Rearranging the deckchairs on the RMS Topicality

A friend was deflecting an invitation to drink the other night on unspecified grounds. I could speculate that his non-availability might be related to the demands of wife, children, or a straight job, but I was a tad irked that he wouldn't volunteer any more detail. When pressed, he replied archly, "They're called responsibilities."

"I believe I've heard of those," I said. "But I've never paid them much attention. A bit like the iceberg warnings on the Titanic. I may be steaming towards a crash."

Titanic analogies seem to follow me around. Ex of exes and queen of commitment-phobia The Evil One, in the midst of one of her half-hearted, twice-weekly attempts to break up with me, asked whether my efforts to save the relationship weren't like "trying to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic".

I responded, "Well, if I knew I was going to die tonight, I think I would want to contrive to sit in the sunshine for as long as possible today. And we might be able to lash some of them together to make a raft..."  [I believe somebody on the Titanic tried that, but didn't enjoy success with the attempt.]

A few years later, The Poet came along, and, after the giddiest few weeks of my life, proved to be the second greatest heartwreck of my wretched romantic career. Very soon after the breakup I was able to ruefully jest with her, "There was an awful inevitability about that. I was the Titanic and you were my iceberg."

Recommended Posts, January-March 2011

Time for my roundup of favourites from the first quarter of last year...

Guided Tour - recommended posts from the 1st quarter of 2011

1)  The worst bar in the world??  -  4th January 2011

I pay a brief but illuminating visit to Beijing's most abysmal - and ludicrously named - bar, La Fite Exotic English Bar.

2)  My new hero  -  5th January 2011

I discover that the tiny Pen-Tailed Tree Shrew of Malaysia subsists entirely on a type of naturally fermented nectar which has a higher alcohol content than Chinese beer!

3)  Top Five Mornings After  -  6th January 2011

Some rather embarrassing tales of alcoholic excess in my younger days...

4)  Another absinthe poem  -  9th January 2011

Arthur Symons' celebration of the blissful haze of daytime drinking...

5)  Froog's esprit de l'escalier  -  13th January 2011

Too late... I come up with a neat answer to that vexed "What are you doing here?" question.

6)  Fodder!!  -  18th January 2011

Beijing's BEST low-budget bar/restaurant remains almost completely unknown - because it's all the way out in Caochangdi.

7)  Suzanne Vega's Caramel  -  23rd January 2011

An overdue addition to my 'Great Songs' series.

8)  The dream landscape  -  25th January 2011

Some of the pubs - and pub crawls - I dream about are better than the real thing!

9)  The virtue of whisky  -  28th January 2011

One of the best of my 'Haiku Bar haiku' - on the relative merits of different beverages for facilitating a good heart-to-heart chat.

10)  How things change....  -  30th January 2011

I reflect on how I became a drinker in China... and how I got fat in the last few years!

11)  Ultimate singalong  -  5th February 2011

Fortuitously reminded of what a great communal headbang Bohemian Rhapsody can be, I celebrate by trawling up a diverse selection of versions of the song - including one by the fabulous US 'rockgrass' band Hayseed Dixie.

12)  Hold On  -  12th February 2011

As close as I get to a 'Valentine's post': my favourite of Tom Waits's more recent songs.

13)  The price issue  -  16th February 2011

On the eve of my departure on a holiday, I try to sound a clarion call to rouse the Beijing population to revolt against overpriced drinks in bars. The effort was a dismal failure, but I shall keep on trying to fight the good fight.

14)  A Tale of Two Bars  -  6th March 2011

And also, pretty much, the tale of my holiday in Penang (apart from my brief fantasy about buying the derelict hotel next door!).

15)  A 'bon mot' about baijiu  -  7th March 2011

Because you can never have too many warnings...

16)  The Coliseum Café & Hotel  -  12th March 2011

One of my curiouser - and most quirkily charming - discoveries on a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur.

17)  The greatest little boozer...  -  17th March 2011

For St Patrick's Day this year I share a personal reminiscence about the Pogues song Sally McLennane (and am lucky enough to turn up on YouTube a great live performance of it from classic BBC2 music show The Old Grey Whistle Test). Alas, despite my Irish heritage, I find the modern Irishman increasingly pisses me off...

18)  Top Five Places To Drink Outdoors  -  27th March 2011

The advent of spring prompts me to reject the supposed allurements of Beijing's expensive terrace bars in favour of... more homely pleasures.

Cocktails in the afternoon!

Always a bad idea!!! 

Bad, in a good way... especially if Stephanie Rocard from MaoMaoChong is making them. Stef's taking part in a mixology contest in a couple of days, so she invited a few friends round to the bar on Sunday to practice on. Since I'd already had a mildly boozy lunch with a former colleague, and then a less mildly boozy afternoon watching the Shanghai Grand Prix with a glamorous lady companion, I was probably already close to exceeding the threshold for 'safe' daylight consumption, but... this seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. My stumbling performance in the Titanic Quiz a little later can be partly attributed to this inappropriate warm-up!

Stef has devised another new recipe of her own, which will doubtless put her in with a very good chance of victory (details must remain under wraps until after the competition; she might still be tweaking it a bit, anyway!). However, the contestants are also to be challenged to produce cocktails from a list of 12 'classics' - most of which hail from an earlier cocktail heyday, and are not always so familiar these days.

