Wired Mesh

Bourbon-Thirty

My workdays are actually getting packed, a surprising development considering my well-established aversion to getting any real work done. Today was especially tight: three afternoon meetings, one on top of the other, in different sections of downtown, with the Big Purple Van O'Love questioning whether she really thinks this ignition thing is really what she wants to do anymore. All of which makes me grateful that Josiah has established Bourbon-Thirty as an evening ritual. It is a comfort, the shot of Knob Creek in a blue mug, standing in the sunshine, feeling my body uncoil a smidgen. Walker Percy said it best in 1975, in an essay that has become a personal favorite this summer:

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system -- that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

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Thanks to Lang, I've managed to upload the sole extant track from The Guild, that fine Gregory Baus/Paton Williams folkadelica ensemble that rocked the Kudzu world in '97. I doubt this is legal, but I also doubt anybody minds. Enjoy this slice of southern OPC rock n' roll.