The Spirits #124: The Rome with a View

Plus: The first rule of Album Club

~ THE ROME WITH A VIEW ~

30ml Campari
30ml dry vermouth
30ml lime juice (approx one lime)
15ml sugar syrup
~100ml fizzy water

Fill a tall glass with ice, garnish with a [blood?] orange slice and place it in the freezer a little ahead of time. Now for the shaking! Introduce the Campari, vermouth, citrus and syrup to the shaker with a few cubes of ice and give it all a hefty shake. Add the fizzy water to shaker, give it a little stir, and then strain into your cold and pre-garnished glass.

Some Rome with a View notes:

1) This is one of an estimated 1.2 million drinks that emanted from NYC’s Milk and Honey in the ‘00s (which British people sometimes call “The Noughties” - to the confusion of Americans, I’ve found). Its creator is Michael McIlroy - now at Attaboy - who had the clever idea of fusing the Americano and the Rickey. The result? A sharp, citrussy aperitivo that provides a sophisticated bit of punctuation to a mid-afternoon (a semi-colon?) but isn’t so powerful that you can’t play a set of tennis afterwards.

2) Blood oranges being in season (in Sicily), I impulsively bought an entire box of the things from a local organic shop. There’s something pleasing about having a glut like this: 50+ oranges, full-blooded and fresh, enough to have two after every meal. It feels so decadent and yet the expense (£12.99) is no greater than a bottle of wine.

3) The Rome with a View has proved a durable template for bartenders; see here, here and here. Think of it as 30ml amaro + 30ml fortified wine + 30ml citrus + 15ml sweetener (or thereabouts) and I’m sure you will find it a profitable one too. Cynar, sherry, blood orange, cinnamon syrup?

4) Apologies for not sending this your way last week - it’s been a manic time in the Godwin household; followed almost inevitably by a parade of viruses. Hope you had a good Easter! There won’t be a post next week as we’re off to Albania… But I will make it up to you on our return.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. 
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.

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BEFORE I tell you about ALBUM CLUB, let me tell you about a small essay that I embarked upon in my drafts last week.

I started writing about my changing social media usage; and the wider backlash against digital technology; about the totalising algorithm; the limits of Spotify; the evils of capitalism; the strange difficulty one has in keeping up with new music these days; the Schleswig-Holstein question; the Library of Babel and and and… and then I deleted it. My thoughts on the matter were simply too multifarious. I felt that the likes of Jonathan Haidt and Ted Gioia had written overwhelmingly well on these subjects (on Substack first, take note). And also - well, it’s Friday and it’s cocktail hour for goodness sake. I do try to keep this passably effervescent, lol!

So last week I didn’t manage to send anything. Then this week, I paused to reflect on that failure. It struck me that back in, oh, 2022, when I was a fairly avid social media user, I would go through this think-overthink-delete process many times a day. I’d begin a tweet… I’d edit my tweet… and then I’d delete it before sharing it with anyone with a feeling of: ah what’s the point? I guess sometimes I would impetuously send the thing (and notice a spelling error); and sometimes I’d write something convoluted and ill-suited to a platform that thrives on impetuosity (and still notice a spelling error). But mostly? I’d delete. I swear I deleted more words than I posted, usually with feeling that someone else had said more or less what I wanted to say more thoroughly, or funnily, or emphatically, or nonchalantly than I could. Because when your audience is potentially the entire world, it’s easy to get stage fright.

And then I wondered, in turn, how much of our phone time is frittered in precisely this way. Probably quite a lot! It’s not that we’re wasting our time playing CandyCrush or reading Guardian comment pieces or anything like that. We’re probably writing drafts and then deleting them; we’re wondering whether to like or to employ a pink heart emoji and finally deciding to do neither; we’re picking up our phone to check the weather and then opening some other app instead; or we’re browsing through Netflix wondering what to watch before deciding: nothing. We are those ellipses (…) that dangle before the screen fails to update. Richard is typing. And then - nothing. Our behaviour (mine anyway) is not merely self-defeating but self-deleting.

