Here we are, the first post of the year and it’s going to be a collection.

You know, I’m still going to figure out what I’ll write for this blog this year. I do have a few posts already in mind, and I’ve kind of decided the theme for the April AtoZ Challenge will be ‘noir’. All the rest is still pretty much black.
So, I may just as well ask you what you’d like to see. Do tell me!

1920s Cocktails

Since we’re still in a festive mood (it’s the Epiphany today, it’s bank holiday here in Italy) I figured the way to stort off is by sharing some good, Prohibition-inspired cocktail recipes.
Now I have to confess I may not be a teetotal, but I’m very closed to it, still I find the culture of cocktails so fashinating. In the early stages of my reserach for Ghost Trilogy I spen quite some energy and time researching liquors and cocktails. I don’t know, it’s fun.

So her eit is a nice collection of Prohibition cocktail to try. Well, if you have a taste for it, go aheand and make some. And dont forget to tell me how it turned out.

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 7: Dark Cabaret

“Dark cabaret may be a simple description of the theme and mood of a cabaret performance, but more recently has come to define a particular musical genre which draws on the aesthetics of the decadent, risqué German Weimar-era cabarets, burlesque and vaudeville shows with the stylings of post-1970s goth and punk music.”

Post WW Europe (both the first and the second) is very popular in Dieselpunk literature. I’ve read quite a few short story set in Europe after WWI. There is indeed a particular feel to it which goes well with the dark, disinlusioned element of Dieselpunk and of course there’s the attitude toward totalitarism, which I suppose Europe at that time is particularly apt at portraying.

Weimar Republic Kabaret is a good synthesis of it: cutting edge, expressionist, eccessive, decadent, but also intimately vibrat. It’s a place where stories are born.

What’s On Your Radio?

Radio was just starting to become popular in the 1920s and by the end of the decad it had turned into a powerful media. Some historians theorise that the success of jazz on a national level was partly possible because of the radio (and because of the pioneering recording industry, of course). Like cinema, radio offering was often national and this helped to create a national feeling for the new world.

This article gathers a bunch of early mystery radio serials (yes, there are links where you can actually listen to those serials), with a commentary on each one of them.
Really really intersting.

100 Iconic Photos of New Orleans Through the Ages

You may know by now that I love vintage photos, so it shouldn’t be a surprise this awesome collection of photoes spanning many decades of New Orleans history caught my interest. Really, go have a look at it.

A duty to the Dead

Dedicated to helping the many wounded during the Great War, Bess Crawford receives a desperate request from a dying lieutenant while serving as a nurse aboard a hospital ship. “Tell my brother Jonathan that I lied,” the young man says. “I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.”

Back home in England, Bess receives an unexpected response from the dead soldier’s family, for neither Jonathan Graham‚ his mother‚ nor his younger brother admit to understanding what the message means.

But the Grahams are harboring a grim secret, and Bess must, somehow, get to the bottom of it. It is her sacred duty to the dead, no matter how painful, or dangerous, that obligation might be.

I’ll be honest, I was first drawn to this book by the cover (yes, I’m that kind of reader), but the blurb is also pretty awesom. And lately, I find that I’m easily hooked by stories set during WWI

Somewhere in France – October 15, 1915

Author M.K. Todd has written a trilogy of novels set during and around WWI based on her huband’s uncle’s letter from the war. On her blog, she’s sharing some of those letters and you can read one at this link.
I find it particularly intersting, and also touching, that we have the possibility to read these fist-hand account of the war. These men and women might have gone, but their words remain to us and remind us of what shoudl never happen again.