Scotch Daiquiri Flambé, Anyone?

Jim’s going to make you a Scotch daiquiri,” Stephen informs me as we stand at the bar at Notsuoh (314 Main, www.myspace.

com/notsuohmusic).

“No, he’s not,” I growl. If anyone blasphemes whisky by using it in some cute cocktail, I’m going to leave and you can walk home.”

Stephen holds up a hand to stop my tirade. “This is a Scotch daiquiri flam-bay.”

“It’s actually ‘flahm-bay,” adds Darrell, who is sitting nearby smoking a cigarette.

“Whatever,” I tell them.

About this time, Jim the owner/bartender returns with a whole peeled banana on a small plate in one hand and a bottle of Drambuie in the other. He carefully begins coating the banana like someone putting ketchup on a hot dog. Once the fruit is sufficiently fueled, Jim digs in the pocket of his khaki shorts and comes up with a disposable lighter. A few flicks later and I’m staring at a flaming banana.

Jim steps away to set up the blender. Those of us at the bar gaze at the blue flame with boozy, pyromaniac delight. There’s a strange moment of Zen before Darrell points at the banana and breaks the silence. “That’s a fairly apt metaphor for the way my now-ex-wife used to treat me.” We all laugh, but no one takes his eyes off the fire.

Jim comes back and extinguishes the blaze before blending the banana with Scotch and ice. Within moments, I’m sitting at a table in the middle of the room with my complicated cocktail while Hank Williams’s voice jumps off a turntable at stage right.

Notsuoh is possessed of a kinetic energy that is hard to trace. Eleven years of fast-living history propelled by myths, legends and stories will do that to the ambience of a venue, but there is much more to this space than hip, underground artistic pretension and outlaw-esque speakeasy mystique.

“You’re going to live in a city, so you do what you can to make it livable,” Jim tells me when I ask what made him think a space like Notsuoh could work amidst the sometimes forced style of downtown.

The Free Radicals take the stage and begin strapping into their gear. We’ve arrived between sets, apparently. Soon, searing bop fills the room. A few people begin circling the dance floor. Stephen and I are joined by local poet/artist David LeJeune, who is also a former Notsuoh employee.

“This place has a different sort of volatility,” David says, “You start with an interesting space and add a vastly diverse bunch of people, then whatever happens to be going on that night…you really never know what’s going to transpire.”

I swirl my glass to encourage mingling between banana and Scotch.

“Jim is a world-famous performance artist,” Stephen says. “Once, on the roof, he ate and regurgitated a dozen raw eggs, then cooked them and fed them to volunteers from the audience.”

I level my eyes at Stephen, then look at the light yellow concoction I’ve been drinking, suddenly finding great comfort in having personally witnessed the blending of my cocktail.

Notsuoh’s roots go back to the time Jim spent working in a nonprofit theater. The focus was on performance art, outsider art…anything weird and in need of an audience. Inspired by loft spaces he saw on a trip to New York City, Jim returned to Houston and purchased the building that now houses Notsuoh (and Dean’s) for $20,000 in 1996. Naturally, he’d been breaking in and putting on indie rock shows there for months prior to the purchase.

“I used to hang out at a coffee shop in Montrose way back, before they went completely legit and I’d play chess for hours. Their clientele started growing, it became more of a place to be seen and one day they told me I had to pack up my chess board to make room for customers who were going to do something besides drink coffee and play chess.”

“So, Notsuoh was basically born of necessity?”

“Pretty much,” Jim laughs. “I wanted a place where me and my friends could come and play chess and drink coffee and not have to worry about being run off. We bought a coffee warmer. Then, people wanted beer, so I started keeping beer around, so that’s how the speakeasy thing started.”

Sitting on the stoop in front of Notsuoh, surrounded by the hipsters, musty jazz musicians and sundry barflies that typically cascade out of the front door and onto the sidewalk, Jim sums up the philosophy behind Notsuoh in two sentences: “There are consumers of culture and creators of culture. I want this place to be a creator of culture.”