Platinum 7x

I've written here before about what I consider to be a great cloud of myth cloaking the truth about vodka - namely, that there really isn't much variance in it, unlike bourbon. And, therefore, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference, taste-wise, whether you buy top-shelf zillion-dollar snob vodka or bottom-shelf bum brands.

Platinum 7x is a testament to my position that quality vodka need not be expensive. I paid a mere ten bucks for this beautiful cobalt blue triangular bottle.

See, the key to a good vodka experience lies in the number of distillations. Vodka snobs may scoff at bottom-shelf brands like Smirnoff, but hey - Smirnoff is actually triple distilled, which is more than I can say for a lot of top-shelf vodkas that rely more on glitzy packaging and marketing than quality.

Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen, Platinum 7x, is seven times distilled. Put that in your beak and smoke it, Grey Goose.

The more you distill an alcohol, y'see, the smoother it gets with each successive purification. Best of all, you get a progressively lower congener count, which means lessened likelihood of a hangover. Last night, I drank eight martinis made with Platinum 7x and this morning I feel great. Remember my words, young Jedi, next time you party on Absolut and then wake up feeling like dirt.

Another thing that interests me greatly about Platinum 7x is that it's made from corn, which, some might say, technically makes it moonshine. According to their website:

Platinum 7X is distilled seven times from American corn. Four distillations are carried out in column stills with the remaining three distillations being made in a special pot still at Buffalo Trace Distillery. Limestone water is added to bring the vodka to bottling proof.

Buffalo Trace? Wait, what? Yep - not only is this vodka technically moonshine, it's bonafide Kentucky moonshine at that: Platinum 7x is owned by Sazerac, which is the parent company of the Buffalo Trace Bourbon Distillery in Frankfort, KY.

And I say to myself, what a wonderful world.

- - JSH

Identity Crisises

Submitted for your amusement: "Identity Crisises", one of the final great songs from Alice Cooper's baffling punk/new wave "lost years" (1979-1984), from the soundtrack to the low budget film Monster Dog. It's probably the closest he ever came to making a Cramps/Nick Cave/Billy Childish type of record.


Since this is from Alice's all-time lowest alcoholic on-the-skids period (reportedly he has zero memory of ever recording the Zipper Catches Skin album), I'm pretty sure he's playing all the instruments here, even the drums. Listen closely - whoever's drumming, I'm pretty sure they're not a drummer by trade. Sounds like me when I try to fake my way on drums, getting by on syncopation with the hi-hat. Also note there's an interlude that sounds like it was meant to have a guitar solo overdubbed onto it, but no one got around to it.

Presumably, there was no one else around to gently whisper in the Coop's ear, "psst.... it's crises, not crisises, darling."


The video itself is equally bewildering in its magnificent crappiness. I've never seen Monster Dog so I don't know if this was a video made to promote the soundtrack, or if this is actually direct from the film itself, as is. I have a sinking feeling it's the latter. Hoo boy. I need to see this movie.

His other song from the film, "See Me In The Mirror", takes a totally different tack. It's a synth-driven dirge that, like "Identity Crisises", sounds like it was recorded in one evening at home on a 4-track and mailed in. Alice is way ahead of his time here, looking like Johnny Depp in any number of Tim Burton films and sounding like a kinder gentler Marilyn Manson.


- - JSH

Black is the Colour of my True Love's Beer

After my utter disappointment with the much-touted "Clear Beer" Weihenstephaner Kristall Weissbier, I went the other direction for this selection. Köstritzer Schwarzbier is, as the name states, a nihilistically pitch-black brew that's not quite as much like spent motor oil as Ola Dubh, but it's damn close. And frankly, it's even tastier.

The aforementioned Ola Dubh looks like the darkest of all possible stouts, but it's actually an ale. Similarly, Köstritzer Schwarzbier is so dark you can't see through a glass of it, which makes it even darker than Coca-Cola - and looks like a superstout but is actually a lager with a big tan frothy head. Suits me fine.

Köstritzer Schwarzbier used to have the hilariously Aryan slogan "The Black Beer with the Blonde Soul", but someone in the PR department finally must have thought better of that one.