I seem to have become sidetracked again. But before I succumb to the temptation to delete all of the nosense above - let me jump ahead to the optimistic second part of the deleted essay. Suffice to say that most of us are aware that we waste an awful lot of time on our phones; that we are being manipulated by them; that this is wasting a lot of our time and in many cases making us lonely and anxious and angry and bored. My sense, however, is that we’re at the beginning of a popular revolt against all this and the tiny class of morons who control this technology - and maybe even the economic models that underpins their vastly inflated wealth (surveillance capitalism; enshittification; etc). Undoing of this will take hard work and (contra the atomising force of phone-society) collective work too. Regulation. Campaigns. Protests. But that’s probably for a Substack that isn’t primarily about cocktails.

Considering the matter with my Spirits hat on, however, I feel that there are small things we can do to improve things now. One of the reasons I like writing about cocktails is that it’s actually bringing something to the party. Something useful and practical and hopefully pleasurable; something that you can fling together from a few ingredients already at your disposal. So this is the frame through which I’d like to modify my phone usage. To write things that are meaningful and targeted and nourishing and personal - and to hit send.

ANYWAY. That’s quite a grand preamble to what is quite a small thing - even a rather basic thing. Because what I actually wanted to write about was a small WhatsApp group that I started with a few old friends a few weeks ago that I have found rather cheering. And to suggest that you should maybe try something similar too because there’s something in it.

We call it ALBUM CLUB. Here’s how it works. You gather together a handful like-minded but hopefully not too like-minded friends and form a WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal group called Album Club. There are six of us. We take it in turns to choose an album of the week - and announce it on Sunday. Everyone listens to said album across the week, lobbing bits of related banter into the chat, before posting some thoughts on it by the following Sunday. If you fancy, you can give it a little mark out of 10, purely subjective. If one of you is good at spreadsheets, you can even collate these scores over time to work out which one is most liked - but the scores aren’t really the point and it certainly isn’t a competition.

The point is to simply to listen to music you might not otherwise listen to - and also, to do so with a modicum of purpose, because actually, I think you get a lot more out of music (or anything!) if you apply a critical ear - and to have a place to talk about it with similarly interested friends. Friends you might like to see more often but you’re all living in different cities these days.

Often the album is posted with a question: Beyoncé’s Lemonade… acclaimed in 2016 as an era-defining masterpiece… does it stand up now that the hype has moved on? (Yes!) Queen’s ill-fated 1982 disco album Hot Space… reviled at the time. Does it contain any lost gems? (No!) Or The Last Dinner Party: annoying? (Not as annoying as RAYE!).

Interestingly: no one has yet dared share an album that they love and treasure - though my two choices so far (Ptah the el Douad by Alice Coltrane and Miami by The Gun Club) were both albums I sensed I would love and this did indeed prove to be the case. And for what it’s worth: the album one that is currently “winning” is the Argentinean trip hop classic, Bocanada by Gustavo Cerati.

But as I say, it’s not really about the scores. Really it’s about shaking up listening habits and opening up a purposeful conversation with friends. Both of these things were promised by Spotify and by social media - and yet both generally have the opposite effect. Spotify invariably pushes music that you already know. Social media tends to leave you hovering on the edge of the party while ignoring your actual friends.

What I like about Album Club is that it is pretty low stakes. There’s always a moment that you can find to listen to an album and it’s not too hard to find a few things to say about it. If you like it you can explore around it. If not - well, it’s fun to rant.

Now I find myself wondering how the concept could be extended. Say, you could do an artist per month - that would give you a little more time to explore an oeuvre, compare albums, etc. Or you could create a group playlist that everyone lobs a song into each week perhaps (as per The Spirits) with some thematic prompt, chosen in rotation. You could have a bunch of these running concurrently! You could do something similar for Movies, I think too? Book Clubs? Well they’re already a thing aren’t they?

I wonder if the post-social media future will end up shaking down into this sort of thing? I’d be interested to hear if any of you have similar things going on - perhaps you have for years and I am, as is so often the case, late to the party? Perhaps too something of this order would be a good direction for the future of The Spirits. I’m all ears.

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