SPEAKEASIES AS SIMULACRA
"BY now, most of the reviews of the decade-that-just-was have been filed, and a consensus has emerged: If not "the worst decade ever," as Time magazine put it, the '00s were awful. Unless, that is, you spent the decade drinking. That sounds like a joke but isn't, because among all the things that didn't improve in the last 10 years -- macro stuff like the global economy, geopolitical stability, the environment, etc. -- one thing, admittedly micro, did improve: the drinks we drank, for pleasure or, considering the above, analgesia. If you observed the '00s from a barstool, and limited your reading to cocktail menus (as I did, as author of this column for almost four years), you'd be forgiven for deeming the decade a bona fide golden age. For my final column, then, a toast: to 10 years of fizzes, slings, juleps, sours, cobblers and rickeys, to a time when the avant-garde seemed to shift almost nightly, to the best decade in generations. We greeted the decade with sugary, vodka-based "-tinis" -- which, despite their suffixed claim to noble descent, were in some ways extensions of the neon drinks of the '80s: alcoholic candy. Yet a quiet revolution was already under way. Building upon the work of Dale DeGroff, the former Rainbow Room bartender, young bartenders, casting aside process mixers, were gleaning inspiration from their counterparts in restaurant kitchens and perusing antique cocktail books like scholars combing the Dead Sea scrolls. The first half of the decade saw a wave of creativity and experimentation come crashing through barrooms in cities like New York and San Francisco and Portland, Ore., followed, in the decade's second half, by a counterblast of earnest classicism."
(Media Pathways)by Kwame Opam, at Dec. 20, 2010, 4:57 p.m.
Area : MULTIPOLYGON (((-73.9850816857640581 40.7572587781365172, -73.9877424371058936 40.7631749003938140, -73.9782152306872973 40.7661002607819825, -73.9756403100336399 40.7601193865139493, -73.9851675164522220 40.7575188385307925, -73.9850816857640581 40.7572587781365172)))
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Text: "BY now, most of the reviews of the decade-that-just-was have been filed, and a consensus has emerged: If not "the worst decade ever," as Time magazine put it, the '00s were awful. Unless, that is, you spent the decade drinking. That sounds like a joke but isn't, because among all the things that didn't improve in the last 10 years -- macro stuff like the global economy, geopolitical stability, the environment, etc. -- one thing, admittedly micro, did improve: the drinks we drank, for pleasure or, considering the above, analgesia. If you observed the '00s from a barstool, and limited your reading to cocktail menus (as I did, as author of this column for almost four years), you'd be forgiven for deeming the decade a bona fide golden age. For my final column, then, a toast: to 10 years of fizzes, slings, juleps, sours, cobblers and rickeys, to a time when the avant-garde seemed to shift almost nightly, to the best decade in generations. We greeted the decade with sugary, vodka-based "-tinis" -- which, despite their suffixed claim to noble descent, were in some ways extensions of the neon drinks of the '80s: alcoholic candy. Yet a quiet revolution was already under way. Building upon the work of Dale DeGroff, the former Rainbow Room bartender, young bartenders, casting aside process mixers, were gleaning inspiration from their counterparts in restaurant kitchens and perusing antique cocktail books like scholars combing the Dead Sea scrolls. The first half of the decade saw a wave of creativity and experimentation come crashing through barrooms in cities like New York and San Francisco and Portland, Ore., followed, in the decade's second half, by a counterblast of earnest classicism."
The following arguments all reference this record.