June 9, 2009
Chicago Confidential: The Low Down on the Big Town is a 1950 tell-all by reporters (and authors of Washington and New York confidentials) Jack Lair and Lee Mortimer, which is both “uncensored” and “shocking.” And reading it, I’m sorta shocked. The indie-rock haven that I know and love used to be a combination of Sodom, Gomorrah, and a Rambo movie, with more sex, death, grifts, grafts, and gambling than this poor boy can understand. Maybe the authors toned it up just a snitch? And maybe Chicago just used to be more rootin’ and tootin’. Maybe I just lived in the wrong neighborhood? Maybe if I would have crick’d my neck out longer (ala PhiSmi) I would have seen more? But wait, wait! This isn’t about Chicago and its malcontents, this is a quick paean to my favorite Chicago bartender and longtime close pal, Joel Meister. See, Mr. Joel (as many know) lives in rowdy Chicago, and tends bar, and rules, damnit, rules. Which is why I want to dedicate this quote to him, completely un-confidentially.
Burlesque bars are few on the near North Side beyond the mile of Clark Street dumps. There is only one open stripper on Rush Street, the Spa. Most establishments are restaurants or cocktail lounges with only a singing pianist, male or female, for entertainment, plus the inevitable B girl. The initiates hang around to drink, talk, meet old friends or pick up new ones. But the bartenders will get you anything you want–tell you where there is a crap game, contact call girls, or take a bet on the horses. Throughout Chicago, bartenders function to a much wider extent than they do in any other known place. It is the fashion to advertise their names in connection with saloons and restaurants, as though they are stars. And some of them are, with individual followings because of their wide usefulness. Their local appellation is “the mixo,” and they are heavily tipped.
–Jack Lair and Lee Mortimer, Chicago Confidential
PS: Don’t forget, when in Chicago and having Joel pour you or shake you or strain you one: “they are heavily tipped.”
June 5, 2009
Not that I’d want to tee off any polar bears (does anyone say “tee off” anymore, outside of the obvious golfers? That’s a good phrase. You should use it this weekend). Anyway, I finally got a copy of an interview I did that was printed in Onion’s NY edition about a billion years ago. Or last fall. It was when Luscious Liqueurs came out, so there is some liqueurs talk, but also just general drinking talk, talk about the Replacements, talk that could get me retroactive tickets, and more, all rolled up in an article that I now have as an incredibly-difficult-to-read pdf. It’s probably my favorite interview (even better than the one that starts “A.J. Rathbun, we’d kill to have a drink with you” if you can believe it), so you should read it! Right now. And if Andy Battaglia is out there, thanks pal. If you see Andy, buy him a drink for me, too.
May 14, 2009
There hasn’t been any Cocktail Talk on here in forever, thanks to me going to Italy and making videos and being generally an anti-literary bum on a tramp steamer. So to speak. But here are a couple quotes for your Friday from a fine bit of pulping (lawyer pulping even, as the main character’s a legal man), a little pocket book called Suddenly a Corpse, by Harold Q. Masur (which you’d think would have to be a pseudonym, right? But no, it’s just one of the greatest names ever). Tough stuff, but then again, so are you:
She had another pull of rye that would have knocked me kicking. She might have been drinking water for all the effect it had. Her stomach, I thought, must have been installed by the Bethlehem Steel Company.
For a moment there I was busier than a drunk on a tightrope.
—Harold Q. Masur, Suddenly a Corpse
March 20, 2009
It’s a dog-gone dreary first day of spring here, with clouds, wind, and intermittently nasty and extra-nasty rain, and I’ve had a cold/flu/allergy/asstastic thing all week (my sinuses hate me, I swear), and am generally in a woe-is-me state of mind (cause, well, I have to work, when I should be under the covers drinking a hot drink and watching the Thin Man or some such). With that, I’m turning to two quotes from Wilkie Collins short stories, quotes about warming up with a drink and fire, a situation I’d much like to be within. Being that Mr. Collins (old schools Dickens era writer and partier) is most remembered for rolling out some formative ancestors to our current detective yarns and mysteries, and has a habit of putting his characters in unfriendly situations, maybe I shouldn’t wish to be one of his characters–but dang, that “gin and water hot” sounds dreamy right now.
He said, ‘All right?’ and walked back to the inn. In the hall he ordered hot rum and water, cigars, slippers, and a fire to be lit in his room
After settling these little matters, having half-an-hour to spare, I turned to and did myself a bloater at the office-fire and had a drop of gin and water hot and felt comparatively happy.
–Wilkie Collins, The Yellow Mask and Other Stories
PS: Just realized “The Yellow Mask” would be a pretty great name for a drink. It’d need to be a bit creepy though (the story is). But hey, if anyone reading this wants to take a shot at a drink that fits the name, go to—just let me know how it turns out.
