To market, to market

Lots of travel lore inside today.

This is Cocktail Charm, a weekly email filled with delicious little things to talk about at parties. In today’s edition: Tuscan Sotheby’s, playing Password, and Flavortown, USA.

I was on vacation last week, and I’m coming down from the all-out sprint I usually pace my Big Summer Trip at (plus, oh, the mental recalibration that comes with an attempted assassination, a major political convention, an election stepdown, and a blingy new presidential contender with pretty elite taste in vinyl entering the fracas all while you’re gone). Last Tuesday’s newsletter arrived thanks to the marvel of modern email scheduling, and next week you’ll read about the Portuguese lending library that checks out not books, but tin-glazed tiles.

But while I’m still shaking off the jet lag, I want to know: Reader, pray tell, are you a grocery store tourist?

If it hasn’t made its way to one of your social feeds yet, here’s the idea: When visiting a new place, making your way to a supermarket is a genuinely insightful form of sightseeing — a way to encounter local life. Un petit TikTok for you here.

But why stop at the supermarket? A friend of mine who sells vintage clothing checks out secondhand stores in every city she’s in to see what the local stockists curate. I know others who, when traveling, always stop in a public library to stroll through the shelves. Playgrounds? Post offices? Possibilities! As for me, I can be a pharmacy tourist, mostly when I’m suffering in some way that requires me to ask for meds in Password Italian. “Ma’am, I need the liquid…for the eyes…with allergies? I have the allergies???”¹

It’s obvious to me that this sliver of slice-of-life tourism isn’t limited to the cereal aisle. So here’s an icebreaker to drop at your next party: The next time you touch down in a new place, what niche sightseeing are you doing there?

Until then, hit reply and let me know.

Up for discussion

Conversation-starters served up on a platter.

The Olympics are closing down art galleries. Security fences along the Seine are standing between exhibitions and their viewers, and the gallerists are understandably displeased.

Who wants to go in on the Mona Lisa’s Florentine villa together? It was purchased by her in-laws in 1498, features fourteen bedrooms and a lemon house, and just dropped on Tuscan Sotheby’s. If we put in an offer, I call first dibs on the oil mill.

IMO, the history of food criticism can be neatly divided into two: Before Flavortown and After Flavortown. Debate me! Pete Wells is leaving his longtime post as the NYT’s chief restaurant critic, and it’s a great day to revisit his ripper of a review of Guy Fieri’s Midtown joint.

GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

Exit interviews can be an art, too. Just see the one from Wells.

Could Big AI actually get away with stealing creatives’ work? Some serious tea leaves to read: The open-source programmers who have sued OpenAI for taking their code without attribution dropped a copyright lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker (although they’re still pursuing other legal action). That still leaves the authors, songwriters, photographers, visual artists, journalists, and more with cases alleging AI companies illegally hoovered up their work to feed the machines. And that doesn’t include the tech companies instructing their chatbots from your social posts! I just revisited Alex Reisner’s staggering 2023 story at the thousands of writers who had their works stolen for training large language models. If you want one story that captures the scope of tech’s heist, I really recommend it. We live in dystopia, etc etc. Good luck in court, Altman!

Here they are, the worst album covers of all time, generously collected for you by Rolling Stone. Lots of glam rock representation on the list, obviously. But I’d like to argue that Trick Daddy’s www.thug.com was actually a Cassandresque flash of foretold prophecy for the Y2K nostalgia in decades to come. Or it’s just camp.

A more delightful rock than those covers. Show someone this oddball little game of rock, paper, scissors where you just keep on guessing. And tell me what you find — apparently, I’m the first to suggest rod beats fish.

I’m going to say a word, and you’re going to give me a gut reaction. Summerween. 🥴

Mailbag

I love when people write back about the newsletter and we get to talk in our inboxes like it’s a digital dinner party. And I really love this note from

Rachel Galton

, who replied to last week’s edition about schoolhouse (and school bus) art with a different kind of show she once saw in a roving vehicle.

I paid not an insubstantial amount of money to attend an immersive theatre production that took place (partially) inside a school bus. It was intended to teach about climate change via a [show] that traveled to different places representing our possible climate futures. I was truly so excited because that shit is right up my alley. And it was so poorly executed. Gimmicky, even! So I am thrilled to see more successful examples in this newsletter.

Rachel’s currently on a sabbatical year in New Zealand, where she and her partner are documenting their small jobs and volunteer gigs in a newsletter called Recess. You really have to subscribe — I was glued to her dispatch about life as a professional wetland weeder.

Parting thoughts

Brain empty, much jet lag, here are a few photos from Portugal!

Clink clink!
Gabriela

Thanks for being a reader of Cocktail Charm! Has this newsletter helped you out at happy hour? Let me know! I’d love to hear it.

1. Rather: “Signora, ho bisogno del liquido…per gli occhi…con l’allergie? Ho l’allergie???” That was the day I found out the Italian word for antihistamine is antihistamine.