BRITAIN DRINKS AND STAYS OUT

It was in New York that I learned to sit at the bar and drink. It’s not a thing you want to do in most English pubs because you get jostled by customers trying to attract the barman’s attention, and then they spill their beer over you as they carry it away once they’ve been served. But finding ourselves in Sloane Square, and seeing a watering hole called The Botanist (a small chain priding itself on its ‘elegant atmosphere’) that had a couple of empty stools at the bar, we thought what the heck.

 

It looked pretty much like the image above and those empty stools are the very ones we sat on, though the picture is from a website called designmynight.com.

 

The cocktail menu looked good and so we ordered two Sipsmith Gin Martinis.  That didn’t seem too much to ask but it was.  There was none behind the bar, and some lad was despatched to the cellar but came back empty handed, so we had to settle for a Sipsmith Vodka Martini.  Who says I’m afraid to try new things?

The ritual of the martini-making was everything you could have asked for, and our barman certainly had a sense of the occasion – no cocktail shaker for him, more a sort of glass vase. 

 

And the resulting martinis were absolutely fine, if expensive and a bit small.  But heck, we were in Sloane Square.

 

You will have noticed that the drinks were served on black napkins, ‘Black Napkins’ being a composition by Frank Zappa which I always use to say I wanted played at my funeral.  Or if not that, then perhaps Zappa’s ‘America Drinks and Goes Home.’  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUwwj4rvakI

NO TONIC FOR THE TROOPS

 

So the great Rodney Graham, conceptual artist, which in this case included being a 

photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, musician and much more besides, has become the 

late, great Rodney Graham.  He was 73.

 

You may remember him from such art films as Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong in which he sits on a chair and throws (or lobs) potatoesat a gong some distance away.  This was apparently inspired by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd.

 

Some of the potatoes hit the gong, some inevitably missed, and the ones that hit were supposedly distilled into vodka.

 

But I do wonder how, after the lobbing, anybody could look at all the potatoes on the floor and tell which had hit and which hadn’t.  Maybe there was a system. Or maybe that was the joke.

 

Anyway, the end result looked like this:

 

Now, some people might say that’s an awful lot of trouble to go to for a bottle of vodka. But then some people just don’t understand art.

 

 

 

 

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

It was Apple Day in Wormingford, Essex.

 

You had to get some apples – take them along to the Community Education Centre in Wormingford where you, or somebody, cut them into quarters, then they went through a coarse chopper, 

then into a big old press which liquidized them, and then eventually you had a bottle or two apple juice.  Best to take your own bottles.

 

The word was that you only had 24 hours to drink the juice before it went off  so a little cocktail-making was obviously required.

 

To be honest with you, apple juice and whisky (seen above) wasn’t all that great a combination - you could taste both the apple juice and the whisky but they never really combined and melded, a bit like Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler in the movie The Bounty Hunter.

And then we tried apple juice with vodka which of course was just fine because most things are OK when they’ve got vodka in them. 

 

I think I shall call this the Nick and Kylie – as in Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue – the ingredients are both OK, you’re not quite sure what they’re doing together, but the end result is a winner.

(Pics are mostly by Luna Woodyear-Smith, except for the ones that obviously aren't)

 

 

THE PATERNAL BONUS

I was eleven years old when I first tasted vodka.  My grandfather had recently died and so 

the family was taking my grandma to the Butlins Hotel in Blackpool to help console her.

        I’d been warned that this holiday might be less fun than usual. The hotel didn’t have a swimming pool or slot machines or ping-pong tables or any of the other things associated with Butlins, but it did have a large all-purpose ballroom in which bands played, where films were shown, and dances held.

         My parents liked old-fashioned dances and the one they dragged me along to had a compere who offered ‘spot prizes’ to the dancers.  So he’d say, ‘I’ll give this big box of chocolates to the first person to show me a dirty picture of the queen,’ and if you ran up to him brandishing a grubby bank note, then you were a winner.

         My dad had some experience of this kind of thing, and when the compere asked for somebody to show him ‘a row of black teeth’ dad ran up waving his comb and he won a bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

         My parents had no qualms about giving alcohol to an eleven year old. I’d already tasted beer, brandy and whisky, but vodka was a new experience.  We didn’t have to drink responsibly in those days. I liked it well enough when it was drowned in orange juice.

         There was a paper collar around the neck of the vodka bottle, for a competition to come up with an advertising slogan for Smirnoff.  The prize, as I remember, was a holiday abroad, and my dad was determined to win it.  Not only that, he quickly came up with a slogan that he thought couldn’t fail.  I never saw my dad so convinced of anything. His slogan was ‘The Onus is on Bonus.’