I'd heard of El Presidente, for example, but never before seen or tried one, as far as I can recall. It seems to be a sort of Manhattan made with rum, the original recipe - allegedly devised in Havana during the years of Prohibition in America - calling for a light rum to be combined with half-measures of dry vermouth and curaçao, and then a generous splash of grenadine as well. Matt Robold of the Rumdood blog aptly points out that these proportions make it excessively sweet, and he recommends dramatically dialling down the curaçao and grenadine while using an aged dark rum. BarSideKick has a version with a similar approach, but using white rum, and adding a dash of lemon juice to further cut the sweetness. However, the prevailing approach these days seems to be to use fresh pineapple juice instead of curaçao, balanced out with lime juice rather than vermouth. Unfortunately, all recipes seem to retain the grenadine, which seems utterly superfluous to me: most rums are plenty sweet enough already for my taste; and - in a dark rum - it isn't adding much to the colour either. I'd be tempted to ditch the grenadine altogether, and restore the dry vermouth of the 'original' and/or add one or two drops of bitters to counteract the sweetness (even unsweetened pineapple is pretty damned sweet). The organisers of the contest seem to be insisting that contestants use Zacapa rum - which again seems a bit daft: Guatemala's finest is much too smooth for a cocktail like this; I think it would work better with something a bit punchier, like Gosling's.

My favourite on this list, though, was the McKinley's Delight (actually listed by the organisers, I think, as McKinley's Favourite; named for the ill-fated 25th US President), which is reminiscent of that old New Orleans favourite, the Sazerac. The contest recipe specifies a bourbon base with cherry brandy for added sweetness and a dash of absinthe or pastis for some extra exoticism in the flavour (ideally just a very small dash, and used to rinse the ice chilling the lowball glass, then thrown away; it has such a strong and distinctive flavour that even a few drops of it can overpower everything else; yet many recipes and many bartenders add it to the drink - horrors!). Older recipes seem to prefer a mix of sweet vermouth and cherry brandy (with emphasis on the vermouth: 2 or 3 to 1) and a little dash of bitters. Both Rye Patriotism and the New Orleans blog Looka! make a convincing case that this drink works much better with a good rye whiskey. I may have to give that a try some time. The unusual combination of peppermintiness and cherry brandy somehow reminded me irresistibly of Christmas cake. I think I'd prefer to reduce those two powerful flavours to a mere hint, and let the whiskey do more of the work - but it did make for a nice hit of nostalgia.

While perusing the dangerously addictive pages of Looka! yesterday, I happened upon another cocktail previously unknown to me - the Purgatory. Neither the name nor the recipe are immediately attractive (Rittenhouse overproof rye with three-quarters of an ounce each of Bénédictine and Green Chartreuse, garnished with a lemon twist), but... I find I'm starting to trust the taste of blog author Chuck Taggart. And it is a very nice picture.

Anyway, that was another very pleasantly wasted couple of afternoons - tasting on Sunday, and researching those recipes yesterday.

Best of luck in the competition, Stephanie!

Postscript (very nearly an epitaph!): Jeff Ji from Mai is taking part in this competition as well. He was 'practising' on me on Tuesday night. We confirmed that Gosling's works pretty well for a dark rum version of the El Presidente... and found that the lingering 'too sweet!' problem is instantly cured by the addition of one or two drops of orange bitters. Good luck to Jeff, too!

By the by, the thing that really finished me off on Sunday was a cocktail called The Iceberg - gimmick of the night at 12 Square Metres to accompany Steven Schwankert's Titanic Quiz. It's just a martini glass of ice-cold vodka 'enlivened' with a splash of Pernod, but... well, after nearly 8 hours of steady drinking, that was the one that put me over the edge. I won one as a spot prize early on in the quiz, and the last vestiges of my mental acuity soon deserted me.


PPS: Congratulations to Stephanie!!  She placed third in the Beijing heats of this global competition (run by Diageo, I gather) on Thursday afternoon, and now goes on to the China Final in Shanghai next week.

That sinking feeling

By one of those odd cosmic coincidences, yesterday marked the centennials of the loss of the Titanic and the birth of Kim Il-sung (one wonders if the father of the Juche philosophy may not perhaps have been a prompt reincarnation of one the illustrious victims of the disaster in the North Atlantic, such as the super-wealthy property magnate J.J. Astor IV). Since I was unable to get over to Pyongyang with my friends from Koryo Tours for the big knees-up in honour of the latter event, I was glad that Steven Schwankert of SinoScuba had volunteered to commemorate the former with a Titanic-related trivia quiz at my local bar, 12 Square Metres.

I have long been a bit of a Titanic nerd, and have been treated to a slew of documentaries about the disaster on the National Geographic channel over the past week; so, I was feeling quietly confident about my prospects for success. Ah, hubris! My personal iceberg came in the person of a former schoolteacher from Halifax, Nova Scotia (closest landfall to the site of the sinking, and hence the place where most of the recovered bodies were eventually buried), who knew... well, everything there was to know about it; even more, I suspect, than Steven himself, who is extremely knowledgeable on the subject. It seemed likely he knew the names of most of the crew (he did know the names of the members of the ship's band!)... and the passengers... and how much they'd paid for their tickets and what their cabin numbers had been. He was not even stumped when Steven broadened the scope of the questions to tangentially related topics like other maritime disasters and films about the Titanic. The chap only dropped one mark in the entire thing, and this solitary lapse soon began to seem so out of character that I began to fret that I must have made an error in marking his answer sheet. He really was robotically perfect (most folks, even if they know all the the answers, will usually blank on something here or there in the heat of competition, or make a careless error in writing down the right letter for a multi-choice answer, or be undone by phantom doubts and second thoughts about something they're only 98% confident of; this guy didn't falter the least little bit - uncanny!!). This was the most devastatingly comprehensive quiz performance I have ever witnessed - a worthy winner indeed. I was a very, very distant second.

