DRUNK HISTORY

New Year's Eve is a drinking holiday, let's face it. We drink and look back at the year and succumb to weepy sentimentality or forced hilarity--sometimes in the middle of the same sentence. The trouble is, every bar in town is packed with amateurs. People who have no business drinking feel obligated to celebrate the passing of the year with copious amounts of booze. You can see them a mile away. Twenty-two year olds clutching their IDs, ordering sucker drinks with naughty names, getting all lizard-eyed and nauseous, calling each other "dude!"


Hey, is that you? Stay home. Keep the roads clear. It's even cheaper drinking at home, and you can mix your own Screaming Orgasms, Fuzzy Navels, and Flaming Velvet Buttcheeks. Stay home and drink and dial. It's easy. Drink and feel sorry for yourself and call up old friends. Drink and dial, you pathetic loser. Or better yet, drink and email. Take the cowardly path, the walk of shame. Better yet, drink and pass out in front of the TV while watching Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. That is just too sad. Dick Clark is as old as Methuselah and he looks exactly the same as he ever did so he probably made a deal with the devil or he has a portrait of himself growing old in the cellar. Anyway, pass out pondering such heavy thoughts while watching Dick Clark and some shitty eighties band of fat guys in skinny neckties but be sure you place the bucket near your head before you nod off.


"Drunk History" is a video that has worked it's way around the web. This poor drunk has a story to tell, and he does pretty well with the help of Michael Cera, the star of Juno and practically every other movie this year. Watch and learn something.

Cheers!

BOOTLEG WHISKEY

Robert Mitchum in "Thunder Road," as an outlaw running bootleg whiskey in a fast '57 Ford Fairlane. Mitchum also wrote and sang the song. I've always been a fan of Mitchum and his sleepy anti-heroes that were doomed from the start. He managed to live outside the law, and still be honest. Unless, of course, he was playing the villain, which he did so well in "Night of the Hunter" and the original "Cape Fear." (Speaking of prohibition, Mitchum was also busted for pot in 1948 and served time in jail. Pot prohibition still hasn't been repealed, but that's another story.) I've painted Robert Mitchum several times, and here he contemplates a ring, as well as his own uncertain future.


In 1932, the Democratic Party platform included a plank to repeal Prohibition, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president promising a repeal. In 1933, the state conventions ratified the Twenty-first Amendment, and liquor was legal once again. Suddenly bootleggers were out, and whiskey was back in business. Big business. Nowadays giant corporations make and market the vast majority of booze, but you can still find good, small-batch, artisan distilled whiskeys. And you no longer have to hide it from the cops.

You've got to hand it to moonshiners who tended stills during our stupid governmental ban on liquor. While creepy Christian moralists like Carrie Nation and the teetotalers in the Temperance Union railed against demon rum, these bootleggers made whiskey and sold it to people who felt like having a drink. One of those small-batch, artisan distillers was my own grandfather. It was a stupid law, and my grandpa was anything but stupid. Of course, we've still got creepy Christian fundamentalists telling people what to do, but they lost this battle once and for all. I'll drink to that.

Here's a short history of whiskey making in America:


Here the Grateful Dead perform "Brown-Eyed Women," a bootlegging song, in March of 1986: