C&C 86: Comic Cocktails and a Daisy Chain of Recommendations

In which I link a few things tenuously together

If I did a gift guide—and I should, ‘tis the season—featured prominently on that list would be The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On (2025), written by David Wondrich and illustrated by Dean Kotz. Cocktail fanatics and comic readers are two sizeable swaths of people, so there’s a decent chance someone on your list will appreciate this book. The highest praise I can offer: I brought my copy to an event to have it signed by the author after already reading it cover to cover.

Wondrich is our foremost cocktail historian, the James Beard Award winner who canonized pioneering bartender Jerry Thomas in Imbibe! (2007) and coedited the gargantuan Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (2021). There’s no better authority to write an accessible, engaging chronology of the mixed drink, complete with recipes from throughout the ages and primers on various spirits and related topics, like Hollywood’s relationship with the cocktail.

Drinking is, or at least should be, a social practice, one primarily about your companions, your servers, your bartenders. Wondrich brings that point home by focusing on individuals, their faces evocatively captured and in some instances imagined by Kotz. You see the bartenders who made Cuba a drinkers’ destination for years, the AAPI craftsmen who provided the foundation for the tiki movement. Kotz plays with form, deploying a radically different graphic style for the section on the “so-called dark ages” of fern bars and Harvey Wallbangers. Every so often there’s a two-page spread that brims with information as it dazzles the eye.

A sample of Dean Kotz’s artistry

I cleared my schedule when Wondrich announced he’d be in conversation with writer/former bartender Andrew Bohrer at Vinnie’s Wine Shop. Plenty more bartenders were in the packed house, with one quick to bring up a subject I was prepared to raise: the book’s shocking revelation that the Mai Tai, a quintessential tropical concoction, was introduced in … Seattle?!? Wondrich confirmed that the drink was launched at an outpost of “Trader Vic” Bergeron’s Outrigger in what is now the Westin Hotel, only blocks from Vinnie’s. When I order one to escape the gloomy Pacific Northwest winter, now it will be a nod to local history.

Vinnie’s served a different vintage libation during the event. The Fancy Gin Cocktail first appeared in the 1862 edition of Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tender’s Guide. The “fancy” part couldn’t be plainer: moisten the rim of the glass with a lemon twist before dropping it into the drink. A kissing cousin is the Improved Gin Cocktail, which swaps in maraschino for curaçao and adds a dash of absinthe. But to start, why not keep things simple, by which I mean fancy.

Fancy Gin Cocktail, adapted from Jerry Thomas’s recipe

• 2 oz. genever

• ¼ oz. curaçao

• ¼ oz. simple syrup

• 2 dashes Boker’s bitters (you can use Angostura)

Stir. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express a lemon twist over the drink, then rub it around the rim of the glass.

What I’m Reading and Watching, Connect-the-Dots Edition

Nouvelle Vague (2025) shouldn’t work yet proves utterly delightful. Director Richard Linklater’s chronicle of the making of Breathless (1960) sent me back to marvel anew at Jean-Luc Godard’s original film and at Linklater’s uncanny recreation of it. Nouvelle Vague succeeds at the difficult task of capturing an entire scene, the cauldron of creativity bubbling over at the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma, with Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and others in their circle conspiring to create movies, not merely write about them. The cast is so sprawling that Linklater’s film doesn’t bother to introduce them in a conventional way. Instead, we’re given a face and a name, the movie trusting us to work out each person’s significance. The on-the-fly approach is descended from Godard’s own shooting and editing techniques.

Damn near every actor is a dead ringer for the person they portray, with Zoey Deutch both a remarkable Jean Seberg and arguably a better Patricia than Seberg is in Breathless. Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) appears here as a hipster outcast from a Marvel movie, a stylish superhero whose power is his sangfroid; at no point is he ever flustered, flapped, or wrong. Godard as unassailably cool art god works for this movie, but I confess some lingering affection for the version of him in Godard Mon Amour (2017), written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius of The Artist. That Godard, played by Louis Garrel, was a nebbish perpetually exasperated by mere mortals’ refusal to acknowledge his superior taste and political acumen. I blame my own feelings toward Godard, an unquestionably galvanic figure responsible for multiple masterpieces including Breathless, plus several films I respect but don’t like and quite a few that I couldn’t finish. Or maybe I’m still carrying a grudge over the way he dusted Agnès Varda at the end of Faces Places (2017).

The artistic life has provided a rich vein for Linklater to mine in 2025. I knew almost instantly that I would love Blue Moon. Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is attending the 1943 Broadway opening of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner Richard Rodgers with new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II. As the cast belts out the title song (“We know we belong to the land …”), Hart leans over to his companion and says, “Here comes ‘grand’!” The jovial cattiness with which he delivers the zinger sealed the deal.