Well, congratulations to Canadian Bruce, the most formidable Titanic expert in Beijing. And many thanks to Steven for an extremely well-balanced and entertaining quiz.

I think such themed quiz nights could perhaps become a semi-regular event at our little bar. We're a bit too small and off-the-beaten track to sustain a regular type of quiz, but a special event like this once or twice a month might draw a modest crowd.

Bon mot for the week

"There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man."

Aristotle  (384-322 BCE)

Great Love Songs (31)

Well, more of a lust song, perhaps; but love and lust are often intertwined, sometimes indistinguishable. I don't suppose Norwegian dynamo Ida Maria will ever have a bigger hit than her anthemic shoutalong I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked. It's not often a song embraces that element of raw attraction in sexual relations with such engaging frankness. And Ida is the kind of gal many of us would like to get naked with: the whiskey-and-cigarettes huskiness of her voice is dead sexy.

You might prefer the the original video, or a live acoustic performance; but I rather like this homemade stop-motion video in atmospheric black&white.

A Top Five Double Whammy - all-nighters and succumbing to slumber

Since I am contemplating an imminent - and possibly permanent - departure from Beijing, I have been reminiscing about the 'good times' had here in the past, and two related 'Top Five' themes occurred to me in regard to my experiences in bars here.

First, a list of the bars in which I've seen the sun come up, or, more accurately, from which I have emerged into the grey light of dawn.

Top Five Beijing Bars Where I've Seen The Dawn Come Up

5=)  Club Football

This somehow hardly seems to count, since it was a place where one only went to watch the climax of the football season - Champions League games not winding up until 4.30 or 5 in the morning! I do miss it, though: the best - the only decent - sports bar I've known in Beijing; and it had the best pub grub too. I probably had more of those stumbling home at dawn experiences on exiting from Club Football than from anywhere else.

5=)  RBL

Ah, but it's not the quantity but the quality of the all-night experience that really matters. This ill-conceived restaurant-bar-"lounge" project just off Wangfujing didn't survive very long, but I went there half a dozen or so times for music events in its spacious cellar bar. And on one of those occasions, I completely lost track of time talking to a gorgeous young woman and, finding it daylight outside when we finally left, we went to Gui Jie to get some breakfast together. This is a tale that deserves a fuller telling one day - in the 'Great Dating Disasters' strand!

4)  Huxley's (Yandai Xijie)

I'm not sure I ever did stay here until quite dawn, but - in that glorious year or so when Jackson Bai was running the place and it was my first 'local' in the Gulou area - I did several times hang out there until 3am or 4am, and find the sky was starting to lighten by the time I'd finished my 20-minute stagger home. Indeed, one such occasion provided the substance of one of my first-ever posts on here. (I do miss those glory days of Huxley's. It's odd how you can miss something that much more acutely when it's still there, but has now turned to shit.)

3)  The Den

Again, I have reservations that this doesn't fully qualify, since The Den is not the kind of place where one would spend an entire evening (it's too bloody expensive when the 'happy hour' runs out at 10pm), but an enticing final stop - especially for an 'early breakfast' - after a long night of debauch elsewhere.

2)  Amilal

About the only place where you can see the dawn come up while you're still drinking, sitting outside in the little courtyard... Alus curled up asleep on a bench, The Weeble wobbling, The Poet suggesting one more drink...

1)  The Pool Bar

Probably the most frequent (non-football-related) of my all-nighter venues, and the one with the richest trove of memories (and memory losses).

And now a list of bars in which I have fallen asleep...

Top Five Beijing Bars In Which I Have Caught Some Zzzzz's

5=)  12 Square Metres

Scarcely eligible, but I wanted to give it a mention: this was a calculated recharging (quite early in the evening!) in one of the comfy chairs rather than an uncontrolled lapse - which is really supposed to be the theme here.

5=)  Amilal

Only once, only briefly (darn, those armchairs are so comfortable!) - but Alus will never let me forget it.

4)  Reef

Head down on one of the tables outside, for almost the entire duration of one of England's games in the 2006 World Cup. After that experience, I realised I needed to go and see my buddy The British Cowboy in America, so that I could watch the second half of the tournament in a more amenable timezone.

3)  The Den

Hasn't everybody fallen asleep in The Den at least once? That's what it's there for, a temporary haven when you're too tired to go home. I've never been all that fond of the place, but my buddy Big Frank would often drag me there at the end of a long evening's session, and once or twice he managed to exhaust my stamina so completely that I just folded my arms on the table - in the approved style of Chinese office workers everywhere - and gave in to a nice long zzzzz.

2)  Suzie Wong's 

The most unlikely entry on the list, since I would not normally be caught dead in this pretentious and painfully expensive 'nightclub'. Indeed, my impromptu snooze there may have been the occasion of my last visit, and that is some 6 years ago now. It was the farewell bar crawl for my buddy Big Frank (how have I not yet got around to writing up that epic session??), who used to live just over the road from Suzie's in the Green Lake Gardens apartments. We had started at the (old) Goose & Duck, abusing their 4pm-8pm 'happy hour' with numerous draught beers and Jack Daniel's chasers. Frank insisted on checking out Suzie's next. I think it was a Monday, the place was deserted, and we didn't stay very long - just long enough for me to lay my head down on the bar and get in 15 minutes' shut-eye.