         Even aged eleven it struck me that this probably wasn’t a winning slogan, chiefly because it didn’t have anything to do with vodka, but I was already wise enough not to say this to my dad.

Of course I wasn’t surprised when the slogan didn’t win, and if my dad was disappointed – and how could he not be? - he kept it to himself.  Maybe it confirmed for him that the world wasn’t fair and that the best didn’t always win prizes, which is obviously true regardless of the quality of his slogan.

I’m not sure what the winning slogan was or if the company even used it, but I know that Smirnoff was famous for its slogans.  One was Clearly Smirnoff, which I imagine might dad just might conceivably have come up. Another was Pure Thrill, something that my dad wouldn’t have come up with in a hundred years.

As you see from some of the ads above, Smirnoff seems to have been ahead of the game in their racial politics.  The sexual politics still had a way to go.

THE CLEAR AND THE NOIR

I know my readers are a sophisticated bunch, so you’ve probably seen the movie of The Lady in the Lake (1947) – based on Chandler’s novel - where Marlowe is played by Robert Montgomery and also played by the camera so that everybody talks directly into the lens, hands the camera a cigarette, takes a swing at the camera, and so on, and we only see the actor when he appears in a mirror, which he does surprisingly often.  It’s kind of clever but it also kind of doesn’t work.

Still, the movie is much enlivened by the presence of Audrey Totter, an actress with a 40 year career, starting as a compelling yet not quite A-list movie actress, and later appearing in all kinds of TV series from Alfred Hitchcock Presents via Dr Kildare and Wagon Train right through to Murder She Wrote, which was her last appearance in 1987.  Here she is in Life magazine, in character I assume, though I haven't worked out which one:

By noir standards there really isn’t a lot of boozing in the movie of The Lady in the Lake, but there’s one scene where the Audrey Totter character (Adrienne Fromsett) takes Marlowe back to her apartment for a drink she returns from the kitchen with a bucket of ice and two tall glasses of some clear liquid (alas you can only see one of them here): 

And my question is: what’s in that glass?  Raw vodka?  Raw gin?  We know that noir women are hard-drinkers but surely even they didn’t serve tumblers of raw alcohol to their gentleman callers.  White wine?  Well that’s probably the best guess, though even in 1940s Hollywood that would surely have seemed a bit gauche.  Or perhaps there are some mysteries that even Marlowe isn’t meant to solve.

LADIES WHO LUNCH

Are you watching Feud – the mini-series about the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis?  I thought the first episode was pretty creaky and I just didn’t buy Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.  But Susan Sarandon seemed to really capture something of Bette Davis – at least as we imagine her to be.

I’m not sure if modern actresses are allowed to drink – all those calories.  But we know that both Joan and Bette liked a tipple.  I found this wonderful, if ludicrous and scary, thing from Joan.  It’s hard not to have affection for a woman who adds a splash of vodka to everything.

It seems that Bette preferred whisky to vodka.  Robert Vaughan’s autobiography contains a wild account of being summoned to Davis’s house for lunch, so she could check him out and see if he was suitable for a project she was doing.  He staggered out at 4 o’ clock drunk, unfed, and barely able to stand or see.  He didn’t get the part, which I think is a great shame.  I’d have liked to see them together.   I think they’d have had more chemistry than Bette and Robert Wagner.

BLACK ICE BABY

Remember when people used to worry that we might be entering a new Ice Age and that the earth would become some giant ice-clad marble hurtling through space?  Well, I guess that’s one thing we don’t have to fret any more.

Yes, I’ve been thinking about ice – not planets but spheres – ever since I saw a bartender in Tokyo place a ball of completely transparent ice into a glass before pouring whisky over it: maximum surface area, minimum dilution.  At the time I thought the guy had carved it by hand from a giant block, using an ice pick, but I can’t actually guarantee that’s the case.  He may have been using a machine like this:

Since I don’t imagine myself to be much of an ice carver, and since I can’t afford one those machines – they cost about a thousand dollars - I bought a couple of moulds made by the Tovolo company.

They’re pretty much foolproof and it’s easy to get obsessed and fill the freezer up with spheres.  There are also tricks you can play: making the spheres hollow, then filling them with booze or smoke or aspic.

As you see in the pics, my spheres are by no means transparent and there are a few online sources debating how you achieve transparency, but I decided to go for minimum transparency and added food dye – black of course – for all your gothic cocktail needs.

And here’s the beauty part - put a black ice sphere into a clear liquid, say vodka, and it starts to “bleed.” Delicate black tendrils swim out into the booze.

But that doesn’t last, and before long the vodka is as black as your soul.

Monsieur Huysmans would have lapped it up.