it is the most convenient route into the city centre for me since moving to my new apartment) I have been looking out for the site of the old Room 101 - which had been a favourite stomping ground of mine (and of a number of my other drinking companions: The Man In Black, The Weeble, Crazy Chris, Mr Sex), very nearly my 'bar of the year' back in 2008. Unfortunately the bar's too numerous investors had bickered endlessly over how to make the best of the venue, eventually opting for a daft rebranding as restaurant/bar Ginkgo - a characterless and directionless venture that died on its feet. It staggered on for 18 months or so, before finally finding some Chinese businessmen to take it over; they kept the Ginkgo 'concept' for a number of months more, without doing anything to advertise or otherwise trying to drum up custom. That may have set some kind of record for the least profitable business in the city: I really think it might have gone a week or more at a time without a single customer, and I doubt if it ever turned over 1,000 rmb in a month.

But then, this lame-ass Ginkgo Mk. II abruptly disappeared, some time around the beginning of last year - disappeared so completely that I struggled to remember where it had been.

But now I've realised it is here - this cookie-cutter Chinese restaurant.

The thing that makes it so difficult to recognise is that the new owners have tackled the thorny problem of the otiose second storey... by demolishing it. I suppose their plan was to create a roof terrace that they can use in the summer; but I didn't notice it being put into service last summer, and it's bugger-all use to them during the long months of winter here. Still, they got rid of the second floor entirely!! That's a pretty radical re-design. I wish I'd thought to suggest it to the original Room 101 people; I'd always said the upstairs was one of the biggest problems with the place... but I couldn't get 'outside the box' enough to conceive of simply taking a sledgehammer to it.

Bravo to the new proprietors, I say. I must go and give this place a try sometime, to see if their cuisine is as innovative as their remodelling of the space.

The Memory Palace of Mr Froog

2012-01-11T02:51:00.020Z

It's funny how powerfully music can recall distant memories - more than poetry (which is a pretty strong trigger for me), more even than the sense of taste or smell.

I have been sundered from the bulk of my record collection for a little over 18 years now. I compiled most of it - somewhere in the range of 600-700 albums and a dozen or so EPs (no singles!!), I think - during the mid-80s, when I was an undergraduate. (I went through a spell in the later '90s of trying to replace - and add to - this collection on CD; mostly during the year I spent in Canada, where I took advantage of the ridiculously low prices [only 5 Canadian dollars per disc for the most of the stuff I bought] at that most wonderful of private music store chains, Sam The Record Man, which, unsurprisingly, went bankrupt a couple of years later.)

And yet, and yet... despite not having given it very much thought in nearly two decades, I find that I can still recall much of that collection in quite a lot of detail: where I first bought each record, who introduced me to the artist, which musicians were playing on the album, which tracks I particularly liked. (And that's just thinking about these records. Christ knows what reveries I might be transported into if I heard some of this stuff again after all these years. Listening to Roger Miller's King Of The Road now [one of the first songs I ever heard] takes me instantly back to sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, five years old, transfixed by a reverential awe for the enormous Pye 'radiogram' in front of me, and for the wondrous music coming out of it.)

This realisation has suddenly been brought home to me by my newest online gadfly, Bucketoftongues - whose thought-provoking (mostly*) music blog has pitched me into a series of long reminiscences over my favourite vocalists, favourite bass players, and the favourite 'obscure' highlights of my record-buying career.

Yes, it is all a bit like the compulsive nerdery of Rob, Dick, and Barry in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, but... well, it's FUN, dammit. In that way that only painful nostalgia for lost happinesses and lost youth can be.

Go and take a look. You might find yourself being sucked in too.....

* I had, of course, intended this 'mostly' to be read as referring forwards rather than backwards. Perhaps I should clarify: always thought-provoking and mostly [about] music.

Hitting the Naale on the head!

2012-01-10T03:05:00.002Z

The 'one and only' proclaims the banner at the top of the famous Newcastle beer's label. How ironic!

In China, you are not quite so unique as you had supposed, Caledonian Brewery Co.! Last week in my local supermarket, I spotted this familiar-seeming can below. And I have to say, at first glance, at a distance - I was fooled. The distinctive five-pointed blue star on the yellow background, the lettering, the name beginning with 'New...': that was more than enough for me. I really thought Newkie had started mass-market distribution in China. Even when I noticed the price was only 3.50 rmb per can (a fifth, at most, of what you'd expect for an import), I wanted to believe that this was an inadvertent slip by the store's staff, a bank error in your favour. Only on the third or fourth look did I realise that this product is in fact.... Newtaste Naale.... from the "USA Ale Development Company Limited".

I'm not sure if the Caledonian Brewery or the great country of the USA should be more aggrieved at this outrageous misrepresentation. This is what we call 山寨 - shanzhai: the fake or copycat products that are so ubiquitous here, and are mostly not quite good enough to fool anyone, but often cut significantly into the market share of the legitimate products they are aping anyway.

And what is this Naale like? Well, weird. It's a lot paler than Newcastle Brown, and what colour it has seems to have been created by the addition of a gloop of malt or caramel to the mixture. There is just a suggestion of the Newcastle Brown taste about it (though that might just be an illusion brought on by the similar packaging?), but very, very watered down. (It can't just be watered-down Newcastle Brown, can it? Well, this is China: it could be...) It's not exactly unpleasant; just odd.

Still, at 3.50 rmb for a half-litre can, it is VALUE.

The 2011 gigging year

2012-01-09T06:19:00.012Z

Beijing Daze's indefatigable Badr did a post at the end of last week on his favourite (and least favourite) gigs of the past year: an interesting selection.

Although we share an enthusiasm for the idea of live music, our specific tastes don't seem to coincide much, even in those areas (heavy rock) that we both like. In general, he's into the very heavy end of things, mosh-pit metal and punk, and tends to be a bit contemptuous of anything too melodically 'poppy'; I quite like pop-punk type stuff, things with a bit less aggression and a bit more tunefulness; but these days, in fact, I'm leaning mostly towards acoustic shows, jazz and folk. So... between the two of us, we've got just about everything covered!

Abaji's appearance at Jianghu last March was about the only thing that made it into both of our lists (my music rundown of the year was at the start of my '2011 Bar Awards' post). And even there, I think I was a little less bowled over than Badr; I felt the Armenian multi-instrumentalist was trying just a little too hard to be ingratiating, and, while it was an extremely entertaining evening, for me, the music didn't quite take off and fly.

I think I would have liked the performance of Norwegian band The Black Snakes, who everyone assures me were the highlight of Badr's superb summer party at 2 Kolegas, the 'dazeFEAST (which we must beg him to make an annual event)... but unfortunately I had to miss them because I was working early the next day.

It's very useful to have BD covering so much of the Beijing (and China) music scene for us, and that Review of the Year of his is well work a look.

I suspect we're both going to be at the big folk show at Mako this Wednesday (it's a benefit gig for a young Kazakh guy who's been seriously injured in a traffic accident and can't pay his hospital bills). See you there too?

Bon mot for the week

2012-01-09T00:36:00.013Z

"What I'm looking for is a blessing that's not in disguise."

Kitty O'Neill Collins

(who appears to be another of the Internet's great almost unknowns...)

Top Five Basslines

2012-01-07T02:36:00.020Z

A little New Year's musical treat for you!

Well, I've been pondering a post like this for ages, but the idea had dropped off my agenda for a while, and I've only just got around to resurrecting it. Of course, once I started thinking seriously about it, I couldn't limit myself to just FIVE. I think I'm going to sneak in six here; and I have enough nominations left over to fill one or two follow-up instalments later in the year...

[Thanks for inspiration to the formidably knowledgeable Bucketoftongues, another Beijing-based blogger (and copy writer/editor, it would seem), who I happened across for the first time a few days ago.]

Anyway, off the top of my head....

My Top Five (or so) Favourite Basslines

5=) My Baby Just Cares For Me

Here's the rather sweet claymation video from Nick Park's Aardman studio which helped to carry the classic Nina Simone version of the song to the top of the UK pop charts (well, No. 5, anyway) when it was re-released in 1987. Most of the bassline is carried by the piano, but if you listen carefully, there is a very mellow upright bass underlining it as well - though I can't discover who was playing this. (You can also hear an extended studio version here, or watch her tearing it up live at the Montreux Jazz Festival here.)

5=) Stand By Me

Here's a rare TV clip of Ben E. King performing his great hit; alas, the opening and closing are clipped a bit. Ruby informs me that his bass player was called Wendell Marshall. A year or so ago on Froogville I found another marvellous version of this song by the Playing For Change project, which supports street musicians.

4) I Scare Myself

Possibly my favourite Thomas Dolby track (and I'm a big fan): Matthew Seligman playing bass, from the 1984 album The Flat Earth. You should really listen to the album version to enjoy the bass in all its richness, and for genuine trumpet rather than synthesizer (the video isn't that interesting, and seems strangely just a little short); but this is quite a good live performance from Channel 4's great '80s music show The Tube (which gave Jools Holland his start as a presenter). It's also interesting to check out the original version by its composer Dan Hicks, with his band The Hot Licks.

3) Caramel

Yes, I've posted this on here before, in my 'Great Songs' series. But no apologies - it's a fabulous song, one of the marvellous Suzanne Vega's very best. And it all hangs on that lilting bossa nova bassline. I'm not sure who played this; two bassists are credited on her Nine Objects Of Desire album, Bruce Thomas (who used to play with Elvis Costello's band, The Attractions) and Sebastian Steinberg. Here's the video for the song; but there are some good live performances worth checking out as well, particularly this one from the TV show 'Sessions at West 54th'. You should also listen to the unaccompanied version (missing the bass, of course) from her recent series of Close-Up albums.

2) The Love Cats

Hmm, are all my selections here played on an upright bass? I think perhaps they are (I have a feeling Caramel might be an electric bass; but the rest are all definitely uprights). I wonder what that signifies?? There don't seem to be any good quality postings of the original video at the moment; this rather grainy MTV screening is the best of a very bad lot. However, this clip - from a German TV show called Bananas - is pretty good (apart from Robert Smith's refusal to even attempt to mime in sync!). Great stuff from Simon Gallup here. On reflection, I realise that the basslines are actually the thing I like most about The Cure. Robert's voice has always irritated me, but they have some great basslines.

Ah, but in the top spot, it can only be....

1) Fever

I discovered just the other day that Peggy Lee's bass player, Max Bennett, introduced this song to her and begged her to add it to her repertoire. That probably tells you all you need to know about what a fantastic bassline it is. The great lady, of course, made the song her own, adding half of the lyrics we know today herself. You can listen to the original recording here (accompanied by a montage of photos of Peggy). This, however, is an interesting - rather speeded up - live performance from the late '60s, with Max on bass and Jack Sperling on drums. No other accompaniment on this song: just a rhythm section, some finger snaps, and that wonderful voice.

Inventory

2012-01-06T03:12:00.047Z

Most of the guests at my little party last weekend were unusually generous in bringing booze, yet surprisingly restrained in their consumption.

Hence, I discovered the day after the revels that my apartment still contained:

10 large cans of beer

1 jug of leftover mulled wine

4-and-a-half bottles of semi-decent red wine

Half a bottle of medium dry sherry

A small bottle of Macedonian rakija

(made of plums, I would guess from the taste, although the label doesn't seem to specify; really quite pleasant)

A 180ml carton (yes, a carton!) of sake

A bottle of something called Snälleröds Vitvins Glögg

(which is seemingly a ready-made mulled wine mix from Sweden, but is strangely colourless)

and...

3 bottles of whisky (Scotch, Irish, American)

What exotic and well-travelled friends I have!

I also have a ton of fruit, nuts, and candies that I laid in to give the apartment something of a Christmas feel. And A LOT of leftover spicy pumpkin soup (a gallon or more, I would guess).

So, I've had little need to set foot outside the apartment this week. And I should be OK for booze until the other side of Chunjie.

HBH 267

2012-01-06T00:20:00.003Z

We wipe the slate clean,

Then hasten to pick up chalk

To scrawl new vices.

I've decided the whole 'New Year's Resolutions' thing tends to be counter-productive. My only resolution this year is to try to remain irresolute.

Half a party

2012-01-05T02:21:00.005Z

I had my first party in my new apartment last weekend - a 'warm-up' for New Year's Eve.

