The Booze Muse

The Green Fairy and her effect on the work (and ears) of artists...

Her story is a cautionary tale. A small town girl who becomes the biggest thing in the world. She catapults to fame, becomes the muse of the writers and the philosophers and the painters, who write about her, philosophize about her, and paint her. She changes Parisian culture during its Belle Époque. But soon her world collapses. She’s blamed for the emasculation of men, the destruction of morals, the downfall of French society. She’s blamed for murder. And just like that she is cast out, unwelcome. This is the story of Absinthe.

Absinthe’s story starts no doubt before history, but we meet her in the Bible and in Ancients Egypt and Greece. It’s wormwood there. Like other things that would become booze, it started out as medicine. It was used for indigestion and was hung above doorways to keep away evil spirits – much like modern Tums. Leaves soaked in wormwood were used to fight rheumatism and ease labor pains. During the Plague wormwood was burned to fumigate infected homes. Absinthe pops up as a drink in Switzerland in the 18^th century, where doctors used it as a cure-all elixir. Part of the global trend towards alcohol-based medicines. They made you feel better, but after a shot of 140 proof liquor, you wouldn’t notice your femur sticking out of your thigh, let alone a sore throat. But Absinthe really starts spreading its wings during the French colonization of Algeria in the 1840s, where French soldiers took it as an anti-malarial. When the soldiers came home, they brought with them absinthe and many STDs.

The French have a relationship with wine that rivals only their love for cigarettes and sexing up two people at once. Another booze could never hope to overtake wine. Normally. But in the mid-19th century, the great wine blight was destroying vineyards throughout France. This was caused by a grape lice brought to France from the US, a thing they probably didn’t realize when they gave us the Statue of Liberty a few years later. So with wine production diminished and the French still looking for a booze to fire them up to yell at people for poorly-accented French, in stepped Absinthe. And boy did it step in. For a while, everything was green. It was so popular that 5 o’clock was called the Green Hour. Absinthe required sleek tools like a slotted spoon, a reservoir glass, a cold water fountain; it had a process and training wheels – a slow drip of cold water through sugar; and it had a mascot – La Fee Verte (the Green Fairy).

Absinthe was soon the drink of Paris’ artistic community. It became the ‘muse in a bottle’ with a who’s who list of artists dedicated to its supposed mind altering effects. Édouard Manet, Paul Gaugin, and Pablo Picasso all drank their green darling for inspiration. Toulouse-Lautrec carried around a hollowed out cane which held a vial of, yep, absinthe. Vincent Van Gogh became particularly fond of using absinthe to chase away his personal demons (spoiler: it didn’t work. Nothing did). Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, and Guy Maupassant were all dedicated absintheurs. No other alcohol has ever had such a reputation as booze muse, nor has one had the impact on the arts as absinthe has. And it is (at least partly) responsible for a laundry list of artistic movements – Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and some isms that were surely lost forever in a haze of green.

But that doesn’t mean the art it produced isn’t terrifying. Absinthe paintings leave one as uneasy as those depicted in them. The spooky green fairy, the haunted green look on the drinkers’ faces. This goes to figure, considering the toll it took on the artists. Many famous artistic absintheurs lost their marbles, died young and drunk, or managed both. Absinthe became Van Gogh’s co-pilot on his rapid mental decline. Baudelaire used laudanum and opium with his absinthe and visited the Great Beyond at 46. Lautrec went into a terrible green alcoholic decline and died at 36. Rimbaud died at 51, but not before he was shot by a drunk Paul Verlaine. Fortunately Verlaine was too drunk to hit much, also he might have been trying to commit suicide. Van Gogh threatened Gaugin with a razor, which he then used to slice off his ear. And suddenly we have an episode of the Real Drunk Housewives of the Belle Époque.

But absinthe soon became seen as the main blight on French society. And it caught the blame for more than just dead impressionists and severed ears. A man in Switzerland murdered his wife and children in a blind drunk rage and despite the fact that he had had multiple brandies and four bottles of wine, the murders were blamed on the two glasses of absinthe. (Remember that time you had sixteen beers and then a glass of wine and blamed puking your guts out on ‘mixing alcohols’? Yeah, it was kind of like that.) This growing fear of absinthe was soon overwhelming the country. France had just lost the Franco-Prussian War, they were in need of fit men, and they were nervously eying their aggressive neighbors (who were busy drinking Jägermeister and planning a couple of world wars). The French saw absinthe as diminishing the combat-readiness of French men. Worse, they saw it as the reason for the decline of French society, as opposed to it being, you know, full of French people.  

Absinthe became public enemy numéro un. Just like gin in England before it and whiskey in the US, the failings and problems of society were blamed on absinthe. Unfairly, too, because despite absinthe’s reputation as a hallucinogenic gateway to an otherworldly experience, it was just strong booze. To get hallucinations from wormwood you’d have to drink a baby pool of it while eating LSD. All absinthe’s high alcohol content got people was good ole fashioned fucked up. Nevertheless, it was a victim of its own public relations and by 1915 it was banned in most places. Today we celebrate the Green Fairy during the Green Hour (whenever you’re drinking)  

Ingredients

-          A bottle of Absinthe

-          A glass (reservoir, if possible)

-          A freezing cold bottle of distilled water (cold, cold. Freezing cold. Think Leo at the end of Titanic or Jack Nicholson in the hedge maze at the end of The Shining)

-          A slotted spoon (or a fork with no spaghetti on it)

-          Sugar cubes

-          A clean olive oil dropper

-          No plans, no need to be in public, no people to see

-          About 300 meters between you and your car keys

Directions

Pour about 1 ounce of absinthe into an absinthe glass. If you have a reservoir glass, then the little reservoir at the bottom is made to hold an ounce of liquid. So just fill that with absinthe. This makes it easy without measuring anything, because measuring absinthe will become far more difficult after drinking absinthe. If you don’t have a reservoir glass, measure out an ounce of absinthe and pour it in the glass. Do not do any more than an ounce. There are plenty of times to be a hero, when you are drinking absinthe is not one of them.

Lay an absinthe spoon across the top of the rim and place a sugar cube on it. Attach the olive oil dropper to the water bottle. Now slowly drip the ice-cold distilled water onto the sugar, just enough to saturate it. Allow it to sit until the sugar cube begins to dissolve. Drip more water over the sugar (again, slowly) until the sugar is completely dissolved. In the glass, you should aim for 3 to 5 parts water to 1 part absinthe. As the water hits the liquor, the louche will swirl through the liquid, creating a milky opaque effect; the sugar will remove a bit of the absinthe’s bitterness and release its herbal bouquet (aka you’ll be able to drink it without crying). Allow the louche to rest, then stir in the rest of the sugar. Then savor it. Remember, absinthe may not be hallucinogenic, but it’s between 45 and 75 % alcohol, so no cars, bikes, messaging exes, or sending your severed ear to hookers. Drink to the booze muse, her bad rap, and Van Gogh’s ear.