I have a problem with the term ‘buckets.’ I hear it all the time in marketing, specifically in the dispiriting discipline of managing ‘content’. The idea is to taxonomise all the stuff you want to talk about, allocating topics to different holding pens until needed. The more buckets you have, the more well-rounded you must be as a brand. But once something has been dissected into the bucket system, can they be meaningfully brought back together again? What’s to stop things feeling bitty? How do you keep the complexity and promote exchange?
When beginning to plan out some posts for Liquid Texts, thematic separation felt like a given: ‘this liquid meets that text and the very specific thing I want to explore about their relationship is this.’ Especially right now, though, I’m struggling with such hygienic segmentation. Perhaps appropriately for the given name of this blog, things feel really ‘fluid’ currently.
I see now that there are holes in my buckets, everything sloshing together in a chaotic and soupy manner. I started off trying to keep things apart and distinct – it felt more writerly. It fostered the illusion of being in control. But the world I see around us is not conducive to feeling in control. I’ve just re-read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books and in the final instalment, Douglas Adams advances the ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’ as the sanest way to confront the universe. This feels like wisdom – we are all in one giant bucket.
What of my buckets for Liquid Texts, then? Is this in danger of becoming one of those anarchic, indigestible stream-of-consciousness blogs? No. Buckets are, I realise, necessary. Though I like my blends, I like hygienic borders around them (however temporary those borders may be).
But rather than having utilitarian containers of arbitrarily segregated stuff, I want to deploy ‘buckets’ as a child might during a day at the seaside: as a tool for play. Let’s make buckets ephemeral aquariums for the weird and wonderful inhabitants of those rockpools on the margins of the mind; let’s use them as a framework with which to build sandcastles, almost certain to be washed away by the incoming waves.
So here is a Top 5 devoted to different creative forms, embracing texts but going beyond them. For each one, I briefly discuss how alcoholic liquids relate to it. The point is to remind myself of creative cross-pollination. In this thought experiment, the best ‘buckets’ are in fact permeable.
5. Film
Whenever my peers start discussing movies, I cower, I cringe, I prevaricate. I go to the cinema about as often as I get my nose hair waxed. I haven’t seen A Clockwork Orange, or Bladerunner, or all of Reservoir Dogs. But I do like Studio Ghibli movies, and Pixar.
As Dave Chang and Nick Kroll discussed on a recent podcast, perhaps animation is the key – drawing and CGI create a Trojan Horse for approaching the biggest themes. Watching My Neighbour Totoro for the first time, I was struck by how much space there was; a child’s anxiety for a parent was embraced by a rich and fantastical relationship with the natural world, not placed in opposition to it. Images, soundtracks and themes build a world, at the core of which is a kernel of pure magic.
As someone who doesn’t really engage with cinema, the reason it is in my top 5 art forms is because it can reliably convey this magic of make-believe.
4. Ceramics
Maybe it’s The Great Pottery Throwdown I have to thank for this, or perhaps discovering Joely Clinkard’s work here in north London before Christmas is a factor, but objects made from clay are really doing it for me right now. Not for the last time in this post, I’ll invoke the word ‘organic’ – wine is one expression of the earth, but a clay sculpture connects even more directly. A mug, like the one I bought from Joely, is an everyday object for everyday things. But beauty clusters on the surface and radiates from the heart. It is simple, yet with an anchoring depth. Again, not to denigrate wines, beers and spirits, but their emotional potency is wired differently to wonderful pottery. The aesthetic imposed upon these products is another step removed from the thing itself.
3. Literature
As my piece on Moby Dick, Mountains of the Mind, and an expensive Johnnie Walker shows, I like to read books and think. Whether it is a blurb about a sandwich or a disquisition on our species in relation to the cosmos, if the tone is right I will be satisfied and stirred. Another Macfarlane book, Underland, blew my tiny mind last year with the extent of its ideas, articulacy and poetry.
Spirits occasionally move me in similar ways, but I believe that the organic, earthy magic of wine gets me closest to the emotional tenor of great writing. Maybe it’s because there is a lot of great writing about wine. Writers like Dan Keeling, Andrew Jefford and Bianca Bosker introduce me to the mercurial vividness of certain bottles, and to the fecundity of ideas held by many of the people who make them. It is hard to read about a Frank Cornelissen, or hear a Maggie Harrison or Mimi Casteel talk about blending and ecology, without wanting to start a blog tracing the links between little units of alcoholic juice we manufacture, and the grandest things we as a culture have ever imagined.
2. Sport
Sport, from one perspective, is about gifted people improvising within the rules of a given game. When performed well, those movements can be beautiful and, when they surpass what we believe to be possible, exceptionally meaningful. Sport lends itself to mythmaking but also statistics and, in this regard, there are parallels to the world of thoughtfully created drinks.
What drinks category maps on to an entire sport, though? How might processes and flavours be consistent with spectacle? I do see cricket as a possible analogues, as a wearing pitch and the constantly evolving permutations of a multi-day game mirror the slow weathering of whisky in the cask, or wine in the bottle. There is certainly enough arcana, history and larger-than-life personalities in cricket to enthrall lovers of red Burgundy. But I tend to view the mechanics of sport as existing in a completely different bucket to the aesthetics and moments of drinks.
1. Music
As much as I love the clarity of literature and the immediacy of sport, music is without question the highest form of art. A lot of people opine that my job is rather cushy, but I consider anyone able to make a living from music – or at least get away with spending most of their time involved in it – to be akin to a demi-god. Body, mind, even the dynamo of desire that exists within me, all align and cohere when I’m listening to music I love. My great spirits romance – Scotch whisky – doesn’t get close.
Song Exploder is a fascinating and valuable resource. Not only does it peer in at creative process, but it demonstrates how great songs are constructed. Songs have multiple tracks, featuring diverse textures, rhythms, melodies and counterpoints. I’m not the first to see the parallels to whisky blending, although I compare a great blender to a producer behind a studio mixing desk as opposed to a conductor in front of an orchestra.
Yet, you could give me the gunkiest Clynelish; the most hyperbolically fruity Ben Nevis; an entire vat of 10yo Macallan (the kind that went into the 100 Proof bottlings of the late 70s and 80s); the fattest and creamiest Dumbartons; the most kaleidoscopically tropical Bowmores of the 1950s and 60s, together with the leatheriest, most hauntingly aromatic Karuizawas… Hand over all of that, and I still couldn’t make you a whisky as rhapsodic as the 6-odd minutes you’ll spend listening to The War on Drugs’ ‘Harmonia’s Dream’.
The inspirations behind Liquid Texts are broad and rather than obey the bucket hegemony, I will try to install connecting pipework between them. We’ll see how my plumbing develops.