It was kind of low-key, ad hoc, informal ('chaotic' is probably the word, in fact), because I hadn't been sure that I was going to be well enough to go ahead with it, after being laid up in bed all over Christmas; and preliminary feelers I'd sent out a week or so earlier produced pretty much a zero response (though it seems China Unicom's SMS was getting overloaded around Christmas, and dumping a lot of messages off the queue; so, I'm trying not to take this as another snub from my notoriously unreliable friends); I'd planned just to invite my core male drinking chums - The Lads - but discovered that most of them (contrary to what some of them had originally told me) weren't going to be back from their hols yet; and the Chinese government had decreed that Saturday would be a working day, to make up for the fact that (inexplicably!) Monday 2nd was going go be a holiday; and everybody was sick with a vicious cold that's been going around. Nightmare!

Anyway, having discovered that only three or four of the eight or ten people I'd invited were actually going to be free (and they're not the kind of people you can completely rely on to turn up just because they've said they would!!), and having suffered something of a midweek relapse in my own seemingly neverending cough/cold... well, I'd pretty much given up on the idea. But then I started mentioning it to a few random people I happened to bump into or have contact with on Thursday or Friday... and I realised there were a few Chinese friends I owed a thank-you to for this or that (one of whom was leaving Beijing in a few days)... and I thought it would be nice to try and drag MB and LJ away from the bar for at least a couple of hours on this big holiday weekend.... and so, I found myself issuing a few more very last-minute invitations (very much 'the Chinese way' - maybe I've been here too long, if I'm picking up these bad habits!), and committing myself to going ahead with the thing barely 24 hours in advance. This made my Friday afternoon (shopping), Friday evening (cooking), and Saturday morning (cleaning, tidying, more shopping), more than a little bit fraught.

Once I get busy in the kitchen, I tend to get a bit carried away. And I'm terrible at estimating quantities. So... I made enough mulled wine and cream of pumpkin and ginger soup for about 30 people, even though I was only expecting a dozen or so. My diet this week has become a bit repetitive....

Still, it's nice to reassure myself that the new pad really is pretty easy to find (even The Chairman managed it!), and that the kitchen is reasonably functional for middling sized cooking projects. I'm hoping to have people over rather more often this year (my principal resolution, I suppose: try to entertain at home rather than going out so much).

This wasn't the 'housewarming' (so, don't feel aggrieved if you weren't invited). I'll probably do that in another couple of months or so, when the weather's started getting a bit more cheerful.

New Picks of the Month

2012-01-04T02:15:00.017Z

What were my best posts from the beginning of the year after the Olympics? Let's see...

From Froogville, I select this frippery on Actors who might play Froog on the movie screen.

On The Barstool, it's a particularly tough choice for this month. I think I'll go for A favourite metaphor revisited, an observation on how I view my relationship with a favourite bar exactly as I do a love affair.

[Close runners-up were this poem on Drying Out; this reminiscence of Hogan's, one of my favourite ever bars (in a suburb of Philadelphia); The Formula?, some romantic advice from a friend that I was scornful of trying to follow myself; and my pair of earth-shattering theories, the Three Pint Rule and The Three Month Rule.]

I hope you'll enjoy this month's little jaunt in the time-machine.

Mess

2012-01-03T09:58:00.002Z

It's amazing, isn't it, how even a small gathering of friends - a very small gathering - can completely trash a kitchen?

I spent most of New Year's Day in bed - to avoid trying to deal with this tidy-up.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for December

2012-01-03T08:08:00.000Z

December has often been an excessively busy blogging month for me, with little or no work to distract me, and lots of seasonal excuses for additional holiday-related frivolity. This year, I managed to keep myself in check reasonably well. Then again, being laid up in bed for two weeks with a horrific cold probably helped.

Anyway...

Last December, there were 38 posts and nearly 14,000 words on Froogville.

There were 32 posts and around 13,500 words on Barstool Blues (largely thanks to the bumper end-of-year Beijing Bar Awards post).

Ooh, and I see that just yesterday The Barstool acquired a new reader in Aubonne, a village in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. Please say 'hi' in the comments somewhere.

A New Year's bon mot

2012-01-02T02:38:00.000Z

"Hangovers are really more to do with regret than with alcohol poisoning. Relationship hangovers and job hangovers can be far worse than 'night before' hangovers. I think I have a hangover from the whole of 2011."

Froog

The Froog Bar Awards - 2011

2011-12-30T02:18:00.542Z

So, here it is - my fifth annual review of the best and worst of Beijing's bar scene.

I've trimmed things down quite a bit this year, dispensing with a number of categories. Partly, this is reflective of the fact that I've been out much less this past year, and am losing touch with - or interest in - many of the city's newer venues. Partly, though, it's down to the fact that things on the nightlife scene have become a bit static in the last few years. The shit bars remain shit; we're still waiting for the customerless Danger Doyle's and Nanluoguxiang's hilariously bad Wiggly Jiggly's to close; no-one has come up with a dafter bar name than Lafite Exotic English Bar; and so on. It's all the same as last year.

I've also given up the attempt to identify a 'Best Cocktail': the field is just too broad, and I'm not that much of a cocktail drinker.

There are, however, a couple of new categories this time: Least Surprising Closure and Best Happy Hour.

(I was also contemplating separating out the music stuff into a separate post... but, you know what, inertia won out!)

As ever, I aim to provoke (and sometimes, godammit, yes, to offend) as well as to enlighten, so please feel free to pitch in - and bitch in - down below in the comments if you have anything to add in regard to any of these opinions.

Best Live Music Venue

Winner: What Bar
I am very happy to have rediscovered this out-of-the-way little gem this year, after three or four years of complete neglect. This place certainly ass-whoops the competition in terms of longevity: it celebrated its 9th anniversary (or 8th, or 10th - depending on who you ask) a few months back. To be honest, I go there more for a quiet early evening drink when I'm walking back from Tiananmen than for gigs (which are ill-advertised, but nevertheless - in such a tiny space - often uncomfortably busy); but it has been the scene of a couple of the most fun shows I've been to this year. If you hit the right night - good band, modest crowd - there's nowhere better. And it also trashes the rest of the field for friendliness of welcome: the lady boss there is one of the best laobans in town.

Runners-up: The Bookworm, Jianghu, 13 Club, Hot Cat
I'd passed over The Bookworm in the past, as being only a very occasional venue for music events; but in the past year or so, in addition to Time Out's excellent monthly 'Sunday Salon' series on Chinese and classical music, they've been mounting a pretty regular series of Saturday gigs with a variety of jazz and folk artists - and it's proved to be really a very good venue indeed: decent sound, intimate vibe, attentive audience (pity the draught beer is so AWFUL!). Jianghu continues to be the most reliable of the venues that are readily accessible to me, and their Tuesday jazz nights have been going particularly well this year. Unfortunately, as they've become better known and their advertising is getting better, it's become impossible to squeeze in there for weekend shows - or whenever there's a major act on. D-22 had got over most of the problems that plagued it in its early years (terrible sound, terrible bar staff), but a couple of Chinese musicians I know have told me that it really seems to have lost its way over the last year or so: just not generating a buzz or drawing many big crowds any more; and now it's about to close. I always preferred the atmosphere of its less laowai-dominated next-door neighbour 13 Club; on those rare occasions when I drag myself up to the Wu, that is. I think 13 is the best venue in the city, but unfortunately is has become almost exclusively a heavy metal club - which is not really my thing. Hot Cat reminds me poignantly of the very first of the Wudaokou music bars, the short-lived, much lamented Loupe Chante: an engagingly cheap and grungy bar that just happens to have some very good rock'n'roll shows occasionally as well. Unfortunately, its programme is still a bit thin, and seldom well-promoted. [I always seem to overlook CD Jazz Cafe in this section, because I don't go that often, and it only does jazz; but it is very good.]

Worst Live Music Venue

Winner: Yugong Yishan

Runner-up: MAO Live House

2 Kolegas is getting back to winning ways (having trimmed down the outsize speaker stacks that for so long obscured their tiny stage); but their 18 months in the doldrums has completely broken my habit for heading out there. And their programming seems to have become very weak: they can't compete for the bigger names very often any more, so it's the same handful of bands week after week after week. Yugong Yishan continues to disappoint - or appal - with its lousy acoustics and posey, chattersome crowds. I have pretty much given up on the place: I can't imagine a band that could draw me back there now (certainly none of the local outfits; it would have to be someone really BIG). MAO Live House seems to have had some good gigs this year, but almost all in the raw punk or heavy metal categories, which have a strong local following but aren't really my cup of tea. The continued absence of any worthwhile bar or any air-conditioning have meant that I haven't been back there in ages - maybe not this year. Mako Live and The One continue to be much too far away and much too intermittent in their programming to register on many people's radars. Gulou newcomer Temple has been starting to piece together a decent schedule; but unfortunately, it lacks charm as a bar, and its dreadful acoustics restrict its potential as a gig venue. Recent openings Modernista and Beiluo Café show some promise, but are probably only going to be once-or-twice-a-week music spots like Salud, rather than dedicated gig venues. Ditto Za Jia - a great bar, but music is only ever going to be an occasional sideline there. Gulou 121, Zui Yuefang, and Tushuguan continue to be largely wasted opportunities - as, increasingly, is Jiangjinjiu (another place I've scarcely been to all year; a sorry indictment from someone who lives a short walk away, and used to be a weekly visitor). VA Bar I have very mixed feelings about: it has probably had the best regular programme of gigs of any venue this year, but it's such a charmless - often downright unfriendly - bar that I seldom feel it's worth a cover charge.

Best Gig of the Year

Winner: The Chicago Live! Jazz and Blues Show at CD Blues Café a few weeks ago (part of a week of arts events organised by Booey Lehoo)

Runners-up: The St Patrick's Day gig by Blackwater at Salud, and visiting Norwegian girl band VOM at What Bar in June

Others bubbling under were amiable world music maven Abaji at Jianghu early this year, Ajinai playing at the short-lived Amilal spin-off Aluss in the spring, local folksters Dawanggang opening for Huun-Huur-Tu at Yugong Yishan a few months back and also playing some great stuff at this year's Ditan Folk Festival, Xiao He quite a few times (the best, I think, was his opening for Jeffrey Lewis [see below] at Yugong), and solo Mongolian folk artist Gangzi (probably the most consistently impressive performer around at the moment) quite a few times. Perhaps the most magical evening of all, though, was the one where my old friend David Mitchell gave a low-key solo show on guitar and tambur at Amilal - basically playing just for me and a few friends - during the October holiday week.

I gather The Cranberries were probably the pick of the year's stadium gigs, but I didn't get to see that. Likewise, I didn't really do the festival scene this year, since most of them had been shunted way out of town; Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the Intercity Music Festival in Chaoyang Park in September provided the one standout open-air music event for me this year. I imagine Cowboy Junkies were as awesome as they always are at the Kama Love Festival in June, but that was the most hideously organised event I've ever been to, and ill health (and raging dehydration: there was NO WATER available!) forced me to quit before they came on - my hugest regret of the century. My second hugest regret is having missed the jam between Black Cat Bone and DH & The Hellcats at Yugong Yishan in September, a collaboration which Beijing Daze memorably dubbed 'Hellbone'! That was, by all accounts, a thoroughly awesome show, and very nearly the last-ever appearance for the now disbanded BCB.

Worst Gig of the Year

Winner: Jeffrey Lewis at Yugong Yishan in August

This guy appears to aspire to be a sort of Tom Lehrer of the slacker generation, aiming for self-consciously 'clever' lyrics and an arch humour. Unfortunately, he's merely lame and obvious. I observed to BeijingDaze's Ruby at the time that I could imagine being mildly diverted by him for a few songs if we were still in college and he showed up to play for free in our favourite coffee shop. But having to pay top dollar for him at Yugong, my patience was exhausted very quickly: I think I walked out after about 20 minutes. The only consolation of the evening was a little dose of genuinely intelligent weirdness from Xiao He doing the warm-up.

Runner-up: Gia (reviving the Hang On The Box name) at Hot Cat early in the year

I can't remember exactly when this one took place; it might possibly have been last year. And it's probably not really eligible for 'Worst Gig of the Year' anyway, because there weren't any expectations to disappoint here: everyone knows Gia is a screeching talent-bypass. On this night, the other two bands were OK, so I just stepped outside for most of the 'HOTB' set.

