The Spirits #156: The Cosmopolitan (1934)

Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth

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~ THE COSMOPOLITAN ~

40ml gin
15ml lemon juice
10ml orange liqueur
10ml raspberry syrup

Freeze your glassware. Place the liquids in the shaker and half-fill with ice. Agitate enthusiastically for 25 seconds. Now fine-strain through a mesh sieve into the optimally cold glass. Garnish with a length of orange peel.

Some Cosmopolitan notes:

1) What you were expecting like cranberry juice and Manolo Blahniks and foxy 90s nostalgia? Get out. What do you think this is? No, this is the original Cosmopolitan as listed in Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars (1934) - none of your Carrie-Come-Latelies here, thank you. Though it does bear a striking resemblance to your Sex and the City Cosmo (vodka, orange liquer, lime, cranberry). The raspberry syrup foreshadows the pinkness of the cranberry juice; the gin provides that compensatory layer of bitterness; the lemon is a straight swap for lime; and the orange liqueur stands unbending across epochs.

2) An effective raspberry syrup substitute = 10ml sugar syrup + three fresh raspberries. I happened to have some actual syrup this time: the Łowicz brand, from the Polish section, which may contain 0.1% “concentrated raspberry flavour” but makes up for it with real cane sugar and trashy disco hue.

3) It’s actually weirdly hard to make a decent Cosmopolitan the 1990s way. I’m sure cranberry juice used to be quite nice? Now, when I taste Ocean Spray (the only brand available, seemingly) all I can taste is the artificial sweeteners. And cranberry sauce seems wrong. It occurs to me that Campari would be a not-bad substitute… but then we’d have a Jasmine. So until I can source some unadulterated cranberry nectar, this is what I’ll be drinking.

4) I bought the blood oranges in the picture from CrowdFarming by the way - an excellent initiative set up by a co-op of Spanish farmers that allows you to buy organic produce direct at harvest time. (Follow the link here and you’ll get €10 off… ). There’s something cheering and even a little chic about having lots of one kind of fruit in season; and they make nice gifts to take to friends too. I’m tempted to get a punnet of bergamots now; they make the most divine oleo-saccharum for punches.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING etc

Hello, I hope the vibeshift is treating you well. Though actually if the vibeshift is treating you well, ha ha, I’m not sure that says wonderful things about your personality. So I suppose I should say I hope the vibeshift is treating you badly but that you are somehow holding on to your dignity - and resisting the urge to, say, size up sites of ethnic cleansing for Tiki bar potential or sell your AI systems to weapons manufacturers or maybe disband public education in favour of boosting meme stocks. Christ. Did 1934 feel like this, I wonder?

Anyway, rather than dwelling on all that - I wanted to share a couple of bits of writing I’ve found inspiring at this unnerving moment, when it’s quite easy to feel a bit thwarted; like a non-player character in some dystopian video game played by a bunch of angry children. They’re about art - visual art specifically - but I think there’s something more widely applicable in there, somehow.

One is an essay on identity politics by the critic Dean Kissick that appeared in Harpers a few weeks ago and I just caught up on. It has the most arresting opening sentence you could hope to read in what is ostensibly an exhibtion review. Come for the double amputation; laugh at the vaulting art-world bitchiness; but do stay for the slightly more hopeful conclusion that in grubby, cynical, deal-making times such as these, there is all the more reason for artists - and all of us, I think? - to try our best to imagine different ways of being.

“The unreality of the present moment should be a boon for artists and all who deal in the imagination. I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised; I’d rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject. Stop making so much sense. Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees.”

Something to aim for then!

And another BIG IMPORTANT DISCUSSION OF ART that I have been thinking about a lot is an interview with the photography curator David Campany hosted on Amy Zoo’s The Interloper. Campany earned himself a little art world virality a few months back after he appeared on a podcast in which the host asked all the contributors their advice for aspiring artists. As Campany related in an Insta post, the other contributers immediately began to offer “hyper-professional advice” about what they should present their portfolios. He was horrified. “To me, it seems extremely dangerous, and extremely lazy, to prescribe how people should present. I know for a fact that there’s absolutely no correlation between the quality of work and quality of self presentation.” The discussion soured and the podcast never aired.

Zoo’s interview takes that as a jumping off point - this idea that art must now arrive in neat packages, in clear formats, be legible and comprehensible and above all “palatable”. “I think this completely misunderstands (or actively refuses to see) how a creative life is a life that doesn’t fit, on some profoundly important level. It is beyond the given paradigms,” says Campany. But the discussion branches down other interesting avenues too, in particular that need that modern audiences seem to have to identify with the artist/author/musician - to engage with them rather as if they were some sort of influencer or reality TV star or maybe some true crime case to be unpicked. When really that’s not what any of this is supposed to be about.

“I prefer the imaginary construction of the maker that naturally comes with an individual engagement with the work itself. When I read Virginia Woolf’s writings, I make for myself a ‘Virginia Woolf’ in my head, inevitably, but this is unlikely to be the same as the actual Virginia Woolf.”

Quite a profound insight - no? Case in point: I watched A Complete Unknown, the Timothée Chalamet Bob Dylan movie the other night, and despite finding it rather silly on many levels, I still thoroughly enjoyed it as it reminded me of the Bob Dylan I constructed in my head when I was a teenager. That Dylan, I realised, is also kind of silly - but equally more interesting to me than the real biographical Dylan. And I think that’s actually something that Bob Dylan himself figured out - hence his determined vandalism of his own biography, his extreme disdain for people who wanted to know what he was really like. As if that really matters! Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.

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SHOPPING LIST: OK, next week it is Valentine’s Day! I’m going to go mildly off-piste with: mezcal, Aperol, yellow Chartreuse (or Strega) and lime juice. I promise I’ll do something super-simple the following week to make up for it.