March 10, 2009
Cornell Woolrich was one of the top crime writers of his time, though he isn’t as super well known as a couple fedora-wearing others (I supposed in-the-know crime buffs are hip to him, but hey, everyone isn’t in the know all the time)–his time being mainly the 1940s and 50s, though he had outlying books from the 1920s until the 1960s. He wrote under some assumed names, wrote literate (and pretty downbeat by and large) crime and noirish numbers, did some time in Hollywood and had movies made from his books and stories (the most cherished being the Hitchcock classic and generally kick-cinematic-ass Rear Window), and then lived the latter part of his life in a seedy hotel in NY next to or with his mother (who never read a word he wrote). I’m a fan. Not of the living in a seedy NY hotel (though maybe that’s okay, too), but of all the books of his I’ve read. Which leads to the following quote, which is from a book called Fright. Originally published in 1950 (with a dandy Hard Case reprint in 2007) under the name George Hopley, it’s not my favorite book by Mr. Woolrich, but the following quote rings right for today, a frigid day in March, a Tuesday (the gloomiest day of the week), a day that would be best spent musing about life while drinking a host of Manhattans.
Sometimes they were like pinwheels, revolving around a single colored center. The bright red cherry of a Manhattan. He must have been looking straight down into his own glass when that happened. He was on Manhattans.
— Cornell Woolrich, Fright
February 27, 2009
I love old pulp novels (the pocket book size especially), with their snazzy (and sometimes silly-ly sexy) covers, mysteries, and generally jazzed up writing. Not to mention that the characters within tend to drink lots and the reading tends to be roll quickly and be perfect when accompanied by a drink–if it’s a drink that’s in the book, even better.
Maybe it’s not a celebrated piece of detective fiction (though the story’s not that bad), but if you can find the book No Business for a Lady, it’s perfect for when you want to match the cocktail you’re having with the cocktail the main character (a feisty redhead with an hourglass figure, of course) is having, because the range of drinks she has is wider than most. As evidence: the three quotes below. So, go pour yourself something and open a book, for gawd’s sake.
Although the doors were wide-open and the temperature was in the nineties outside, it was air conditioned and cool in the dimly lighted interior. I picked out a booth and sat down, and when the waiter came I ordered a Gin Rickey.
And just to prove to him that I knew how to take care of the whips and jingles, I built a couple of Ramos Fizzes.
My stomach was still queasy so I went to the bar downstairs and mixed myself a Gin Fizz.
February 10, 2009
There are good drink writers, and then there’s Kingsley Amis. Okay, that’s oversimplifying, but if I underline “writers” above I may take some of the oversimplification out of the equation (of course, that’s like saying I’m taking the buttermint out of the Drowsy Chaperone–probably doesn’t make much sense to any right minded sort). Mr. Amis (sadly departed, meaning I’ll never get to have that drink with him I’d like to have had. Though reading him while drinking at least gets us cocktail communing on some level) might not always have the, umm, intense bartenderly craft approach that some do, as he’s focused mostly on drinking at home, and also didn’t have the reach of ingredients as we do now (and in addition because a lot of pomp probably didn’t stir his drink), but the writing reaches such a fun, engaging, and just damn good height that I find myself forgetting I’m on the bus when reading it on the bus. And laughing out loud lots, and thinking I could take almost every sentence (or, if not every sentence, every other one) and pull it out for a quote that each drinker I know must read. Which means I’ll probably have more from him up on the site, which means you can think of this particular quote as the opening liquid salvo before a long night’s imbibing. This is from the first book in his drinking triptych (all three of which are collected in Everyday Drinking), On Drink, from the beginning of the chapter entitled, “The Boozing Man’s Diet:”
The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree. Well, and it should be simple: no charts, tables, menus, recipes. None of those pages of fusspottery which normally end–end, after you have wasted minutes ploughing your way through–“and, of course, no alcohol” in tones of fatuous apology for laying tongue to something so pikestaff-plain. Of course? No alcohol? What kind of people do they think we are?
–Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
January 30, 2009
I usually shy away from the more modern quotes (cause, well, modern folks just aren’t as poetic. Except you. You’re awfully swell, and speak like a tipsy angel. And many writers today have fine quotes–I just tend towards the older quotes. So sue me) on the site and in the books, but I just read this article on Slate, about how President Obama is turning around Bush’s no-cocktail-party ethos and having drinks again around the White House (which, naturally, tickles me) with a little dip into past presidential drinking, and came across a great, great quote. It’s by the article author, John Dickerson, talking about a cocktail affair with folks from both parties there after a hard day of hill haggling, and I dug it (even if it wasn’t written 100 years ago):
First, drinking in moderation leads to an equitable distribution of the humors, and we want our president to be healthy. Second, among adversaries, drinking promotes relaxation and laughter. I doubt it will lead to an agreement on the size of small-business tax cuts in the recovery package, but a few drinks might shave off a few layers of posturing. All of the guessing at motives will decrease. Without so much chest-thumping, the two parties may even get to genuine points of disagreement faster. As a community organizer, Obama knows the power of getting everyone to recognize themselves in one another. What better way to do that than over a few drinks? (Those who disagree should stop wondering why they are lonely at parties or aren’t invited at all.)
–John Dickinson, Obama Raises the Bar