Best Bar Food

Winners: Flamme, The Den

Runners-up: Luga's, First Floor, The Irish Volunteer

Last year's winner Sand Pebbles has disappointed most times I've been this year. The food is good value, and there are a few things I really like on the menu; but service out of the kitchen is chaotic, and you often wait a long time for something that is barely warmed through. First Floor's grub is a bit variable in quality (AVOID the nachos!), and seriously overpriced; but the steaks, burgers, and ribs are amongst the best to be had (not high praise in Beijing, but...). The Irish Volunteer has some very good dishes (the Thai curries added this year are almost worth the long hike out to Lido on their own), but there's nothing else about the bar that's ever likely to entice me there. Luga's worthy-but-dull burritos, and The Den's reassuringly unchanging and refreshingly affordable menu of bar food standards continue to be front-runners year after year. I feel slightly awkward about giving the top spot to Flamme, since it is really a restaurant rather than a bar, and so its food is naturally a class-and-a-half above any of these other picks. However, it does also have an extremely good bar; and the veggie side-dishes are very reasonably priced. Hence, I find myself more often eating a snack at the bar than sitting down at a table for a full meal. [The pizzas at MaoMaoChong are very, very good, but... well, that's all they do; and I don't somehow think of pizza as 'bar food'; and it's pretty much impossible to get one unless you go down there early evening before they get too busy.]

Best Place To Drink While Eating

Winners: Fodder Factory, Home Plate BBQ

Runner-up: Biteapitta

The Russian places - Traktirr and White Knights - have rather dropped off my circuit this year, as the drinking buddies who used to like to eat there have left... and as the quality of service and portion sizes has progressively dwindled. Fodder Factory feels like a little bit of a cheat, because it's impossible to get to, outside the city limits. But it is a great place to get sloshed over/after a meal: come for an early dinner, stay for 4 or 5 hours! Home Plate is a major arrival on the scene this year, and might have won in the 'Best Bar Food' category... if it actually had a bar. Definitely a great place to suck back a few cold ones before, during, or after a light meal, though - especially when it's warm enough to sit outside on the sidewalk. I frittered away a few weekend afternoons there during this year's mild autumn. My one gripe with the place is that they try to stock too many beers in one tiny fridge, and thus invariably run out of the beer you want - or run out of cold ones, anyway - very quickly. Biteapitta continues to be one of the only places around Sanlitun that regularly draws me back for its food.

Best Place To Go For A Cocktail

Winner: Flamme

Runners-up: Mai, MaoMaoChong

Flamme, for me, continues to be head-and-shoulders above the competition, even now that Paul Mathew has transitioned from being a hands-on manager to an occasional supervisor/consultant/'guest barman'. He's trained up the charming Coco and Sophie very well, and his recipes are the best in town. I know Twilight is very good too, and I'm sure George's and Migas are as well; but they have insufficient magic to entice me into a long cab ride across town. Apothecary is too expensive and too up itself; I haven't been there in over a year, but nothing I hear from others encourages me to give it another chance. MaoMaoChong is a great resource to have in my neighbourhood, but most of their mixes tend towards being too sweet for my taste (I prefer their winter specials - when hot'n'sweet is what you want to keep the cold and the 'Beijing throat' at bay! - to their summer ones). MMC may have some serious competition now, with newcomer Mai having just opened up in an even nicer hutong space (and even nearer to my apartment!).

Best Place For Sitting Outside

Winner: Home Plate BBQ

Runner-Up: Alba

Still rather a limited category for me, alas. Hutong restaurants with outside seating are still woefully few and far between after the Olympic crackdown on sidewalk 'clutter'. There aren't many bars with decent rooftops in my 'hood any more, either. I gather there are lots of fancy-schmancy places with terraces around Sanlitun and Gongti these days, but they're probably all a bit out of my price bracket, and I don't like that part of town anyway. The outside seating area is Home Plate's main attraction (see above under 'Best Place To Drink While Eating'), but they had a lot of hassles with the local chengguan arbitrarily shutting that down during their early months; let's hope we'll be free of those interruptions next year. I find the food at Alba, apart from the desserts, mostly fairly uninspiring; but it does have a great roof terrace, and is thus a fairly regular weekend brunch spot whenever the sun shines.

Best Happy Hour

Winner: Flamme

It's got a bit shorter (finishing at 7.30pm rather than 8pm now). They've never been very good at advertising when their special promotions are on (has that 'all day happy hour' or 'extended happy hour' on Tuesdays been completely discontinued now??). Things are getting a wee bit more expensive (the 330ml of draft Stella has sneaked up from 25 to 30 rmb). And they've recently introduced a cover charge too (an utterly trivial 10rmb, but it still rankles slightly). However, it is the only proper Happy Hour in the city: half price on everything - including the superb cocktails. Nothing else comes close.

Runners-up: The Den, Mississippi

The Den deserves kudos for having the longest-running and most consistent Happy Hour. I think they've moved the start time back from 4pm to 5pm, but basically it's been exactly the same deal ever since I came here: half-price, or very nearly half-price, on very nearly everything. Mrs Hippy (as I like to think of it) only knocks off about a third of the price for its Happy Hour tariff, but it's already a bit cheaper than The Den on its regular tariff. It has the additional advantage of being much less well-known (and is thus often virtually deserted). And its Happy Hour runs from 4pm to 11pm (which I feel is really a bit too long; but if you want to get completely lashed for as little as possible, this is the place).

Least Surprising Closure

Winner: July's

The second most awful and consistently customer-free bar on Nanluoguxiang has finally succumbed to economic realities. Wiggly Jiggly's, however, somehow still shambles on.

Worst Bar

Winner: The Stumble Inn
Which also, oddly enough, won 'Best Bar' in The Beijinger's (rigged??) poll earlier this year. There's no accounting for taste! I've hardly been in this year, so dismal an impression did it make on me in its opening six months; however, no-one I've spoken to who has visited more recently has anything good to say about it. Food, prices, and service all seem to provide regular sources of complaint. And it's upstairs in a mall.

Runner-up: Drei Kronen
How does this overpriced Bavarian theme-park keep going???

Additional Runner-up: BeerMania
In the old days, it was unassuming, it had no delusions of grandeur. The original space was at least cosy, projected a sort of ramshackle charm. The new, vastly expanded venue has the ambience of a college cafeteria. The beer list is irrationally long, and overpriced - and, of course, none of the staff knows how much anything costs!

Award in Perpetuity for Consistent Vileness

Centro
I always do this, to open up the 'Worst Bar' category for other contenders.... I have found Centro's inadequacies, year after year, across the board, in every aspect of its operation (bad layout, bad decor, bad acoustics, bad service, weak drinks, exorbitant prices) to be just flabbergasting. I don't understand how a place can be so bad for so long - and still have any customers. I assume it only attracts businessmen staying at the Kerry Hotel of which it is part, newbies who don't know any better, and well-to-do idiots who are so wedded to familiar home comforts that they want to spend all their time in a Western hotel bar even though it's a very poor Western hotel bar. It had looked like it might have closed for good this year (it's now getting its arse kicked by other bar options in the CBD, especially upscale club Xiu); but, after a long 'refurbishment' hiatus, it's now back again - and almost certainly as DISMAL as ever.

Most Sadly Missed Departures of the Year

Winner: No. 8 Beer Garden
Although, in fact, this little-known open-air terrace beside Gongti Beimen may perhaps have foundered in 2010; we had such a shitty summer I didn't get over to Gongti much (and I was distracted by the World Cup, and a bad back, and a spell off alcohol: so, scarcely had a summer at all). I only noticed the site had been redeveloped into a restaurant this year.

Runners-up: Ned's, Reef (?)
Yes, very sad to see the cheery little Aussie cubby-hole on Nanluoguxiang disappear - although I gather Stevo made a tidy sum on the buyout; good on him. And, oh my god, Reef is gone?? I just noticed last night that it's been gutted - don't yet know what the story is there. But it looks bad.

In the music scene, of course, we've had little but bad news, with some of Beijing's best - and most fun - bands, Black Cat Bone, The Amazing Insurance Salesmen, the No Name Trio, and Rustic (at least, as we have known them till now) all calling it a day, and Ziyo/Free The Birds looking moribund.

The demise of long-time Lido favourite, Tom's DVD Store, was also a sorry blow.

And on a personal note, I said goodbye to JK, the creator of best bar in Beijing, 12 Square Metres, and to KP, my oldest friend in China. A very sad year.

Party of the Year

Winner: The inaugural 'dazeFEAST at 2 Kolegas
Food, booze, friends, music, and perfect weather. Badr and Ruby are now honour-bound (and goaded by death threats) to make this an annual event.

Runner-up: Nick Bonner's b'day bash at Great Leap Brewing
The Koryo Tours supremo is an all-around top bloke, and the surprise party for his birthday (50th?? Surely not?!) at the end of September drew an exceptionally diverse and jolly crowd.

Find of the Year

Winner: Mai
In its first few weeks of 'soft opening', Mai really was almost impossible to find. The door to the street was usually not open, and sometimes not unlocked (even when it was supposed to be). The first time I went in, I'm not sure if he even had the red lanterns up. And then the lanterns were tiny, easy to ignore; the place looked like it might be a restaurant, if it was anything. I rather miss that initial speakeasy vibe - now Jeff's put an illuminated sign outside, he'll be starting to attract riff-raff.

Runner-up: Za Jia
Not actually that hard to find, but the absence of a sign outside makes it possible to wander past without noticing it on your first visit.

There were many others too, ultimately less worthy but intriguing oddities nonetheless.

Most Promising New Bar

Winners: Mai, Za Jia
Both have marvellous hutong spaces (though Za Jia has the richer decor, the warmer ambience), both are indecently convenient to where I live (though Mai has the advantage on that, since my move in November), both have very cool owners. It's pretty well impossible to choose between them at the moment. Although I suspect that, if Mai fully lives up to its promise (it's only a month old, for heaven's sake!), it will edge out all rivals next year - for its fine selection of imported beers and its very good and reasonably priced cocktails.

Runners-up: The James Joyce, Temple, Modernista

Modernista is a bit too airy and European in flavour for my taste; but it looks to be aiming to put on a good number of live music shows, and may well establish itself as a decent alternative to Salud. Temple is grungy and also does live music shows, yet somehow it's failing to call to me - perhaps not grungy enough? Or not cheap enough? It has the potential to become the best dive bar in the district (er, the only dive bar...), but I'm doubtful whether it will realise this. The James Joyce is a very welcome new alternative to The Den, The Tree, and Paddy O'Shea's; but its charming Malaysian landlady is its strongest card. No ambience has yet developed there, the service is haphazard, and the food is so crazily expensive that nobody ever orders any. However, it's still early days. We must keep our fingers crossed for it.

Barperson of the Year

Winners: Coco and Sophie at Flamme
(See above, under 'Best Place To Go For A Cocktail')

Bar Owner of the Year

Winners: Michael and Lauren of 12 Square Metres
I had been distraught at the prospect of losing both my favourite bar - second home! - of the last three years and its owner, JK, who had become one of my best mates. But I have to say, Mike and Lauren have proven to be superb replacements, far better than we could ever have dared to hope. They're an absolutely charming pair; and, in many ways, the bar is actually a little better than before. They're exerting themselves rather more to drum up new custom (a monthly Book Club, occasional movie nights and live music performances, a whisky tasting, a theme party for Halloween); and their own - small but very diverse - circle of friends has given us a much-needed infusion of new blood.

Runner-up: Chad of Fubar and Grinder's
Grinder's has failed to impress me, and I'm a very irregular visitor to Fubar these days; but you have to give the big guy credit for managing to run two successful bars simultaneously. He's one of the most astute operators on the Beijing scene (though again, that's not necessarily high praise).

Bar of the Year

Winner: Fubar
To be honest, I've hardly gone there this year, compared to my frequency of visits when it first opened. But I like it a whole lot better since the 2010 remodelling; it's much cosier, and that mezzanine is a great use of space. It is now about the only bar in Sanlitun/Gongti that could tempt me to cross town; the only place that always seems to have a good crowd in, mid or late evening; the only place that seems to be invariably well spoken off by a broad mix of people. Yet again, it seems Mr Lager is doing a lot of things right.

Runners-up: Er, many, and none. I am reluctant to revisit past selections in this category - although 12 Square Metres, Salud, Amilal, El Nido, and the Pool Bar are all still exerting their charm. I considered the supposedly likeliest 'contenders' - mostly notably El Nido, First Floor, and Great Leap Brewing - in this post a few weeks back. Though several places have created a lot of buzz for one reason or another, none of them, for my money, has been an unequivocal success.

