C&C 1: Introductions, Recommendations, Noir Cocktails

In which I roll out the welcome mat

Why am I here? I was told it was compulsory. Is that not the case?

I want to say I’ve set up camp at Substack because I miss the golden age of blogging. But let’s not kid ourselves. Nothing with a root as inelegant as “blog” could ever have a golden age.

Still, I owe a lot to my blog, which I launched in April of 2004. I even have a lingering affection for the old layout, which Rosemarie and I kludged together using basic HTML and my limited design sense. I like to think it possessed a rustic, artisanal charm.

My productivity eventually dipped but I kept the place open, even amidst the rise of Twitter and Facebook. As I soured on social media, I made half-hearted if well-intentioned efforts to post more frequently, though no one reads blogs anymore.

Earlier this year, my friend Ray Banks asked me why I didn’t have a Substack. A valid question. I wandered over, set up an account, and promptly did nothing with it.

Last month, my friend Ethan Iverson called expressly to tell me to start a Substack, offering concrete examples from his own excellent joint Transitional Technology.

And so here I am. In part because of their advice, in part because I realized that I only know Ray and Ethan because of my blog. That’s how our paths first crossed. Virtually all my current close friends I met thanks to the claim I’d staked on the internet.

The website I started on a whim almost twenty years ago resulted in my first book, several jobs, and a network of fellow writers and readers that proved invaluable when Rosemarie and I created our alter ego Renee Patrick, author of the Lillian Frost & Edith Head mysteries. That website materially changed the course of my life. I still want to do the kind of writing that I did there, and I have hopes that Substack could be the best home for it.

Expect occasional updates on my work (and Renee’s), plus various recommendations and cocktail recipes. Kind of like what follows.

What I’m Watching

John Early: Now More Than Ever. I’ve been a John Early fan since I saw him in the TV series Search Party. I’ve watched this standup-with-music HBO special twice and will likely fire it up again. The pseudo-documentary framework doesn’t add much, but the material—especially Early’s brutal analysis of his generation’s spotty education and their resulting aspirations (“Nobody wants to be a locksmith anymore”) and contributions to the English language (“All the things”)—is strong, as is the “Wait, he’s not really gonna sing that, is he?” closing number.

What I’m Reading

Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir. I would recommend this gorgeous volume even if Eddie weren’t a friend and colleague (another person I met because of my blog), and even if my name didn’t appear in it several times. Which it does.

This article, about how Western science has begun to catch up with the Eastern concept of self, has done wonders for my sleep. Seriously. I find myself saying “There is no self” as I climb into bed and I drift off in total comfort. Hat tip to Sunday Long Read.

What I’m Drinking

Let’s kick things off with an Eddie Muller original from Noir Bar. Eddie wanted to create a cocktail to commemorate Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948). As Eddie writes: “I felt it needed to be done in the true Wellesian spirit: something brash and startling, using ingredients rarely if ever combined, assembled in a totally unexpected way—and then I’d walk away before I finished making it.” (Time for a gratuitous reminder that Orson has a recurring role in the novels of Renee Patrick.)

Sailor Beware

• 1 ¼ oz. Irish whiskey

• ¾ oz. brandy

• ½ oz. green chartreuse

• ½ oz. Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur

• absinthe rinse

• lemon peel twist

Stir the first four ingredients. Let them rest in the mixing glass. Rinse a Nick and Nora glass with absinthe. Strain. Express the oil from a lemon peel over the surface, rub the peel on the rim of the glass, then place in the drink.