Raise a glass to fantasy pubs
A Moby dope
THE awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan was notable on two levels. First – and when did this last happen? – it meant the general public had actually heard of the recipient and a few of them could even hum one of his tunes. Second, it raised the delicious prospect of a publicity-shy rock icon shuffling into his local PC World to ask how PowerPoint works – you see, the $900,000 Nobel award money is dependent on the winner delivering a Nobel lecture and as every middle manager knows, a lecture ain’t worth **** if it doesn’t have slides, graphs and frequency polygons.
In the end, Dylan plumped for something that avoided PowerPoint entirely: a rambling, 22-minute recording backed by schmaltzy piano music in which he speaks about his formative influences. It’s actually quite instructive, despite the lack of slides, graphs and frequency polygons. There’s a wonderful anecdote about him travelling 100 miles to see Buddy Holly play, standing six feet from his hero and at one point making eye contact. This was a few days before Holly died in a plane crash.
Dylan talks about Moby Dick, too, calling it “a book that is filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue” and one which “makes demands on you”.
One of those demands is that you’ve actually read it recently enough to be able to quote from it, a demand that some mischievous chap in the US now thinks Dylan wasn’t quite up to when he cobbled together his acceptance “speech”.
He is blogger Ben Greenman and he notes that a quotation Dylan gives from the novel – “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness” – isn’t actually in it. Worse, it appears to have come from Spark Notes, an online resource which provides handy synopses of famous literary texts for schoolchildren.
No-one likes to use the P-word – plagiarism – around a Nobel Prize winner, but that’s exactly the claim which has been levelled at Dylan. He hasn’t responded – in song, in person, via a recorded message or even through a PowerPoint presentation – and isn’t likely to either.
Mind you, at the end of the day, does anyone really care? Not if the people posting comments on Greenman’s original blog post are to be believed. “Good artists borrow, brilliant artists steal” writes one of them, attributing the quote to Picasso.
However, in a further ironic twist, my own diligent research says it was probably Igor Stravinsky who said it.
Well, Throne me!
WHO knew pop-up Game Of Thrones-themed bars would become such a hit? Edinburgh is set to get one next month, a reprise of the fur-swaddled establishment that appeared in the capital over the Christmas period and which offered fans such delights as sweet red wine from Volantis. Or, more likely, from Oddbins. Anyway, people bought into it to the extent that one fan even turned up to the opening wearing a suit of armour. And so it’s back, for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival. In Washington DC, meanwhile, a Game Of Thrones-themed pop-up bar opens on Wednesday – and this one even has an Iron Throne, as well as cocktails with names such as The North Remembers (served in a horn tankard), What Is Dead May Never Die and (my favourite) the Dothraquiri. There’s even a specially-named craft beer called Bend The Knee. The bar will be open all week, though it’ll close on Sundays so that fans and employees can watch the show – the much-anticipated seventh series starts on July 17. No word if the bar menu includes such Game Of Thrones delicacies as Lamprey Pie and Stallion Heart, though.
Taking the Pisner
ONE thing our GoTthemed bars almost definitely won’t be selling is beer made from urine, though they could if they wanted to: Danish brewer Norrebro Bryghus has turned to this most plentiful of raw materials for a new lager they’ve christened (wait for it) Pisner.
“When the news that we had started brewing the Pisner came out, a lot of people thought we were filtering the urine to put it directly in the beer,” said chief executive Henrik Vang. “We had a good laugh about that.”
So Henrik, does that mean you’re not just taking the **** and, you know, turning it into beer? Yes indeed. Instead they’re simply collecting urine and using it to fertilise fields of malting barley, and it’s that barley they’re using for the beer. Phew. And given that the 50,000 litres of urine required for the first batch of Pisner was collected at a Danish music festival, chances are it was 80 per cent lager already. Still, how’s that for sustainability?
Chateau de Brexit
WITH the exception of the Department for Exiting the European Union, nowhere in the world will you find a starker illustration of the gap between fantasy and reality than between the contents of a bottle of wine and the highfalutin tasting notes on the back of it.
Here’s one from a Chilean Merlot I popped the cork on earlier this morning (hic!): “Combines plum and red berry flavours with smoky, cedar wood aromas.” And so it does, come to think of it. But would I be saying the same thing if the label read: “Six quid in Iceland. Find it next to the Pisner”? In other words, does the description improve the taste?
You wouldn’t think so – in fact, you’d hope not – but according to newlypublished research from the University of Adelaide, the more grandiose and extravagant the tasting notes, the more the participants in a blind test enjoyed the wine. Gullible? Us?
The Aussie guinea pigs were given three wines to taste in sessions held a week apart. In the first session there was no description of the wine, in the second there was a basic “sensory” description plus the full “whispers of banana and peach with toffee apple bass notes” baloney. In each session it was the same wines, of course, but the participants generally ranked the ones in the second session higher. Even worse, they were prepared to pay more for them.
By now you can probably see where I’m headed with this: back to the Department for Exiting the European Union, of course, which is far more likely to strike a good deal with the EU when talks start tomorrow if its gaffer could take some of this on board.
So charge your glasses people and here’s the toast: to David Davis, a flinty white with strong gooseberry notes, a sulphurous aroma, a supercilious finish and mature to the point of over-ripe. Best before March 2019.