1)  The Pool Bar

The most spectacular and abject of my rare public surrenders to slumber: I once passed out spreadeagled on one of the tables (NOT the pool table, obviously; I have far too much respect) for a full 90 minutes.

I don't think there are many other cities in the world - even in China/East Asia - where this kind of all-night indulgence is such a commonplace event. But perhaps I should go and find out....

HBH 281

Simplest of pleasures,

Dearest to the weary heart:

New friends, old whisky.

Jeff at Mai put on a little whisky tasting for me last night. We had a cosmopolitan assemblage - a couple of Yanks, a couple of Germans, a couple of Czechs, an Italian... and I forget what else. An Aussie friend had hoped to join from Hong Kong, but had his travelling schedule altered at the last minute. And my usual Irishman was away on a visa run. I was left as the lone Englishman because my journo friend Stroppy Tom cried off on the grounds of being dangerously hungover from the night before (oh, how he shames my country!). Still, 8 or 9 people was about the maximum that can be accommodated for such an event in this cosy little bar.

I think we'll be doing another one or two of these quite soon. Jeff's list of ryes and bourbons is tempting me next...

While the cat's away...

The mice fall back into bad habits.

I dropped in on Chad Lager's new project, The Little Easy, a couple of nights ago. He's acting as a "consultant", attempting to revamp one of those shitty little tourist traps at the bottom end of Sanlitun North Street into a bar that Beijing residents might actually want to go to.

The concept is sound: re-do the decor, introduce a New Orleans theme, add some quality booze at fair prices (Slow Boat craft brews on draft, for example; and GIANT cocktails for 60 RMB, including French Quarter standby, the Hurricane). Unfortunately, he's having to work against 15 years or more of history, the stigma of that strip having always been nothing but a collection of gaudy, inept rip-off joints.

And he's thus having to battle an unhappy combination of the extreme lackadaisicalness typical of most unsupervised Chinese bar staff and the dire culture of hard sell that has so long prevailed in that area.

Chad was not around when my friend and I stopped by to check the place out. In his absence, the staff had reflexively tossed aside all the improvements he's trying to bring to the place - reverting to their old cheesy playlist, cranking the volume way up high (to let people 100m away know that they're OPEN - and warn them against coming any closer!), turning the lighting up to the max. Moreover, the catastrophically dim waiter for some reason assumed that we would like to see the old menu - which is in Chinese only! When we eventually managed to pry a draft copy of Chad's new menu out of him, he hovered over-solicitously at our shoulder and kept flipping the pages for us every few seconds. Needless to say, there was not a single customer in the place. We quickly decided to leave without trying a drink.

Just a few ingrained bad habits among the staff had instantly converted the bar back into something that was indistinguishable from any of its godawful neighbours - and equally unappealing, equally CUSTOMER-FREE.

I fear the Chinese owner is likely to manifest similar recidivist tendencies. The rebranding is thus far limited to one - not particularly large or prominent - sign above the door. The previous name - e-Log - continues to be far more conspicuous, displayed multiple times in a frieze around the building. And one of the new cocktail recipes is lumbered with the name e-LOnG Island Iced Tea. (I'm told the chap is rather obstinately attached to this abysmal name because it is the name of  his Chinese blog!)

Ah well, the place is still in a preliminary, transitional phase - scarcely even what we'd conventionally term a 'soft opening' at the moment. However, Chad tells me that things have been going pretty well over the past week or so when he's been on-site to run things in person, and he did good business last weekend. He thinks it'll be another couple of weeks before he's really got things how he wants them.

I think the big man has got his work cut out with this one. But I keep my fingers crossed. Aside from the lingering stigma of the aggressive bar touts and naff cover bands that characterise this corner of Sanlitun, it is potentially a great location - right in the heart of the bar district, directly opposite The Village, just a couple of minutes away from Flamme, Union, and Blue Frog. If Chad can train the staff up a bit, condition them to keep the lights turned down low and the music playlist restricted to an upbeat mix of atmospheric Southern Americana*.... this might just possibly become the 'bar of the year'.

Then again, it might become the great dream that died, the bar that failed to crawl free of the swamp of tackiness that surrounds it.

* Disclosure: I'm ripping a lot of trad jazz, blues, and zydeco for Chad to incorporate into the music selection there, for even more of a N'Awlins flavour.

Strange tastes

I see City Weekend has posted the result of the Back-Alley Chilli Cook-Off at Great Leap Brewing a few weeks back on its blog. The winner chosen by their panel of celebrity chefs was... New Yorker John Korkidis' 'Hainan Yellow' Duck Chilli.

A (not very revealing) glimpse of the winning chilli 

from City Weekend's website

As I mentioned in my earlier review of the event, this deserved credit as one of the most innovative efforts, one which attempted to "re-invent" chilli with local ingredients. For me, though, the bold ambition just didn't come off. I wouldn't say it was nasty, but it was fairly unappealing - very nearly dead last in my personal appraisal of the dishes on offer. The Hainan yellow chillis were its strongest point, bringing a complex and subtle blend of sweet & hot. The use of duck as the main meat content, however, didn't work at all for me: duck doesn't take well to stewing - it loses most of its flavour, and breaks down into long chewy fibres. The pale colour and stringy texture were pretty unattractive; and it just didn't have any essence of 'chilli-ness' about it, none of the other spices - garlic, cumin - that give the dish its characteristic flavour (John's recipe, posted at the end of the CW blog piece, suggests that he included some, but I wasn't tasting much of them!). And it didn't have an awful lot of heat about it, either. I like my chillis fairly robust on the HOT factor!