I suppose many people would put MaoMaoChong (City Weekend's 'Bar of the Year' winner) in the frame as well. Much as I love the place, I somehow just never think of it as 'a bar'. It still, for me, has more of a bistro feel, even though they've given up the idea of positioning themselves as a pizzeria (what with the hopeless constraints of that tiny kitchen and the completely inadequate two-at-a-time oven). Their spirits and cocktail selections are great, but the beer list is very limited; and I can't see myself giving my top award to a place that doesn't have anything on draught. Maybe next year I might rethink - I almost feel they need a special category all of their own!

There we have it. Any comments, queries, abuse??

HBH 266

2011-12-30T00:25:00.018Z

The agents of change

snatch our memories from the street.

Favourite bars vanish.

Walking home last night, I was saddened - shocked, appalled - to see that Reef, one of the oldest and most popular bars on Nanluoguxiang (the 'Yacht Club', as it was affectionately known to my friends and me), appears to be demised. Everything seems to be gone from inside, including the bar itself. I can't imagine why Chen would think he needed such a thoroughgoing refit. So, I must assume that he's been bumped out by an inflated rent demand, and that the space is about to become yet another upmarket boutique.

The Nanluoguxiang we knew and loved is all but gone. I expect it will have been swept away entirely within another couple of years. I don't want to be around to see it happen.

So, farewell then... D-22

2011-12-29T02:50:00.014Z

The 'big news' on the music scene this week is the apparent confirmation that the long rumoured closure of Wudaokou's trendiest music venue, D-22, is now imminent - probably some time early in the New Year.

I wonder if this has been on the cards for a long while; perhaps the owners, knowing the lease was up, had been losing interest in the place, starting to pursue other options. A couple of people in bands have told me that D-22 has been in the doldrums for a year or more, that the energy seemed to have drained out of the project, and the crowds weren't coming any more.

It's always sad to see the number of music bars get smaller rather than bigger; sad, too, to see a place go under that's been around for more than five years now.

I liked the intensity the place could sometimes achieve, with people packed at the front around that tiny stage - or hanging over the balcony behind it. And, after a very ropey start over their first year or two, they did eventually manage to get their act together in getting the sound system to work properly and finding some decent bar staff.

But, for me, it was never a great venue. The long narrow space meant you couldn't see much unless you managed to push your way down to the front. The mezzanine made the acoustics very muddy, unless you managed to push your way right down the front. Unnecessarily long bills and maddeningly late starts would often mean you'd have to hang around till 2am to see a decent band come on.

Worst of all, the place seemed to me to become almost immediately very incestuous and self-satisfied. In theory, the idea of providing a home base to incubate promising student bands is all well and good. But I'm not convinced how well it worked in practice; for my money, the roster of 'house bands' never had enough quality or diversity. It was mostly just a lot of second raters copying each other; and thinking they were pretty cool because they were drawing big crowds of foreign students from the nearby universities. Carsick Cars were generally reckoned to be the best of the "D-22 bands" - and I didn't rate them.

During the first two or three years they were open, I lost count of the number of times I found myself up in Wudaokou on a gig night, wandered past D-22 to see who they had on.... and ended up going to next-door 13 Club instead. Better space, better bar, lower door fee, bigger crowd - always fun times. 13 has always tended to draw more of a Chinese crowd, too. I think the thing that used to piss me off most about D-22 in recent years was that, on a weekend, the crowd would very often seem to be 70% or 80% laowai. When that happens, you're doing something wrong; there are lots of local kids who love this music too, but you've got to make it affordable for them.

Looking back over six years of gigs there, I think I've probably only had 4 or 5 really good nights (the best being a launch event for Arrows Made Of Desire's first CD, at which I got utterly wrecked on tequila shots with a bunch of Swedes...), and a similar number of rather mixed experiences (good bands/ shitty bar service, good bands/ show going on much too late, bands half good/ half bad); the other 15 or 20 shows I went to there were painful to endure.

So, sorry, D-22 - to be honest, you're not going to be much missed. I hope that something better is going to come along in your place.

Return of the Harmonica Man

2011-12-28T10:05:00.003Z

Laurent Maur, one of the best jazz harmonica players in the world, is back in town again. I caught a few shows by him when he visited around this time last year, and he was quite spellbinding (check out the video clip embedded in that earlier post).

He played a small show last week at Jianghu, but I only found out about that at the last minute, and was feeling too ill to go. I hadn't heard of any other gigs scheduled. Last night, I received a fortuitous tip-off from one of the punters in the bar that he was jamming with the Hot Club de Beijing at Salud; so glad I caught a half hour of that at the end of the evening, but now I'm hungry for more of his playing.

I'm not sure how long's he's around this time. I hear he might be heading home to France early in the New Year. But I gather he's slated to play at Modernista on Thursday, and East Shore Jazz Café on Saturday. I'll have to go to at least one of those.

[Thanks to Jean-Seb for letting me know about these two gigs.]

Froog's Christmas Solution (No. 22 in the neverending series...)

2011-12-27T08:27:00.005Z

Froog's solution to being abandoned by all his friends, and having nothing much to do over Christmas in a foreign country, and being too wretchedly ill to fancy going out anyway....

Spend the entire (four-day!) weekend at home, around two-thirds of it in bed... with a bottle of whiskey on hand for comfort...

When some people remarked to me via SMS that the whiskey-in-bed option sounded quite enviable, I observed, "Just so long as people don't start to think 'Jim Beam' is my gay porn star lover!"

The worst business card in the world?

2011-12-27T03:37:00.002Z

Take a look at this.

Does this guy actually want anyone to find his bar? Does he want a successful business?

It's not the hideous green-and-white colour scheme I object to. (Well, it is; but there's so much more...)

It's not the inaccuracy of the map, or the fact that it's in Chinese only. These things we get used to. (Although anywhere that courts a laowai customer base really ought to do biliingual promotion. And this chap has chosen an English name for his establishment and highlighted 'pizza' on his menu...)

No, it's the utter illegibility of the key contact information. The phone numbers are in a font that is only about 1.5 mm high, and extremely thin. I still have pretty acute eyesight, but I strained my eyes trying to read this. There is not a chance in hell that any Chinese patron would be able to.

Instant FAIL.

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-26T00:35:00.007Z

"If there is a virtue in the world at which we should always aim, it is cheerfulness."

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T00:32:00.002Z

I don't think I shall be celebrating quite this heartily. But that's what our imaginations are for.

A Merry Christmas to all my readers!!

Christmas (anti-)cheer

2011-12-24T01:28:00.003Z

A bar owner acquaintance of mine several years ago introduced me to this antidote to seasonal jollity, a song called Christmas Sucks, ostensibly by Tom Waits and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus. I mentioned this way back in the early days of the blog; but I couldn't find audio or video to embed back then, so just reprinted the lyrics. Now that everything is on YouTube (perhaps the only progress the world has seen in the last five years), I can finally let you hear the song.

But - shock, horror! - I discover that it's not really Tom and Peter after all. The song is by a band called Porn Orchard (GREAT band name!): Murphy is impersonated by their vocalist Ted Hafer, and Waits by guitarist Curtiss Pernice.

The bottle is empty. The sleigh has a flat.

The stripper in my bed is ugly and fat.

Great stuff!

But just in case fake Tom is not good enough for you, here's the real thing: a vintage performance from the 1970s - Silent Night and Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis. [I posted this once before, but it bears repeating.]

A labour of love

2011-12-23T03:10:00.003Z

My new favourite barman - Jeff, at the dangerously nearby hutong cocktail haunt Mai - asked me if I could give him some jazz to play at the bar.

Could I?! Well, I wasn't all that sure. Jazz has always been something of a minority interest in my music collection; I'm certainly not any sort of expert. And the majority of my music collection - very nearly all of my jazz - is on vinyl, and back home in the UK in a friend's barn. I have just about nothing on my computer. But I said I'd see what I could do.

And as I progressed with my unpacking, I discovered that I did in fact have a surprisingly large number of jazz records on CD. So, at the beginning of last week, I set to ripping them all on to my computer, so that I could copy them to a USB for Jeff. And it took me about two days.

There are nearly 1,200 tracks (and I took some trouble to weed out duplicates; of course, there are various versions of classic songs by different artists, and a few different versions - or 'alternate takes' - of a song by the same artist, but no two tracks are identical). That's around 70 hours of music. Most of it is very trad and mellow, although there's quite a bit of variety. Billie Holiday probably takes the largest share, although Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, and the majestic Cape Verdean moma singer Cesária Évora are running her close. Sinatra, Miles Davis, Fats Waller, and, of course, Louis Armstrong are also heavily featured. Those seven or eight artists probably account for nearly half of the total. But there are twenty or so others who contribute an album or two each, and another four or five dozen who crop up just for an occasional song.

There's an Edith Piaf anthology, and a double album of other great French chansons of the '30s and '40s: Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier, Arletty, and so on. There's an album of Argentinean tango classics. There's quite a lot of Cuban music: old school stuff from the 1950s and the 'Buena Vista Social Club' revival of more recent times. There are also a few more modern things: Thomas Dolby's mellow cover of Dan Hicks's I Scare Myself, the reinvented cocktail jazz of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the irresistible bossa nova of Suzanne Vega's Caramel, and the gorgeous folk/jazz ballads of the short-lived Eddi Reader/Mark E. Nevin collaboration Fairground Attraction.

Jeff, though, isn't sure if he'll use any of this. He seems to think modern punters prefer 'chillout lounge' stuff with their cocktails - and he may be right. Oh dear.

But if, next time you're in there, you should happen to hear... Coleman Hawkins, Julie London, Stan Getz, Dinah Washington, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Etta James, Eva Cassidy... that was me. Enjoy.

HBH 265

2011-12-23T00:21:00.000Z

Ground glass in the throat!

Alcohol's the only balm:

Breakfast hot toddy.

I am mildly ashamed of myself, but... this is the most miserably persistent cough/cold/sore throat I've had in ages, and I don't seem to have any other medicine in the house.

In fact, I don't even have any decent alcohol. We're talking an apple-cinnamon tea toddy with a shot of Jingjiu. Not the most wonderful tasting drink in the world, but it gets the job done. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to bed shortly and attempt to get some of the sleep I didn't really manage last night.

Looks like it's going to be an under-the-duvet Christmas for me this year...

Top Five New Arrivals

2011-12-22T02:52:00.008Z

As a prelude to my forthcoming 2011 Bar Awards, here's a quick rundown of the most welcome - or at any rate, the most significant - changes on the scene this past year.

I have been grumping for a while that things have got rather static in the last few years, that there haven't been many exciting new openings.

While that's still largely true - no newcomers at all around Sanlitun or on Nanluoguxiang? - there have been a handful of openings this year that at least have the potential to have quite a major and lasting impact.

I won't do a numbered countdown this time, because each of these places is of a very different type, and it's therefore difficult to compare them or put them in any meaningful rank order. Instead, I'll attempt a chronological order.

The Top Five New Arrivals on the Beijing F&B scene in 2011

Great Leap Brewing

Craft brews on draught in a great courtyard setting - it's won over many hearts. It is hoped this may usher in a proliferation of microbreweries around the city, and the possibility of regular bars being able to start stocking locally-produced craft beers. I'm afraid I'm disappointed that Great Leap concentrates on novelty flavours rather than on beer that is more traditional in style and genuinely characterful. Most of their brews are off-puttingly expensive, and just not very nice.

Temple

A large-ish dive bar in the Gulou neighbourhood, with ambitions of becoming a major music venue - it's got everyone's hopes up. Well, it's had our hopes up for well over a year now, since Clément first started looking for a space to build his dream in. Unfortunately, it's not a great space: it's an ugly, windowless box, with severe - possibly insurmountable - problems with its ventilation and acoustics. It's also fighting against the upstairs in a mall stigma, and against the obscurity of its location: we're not really a speakeasy, we're just very hard to find, and we don't have a sign outside....

Home Plate BBQ

The best American diner-type place in town, by far (though there's not a lot of competition): hardly surprising this place has so quickly built a following. They had a lot of problems early on with their chengguan closing down their outside seating area for days at a time; hopefully, that won't plague them again next summer. A more pressing concern is that they don't have that much space inside, or any bar as such; or very much beer storage capacity (only ONE fridge?? Come on, guys!). An expansion venue is urgently needed.

