A Little Chai With Your Viking Cello?

Let me begin this entry with a tasty recipe. This for chai and was given to me by my favorite (practicing) barista.

Boil 1½ cubes of chopped ginger in 5 cups of water for 15 minutes

Add:
6 cloves
5 peppercorns
½ stick of cinnamon
8 cardamom pods

Boil all for at least 15 minutes – 30 is best

Take off heat. Add 2 heaping tablespoons of black tea. Steep.

Add: Brown sugar to taste & a pinch of saffron

Strain & add milk or cream to taste

I’ve tried this out and the result is mighty tasty. Unfortunately, it makes only a serving or 2 so my next project is to kick it up a notch and make more. I’m thinking a nice big cauldron would do the trick. That way I can stand over it muttering to myself:

Round about the cauldron go
In the ginger cubes throw.
Berries of peppercorn and clove
From the co-op a buck thirty-one
Stick of cinnamon I’ve got
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot
Fire burn and cauldron bubble!

Last night I attended a lecture by Jim Leary, a professor here at the UW, entitled "Lomax and Wisconsin". It was - how shall I say it? - really fucking cool! (I recorded it so, if I ever get into padcasting, perhaps I'll use it.) Lots of interesting and funny stories plus great music. Lomax only spent a day here in Cheeseland back in 1938 but spent a longer time in the UP. However, people from Wisconsin took the torch and did field recordings here. At one point, Lomax wrote his benefactors in Washington D.C. asking for more beer money. He went to various parties to record and barley pop quickly ate up his cash. Leary recounted growing up in Rice Lake (in northwestern Wisconsin) and all the various folks there playing there own music. He went on to describe an imaginary trek of Lomax's and what he would encounter. Chippewa Indians playing the fiddle, Norwegians with Viking cellos, and blue-faced drunken Finns singing songs trying to persuade lumberjacks to join the IWW. Probably the most contentious thing he said was that, if Lomax had recorded more in the Upper Midwest, then the hegemony of the South as American folk culture would never have been attained. I see where he's coming from but I still think the tendency to equate Southern folk culture with that of America as a whole is due in large part to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll would still have happened as it did in the 1950s even if Lomax had recorded extensively up here. Elvis Presley would still have had "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "That's Alright Mama" on his first single. A bluegrass and a blues song. Southern musical styles. Would the 60s folk revival have been different had Lomax recorded more folk music up here? Possibly. Still, lots of folk/blues tunes that entered rock music were not recorded by Lomax. Take that Harry Smith compilation. Would the Chess Records phenomenon not have happened? I doubt it. I think the ascendance of Southern folk culture to great popularity has to do with popular music and rock'n'roll was destined to be a confluence of Southern cultures.