I think this rather odd choice goes to show that chefs tend to overrate cheffy-ness. Chilli is one of the most down-home, basic comfort foods in the world. It doesn't need to be at all FANCY; it just needs to be hearty and spicy. It was little surprise that the popular vote went to the Santorum chilli, one of the simplest - and hottest - on offer.

John K's duck dish was certainly interesting, and I can imagine it working well as a thick stew (with a bit of rebalancing of the flavours, and the use of whole pieces of duck, sautéed separately and added to the mixture fairly late, to prevent it breaking up) - something akin to south-east Asian curries. It just wasn't a 'chilli'.

Blue Mondays*

I haven't been out on a Monday for ages.

I had been thinking that it was just because I'd become addicted to the Monday night lineup on the National Geographic Channel (lots of WWII documentaries, and that crazy guy who's trying to resurrect jousting as a professional sport).

I'd forgotten that it was because Monday nights suck. Everything is closed.

I'd been working over the weekend, so hadn't had a chance to go shopping for food. Suddenly finding the larder bare, I didn't fancy shopping and cooking on Monday evening, so went out in search of a place to dine and/or get a drink.

Now, I knew my best beloved 12 Square Metres has been dark on Mondays through the winter, but I thought they might be starting to open seven days a week again now that the weather's getting warmer. No such luck. And I know MaoMaoChong used to close on Mondays a while back, but I thought they'd switched to having Tuesdays as their night off. No - they're now closed on Tuesdays and Mondays.Saveurs de Corée? Closed. Suzuki Kitchen? Closed. Vineleaf?? Closed.

Even some of the Chinese restaurants in the 'hood appeared to be closed. And because at least half of all the foreigner-oriented places were having a night off, the ones that were open were heaved out (Sand Pebbles...).

Eventually I gave up, nipped into a supermarket for some bread and ham, made do with a sandwich when I got home.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now that the jousting series has finished...

[* Doesn't that remind us of a song? Indeed it does. But I think I'd better leave that for one of my 'Great Basslines' posts.]

Bon mot for the week

"The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment."

Samuel Johnson  (1709-1784)

Great Drinking Songs (32)

Big Rock Candy Mountains won a new audience when it was included in the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? a decade ago, but I'd known it from childhood - one of those songs that somehow always seemed to be in the background of my earliest memories. I don't think it was part of my parents' large and eccentric - if mostly very middlebrow - record collection, so I guess I must have been hearing it on the radio. There was a Saturday morning show "for kids" on BBC Radio 2 (I think) which we used to listen to a lot, and which had a tiny repertoire of songs that used to get endlessly repeated: Three Wheels On My Wagon, Wonderful Toy, My Brother Sylvest, Three Little Fishes, Lily The Pink, Two Little Boys. These are all indelibly hardwired into my brain, with (mostly) fond memories; and a few more of them might find their way into the 'Great Songs' series eventually.

Big Rock Candy Mountains was really a rather inappropriate song for a children's show, since it's a 1930s fantasy of a hobo heaven ("where the handouts grow on trees"), and thus contains a number of uncomfortable - if mostly fairly oblique - references to the poverty, hardship, and violence encountered in that way of life. Beneath the jauntiness of the tune and the playful inventiveness of the lyrics, there's a deep vein of sadness, a sense of desperate self-delusion. It's similar in some ways to that other great hobo-ing song - possibly my favourite song of all time - Roger Miller's King of the Road, but its apparent buoyancy and optimism is more superficial, less convincing. It's got some great lines in it, though; how can you not love "where the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks"?

Here's some scratchy archive footage of the song's composer Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock.

[Wikipedia tells me that Harry was included in a set of trading cards on 'Heroes of Old Time Country Music' by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, but unfortunately I can't find that picture anywhere on the Internet.]

The wisdom of Swiss Toni

Last week, I mentioned that I'd found a Swiss Club in Tianjin, and that I could imagine it being the sort of place that Charlie Higson's 'Swiss' Toni character might have hung out. 'Swiss', of course, was distinguished by his gift for simile: for him, almost any activity could be usefully compared to "making love to a beautiful woman." 

Here is the great man in action.

In that earlier post, I ventured that perhaps "Running a bar in China is like making love to a beautiful woman", and later, in a comment, I attempted a few illustrations of my point:

Everybody wants to, but no-one's got any idea what they're doing.

You spend a lot of money for the privilege, but then pull out very quickly.

It'll break the bank, and then it'll break your heart.

It's not as much fun as you think it's going to be.

I now throw this open to the masses. Do you have any suggestions on how attempting to run a business in China is, or is not, like making love to a beautiful woman?

HBH 280

Two drinks, home early.

Chance meeting, plan miscarries.

A bad influence.

"Of all the bars in all the towns in all the world..." I was having a swift 'Happy Hour' drink in my local the other day when Terrible Tes walked in. We haven't seen him in there since my birthday party nearly six months ago. In fact, I haven't seen him outside his favoured stomping ground of Wudaokou since then. Of course, bad things ensued... several cocktails, skipping dinner, being completely wasted by 9.30pm, that kind of thing.