The James Joyce

One of the very rare attempts to launch a proper pub around Sanlitun (or anywhere else for that matter): its custom is building slowly. Actually, if we disregard Danger Doyle's (which is just ludicrously awful) and Nearby The Tree (which is a 'spillover' from its parent venue around the corner), the last such newcomer was Paddy O'Shea's - which is now 3 or 4 years old. And the last one before that was the transplanting of The Tree from Sanlitun Nanjie - which is, what, 8 years or so ago now; and it had quite a few years of history on Nanjie prior to that. And the only other surviving representative in this category is The Den, which is as old as the hills. At present, there are a lot of things wrong with the Joyce; but not nearly as many as there are with its rivals, The Den and The Tree. It does have - by a country mile - the best pint of Guinness in town. And it provides a very welcome - and, thus far, mercifully uncrowded - alternative for watching TV sport.

Mai

A cocktail bar that's not too prissy to keep a decent beer list too? In a siheyuan? 12 minutes from my home? Thank you, Santa!

Christmas comes early

2011-12-19T09:08:00.000Z

My friend DD threw her annual kids' Christmas Party for friends of her little boy this weekend. I am a soppy fool around young children, and the afternoon did much to revive spirits which had been flagging badly for a week or more. Also, I was grateful this year to be excused playing Santa, as I've been called on to do once or twice before. That's fun up to a point, but it is a lot of additional responsibility and stress that I didn't fancy trying to deal with this year.

Then MB and LJ, the new folks in charge down at my favourite bar, threw a freebie lock-in party for a small group of friends and regulars last night. That was great fun - and dangerously alcoholic.

Unfortunately... we may have peaked too early.

There's now nothing on the social calendar for the next 12 days. The infamous Big Frank has cancelled a plan to pop over from Korea. The Chairman is heading off down to south China to visit his elder brother. The Choirboy has returned to the bosom of his family for the holidays - lucky, lucky bastard! Ditto The Weeble, The Man In Black. The city has emptied out. And there's absolutely bugger-all to do.

Christmas is a bit of a non-event around here.

But I have one of the shittiest colds in recent memory, so I'm not likely to be able to go out anywhere for a while anyway. Grump, grump, grump.

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-19T00:26:00.005Z

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

See what you missed!

2011-12-17T03:02:00.002Z

Here's a great clip of Andrew "Jnr Boy" Jones in action. He was the highlight of Thursday's Chicago Live! jazz & blues show at CD Blues Café.

HBH 264

2011-12-16T00:10:00.004Z

Spirits lift at last,

After weeks in the doldrums.

Old friends, good music.

Last night's jazz and blues concert was very nearly as good as I'd hoped (I didn't much care for the female vocalist who came on in the middle, but blues guitarist Junior Boy Jones got the joint jumping with his closing set, and all the supporting musicians were excellent), but what made the evening especially enjoyable was the unexpected appearance of several friends among the audience - including one who had supposedly abandoned us for good a year or so ago, but has just returned.

Despite the lack of publicity, and the icy weather, there was a very good turnout - slightly too many for comfort, in such a cramped venue as CD Blues, at least at first. Unfortunately, many of these seemed not to have come for this event. The place appears to have become a trendy spot for Chinese yuppies to hang out, many of whom don't have much interest in the music: several left noisily in the middle of sets, even in the middle of a song; and one chap, sat right up front by the stage, was working on his laptop throughout, paying the musicians no attention at all. I've never warmed to this venue, anyway: the drinks are a bit too pricey, and the space is very awkwardly laid out - with poor access to the bar, and poor sightlines to the stage from much of the room. And if this is the sort of clientele they are drawing, I won't be going back in a hurry.

But I was very glad to have caught this Booey Lehoo show (my translator friend The Weeble was good enough to explain the reference for us yesterday) - definitely one of the best gigs I've seen in a few years.

Gig of the year?

2011-12-15T02:28:00.011Z

This doesn't seem to have received any publicity anywhere that I've seen, but.... since the show's in quite a small venue, that's probably a good thing.

I discovered this in a happy moment of serendipity last weekend at an art exhibition opening which was part of a series of events being organised this week by an outfit called Booey Lehoo. No, I've no idea what the name is supposed to mean (and the website doesn't very clearly explain what the organization or the event is), but it's apparently a promotional initiative from APSA (Americans Promoting Study Abroad), collaborating with the 100,000 Strong Initiative and the Jackie Chan Foundation in efforts to broaden the social profile of young Americans coming here to study Mandarin.

The 'main event' is supposed to be a big concert this Saturday at the National Indoor Stadium (wherever the hell that is - never heard of it!) - but the 'headliner' is a rapper called will.i.am, so that's of absolutely NO INTEREST to me.

No, the thing that's got me hopping around in excitement is that tonight they're putting on a much more intimate show at CD Blues - with a diverse bunch of blues and jazz musicians, most of whom hail from the Chicago scene and seem to have some pretty awesome resumés. [Not that any of this appears to be on the Booey website! If I hadn't happened to pick up the little booklet about their week of other arts events supporting the main concert, I'd be completely in the dark about this likely gem of a show. Aha - here it is on the website. Very well hidden!]

Apart from hotel bar residencies and the occasional mini-festival, we don't really get any significant jazz performers coming here. And we don't get visiting bluesmen at all. Harp player Charlie Musselwhite was probably the last one, and that was nearly 4 years ago.

This is my Christmas present come early. Thank you, Santa!

My Mai

2011-12-14T07:38:00.123Z

麦

Gosh, this is FATE.

Just as I move apartments, migrating outside the North 2nd Ringroad which necessitates a change of walking habits such that I now usually go down Beiluoguxiang rather than Jiugulou Dajie when heading out for the evening,.... a new bar opens up near the north end of Beiluo.

It's barely 15 minutes' walk from my apartment (it would be a lot quicker, if the 2nd Ringroad weren't such a pain to get across). It is now the nearest bar to my apartment (well, apart from Cangku and ZuiYuefang, and a couple of little cafés - none of which are serious contenders as a 'local'). And it's good. Very, very good.

It's called Mai, and it's set in a siheyuan. The long main room has some lovely high roof beams, well restored with a dark varnish. And the little courtyard might be nice in the summer. There's a small 'private room' and a kitchen on the other two sides of the yard. The boss, a young chap called Jeff Ji, trained at a couple of the city's premier cocktail bars, so he's going to emphasise his cocktails - very well-made, and some quite unusual recipes, but affordably priced - but not get snobby about it; there'll be a good range of wines and imported bottled beers as well. It's like Apothecary, but without the pretension - and practically on my doorstep. Or... like El Nido, but with way more space to sit inside - and cocktails! This place is going to be a winner.

I discovered it by sheer good fortune - intrigued by the two tiny red lanterns hanging above an otherwise plain and inconspicuous doorway. It was just entering a week or two of 'soft opening' prior to its big launch on the first Friday of December. Jeff's a friendly guy, and eager to learn - open to feedback on everything from the cocktail recipes to the pricing. And the 'soft opening' phase wasn't really an 'opening' at all; while he was still stocking the bar and getting things shipshape, he refused to let anyone pay for anything (I tried not to take advantage of him too much). The launch party was a recklessly loss-making event too: bottled Stellas at a nominal 5 kuai and very strong Old Fashioneds for an equally ridiculous 10 kuai. Man, was I wrecked that night!

But this is a fine example of the effectiveness of spending a little money to engender customer goodwill (something Chinese entrepreneurs are often blind to). I feel so goddamned guilty and grateful for all the cheap-or-free good times he's showed me in the past few weeks that I'm now honour-bound to drop in for a last nightcap almost every time I've been out.

And Jeff's latest promotional craziness is a 'Beer Tasting' this Friday. He hasn't confirmed the details to me yet, but I think the plan is supposed to be that you can get 6 bottles of premium imported beer (not sure if it will be a specified 6, or a free choice from his extensive list) for the giveaway price of 60 rmb. Aha! It's not such a complete giveaway. He really is planning a 'tasting' - just a small glass of each beer. But then, you can get a free bottle of your favourite one at the end. 9pm start. Give Jeff a call on 13811252641 if you'd like to take part.

Hm, I wonder where I'll be this Friday....

[Mai is the Chinese word for wheat or malt, so Jeff felt it would be an apposite name for a bar that boasts an array of fine beers and single malt whiskies. Unfortunately, he picked the bizarre and rather unclassy Malteasers as the English name for the bar. I think he might be persuaded to drop that. Mai is a way cooler name, and easy to remember. That's all that's on the menu and the business cards, I think. And on the sign outside the door. (Yes, there is one now! He had a bit of a speakeasy vibe going at first: nothing to indicate that this unremarkable door was the portal to a little slice of bar heaven.)]

Why I'll probably NEVER go to Blue Frog again

2011-12-13T02:21:00.019Z

I have a friend who is strangely, sadly addicted to the Blue Frog 'Two-for-One Burger Deal' on Mondays, and she occasionally tempts me to accompany her. But last night, I ducked out on her, after suffering something of a panic attack in there. No, revulsion attack would be more like it. I've never really liked the place; and suddenly ALL THE REASONS WHY came rushing upon me at once!

Namely....

Crowds

Boy, it gets busy in there on Mondays now. I think I hadn't been inside the place in well over two years, maybe more like three - and back then, their custom was fairly slow. I'll usually only go when the weather's nice enough to sit outside - and right at the start of the evening, before things get too hectic. 7.30pm on a drab winter's evening: VISION OF HELL.

Noise

A full or nearly full house generates an intolerable hubbub in there. In those conditions, there is a strong case for no longer fighting to keep the music audible above the din of conversation: there's already enough of a feedback loop with people shouting to be heard above loud chatterers at other tables, without having to try to compete with the Frog's shite music playlist being progressively cranked up as well.

Impatient hunger

I have developed very Chinese dining habits: I don't usually eat very much during the day, and so am more than ready for my main evening meal by 6pm or so, and positively ravenous by 7pm. I have a very low tolerance of crap service at the best of times, but if you keep me waiting for food when my stomach is rumbling, I'm likely to get very cranky indeed. I've often had to wait 10 or 20 minutes to get a drink order filled in Blue Frog, even early evening when they're not yet that busy. In the chock-a-block conditions last night, I anticipated that we'd be lucky to place an order in much less than 30 minutes, and might have to wait twice that long for any food to arrive. That's not a viable situation for me.

Laowai overload

I've never liked the idea of places that completely insulate you from the experience of being in China. I thus prefer bars like Reef and the Pool Bar, where the clientele is predominantly Chinese, or places like 12 Square Metres and Salud, where it's about 50/50 - to places like The Den, where it's always 90% or more foreigners. But at least The Den manages to pull in a certain proportion of Chinese WAGs and business partners; Blue Frog last night was 100% wall-to-wall foreigners. How did we come to be so numerous? And why do we have such lousy taste?!

The quality's not there

I've found Blue Frog's burgers to be of somewhat variable quality, and - even at their best - nothing really all that special. The ones at Let's Burger are significantly better. The ones at First Floor are almost comparable, for a bit less. The ones at Home Plate and The Den are pretty good, and cost much less. Why does anyone bother with Blue Frog - even on 'half-price Mondays'??

Why the hell I am eating a burger anyway?

Back in England, I probably wouldn't eat more than 5 or 6 a year, at the very most - and those would usually be from Burger King (or, more likely, from a Turkish kebab place; I like to support the independent operators against the big chains wherever I can). I don't eat in bars very much back home; and burgers just aren't such a big thing over there. When I'm visiting friends in the States - yes, that can be a different story: I don't have cooking facilities of my own, so I eat out in bars and diners much more often; burgers are a standard, competitively-priced meal; and there are some very good quality 'fast food' outlets, such as Five Guys in the DC area (where I most often stay). I might well eat half a dozen burgers in a two or three week visit to the States. But here in Beijing? I cook for myself around half of the time. I'm quite happy to eat in Chinese restaurants most of the rest of the time. I only feel inclined to indulge in Western 'comfort food' two or three times a month - and more for the convenience factor of being able to get served quickly and eat on the hoof than because I suffer cravings for this kind of thing. And if my urges do take me in that direction... well, I'm more inclined to go for British pub grub (the steak-and-kidney pie at The Den or battered sausage and chips from Fish Nation), or for Tex-Mex (the Luga's burritos or the Mexican stuffed chicken breasts at Sand Pebbles), or for Middle Eastern (a doner from Kebab Republic or a falafel sandwich from Biteapitta), or for some barbecue (the pulled pork sandwich at Home Plate or the ribs at First Floor). A burger?? WHY????

I figure I eat 8 to 10 burgers a year out here. And that's about 6 too many. I've decided to cut back - and Blue Frog will be the first place to go.

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-12T00:26:00.000Z

"Sadness can be alleviated by a good sleep, a hot bath, and a glass of wine."

