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The Holiday Cocktail Lounge Presents:
THE TIME MACHINE
What’s next?
… the sound of ice in the shaker, like no other, always the same. The seal pops, the bartender pours and a classic is reborn. This resurrection business can be a prison - but first this beautiful moment again in a chilled glass. This is a holiday. But how long to get back? Cocktails, bars- every decade wipes more away. Ten years? Twenty? It feels the same, like grooves on a record, skipping through the decades until…“It sounds plausible enough tonight but wait until tomorrow. Wait until the common sense of the morning.”
Every cocktail is a time machine. From our introductory sip to the last quaff we’re afforded and all the jagged points between to get caught on. They are windows to the past and doorways to the future and bright points of light on a dark line. But time machines aren’t trivial things. They’re dangerous: you can fall too far back or too far ahead; you can land where the eyes and stars are strange. Or worse - you can get stuck.
You can find where your rail’s going too late - or too early, it doesn’t matter if you can’t get off. The East Village runs at breakneck speeds, stroboscopic scaffolding up and down as facades morph and the hairstyles change with an eyeblink. They say “out of time” but you’re never out of it even when you run out of it. No matter how much it changes it’s the same and you know you’re still rushing to that point where the rail turns around and around again. Into that last bar, that last survivor, that last holiday. And this is the moment before the end becomes the beginning. Once more chance to jump the loop as the familiar faces rush past your entry, the bartop. You ask yourself - am I even making choices anymore? You squeeze your eyes shut and hope against hope and it's the sound of gravity sucking back into the vacuum but it's also…
Al Sotack - Jupiter disco
Friend, Psychonaut, wordsmith. Floating in space.
VOL. 9 2023
Holiday Cocktail Lounge
75 St. Mark’s Place
New York, NY 10003
212-777-9637
ROB EHRLICH
bar owner/holidayer/friend/snack guru
JOE DONOHUE, ALEX STRANGE
cocktail makers/time travelers/editors
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Gabi Porter
BARBARA SIBLEY
creative director
THE HOLIDAY STAFF
the usual gang of weirdos
DESIGNED BY
Holly Zmijewski