People have called me a 'bad influence', but I am a saint compared to Terrible Tes.

New Picks of the Month

More recommendations from three years ago this month...

It's really hard to pick just one post from Froogville. I think April 2009 may have been one of my richest ever months on there. I think I'll go for the succinct frivolity of The ming pian game, some amusing ideas for a self-description I might add to the next set of business cards I get printed. [However, this recollection of my first visit to China (in 1994!), this idea for a cartoon, this speculation on the causes of Beijing's dearth of rainfall, this heartbroken haiku, this collection of somewhat abstract photographs, this selection of North Korean pick-up lines, and this celebration of some of my favourite experiences in the cinema are also strong contenders.]

There's less of a wealth of choice over on The Barstool (I was perhaps distracted - or impaired - by my notorious Nanluoguxiang bar crawl in that month: 15 or 20 bars visited in one day!!). I think my choice here must be Gan bei! (Surviving the baijiu ritual), some valuable advice for dealing with the mass toasting that occurs at Chinese banquets - harsh lessons learned during my first experience of the country 15 years earlier.

Enjoy.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for March

Although my frequency of posting last month was much the same as ever, I seem to have been rather wordier than usual - perhaps because it was a rather light month on the work front.

There were 35 posts and around 16,000 words on Froogville.

There were 32 posts and 10,000 words on Barstool Blues.

Check out the shiny new feature over there near the top of the sidebar for both blogs - a link to a summary view of this month's posts. Very handy for the browser-in-a-hurry who just wants to try a taste of my recent output (Note to self: must try to make post titles more relevant to post content!). My thanks to the surprisingly tech-savvy Tony of Other Men's Flowers for alerting me to the existence of this widget. I don't know how long Blogger has been offering this facility, but apparently all you have to do is add the tag /?m=1 to the end of your blog address to create a link to this useful summary view.

Also of note over the weekend just past, my revived Invent a name for a rock band post reached its 200th comment with a Chinese band name suggestion from someone called Jim. I have a suspicion that might be one of my translator friends. Then again, it could also the Captain of the Starship Enterprise. Or any one of a hundred million other Jims. But thank you, Jim, whoever you are. If you identify yourself to me, I will try to arrange a small 'prize' for you.

Bon mot for the week

"Most people seem to think that you can either 'live healthily' or have fun. For me, if it's not both, it's neither."

Froog

Another Top Five Basslines - 'Chuggers'

A few months back I did my first 'Top Five' on favourite basslines and it proved to be one of my more popular posts. I said at the time that this idea would probably evolve into its own sub-series, because in the process of compiling the first selection I'd thought of probably a couple of dozen more songs that I really ought to have at least given a mention to.

I also started groping towards a classification of great basslines into three main types: hooks (quite simple bass figures that are one of the most prominent features of the song and somehow just have that 'earworm' quality - hear it once and never forget it), chuggers (even simpler and more repetitive bass figures that drive the song forward powerfully and drill their way into your brain more by sheer relentlessness than any particular 'hooky' quality), and, er, well a third category which I'm still struggling to come up with a good name for: I called it hoopy at first (the kind of bass that's often not so front-and-centre of the mix but buried in the heart of the music... weaving sinuously through it with a restless energy and inventiveness; a lot of Paul McCartney's work with The Beatles and Colin Moulding's with XTC is like this).

Anyway, that first selection was all classic hooks; so, this time out, I thought I'd go for some chuggers.

Play LOUD, and enjoy.

5)  I Won't Back Down

Ha! That might well be my theme song! Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was one of those albums that just about everyone bought at the end of the '80s. I don't think I'd heard of him before that, but kept an eye out for other stuff of his thereafter: I particularly liked the soundtrack he did a few years later for Edward Burns's second film, She's The One. This song comes up quite a lot on the playlist down at my local bar, and it suddenly struck me what a perfectly simple exemplar of the chugger this is: it isn't loud, it isn't fast, it isn't angry; it doesn't do anything very much; it hardly varies at all; but it carries the song along, just chug-chug-chugging like an outboard motor on medium revs. I hadn't known until just now that Jeff Lynne (of ELO and Traveling Wilburys fame) was playing bass on this. (And Ringo Starr appears to be playing drums in this video, although it was Phil Jones on the album. Not sure what's going on with that!)

4)  Smells Like Teen Spirit

Nirvana rather passed me by at the time. I was flat broke, so didn't have the wherewithal to go buying new records. And I still had some hundreds of records I'd impulsively picked up in the bargain bin over the preceding decade and seldom or never played. So, new music wasn't getting much of a look-in during the early '90s. I discovered them some years on, after Kurt's death, and while I admired the musicianship, could understand why they had been hailed as the most important representatives of the 'Seattle sound', they never found a place in my heart. This album, though, and this song have a dark intensity that's impossible to dismiss... and Krist Novoselic's bass throbs so broodingly through it, conjuring exactly that kind of relentlessness I was thinking of when I was trying to define the categories above.

3)  Paranoid

Ah, the indispensable heavy rock chugger! Crikey, I hadn't realised that this was 42 years old. I only got to know Ozzy a dozen or so years later: I don't think I've ever seen footage of him this young before - spooky! Ozzy was just 21 in this video, and Terry 'Geezer' Butler, chugging away at pretty high revs on the bass, was only 20.