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

They didn't have beer in the 13th century?

Top Five Nearly But Not Quites

2011-12-10T06:30:00.019Z

As the time looms for me to draw up my year-end 'Bar Awards', I find myself doubting whether I am going to be able to give a prize for 'Best Bar' this year.

Amongst my little circle of friends, the accolade would probably have to go to Nearby The Tree - which has become our default rendezvous in Sanlitun, because of its good service, keen prices, and convenient location (and the rather good - and scarcely ever used - pool table hiding upstairs). But it has to be said, the place lacks atmosphere. And it doesn't enjoy a particularly busy custom. I hope with this award to reflect a zeitgeist feeling of what bar has made the biggest impact on the drinking scene over the past year, rather than just boosting my personal favourites; and NTT, alas, falls a long way short by that criterion. The James Joyce shows a lot of promise, but is far too new for consideration this year. Za Jia is my pick of the year's newcomers, but it remains determinedly low-key; it hasn't yet built up much of a following beyond the surrounding Gulou neighbourhood.

I suspect quite a few people would nominate one or more of the following bars as a possible year's best. Hence, this post becomes a....

Top Five NOT Best Bar of the Year candidates

5) The Stumble Inn

It seems to have developed some kind of a following. I find it hard to imagine how. I haven't been in since the beginning of the year, and I can't imagine ever going back there. I had such egregiously awful experiences with the staff there last year that I completely gave up on it - but the prices, decor, and location all work heavily against it as well. I find it almost literally invisible: I walk through the Sanlitun Village mall pretty often, never noticing quite where the Stumble is. And even if I could keep my prejudice against being upstairs in a mall in check - as I do quite often for Flamme, and occasionally for the Union Bar & Grille - I'd far prefer one of those near neighbours: much better food and a proper bar ambience at Union (but prices similarly far too high); much, much, much better food and one of the best bars in town at Flamme (although, unfortunately, not very much of it - since the place pitches itself as a restaurant rather than a bar).

4) El Nido

Much as I love the place, El Nido doesn't have the scope to be anything other than a hutong curiosity. And I feel it has failed to sustain the momentum of its first six months. The likeable young boss Xiao Shuai was himself one of the main attractions of the place, but this year he's been distracted with other business ventures and is spending less and less time in his original bar; without him, the experience is just a bit flat. Limited opening hours may work against the place a little as well; I really think he ought to open no later than 6pm (I haven't actually worked out when he does open: I think it must be a not always terribly prompt 7pm), and possibly at 4pm or 5pm during the summer.

3) Temple

The new Gulou live music venue shows some promise, but - having only finally opened this summer after protracted difficulties with lease and licences - it is still too new for the top honour. And I have my doubts as to whether it will manage to be a contender next year either. It's a great location for me, only 15 or 20 minutes from home. And they are starting to piece together a decent programme of - mostly free - gigs. Clément Berger's music biz contacts and experience working at Salud give the place a head start; indeed, he's poached key elements of the staff and the core custom from Salud! But I'm not convinced that musicians will ever prove that successful at running a bar. The place just isn't inviting enough - or cheap enough - to draw a crowd other than on gig nights. And its prospects as a gig venue are severely limited by its awful acoustics (there's one 'sweet spot' near the head of the stairs; the uneven ceiling and huge transverse beams make it hopelessly muddy everywhere else - and the best sound system in the world isn't going to be able to do anything about that). My hunch is that Temple will manage to survive, perhaps even do modestly well for itself, but never break through to the level of becoming one of the city's leading 'destination' venues.

2) First Floor

I predicted last year that this place would do OK but fall just short of greatness. I'm surprised it's done as well as it has. I suppose some credit is due to affable manager Jack Zhou for that. But I think it's rather more down to its prime location - that very conspicuous ground-floor spot on bustling Sanlitun Houjie - and the comparative dearth of decent bars in Sanlitun these days, rather than any great virtue of the bar or its staff. It has awful acoustics, awful atmosphere; and the food (other than on 'Half-Price Mondays') is too expensive. I hardly ever think of going there these days: The Den has comparable pub grub at much lower prices; Flamme and Element Fresh have much better food at similar prices.

And in the top spot, the place that has produced the most buzz this year, but still, for me, isn't quite making it....

1) Great Leap Brewing

I think every foreigner in this city must have been to Great Leap at least once or twice. I'm sure every foreigner has at least heard of it. That's quite an achievement! But I like the idea of Great Leap more than its execution. I love the location, I love the courtyard... and I love decently strong and tasty beer in a style other than lager. I just don't particularly like the beer they make. It's all much too sweet for my palate: even the supposedly more bitter ones have a heavy dose of malt on top, and most of their brews have a fruitiness or a honey-sweetness about them that I find cloying. And for what it is - homebrew, with no brand name behind it, and weak consistency of product - it is far too expensive. (It particularly pisses me off that they never display the price of anything, either. I mostly drink only the No. 6 Pale Ale, but I seem to get charged something different for it every time I go there.) Their limited winter opening hours also militate against it being treated as a regular bar rather than a brewery that runs an occasional bar on the side. And one wonders how the viability of the bar operation may be impacted by their recent setback over getting a distribution licence (with them opening up a second production facility out of town, it had seemed as though their main focus was going to be supplying other bars rather than running one of their own). So, Great Leap Brewing has been a very welcome addition to the scene, and the year's biggest talking point, but that's not quite enough, in my book, to make it the year's 'Best Bar'. Indeed, it scarcely even counts as a bar at all, because they don't sell anything other than their own beer. No, I think that alone renders them ineligible in the category. Misgivings about their product (mostly fatuous novelty beer rather than real beer) and the warmth of their welcome (non-existent: gawd, they're an unfriendly bunch in there!) are but secondary gripes.

Party season? Bah, humbug!

2011-12-09T07:55:00.009Z

I see Time Out Beijing is having a Christmas Party tonight.

I had been thinking of going. There's supposedly a free flow of drink for 100 RMB. (Although I fear it will be hemmed around with all sorts of restrictions; and the venue will probably run short in no time. And, as I've observed before, I don't think free-flow drinks are a good idea - it just leads to bad behaviour.)

I had been thinking of going, but...

It's on a Friday night (rather than the usual Saturday); getting anywhere over on the east side of the city in Friday evening rush hour traffic is a nightmare - people are increasingly reluctant to venture far from where they live on Fridays.

It's in a nightclub. A particularly crap nightclub that has only just opened - to universally terrible reviews.

It's in a shitty location (unless you happen to live or work nearby), inaccessible via the subway network.

And there are probably about a million other parties on tonight competing with it. (This, believe it or not, is the Christmas weekend in Beijing. Most expats who have the wherewithal to escape the city during the holidays contrive quite long breaks for themselves; and the exodus will be starting in earnest next week. This is the week when all the works Christmas parties happen, and this weekend will see the last orgy of Christmas Fayres and such [most such events were scheduled last weekend or the weekend before].)

I wish you well, Time Out. But you guys did make some really dumb decisions about where and when to throw your party this year.

I'm staying in the 'hood tonight. And I may need to don my longjohns even for such a modest expedition as that!

HBH 263

2011-12-09T00:22:00.000Z

Too cold to go out;

Sofa-bound for ten long weeks.

Cabin fever looms.

Gawd, the winters in Beijing can be miserable. Today is set to be the first day that it doesn't get above freezing during the day. It's likely to stay this way all the way through to mid-February. Shiver.

And it's a horrible time to be a bar owner, because most of the wealthier expats quit the country altogether for extended Christmas breaks, while we paupers just skulk at home under the duvet working through our libraries of DVDs.

'Bye to The Bone?

2011-12-06T06:25:00.018Z

Oh, woe! Only a few weeks after my long-time French jazz favourites the No-Name Trio called it a day, Beijing Daze announces that Black Cat Bone - the dirty blues rockers who have been the city's pre-eminent laowai party band for the last 6 or 7 years - are also retiring. This has been on the cards since they lost their original drummer, Jon Campbell, at the end of last year, and perhaps for rather longer; their collaboration had become a little more intermittent as the band members developed various side projects of their own. Jaime and Tobi, of course, are still going strong with their metal band Bad Mamasan, and the irrepressible Des McGarry will get up on stage and sing any time someone asks him to... but I worry about how I'm going to get a fix of Royce's soulful harmonica from now on. That I'm really going to miss.

Still, you can check out a few clips of the boys in action at 2 Kolegas a few years ago on their YouTube channel; not great sound quality, unfortunately, and disappointingly short excerpts of each song. [There used to be quite a lot more performance videos of them on YouTube, but they all seem to have disappeared - or else they're impossible to find, because 'Black Cat Bone' is such a common band/song name!!] You can also sample some of their complete songs at Last.FM, or buy their one-and-only album Drinkin' Alone from CD Baby.

Here's the best bit of them I could find - a performance at Jianghu about 4 years ago, part of the awesome 'Blues Harmonica Blowout' party organised by another fine harp player, Woodie Wu. [More of BCB playing at that here.]

So long, boys - and thanks for all the good times, great times.

Froog Solutions (21)

2011-12-05T15:26:00.006Z

Froog's solution to feeling still rather antisocial....

Problem? What problem?! I have HBO now!

There's now a raft of good films I can watch for free every day. This could get dangerously addictive. Even bad films pass the time quite beguilingly (Jonah Hex, for example, is pretty bloody awful!).

Bon mot for the week

2011-12-05T00:08:00.003Z

"If aliens do one day invade our little planet, it will surely be for the whisky."

Froog

Great Love Songs (30)

2011-12-03T07:20:00.029Z

This might also merit inclusion as a Great Drinking Song - in that most of my (all too few!) romantic breakthroughs down the years have been significantly alcohol-assisted. And I'm not talking about getting the ladies drunk to wear down their resistance. Oh no, I am sternly moral about that: I have, in fact, numerous times refrained from responding to apparent advances because I was concerned that the young woman's rationality was too far compromised. No, I meant that I need the disinhibiting boost of alcohol to soothe my nerves and hang-ups and fears of rejection. So, the scene evoked in this song If You Gotta Go, Go Now calls to mind rather too aptly a number of awkward culminations to evenings of drink-fuelled flirting back in my college days (and since, once or twice, I grant you). It is enormously refreshing - but oh, how rare! - to meet a woman who'll cut through all that 'red tape' of social deference and embarrassment, and just tell you to get on with it.

It is particularly bewitching to imagine someone as entirely lovely as Margo Timmins assuming such a role! So, yes, here - from their offcuts album Rarities, B-Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes (which I actually prefer to most of their regular albums; it's a fabulous collection) - are my beloved Cowboy Junkies singing it. [A pity it's just a still photo - and a rather unflattering one, at that! - on this YouTube clip, but there was no version of this available at all until recently. Margo always manages to seem gorgeous, but the lads all look caught-in-the-headlights petrified.] This is one of those covers that completely eclipses the original: Bob Dylan's whiny, braying vocals leave it dead in the water; and it's just so much more poignant, and so much more sexy done from a female perspective.

New Picks of the Month

2011-12-02T02:10:00.003Z

What was I blogging about three years ago this month?

Well, from Froogville, I suppose I should go for the very seasonal Christmas shopping blues - a gripe about the sorry dearth of parsnips in Beijing.

And from The Barstool, I choose Alas, poor Sammy's - an appreciation of one of the city's great dive bars, which, unfortunately, survived only for a scant 6 or 8 months.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

HBH 262

2011-12-02T00:47:00.021Z

Hot toddies warm us

Roaring log fires keep us home

Empty winter streets

And by 'home', of course, I mean in a bar.

Except that toddies are something of a rarity in Beijing (though becoming less so in recent years), and real fires completely unknown. The original Sanlitun Nanjie Huxley's had one - but that was years ago. And the new James Joyce, I suppose, has one - but it's not all that imposing. Those are the only two I can think of. A sorry oversight on our bar scene.

I may well have to try to go back to the UK at some point during this winter, for a fix of log-fire goodness!

My November in a picture

2011-12-01T08:15:00.006Z

I'd always rather fancied coming back as a cat in my next life. But even cats have problems....

Traffic Report - the blog stats for November

2011-12-01T03:52:00.002Z

Well, that was a strange month - probably my lightest month ever in volume of verbiage, but still awesomely regular in the tempo of posting.

Totting up the wordcounts this month is a relative doddle because the quirky challenge I set myself at the beginning of November was to write one post a day on each blog (giving myself a day off on Sundays; and excluding Monday's Bon mot of the week feature, most of which I 'pre-cook' some way in advance), and to keep each of those posts to exactly the same length. Exactly.