- - JSH

Creeps Time

Many years ago I wrote the earliest version of the Creeps Manifesto, which sought to codify a certain zeit exemplified by a certain breed of ne'er-do-wells, louts, and manchildren. The name "The Creeps" was chosen because of a parallel, real or imagined, with that of "The Blues", which was oft stated to be more of a feeling than just a music genre, something visceral, nebulous, ineffably impossible to fully convey in mere words.

It's interesting to note, then, that a key tenet I wrote in said manifesto was that "to have the Creeps" one must have an acute awareness that time is passing. Time is indeed the monkeywrench in the works for all humans. Most humans are wary of its mysterious interactions with space that mess with our perceptions, and virtually all humans are well aware of its conveyor-belt pathway to the cemetery for each of us. Even scientists are secretly bewildered by time, and have constructed entire fields of mathematics and physics around a phony and faulty theory that time is the fourth dimension.

It is not.


All dimensions have time or something like it, and spacetime is one big amalgamated lump of stuff - not a lump of mere space with a weird half-ghostly appendage called time hanging off of it. Time can behave like a dimension, just as light is capable of behaving like a wave, but what we call time itself is just a partial aspect of something much, much larger and unfathomably higher-dimensional. What scientists think Time is all about is so far off from the real thing, it's like the difference between the hologram on your VISA card, and the shadow that the card itself casts. And don't even get me started on Gravity.


How we perceive quantum spacetime via microtubules is also related to The Big Bang and events that happened prior to its occurence, prior to this Universe's existence. As the Universe expands and as certain events take place within it, so does our perception of time. This is why everyone says that Time seems to pass faster as one gets older - it's not an illusion, our relation to Time IS changing and dilating, and so are we. As the Universe is expanding, we too are expanding - you, me, Andy Griffith, your mailbox, your car, the Baseball Hall of Fame, everything is expanding. We just can't see it because everything else is expanding at mostly the same rate so it all looks the same and feels mostly the same. Mostly.

But Relativity is still what it is, and over the course of our short lives, we gradually start to get an inkling that spacetime is not the same now as it was in our youths. There's something else going on here. There's a ghost in the machine. There's a fairy on the clock.

Not being a mathematician, I can't work it all out into numbers. Not that this ever really proved anything anyway. My truths are experiential-philosophical in nature rather than mathematical, but they are no less scientific. But how do I know? I just do.

These fundamental truths about the real nature of spacetime, and more, are easily grasped by children, and consequently, manchildren. That's why sometimes it takes a comic book geek to tell Einstein what's what. And that's where the Creeps comes in. And that's where "Creeps Time" comes in.

The concept of "Creeps Time" originally began as an in-joke between my friends and I, intended to refer to profound laziness on the part of one of us (usually me):

"Hey, where's that charity Burrito-eating contest that JSH said he was going to stage on the roof of his studio to benefit toenail-fungus sufferers?"

"Well, you know, we do things a little differently around here - we live on Creeps Time, and two weeks in Creeps Time could mean twenty years to the common man."

Funny thing is, I've come to realize that there really is a sort of time-dilation discrepancy between certain types of people who observe the observable Universe in one way, and those who view it another way. In a very real quantum sense, the act of looking at something does indeed change it. And what I am looking at informs my peculiar order with which I go about things.

The real punchline about "Creeps Time" is that sooner or later, I really do get around to doing all the things I say I'm going to do at one point or another. But because my impression of spacetime tends to be more all-inclusive and treat each point as a discrete unit (in other words, March 13, 1453 is just as important to me as May 13, 1966 or September 16, 2051), I tend to move in mysterious ways that don't make sense to most outside observers, who think of life as flowcharting in one direction: Past > Present > Future.


And so, friends and countrymen, next time you're accused of being lackadaisical, just pull the big straw hat over your eyes and tell them you're currently in Creeps Time, mentally plotting multiple actions on several timelines spanning across infinite dimensions, and that on some portions of the continuum you've actually mowed the yard already, and to just be patient. But don't blame me if your wife throws a frying pan at you.

- - JSH