2)  Lust For Life

Damn, it's hard to find a good studio version of the Iggy Pop classic on Youtube. This is the new video brought out to accompany the song's prominent use in Danny Boyle's 1996 breakout film Trainspotting, but I think it's the original 1977 studio version, with Tony Sales driving along the bass (his brother Hunt plays the drums here, which gives you that extra level of tightness you don't often find in a rhythm section).

And in the top spot this time we have...

1)  White Wedding

I used to have the 12" of this (one of the very few I ever bought), but I can't now recall who was credited as the bassist. I had thought it was Phil Feit, who I remember as being the regular bass player in Billy Idol's touring band, but it's hard to verify this online: one contributor to a bassists' forum suggests that on the record it was Sal Cuevas, who's known primarily as a salsa and jazz player. One of the GREAT chuggers, whoever was playing it! Ah, the '80s - we were young then. Well, I was.

O brave new world!

I went over to Tianjin this week (for the first time in ages), and discovered - in the big mall over the road from the Olympic football stadium - this, the Swiss Club, which advertises such intriguing delights as "Swiss red wine". Who knew such wonders existed? (Odd how Switzerland seems to be following me around in recent years!)

Given the general tackiness of its appearance, and its grandiose pretensions to being a 'Club', I rather doubt if any actual Swiss people are involved in this venture. In fact, I found myself irresistibly reminded of Swiss Toni: "Running a bar in China is like making love to a beautiful woman..."

HBH 279

Pretty girls warble;

Weird instruments disappoint.

Not worth the money.

I nipped in to Jianghu last night to catch the last of a series of concerts by the Dong Chorus, a small choir of performers (three girls, three boys) from the Dong ethnic group of southern China who've been playing a number of shows around Beijing over the past couple of weeks.

I baulked slightly at the 80rmb door fee being demanded, but thought I'd bite the bullet because I'd heard good things about this group. Unfortunately, ennui set in very quickly, and I could barely survive 30 minutes of it. The girls were extremely pretty; that was probably all that made the show survivable for more than 10 minutes. The ethnic costumes were... well, very "ethnic". And the local instruments the guys occasionally played... well, I was curious to see what they'd sound like, but they weren't much used. I commented to a friend via SMS that they had a very rough-and-ready finish to them, looked in fact "like a shoddy junior school craft project"; I went on, "A balsa wood lap fiddle, how good is that going to sound?? Hm, not very!"

The problem, I think, is the commoditization of ethnic culture in China. You see this kind of thing all the time: on TV shows, in advertisements, in 'local colour' performances staged every hour, on the hour, for tourists passing through one of the ethnic enclaves, in 'variety' extravaganzas at your local theatre several times a year (I've been to a fair few, the obligatory hospitality that 'foreign experts' here are subjected to by state employers), and at dinner shows in slightly upmarket regional restaurants. The government sponsors a lot of this for propaganda purposes, to demonstrate how well integrated China's diverse ethnic communities are, and what an adornment to the national culture their quaint folk customs are. So, much of the time the costumes and the instruments are cheap, tacky, mass-produced copies. The songs and dances may be inauthentic too, syrupy arrangements with modern instruments pandering to the 'elevator music' taste of the mass market here and bawdy lyrics bowdlerised. Quite often, you don't even have genuine members of the minority group in question, but regular Han Chinese performers impersonating them.

The Dong Chorus may be the real deal. But I couldn't help thinking that I'd seen it all before, that I probably could have seen the same kind of thing at the Guizhou Provincial Restaurant and - for 80 kuai! - got a nice supper along with it.

Half-plugged

Last night's experimental appearance by the wildly popular tribute band The Beijing Beatles in the cosy environs of 12 Square Metres (the cramped space and bare brick walls nicely evocative of Liverpool's famous Cavern Club where The Beatles first made their name) was a slow-building success. At first, we'd feared that the band might decide to cancel it, since almost nobody had turned up to watch them by the originally advertised start time, and even when they finally made a start nearly an hour-and-a-half later, the audience was rather thin. However, boisterous frontman Don Lemon made a sterling effort to entice passers-by in from street, frequently wandering off mid-song to perform at the top of the stairs outside. Ultimately, it was the music spilling out into the street through the open door and window more than these spirited busking forays that started attracting more and more interest (although for a long time it looked as though people might be satisfied with listening to a song or two from outside, before continuing on their way); within an hour, we had decent numbers in the bar, and the musicians were really starting to have fun, and trying out a bunch of stuff they don't usually include in their regular sets. They ended up playing for more than an hour-and-a-half without a break... and then coming back to do Hey Jude and a couple more as encores.... and then getting sucked into a raucous jam session with a couple of the punters.

The band made a late decision that they would bring amps for their electric guitar and bass rather rely just on acoustic instruments as they'd originally planned. Percussion, though, was restricted to tambourine and hand drum, which made an interesting change. They didn't have microphones, so Don struggled occasionally to impose his voice over the electric guitar, but in general the sound balance was pretty good. 12 SqM actually has a really nice acoustic (bizarrely, there's a real sweet spot in the far corner of the room, through the other side of the bar - god knows how that works!), and makes a great venue for intimate shows like this (The Randy Abel Stable did a great show there a few months ago as well). I think our Fake Four will be back to do this again.