Obsessive compulsive? Moi?!

I had originally planned to take 200 words per post as my guideline, but the first couple of posts - the regular information-only Traffic Report and Picks of the Month notices - I found I could barely spin out to 150 words. So, that became my word-limit for the rest of the month. (I did occasionally find it rather frustrating that I was having to leave a thought unfinished. Towards the end of the month, I allowed myself to vary the experiment with a few posts of 200 words, and this one on The Barstool of 300. And I sometimes made use of the comments to provide supplementary links and so on that I hadn't had room for within this very narrow constraint. In general, though, I soon found that I was naturally conceiving of posts to fit this size, and was only having to make a few small edits to bring the wordcount to exactly 150.)

Thus....

Last month, there were 30 posts and a little over 4,000 words on Froogville.

And there were likewise 30 posts and a little over 4,000 words on Barstool Blues.

Oh, the symmetry of it!

And lookee over there in the sidebar: Froogville is about to pass its 100,000th "visitor"* at some point in the next few days. I can't very well retire at a moment of such high excitement, can I?

[* According to Statcounter, Froogville has already passed 150,000 visitors, and humble Barstool Blues is closing in on 100,000. Different metrics - confusing, isn't it? My favourite traffic-monitoring site, that one - more fun, as well as more flattering! This month, it informs me that we have added Lithuania, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, and Mozambique to the list of countries which have found us here.]

New locals

2011-11-30T05:19:00.003Z

The major impact of my move to a new apartment is likely to be not the living space itself, but the slight shift in location which requires from me entirely new habits of perambulation.

For more than 9 years, I have been walking down Jiugulou Dajie almost every day of my life (well, not during the period from 2004 to 2006, when it was continuously under reconstruction, and I had to thread my way through the hutongs instead, but apart from that…). Now, nearby Beiluoguxiang (or Andingmennei) is my primary route into town instead; and, in particular, towards my favourite regular bars, my ‘locals’.

Most of the stuff I like around Nanluoguxiang – 12 Square Metres, MaoMaoChong, Salud, Pool Bar, Amilal – is about the same distance away as before. However, Gulou spots like Za Jia and Jiangjinjiu (and the less likely to be missed Gulou 121 and Laker’s) are in danger of dropping off my itinerary now. The proliferating bars and restaurants of Wudaoying Hutong, on the other hand, are now temptingly a little bit nearer.

And if I’m feeling lazy, I have some new bar options ‘on the doorstep’ – well, only 10 or 15 minutes away. Cangku, ZuiYuefang, and…..???

Top Five Lamented Music Bars

2011-11-29T05:22:00.002Z

We still have plenty of decent music bars in Beijing, notably What Bar (which turned 9 years old a couple of months back), Jianghu (which, amazingly, just celebrated its 5th birthday this last weekend), 2 Kolegas (which turned 6 this summer), and Jiangjinjiu (which must also be 6 years or so old now). And the last couple of years have seen a rush of newcomers like Tiny Salt, Gulou 121, Alanting, Zui Yuefang, VA Bar, and (my personal favourite of these) Hot Cat.

But I still get a little wistful about some of the places I enjoyed in my early years here.

My Top Five Disappeared Music Bars

5) Get Lucky

A horrible bar run by Mongolian gangsters (they had a very unsalubrious "upmarket" KTV wing out the back, and a house pickpocket) – but it was the first live music venue I discovered here, and they did put on a few good shows.

4) River Bar

More of a folkie vibe, although I’m told they used to have a few rock shows too. I kind of missed out on this one’s heyday, since it folded less than a year after my arrival.

3) Wuming Gaodi (Nameless Highland)

Fiendishly difficult to find, and severely unwelcoming on the service front – but a great space, and host to some of the best gigs I’ve seen here.

2) Loupe Chante

Yugong Yishan boss Gouzi’s first venture – it lasted barely a year, but it had a tremendous atmosphere, a properly grungy little rock’n’roll bar.

But, in the top spot we have…

1) Yugong Yishan

One of the reasons I so despise this bar’s later, more grandiose incarnation is that it is such a wretchedly pale shadow of the brilliant original. 4 or 5 years ago, I was a weekly – sometimes twice or thrice weekly – visitor here. Of course, it helped that it was right next to Sanlitun and Gongti…

A new route home

2011-11-28T08:52:00.002Z

It wasn’t really very much of a move – less than a mile, as the crow flies.

However, I have crossed two – arguably three – psychologically significant boundaries in my recent switch of apartments: I've moved from Xicheng into Dongcheng district for the first time in 8⅟₂ years; I've moved east of Jiugulou Dajie for the first time ever; and I've moved back outside the North 2nd Ringroad, after two years of being properly a city centre dweller.

The chief impacts of this are that I now have to cross the 2nd Ringroad (or its racetrack-dangerous fulu – ‘service road’ – anyway) on a daily basis; and that I no longer go down Jiugulou, but down the modest alley of Beiluoguxiang, nearly half a mile further east, whenever I head into the city on foot. My walk home from my 'local', 12 Square Metres, now takes me more-or-less due north.

Hmm, maybe it’s the walk down there that’s homeward….

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-28T00:10:00.001Z

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

Julius Henry 'Groucho' Marx (1890-1977)

Great Love Songs (29)

2011-11-26T05:17:00.011Z

When I went to university, I knew '70s-era Fleetwood Mac only dimly – chiefly through The Chain, the instrumental outro to which had long been used as the theme music for BBC2’s Formula 1 Grand Prix highlights programme. In my second year, a friend gave me an unlabelled tape of British blues music from the 1960s. It turned out, of course, that it was a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation of Fleetwood Mac’s output from their first incarnation, under the leadership of the sublime guitar player Peter Green. It was surprising, confusing, bewildering to discover that this band could have produced such a very different style of music in its early days.

I was immediately smitten: I’ve always had a weakness for the blues, and Peter Green was – is – one of the greatest of all blues players. This is one of my favourite tracks, Need Your Love So Bad.

[There's a rather longer version here.]

HBH 261

2011-11-25T00:26:00.002Z

Just a vague address

On a street with no numbers -

A hard-to-find bar!

Beijing is full of them. Just lately, new bars seem to have been opening up in the hutongs near me almost every week. But few of them will ever attract much custom, because they do damn-all to advertise. And because it is near impossible to describe to anyone where they are. Even Za Jia, the year’s best new opening, is very well hidden - and only reasonably readily locatable by virtue of its proximity to the prominent landmark of the Bell Tower.

I suppose things are better than they once were. The hutongs used to be largely unlabelled, even in Chinese; in preparation for the Olympics, they were all given street-signs in pinyin 4 or 5 years ago. But there’s still little or no street numbering. Finding a new bar can be a pain-in-the-arse.

Froog Solutions (20)

2011-11-24T03:15:00.007Z

Froog’s solution to the problem of having no American friends left with whom to share Thanksgiving….

Solo holiday fun, on a budget: get a turkey sandwich from Sequoia and watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles on DVD.

Oh, wait – that’s not going to work. My DVDs are in disorganised heaps all over the new apartment: it might take me hours to find a specific title. And I have repeatedly failed to discover Sequoia’s new – devilishly obscure – location; that scuppered my similar plans for a low-key Thanksgiving last year.

Still, it’s a plan – the best I can come up with at the moment.

I fear it’s going to be a glum and lonesome and turkey-less Thanksgiving for me this year. I’ll just have to hope there are some decent films on HBO tonight.

And I need to start taking precautions against Christmas becoming a similar washout.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

Sometimes this is how it feels

2011-11-23T02:52:00.003Z

Stress and sleep deprivation have broken me down over this past week. I am grumpy and distracted. I can hardly string a sentence together in conversation. I feel as though I could sleep for a week. Two weeks. A month.

Time to take a break from the social whirl for a while. Until I recover my brain function and my composure, I’m likely to be very bad company for anyone.

And I probably need to put in 100 hours or so of cleaning and tidying to make my new apartment properly habitable, so I could do with curtailing my nocturnal activities until that’s taken care of.

SLEEP first. Then fixing up the apartment. Then – perhaps – the resumption of a normal life.

It might not have been so apparent on the blogs, but I’ve been an irritable bastard in real life recently. My apologies.

Meltdown

2011-11-22T08:38:00.005Z

I’m a very mellow fellow most of the time. But the last month or so has been a time of humongous stress, and I slept very badly during the last week before my change of apartments last Friday.

Moving day was horrendous: just about everything that could conceivably have gone wrong did go wrong – and several more things besides, from the realm of the inconceivable (even in China!).

Then I discovered that the Internet – which I really need for work (as well as blogging, of course) – cannot be connected at my new apartment, for a variety of strange and implausible and maddeningly annoying reasons.

Then, I found that I was – for a variety of god-knows-why reasons - unable to connect to wi-fi at any of the bars or cafés I tried on Sunday afternoon.

And eventually, I just lost it – big time! Weeping, yelling, punching the wall…

All better now....

Parma Night

2011-11-21T14:58:00.002Z

One of the biggest hassles of an apartment move is that for at least a week or two either side of the moving date your home is too disorganised for you to do anything much in it. Even watching television or a DVD can be major hassle with piles of boxes everywhere. Cooking and eating are definitely out (where did I pack my cutlery??).

So, thank heavens Stephen at MaoMaoChong is reviving his ‘Parma Night’ tonight. Much as I enjoy a generous hunk of chicken fillet in cheese & tomato sauce, I think I’m looking forward to his famous potato wedges even more.

As it happens, I’ve got ‘something’ on every night this week. Pure coincidence – but very fortunate, given what an unliveable tip my apartment is at the moment. I don’t think I’ll be in a position to do any substantial cooking for myself again until December.

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-21T00:57:00.003Z

"Suspense is worse than disappointment."

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Music, rain, fatigue, whisky

2011-11-19T03:31:00.000Z

The story of my Friday night.

LJ and MB, the new folks in charge at 12 Square Metres, were trying out a little live music for the first time, inviting our local bluegrass collective The Randy Abel Stable to come down and play. We also got a short warm-up set of mellow jazz standards from MB himself – no mean guitarist – and Softly-Spoken Jon, a saxophonist who’s one of our newer regulars.

It was a delightful evening, but… after the hassles of moving day, and facing an anxious meeting with my old landlord the next morning… I really should have had an early night.

But an unseasonal downpour saved me from that…. For a couple of hours or so – from round about the time the music started, it rained so damned hard there was no way anyone could go anywhere.

But that was just fine with me….

HBH 260

2011-11-18T00:51:00.004Z

Familiar faces,
Comforting warmth on chill nights -
The bar's become home.

I should not really have been going out this week, mired as I am in the hell of packing and tidying prior to an imminent change of apartments. But I have found myself strolling down to my favourite ‘local’, 12 Square Metres, almost every night.

Partly, it’s that an apartment full of dust and boxes isn’t a very appealing place to spend the evening. And partly it’s that the emotional stress and physical exhaustion of the packing process do tend to evoke a powerful desire to unwind with a drink (I never like to say that I feel I need a drink, but this week, I have!).

But mostly, it’s because that bar provides a far cosier environment than my apartment – any of my apartments – ever has or ever will. And that’s mostly down to the people there.

The Music Man gives it away

2011-11-17T11:45:00.001Z

Jean-Sebastien Héry, the seriously talented French guitarist who put together last year’s best rock band, AIS (The Amazing Insurance Salesmen – winners of the Beijing and China rounds of last year’s Global Battle of the Bands), has lately been venturing into ‘experimental folk’ territory. That is to say, he’s using digital loop effects to produce ‘multi-tracked’ live performances. This has been somewhat of an overplayed fad among the avant garde set for the past couple of years – with Xiao He and Li Tieqiao, in particular, going way overboard on the idea. Jean-Seb deploys these gizmos with rather more taste and restraint, but it still – for me – takes away something of the verve and spontaneity of a conventional one-instrument-at-a-time performance.

Interesting stuff, though – if you want to give it a try, you can listen to it for free here and here (along with the rest of his astonishingly diverse 10-year catalogue of music).

Another trivia quiz idea

2011-11-16T08:38:00.002Z

The Hong Bao Quiz!

Last week, I pondered addressing the widely disparate ability among Beijing’s quizzers with a double quiz – two sets of questions being asked concurrently, one hard, one easy.