The sun sets on a partnership in Blue Moon

Hart slips out of the theater and heads to Sardi’s, where he tries not to drink as he steels himself to congratulate Rodgers on his triumph and possibly salvage their creative union. He also anticipates a dalliance with the young Yale student (Margaret Qualley) whom he’s half-convinced will be his salvation. The script by Robert Kaplow, whose novel Me and Orson Welles Linklater brought to the screen in 2008, could easily be a play, almost the entirety of its action playing out within the storied Big Stem eatery. But the joint can barely contain Hart. Hawke doesn’t resemble him physically—camera tricks are deployed to make him seem shorter—but is a near-perfect match otherwise; the lyricist is a world-class talker and “appreciator of beauty,” attributes that suit the actor to a T. Andrew Scott matches him in an extraordinary, subtle turn as Rodgers, patiently gladhanding well-wishers and hangers-on as he realizes that he has just transformed American theater. Rodgers is no villain but a craftsman who insists on a regular schedule. His ears can’t help pricking up as Hart pitches a gargantuan new show, but Hart’s glib insistence on satirizing everything—love, history, theatrical conventions—flies in the face of the emotional simplicity Rodgers wants to emphasize. Hart also has near-superhuman abilities here. In the span of an evening, he provides Baby Stephen Sondheim with a lyric that will appear in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; suggests to George Roy Hill, who will direct Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, that the key to career longevity is focusing on male friendship; and unlocks the secret of Stuart Little for E. B. White (a lovely performance by Patrick Kennedy, recently in Netflix’s Dept. Q). But it never comes off as showboating, merely engaging company. Rosemarie and I took in Blue Moon at a Saturday matinee. The movie played in one of the smaller auditoriums at the multiplex, and there were seats to spare. But for every member of that audience, there was nowhere else they’d rather be, their enthusiasm palpable. Forget all this talk about special effects-driven tentpoles. Blue Moon was the best theatrical experience I’ve had all year.

MacLachlan and Hawke face off in The Lowdown

Ethan Hawke—you see what I’m doing here—has his most Ethan Hawke role to date in the FX series The Lowdown. Self-described “truthstorian” Lee Raybon is Tulsa’s biggest rabblerouser, picking fights with moneyed interests. His latest exposé on the powerful Washberg family hits the streets as one scion (Kyle MacLachlan) is cruising to election as Oklahoma’s governor. When the candidate’s “sensitive” brother (Tim Blake Nelson) commits suicide, Lee doesn’t buy the story. The name of native Sooner Jim Thompson is repeatedly invoked—a collection of first editions of his pulp novels kickstarts the action—but while the show’s debut season does build a solid noirish plot that redeems the hackneyed “land deal” trope, it shares the hangout vibe of creator Sterlin Harjo’s previous outing Reservation Dogs. That’s only to The Lowdown’s benefit, as these characters are worth spending time with: Lee, all motormouthed sincerity; Keith David’s private eye¹, wondering if he’s on the right side of things; and a magnificent, where-has-she-been Jeanne Tripplehorn as the new Widow Washberg, hatching schemes of her own. Almost every episode turns the spotlight on a guest star, like a heartbreaking Graham Greene in one of his final appearances. Mention must be made of episode 5, a deep dive into male friendship with Peter Dinklage and Hawke embodying the two types that all Dudes of a Certain Age become: The One Who Hates Everything, and The One Who Thinks He Can Still Make a Difference. Consider this a thumbs-up from a dude who toggles between both.

Among The Lowdown’s staff writers is Oklahoma-born Edgar Award winner Lou Berney, whose new novel Crooks (2025) is about a crime family. Not in the sense that the federal government would slap a RICO charge against them.² No, the Mercurios are a crime family in that each member of the clan has a touch of larceny in their heart. Only a genealogist could say how far back it goes: “A Mercurio probably sold counterfeit Michelangelos to gullible popes. A Mercurio probably supplied dice to the Roman legions and took a healthy cut of the action.” Berney starts the tale with parents Buddy and Lillian, who fall in love in the mob-run Las Vegas of the 1960s. He then follows their progeny around the globe and in and out of trouble: Los Angeles in the 1980s, the corporate Vegas of the ‘90s, the wild west of Moscow in the Yeltsin years. Each Mercurio sibling warrants their own story, especially Alice, who has done everything in her power to resist the siren song of lawlessness encoded in her DNA, and the unfortunately nicknamed Piggy, who just wants to see his kin again. Practically Dickensian in scope and chockful of Mercurio truisms like “Amateurs spend all their time figuring out a way in; professionals always make sure they know how to get out” and “It’s not what you do, it’s what people think you do,” Crooks is a bighearted novel about what you get from your family and what you take from them.

1. The actor is known around here as “Close Personal Friend Keith David” because he was a celebrity judge on the basic cable game show I appeared on as a contestant twenty years ago. He repeatedly voted against me, but fellow judge Henry Rollins called me “presidential” so I can be magnanimous about the experience.

2. As if the federal government is still in that line of work.