The depiction of the absinthe imbiber as a figure of satire and ridicule is increasingly apparent in period newspapers and publication of the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, riding shotgun to more formal prohibitionist sentimentality.

A curious piece reproduced in the New Zealand Taranaki Herald (Volume XLVIII, Issue 11755, 23 February 1900) effectively borrows a Boer War propaganda poem & song by Rudyard Kipling of 1899 ‘The Absent Minded Beggar’, making social commentary on the then state of Anglo-French relations by changing it to ‘The Absinthe Minded Beggar’.

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Love
-Edwin Morgan

Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love
is the wolf that guards the gate.
Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It
fills us and fuels us and fires us to create.
Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed
pillow, crumpled sheet, unenviable fate.
Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing
will ever let that high ambiguity abate.
Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers
and clinks fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched
absinth to fall on it and alter its state.
With love you send a probe
So far from the globe
No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the
zones the drags the flares it signals all to
leave all and to navigate.

Who says the era of absinthe-addled poets is part of history long gone?

This poem written in 2002 by Scotland’s National Poet, Edwin Morgan shows that the allure of the green muse still prompts literary reference and deference.
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We like plugging Australian artists here at absinthe.com.au, even ones that have found a degree of success already.

One such individual of note is Ben Templesmith. Never heard of him?

Well, he is probably most recently known as the illustrative genius behind the vampiric graphic novel, 30 Days of Night, that has recently been transformed into a major motion picture. Not bad for a Curtin University design grad who is just ticking into his early thirties, eh?

As the one of the biggest artistic exports from down under to make his mark on the US comic and graphic novel scene, his unique sense of the gothic and individual style has seen him work on the illustrated installments for Star Wars, Army of Darkness, Silent Hill and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.

But maybe the one I like best, as an absintheur, is his wonderfully named Wormwood - Gentleman Corpse.

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One of Weimar Germany’s most important artists was the mysterious Otto Dix (1891-1969), who was famed for his striking portrayal of both bourgeois society and the seedy underclass, as they struggled in a rapidly degenerating Berlin society.

The motivation for the realism of his work, particularly arising from his war service as machine gunner in WW1 is highlighted in a 1963 interview:

‘I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself.’

Living in post-Kaiser Berlin, the absence of censorship resulted in Berlin becoming a New Babylon, providing ripe material for Dix as the city went to extremes to satisfy the every desire of anyone with hard foreign currency. One of his more famous subjects was the German dancer, actress, writer, and prostitute, Anita Berber - a daughter of Bohemian parents who was dancing in cabaret in Berlin by the time she was 16, and working nude by the time she was 19.

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity

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Imagine if you will the following scenario.Someone is killing the great modernist artists of early 20th century Europe - principally by separating their heads from their bodies.

But what of the addictive blue absinthe that painters around Paris have been using to enter famous paintings in a transcendental psychadelic trip? Who is the mysterious “Blue Lady”? Could this hold the key to the murders?

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