Some quizzes tackle this problem with ‘randomising’ elements - such as ‘jokers’ (where you can double your score on a nominated round of questions), ‘penalty’ rounds (where you forfeit your entire score if you make a mistake), or ‘gambling rounds’ (where you stake a certain proportion of your points total on the outcome of a short series of final tiebreak questions). Some have also tried to move away from trivia knowledge altogether, invoking ‘feats of strength’ such as arm-wrestling or downing pints in one, at least for tiebreaks.

But how about simply bribing the quizmaster – paying cash for answers/extra points? It’s so very appropriate for China!

And it would add nicely to the prize fund.

A dream of pies

2011-11-15T09:32:00.000Z

MaoMaoChong’s Stephen Rocard has been taunting us this month, doing a couple of one-off supper specials based on that favourite Aussie snack, the pie. Last night was a veggie version, but very tasty – indeed, surprisingly enough, it turned out to be rather more filling than the meat pie he served up a couple of weeks ago.

Alas, there seems no likelihood of this becoming a regular offering there. In fact, Stephen and Stephanie are shortly to depart on an extended winter break, so, although friends will be continuing to keep the bar open for them, there’ll be no food there at all through December and January.

Stephen’s little pie treat this November has only served to torment me with memories of the meat pies we used to enjoy – just being downwind of one coming out of the oven was a rich experience! – at 12 Square Metres.

Froog Solutions (19)

2011-11-14T09:11:00.014Z

Froog’s solution to the problem of having only a week to pack and move (a process which last time took nearer to two weeks)….

Spend the first day procrastinating, spend the second day on a marathon bar crawl ending at 1.30am (well, it would have ended then, if I’d gone straight to bed…), spend most of the third day ‘recovering’ (erm, make that procrastinate some more), then begin the fourth day with a restorative lie-in.

Hmm, the next three days are going to be extremely fraught. But I think I’m going to make it. Just about. I might have to put in an 18-hour shift tomorrow to get back on track. And I definitely don’t have any more procrastination cards to play.

I’d better have moderate night of it tonight!!

I hate staying put in one place, but I hate the process of moving house even more.

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-14T00:22:00.002Z

"We know both the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together."

Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696)

Top Five Lost Laowai Landmarks

2011-11-12T02:38:00.004Z

The Beijing I knew in my early years here at the start of the Noughties has long since disappeared.

Here’s a rundown of the institutions that we expats of a certain generation most miss…

The Top Five Lost Beijing Landmarks

5) The Mexican Wave

Indifferent food, but an essential networking hub for older expats.

4) Poachers

A crappy bar – but Friday night Party Central!

3) Nanjie – Sanlitun South Bar Street

As I’ve observed before, it was a great melting-pot. Back then, the city only had a dozen or so decent bars, and most of them were side by side on Dongdaqiao Xiaojie.

2) The Sanlitun Beer Mug

The city’s cutest novelty: a fibreglass convenience kiosk in the form of a giant foaming beer stein.

But in the top spot…

1) The John Bull Pub

A little piece of London in the heart of the Embassy district.

HBH 259

2011-11-11T00:20:00.011Z

Young men drink freely

The old must sip cautiously

Whisky grows harsher

It is a sad truth. I remember my father complaining of the same thing. And several of my older friends.

My tolerance for alcohol in general may be very nearly as robust as it ever was, but I am becoming unfortunately sensitive to the after-effects of that best of all drinks, whisky. As I grow older, I find that it dries the throat terribly, and leaves me feeling the next morning as though I’m going down with a wretched cold.

Then again, perhaps I am going down with a wretched cold.

Or perhaps it was the brace of Long Island Iced Teas earlier in the evening that really did the damage.

I would hate to think that I’ve already reached that point of decrepitude where the morning-after sore throat compromises my enjoyment of a fine whisky.

A trivia teaser

2011-11-10T08:28:00.007Z

When I was helping LJ to throw together some questions for an ‘experimental’ quiz at 12 Square Metres the other week (we’re still undecided as to whether there’s any scope for trying to launch our own weekly quiz; I favour waiting until after the miserable months of winter are behind us), I was reminded of the Wikipedia page on comparative national GDP (nominal) per capita, which I first happened upon for work reasons a year or so ago. The three main rankings are compiled by the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA World Factbook. Because of differences of methodology in drawing up the rankings (e.g., over whether or not to include citizens’ personal income earned overseas), these three tables are rather different.

In the 2010 lists, only THREE countries appeared in the top five on all three – what were they?

I’ll post the answer below later.

The price of goodwill

2011-11-09T02:33:00.001Z

JK, my good friend and former landlord of my favourite bar here in Beijing, could be a bit of a penny-pincher at times. This was definitely his idea of 'a promotion'.

It was only very reluctantly that he finally introduced a ‘happy hour’ at our bar – and that only because he knew it wouldn’t “cost” him anything, since he had very little early evening trade (pretty hard to change that: we’re just too far away from the major centres of office working). Moreover, he limited the initiative to a rather modest discount on two items only – the house wine and draught beer – that are not really the top sellers.

I always feel that ‘happy hours’ that aren’t really all that happy tend to have a negative effect. If you can’t offer a decent discount on (nearly) everything, why bother?

A well-judged ‘happy hour’ pays for itself.

Double, double toil and trouble

2011-11-08T05:01:00.004Z

I have been pondering the essence of the pub quiz. More specifically - wondering if there’s any room in Beijing for another one (Shuangjing upstarts Grinders and The Brick have recently added their own offerings in this category to the long-established ones at Lush, The Bookworm, Paddy O’Shea's, Texas Tim’s – and there are a few others as well). And, if there is, how could one differentiate it from the rest of this packed field?

The big problem with these events is balancing the difficulty of questions: you can’t humiliate the know-nothings by asking too many ‘hard’ questions, or bore the super-nerds by asking too many easy ones.

And so it came to me – what about A DOUBLE QUIZ: two sets of questions side by side, one hard, one easy; and separate prizes for each quiz? Too much bother????

Ah, I’m an ideas man, you know.

A fond farewell

2011-11-07T06:30:00.002Z

The No Name Trio – two guitars and an accordion performing mellow French jazz, Django Rheinhardt et al – played their final gig this Saturday.

Well, never say NEVER; I wouldn’t rule out an occasional reunion at some point. And they’re still playing together as Blackwater, accompanying the great Des McGarry in his renditions of favourite Irish folk songs. But, for now, the gypsy jazz is over. They’ve been together in this lineup for four-and-a-half years (and Nico and Dan had been playing the same sort of stuff as a duo for a year or two before that), and a little bit of ennui had been setting in for them.

It was a very poignant moment for me: I’ve been following these guys since they first got together, and have many, many happy memories of their shows, particularly from their long residency in the marvellous early days at Jianghu.

Bon mot for the week

2011-11-07T00:16:00.004Z

"Individual disappointments wouldn't be so hard to bear, but for the fact that they remind us so terribly of the general unfairness of the world."

Froog

Yes, still grumping about that job I didn't get last month...

A moment of cognitive dissonance

2011-11-05T02:32:00.003Z

I was reminded recently of an unexpectedly diverting – compellingly atmospheric – thriller I chanced upon a few years ago, Matt Dillon’s 2002 directorial debut City of Ghosts. Dillon plays a con man who journeys to Cambodia on the trail of the mentor/father-figure who left him carrying the can for a boiler-room insurance scam back in the States. It has that Graham Greene-ish magic of portraying a developing country as thoroughly corrupt, squalid, and dangerous – and yet making you want to go there anyway.

One of the film’s many incidental delights is the end credit music, provided by a band called Dengue Fever (and what a great band name that is!), an LA outfit who play ‘Cambodian pop’. Here, from City of Ghosts, is their Cambodian frontwoman Chhom Nimol singing Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now in her native Khmer language. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

HBH 258

2011-11-04T00:26:00.027Z

All such jolly fun,

A neverending party -

Till they bring the tab.

I feel as though the Angel of Death is keeping me under surveillance again. Or his friend, the Angel of Annoying and Embarrassing Incapacities, anyway. I fear I may have gout. This seems unjust, as I haven’t touched a drop of port in years. However, I gather that other ‘lifestyle factors’ - such as the substitution of alcoholic beverages for food – probably put me in a high-risk category.

Then again, perhaps it’s something even weirder and more sinister, because…. it occurs to me that this – a sudden onset of stubborn and debilitating pain in the middle of my left foot - has been happening to me at around this time every year for the past five years or more. After a few weeks of hobbling me, it goes away again, just as suddenly.

Any ideas?

I just want to drink ALONE

2011-11-03T03:06:00.011Z

Not - usually - in the sense of shunning all companionship. No, I generally prefer some company and conversation with my drink.

But I do cherish my autonomy - in drinking as in everything else. I like to be able to take a drink on my own, to be independent of others in regard to when and what and how much and how fast I drink.

Unfortunately, this is anathema to Chinese drinking culture.

Nowhere, I find, is China’s collectivist mentality more oppressive than in regard to drinking. Drinking rituals here are all about toasting and counter-toasting. Above all, no-one must ever drink alone; every time you want to take a sip, you're supposed to raise your glass to somebody else. And other people will keep raising their glasses to you, if they think you're not drinking enough.

It can be a royal pain-in-the-arse.

New Picks of the Month

2011-11-02T05:01:00.001Z

Time for another journey-through-time to rediscover what I was writing about three years ago this month...

On Froogville, there were quite a few compellingly weird little entries to choose from. I think I'll go for my piece about how the Chinese cope, or not, with fly-less underpants, one of my intermittent Chinese People LOVE Me! series. However, I was also very tempted by my jokey pitch for a non-fiction bestseller on Gin, my favourite-ever example of Chinese mispronunciation, my selection of 'Desert Island' albums, and my ruminations on the possible significance of an unfortunately risible Danish name I encountered.

And from The Barstool I pick the most poignant entry in my 'Unsuitable Role Model' cycle, Terry Collier (a name that may mean something to Brits of a certain age...). This poem on the perils of the 4th Martini was a close runner-up, though.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for October

2011-11-01T02:26:00.000Z

Another pretty typical month: slightly subdued over on The Barstool, because I was not drinking for most of the month (although this did, of course, provoke a lot of short posts on the fact that I was not drinking), but surprisingly robust on Froogville, despite a heavy work schedule and the anxiety of suddenly facing imminent homelessness.

There were 35 posts and around 12,000 words on Froogville last month.

There 32 posts and just under 7,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues.

Statcounter tells me that Romania and Argentina have been added to the list of countries that have looked in on us.

I have in mind a new idea for curtailing my effusiveness on here. Though I fear it is so crazy that it may end up costing me even more time and effort…

See if you can guess what it is.

Round-The-World Barstool Blues

HBH 270

This week's drinking excuse

Elements of a memorable Chinese New Year's Eve

Bon mot for the week

A welcome alternative

Happy Year of the Dragon!

Positive feedback

HBH 269

A rocking anniversary (with its own drink?!)

Recommended Posts, October-December 2010

Starting the Wish List early

Bon mot for the week

A musical youth

A student of history

HBH 268

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

The Memory Palace of Mr Froog

Hitting the Naale on the head!

The 2011 gigging year

Bon mot for the week

Top Five Basslines

Inventory

HBH 267

Half a party

New Picks of the Month

Mess

Traffic Report - the blog stats for December

A New Year's bon mot

The Froog Bar Awards - 2011

HBH 266

So, farewell then... D-22

Return of the Harmonica Man

Froog's Christmas Solution (No. 22 in the neverending series...)

The worst business card in the world?

Bon mot for the week

Merry Christmas!

Christmas (anti-)cheer

A labour of love

HBH 265

Top Five New Arrivals

Recommended Posts, July-September 2010

Christmas comes early

Bon mot for the week

See what you missed!

HBH 264

Gig of the year?

My Mai

Why I'll probably NEVER go to Blue Frog again

Bon mot for the week

Top Five Nearly But Not Quites

Party season? Bah, humbug!

HBH 263

'Bye to The Bone?

Froog Solutions (21)

Bon mot for the week

Great Love Songs (30)

New Picks of the Month

HBH 262

My November in a picture

Traffic Report - the blog stats for November

New locals

Top Five Lamented Music Bars

A new route home

Bon mot for the week

Great Love Songs (29)

HBH 261

Froog Solutions (20)

Sometimes this is how it feels

Meltdown

Parma Night

Bon mot for the week

Music, rain, fatigue, whisky

HBH 260

The Music Man gives it away

Another trivia quiz idea

A dream of pies

Froog Solutions (19)

Bon mot for the week

Top Five Lost Laowai Landmarks