Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Monday, November 12, 2007

Absinthe Returns

Dear reader! Should this column impress you as being more than usually lyrical, recalling perhaps the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine; should it seem a bit decadent, redolent of Oscar Wilde’s withering hauteur; should it have a touch of madness or perversity, combining, say, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec with the passions of van Gogh; should it simply sound direct and forceful and knowing like one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters; should it do any or all of that, let me credit something that each of these figures fervently paid tribute to: the green fairy, the green goddess, the green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons.


Swim Ink 2/Corbis

Privat-Livemont’s 1896 poster advertising absinthe.


Musée de Picardie, Amiens

Albert Maignan’s “Green Muse” (1895) shows a poet succumbing to the green fairy.

Absinthe.

For this column was conceived under the influence of a green-colored, high-proof herbal liquor that was illegal in the United States for more than 95 years. And not just here, for when that mini-Prohibition began in 1912, alarm bells were ringing all over Europe. In 1905 a Swiss man murdered his family after drinking absinthe, leading to the liquor’s banishment from that country, where it originated. The French thought they risked losing World War I to robust beer-drinking Germans because of the dissolute influence of absinthe, so it was banned in that nation as well.

The medical evidence was also damning. As early as 1879 The New York Times warned that absinthe “is much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.” A 19th-century French doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its symptoms: “sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory delirium.”

But recently this anise-flavored spirit has been seeping back into the mainstream. In 1994 a museum devoted to absinthe opened in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. With its limited availability and exotic reputation, the drink inspired cultish devotion. It tantalized with its promises of visionary consciousness, so elaborately celebrated by a century of artists and writers.

Now absinthe has been widely restored. The European Union gradually hodgepodge of bans and widened absinthe’s availability. And this year two brands of absinthe made according to traditional recipes have been legally imported to the United States.

Last spring a French brand, Lucid, made its debut here, using 19th-century distilling methods and replicating chemical analyses of pre-ban absinthe. A Swiss absinthe, Kübler. appeared on the American market a few weeks ago, using a 1863 family formula.

One reason legal barriers have fallen is that, as The New Yorker reported in 2006, the regulated chemical thujone, found in wormwood and once thought to have been the cause of absinthe’s lure and its dangers, did not show up in any significant quantities in analyses of historical absinthe. So these authentic replicas, despite containing wormwood, do not pose a legal challenge. And the alarmed pronouncements about absinthe made from the beginning of the Belle Époque have been proved groundless, which was decisive, a Kübler spokesman said, in swaying United States government regulators.

This still leaves open the reasons behind absinthe’s reputation as an intoxicating source of creativity and invention, a power that led Hemingway’s character Robert Jordan, in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” to carry around a flask of this “opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.” It also leaves unsettled the cause of what led absinthe to be attacked, as one 19th-century poet put it, “the Devil, made liquid.”


The New York Times

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

4
通常坊間高 酒店兼職檔西餐廳情人套餐壹客就要花費五 酒店工作、六百元以上,甚至上千元,對於有荷包預算的情侶們無疑是大大的負擔。 酒店上班考量目前低靡景氣,加 寒假打工上今年七夕情人節是在平常日,為刺激買氣高雄麗尊酒店特 暑假打工別推出「經濟型情人自助餐每對990元」,23日前預 酒店PT約且付定金者可免費獲贈「純手工玫瑰巧戒」乙只;現點現做的 禮服酒店香煎美國沙朗牛排吃到飽」更是經濟實惠,僅限於8/26七夕情人節晚餐時 兼差段。七夕情人節還沒想好怎麼過嗎?趕 打工快把握機會!


台北酒店經紀酒店於8/26晚上推出「七夕夜~五星經濟情人 酒店經紀餐優惠專案」,每對只要990元(含一成服務費),此外 酒店打工,凡於8/23日前預約並付訂金者免費 酒店兼差獲贈「純手工玫瑰巧戒」乙只,更為小倆口的戀情喝花酒加溫!值得一提的是,「純手工玫瑰巧戒」交際應酬用比利時產地的白巧克力,經由隔水加熱法融解、降溫再粉味小火加熱等多道繁複製作過程才能完成戒台部份,玫瑰花亦使用白巧克力加上麥芽糖隔水加熱充份混合均勻後再冷卻一夜後方可塑形。


﹝含豐富鐵質的玫瑰海鹽也將牛排的鮮味更加提振,肉香四溢酒店喝酒沙朗牛排,每一口極具嚼勁,鮮嫩好吃。﹞


另外,以多國料理聞名的地球村自助餐廳提供多樣化精緻自助吧,無論 酒店是前菜、甜點、湯品、DIY擔仔麵、鮮蔬沙拉、鐵板燒等,提供豐富且多樣的菜式,讓喜愛自由用餐、歡樂氛圍的情侶們可以輕鬆大啖美食,不用擔心荷包大失血的顧慮。