Word: martinis
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Indeed there has. The martini, once a symbol of American imbibing, memorialized in thousands of neon outlines of cocktail glasses, is becoming an amusing antique, like a downtown Art Deco apartment building. The new sign of the times? It should be the outline of the ubiquitous green Perrier bottle. Whether it is imported from exotic locales or comes from a local spring, cool, clear water is the quaff of the moment. "Everyone is drinking Perrier and iced tea," observes Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. "White wine is almost daring now." The temperate mood is transforming...
...most deductions. It calls for three income brackets for individuals (15%, 25% and 35%) instead of the current 15 (ranging from 11% to 50%), and just one tax rate (33%) for corporations. Most middle-class tax breaks, including charitable gifts, mortgage interest on vacation homes, and the fabled three-martini lunch, would be eliminated or severely limited. In fiscal 1986, individual taxes would go down 5.9%, and business taxes would jump 25%. Consistent with Reagan's insistence on a "revenue-neutral" plan, the Treasury's total take would stay about the same...
Judging from the opening fusillade of press releases, not just the three-martini lunch but the welfare of the republic hangs in the balance. Cutting back tax deductions for entertainment and business meals "is not only bad tax policy but also an unsound way to further the goals of strengthening the economy," intoned the Distilled Spirits Council. Taxing health-and life-insurance fringe benefits "threatens the financial security of millions of working Americans," cried the American Council of Life Insurance. And phasing out accelerated depreciation "would end up lowering the standard of living of the 30 million Americans who rent...
...Mickey Mouse. No Coney Island." He hired a decorator and paid him $5,000. He hired a professional bartender, Bill Me Nichols, a man with 30 years' experience in the trade. And he applied for a liquor license, "pleasantly surprising" the state. Today the lights dance on the martini glasses...
...that ends the book enables Larkin to thresh out his quarrel fully with modernism. He writes warmly about his youthful passion for the likes of Armstrong, Beiderbecke and Ellington, but charges that Bebop Saxophonist Charlie Parker destroyed it all with music that gave "the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously." Parker thus joins Pound and Picasso in Larkin's unholy trinity of decadent experimenters, and jazz's evolution becomes a capsule version of the "degeneration into private and subsidized absurdity" that he believes is overtaking all the arts. What has been lost, Larkin...