Recipe: The Ambrose

Serves 2.  Actually, 1.

Ingredients

• (2) absurdly rectangular slices of Pumpernickel bread
• Nova lox
• (1) Pickled green tomato (Bubbies brand widely avail.)

Directions

1. Toast the pumpernickel.  This takes 17x as long as with normal bread.  You’ve got time.
2. Pour a tall glass of whiskey on the rocks.  Swirl the ice around a bit.  Enjoy this sound, and the cold mist of your breath fogging up the top half of the glass.
3. Imagine the history of fire.
4. Listen to non-digitally compressed music of nearly any kind.
5. Ding!
6. Spread a thin layer of cream cheese over the tops of both slices.  
7. Slice the pickled tomato, thin.  Place atop the pumpernickel so that a uniform layer of pickled tomato covers the bread.  
8. Place a single, uniform layer of lox atop the pickled tomato.  
9. Place the other slice of pumpernickel on top.  
10. Cut into four (4) right triangles, trimming the edges.  Your great-grandfather would be proud.

Enjoy the perfect pairing of whiskey (Scotch, Irish or Bourbon) and food.  Not just the flavors that somehow cut through and yet mellow each other, but the fact that they can be enjoyed on a cushioned chair in front of a roaring fire, which you now mistakenly feel you understand in an historical context.

Hue’s blogpost on Devo, and genius assertion that Notes From Underground was punk, got me thinking.

In his first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, young punk philosopher (and admirer of NFU) Friedrich Nietzsche envisions an enantiomorph whose legacy remains with us today: the Apolline versus the Dionysiac.  These Hellenic gods never knew they were antagonistically opposed to one another - indeed, as far as I know, they had never given their differences a moment’s thought.  But to Nietzsche, great art was inspired and explained best by the opposing forces of dreams (Apolline) and intoxication (Dionysiac).  What is truly punk about this theory is that Socrates himself, to whom more than two thousand years of art theory had been indebted, was incapable of either dreaming or intoxication*, and therefore incapable of understanding great art.  In fact, according to Nietzsche, Socrates actually fucking killed art, or at least until Wagner.  

I digress…

Punk music itself can similarly be explained by the opposing forces of nihilsm and proselytism, each personified by the two groups most commonly credited with its birth, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.

The Sex Pistols didn’t give a shit about themselves, anyone, or anything.  To the extent that it was sold at all, it was marketed as a swindle, hoodwinking their own fans.

On the other hand, the Ramones did give a shit, and they wanted their fans to as well.  The mechanical solidarity of the band’s image and sound culture was geared to overwhelm, to move, to inspire, and to convert.  Not to any particular idealogy but simply to them, whatever they or even that one particular song represented.  It’s amazing how one bandmember in isolation is unremarkable: Converse, Levi’s, t-shirt, leather jacket, Cleopatra-meets-bowl-cut black hairdo… But turn that into a uniform, and you see a battalion unified by power and purpose.  Now add their signature presidential seal, and you’ve got a whole lot of young boys who want to join the army.

And so to the extent that Devo is punk, they, like the Ramones, are of the proselyte order of Punk.  Image.  Brand.  Giving a shit.  Purpose.   They want to change the way you think.   They want you to join them on their crusade.  Diametrically opposed to the nihilsm of punk’s co-founders the Sex Pistols, the proselytes of punk believe that (sh)it matters.

* According to Plato, Socrates almost never dreamed and never became drunk.