Odd that the early turnout was so weak, though. MB and LJ at the bar had got the word out early, and had prominent notices in the listings sections of all the expat magazines for this month. And the band themselves usually advertise to their fanbase and bring along their own entourage of friends and regulars. Perhaps people were discouraged by the would-be early start (8pm is a bit early for most people to get out of work, cross town, and have dinner) or the threatened door charge (a very modest 25rmb cover was originally proposed, soon abandoned; but some people just HATE door fees on principle [I'm one of them, actually!]). Perhaps there was too much else going on ('Hump Day' is always pretty busy; although last night was in fact relatively uncrowded in the gig schedule). Or perhaps it was just the vicious drop in temperature; after a blissfully warm - forget about spring, this almost feels like summer! - kind of day, it plunged to near freezing yesterday evening; foot traffic on Nanluoguxiang was accordingly rather light.

Who knows?! That's Beijing for you - it's tough to run a bar here because the behaviour patterns of the clientele are so goddamned variable.

I'm relieved it all turned out OK in the end. Better than OK: it was a really magical little show - an early contender for the year's best.

A Band Naming landmark approaches

My silly Invent a band name challenge thread (originally BIG in 2008; I revived it just a couple of weeks ago), is now closing in on its 200th comment.

Can you claim the glory of being the 200th commenter?

If you can (and come up with a decent band name suggestion in the process), I may produce a prize of some sort for you. No promises, but I'll do my best.

Head over there now and get naming!!

[Oh dear, this has been a bit of a fizzle; the thread seems to have run out of steam this week. I fear part of the problem is that my blogs - and that post, in particular - have become just about the most heavily blocked thing in China... thanks to my pal Brendan suggesting Bo Xilai's Political Future as a possible band name. And I then couldn't resist querying whether this was a re-branding of the self-destructively named band Cancelled Due To Lack Of Interest, which someone had proposed earlier in the thread. A few days later, band-naming stalwart Gary chipped in with the dangerously plausible (as a band name, I mean!) Bring Back Bo & The Chongqing Counterstrike. I now really have NO CHANCE of getting another visa this year!

However, we are now - 2.30pm my time on Thursday 29th, that is - ONLY TWO COMMENTS away from the bicentennial.]

Hmmm, chilli!

Hutong beer haven Great Leap Brewing launched its spring season on Saturday afternoon with a Chilli Cook-Off competition.

I love me a good chilli, so this was an irresistible temptation for me. (Also, having got up at 7am to finish a mammoth article on marketing theory for a "Friday deadline" that I'd only been told about on Thursday evening, I felt in need of a little treat.)

The various chillis in competition were all very different, quite easy to distinguish; and all were pretty tasty. I had thought at first that the tiny plastic 'tasting cups' we were using were a bit niggardly, likely to be unsatisfyingly small, but in fact they accommodated a surprisingly decent four or five mouthfuls... and after sampling the 9 or 10 different mixtures on offer, I was starting to feel reasonably full (although the cornbread and dumplings being offered by the guys down at the far end of the tasting line certainly helped with that).

The official results - chosen by a panel of well-known Beijing chefs - don't seem to have been posted yet. (Aha - they have now.) The clear winner for me was the one that styled itself Long March Mete (??!! I can't find any reference to that as a Spanish cooking term. Maybe its creator just meant Meat? Or Mate??): this had benefitted from a really long slow cooking process, emerging rich in both taste and texture, much darker and sludgier (a good thing, for me!) than any of the others. Second place was a tough call between Kevin's Chorizo & Chinese Hot Sausage recipe and the memorably (subconscious-manipulatingly) named 'You'll eat it, and you'll like it!', which, with plenty of tomatoes and red kidney beans and a very nicely balanced flavour, was the closest to what you typically get - or hope to get - in a bar or restaurant chilli. Kevin (one of the winners, we were told, in a major Chilli Cook-Off in Brooklyn last year) explained that his chilli had no actual peppers in it, but was flavoured purely with the spices that had leached out of the sausages he'd sliced into it. I find that hard to believe, but, if true, it had worked astonishingly well, producing a fine slow-build heat that didn't overwhelm but eventually proved to be, surprisingly, the fieriest of the lot. However, I also found a slight hint of sweetness in this one that didn't appeal to me so much, which, along with its austere abstinence from any vegetable content, relegated it to a very close third place.

Honourable mentions should also go to Chile (not just a country!) and the Santorum. Chile was made by a young Irish couple, who generously loaded their spicy stew with vegetables, including some big chunks of potato - which may offend purists, but I like the variety and the fillingness of it. Santorum had a really interesting blend of flavours, and was probably the second hottest, but it was a bit runny for my taste; and the roasted peppers in it may perhaps have been over-roasted a little, producing an aftertaste that was a bit more ashy than smoky.

There was also a guy with an inventive duck-based recipe - although that may perhaps have been taking the "Chinese characteristics" idea a little too far. He was using Hainan yellow peppers, which I'd never heard of, but did seem to have an excellent flavour. Unfortunately, duck evidently breaks down into long fibres when you stew it, which doesn't make for a particularly appealing appearance or texture.

Apologies to the other three or four competitors whose names I've forgotten. I enjoyed all the chillis, but I'm afraid I didn't keep tasting notes (and I did get very drunk later that evening...).

I hope we'll see a few more events like this here over the summer. But perhaps not quite so expensive next time... (Asking a 120 rmb door fee for an event with basically no overheads is really a bit of a cheek!)

And don't pussyfoot around with the HEAT next time. Bring on the Guatemalan Insanity Peppers! (Ooh, a possible band name, that?)

Bon mot for the week

"If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it."

Brendan Behan  (1923-1964)