Click Here for Tableaux Complete Issue

click to read

click to read

click to read

By Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, February 2008

… Downtown is still a tough sell to a designated driver. But if you have a reason to go there–jury duty, long-delayed first visit to friend’s loft, etcetera–don’t head back to your comfort zone without checking out The Edison: a well-funded experiment with alcohol, distressed surfaces, and visible filament. Take a date to a pair of leather club chairs in a candlelit boiler. (Just pretend you don’t notice the busboys hustling around you in suspenders and newsboy caps.) click to continue reading this and more bar reviews

The Drinking Man’s Guide To Summer
Contributions by Stinson Carter
Maxim Magazine, Summer 2009

Mixologists start your blenders! It’s time for Maxim’s guide to the craziest cocktails, hottest bartenders, bawdiest beach bars, and secretest hideaways. Follow us down the hatch. click to continue

Gone Fishing (Of Moose And Men)
By Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, March 2007

“John Wayne taught his kids how to fish here,” says Patrick Holleran, owner of the Sportsmen’s Lodge. It opened in 1946 as a clubhouse for the Trout Lakes Farm that supplied restaurants as far off as Vegas and offered locals a place to toss back beers while tossing out lines.

Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis were also among those who dangled liverwurst-baited rods into the lakes to lure trout that the lodge staff would grill and serve on white tablecloths with a martini, or on the bar with a lager. Though suburbia has since turned the lakes into a pond, the Sportsmen’s Lodge has barricaded itself from the strip malls of bordering Ventura Boulevard with a parapet of towering eucalyptus and palm trees, and the stubborn ghosts of the past… click to continue reading

The Real Big Easy
Maxim, March 2009
Contributions by Stinson Carter

Rip up your tourist brochures! Get your butt off Bourbon Street, and cross over to the “other side.” Our no-holds-barred insider’s guide is the only thing you’ll need to experience New Orleans-and Mardi Gras-the way the coolest locals do. click to continue reading

Whistling Dixie
by Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, March 2008

My grandfather chased his bourbon with it, my father stocked his fraternity house with it, and it was my first stolen sip of beer as a kid. I still remember the green and white label looking up at me from the bottom of an ice chest at a barbecue when I was twelve–magnified by a foot of water and the lure of the forbidden, promising Southern manhood by the ounce. Even at twelve, I’d heard the name enough to know that Dixie beer had a cultural significance in Louisiana on par with LSU football, gumbo, and humidity. Even Walker Percy gave it due reverence when he wrote that one can “eat crawfish and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century.” click to continue reading

Message In a Bottle: Elephants drink wine and other tales from the still.
Review by Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, April/May 2007

Humans first fell off the wagon when we “gave up wandering around eating whatever came to hand and settle down to raise crops,” writes Barbara Holland in her new book, The Joy Of Drinking. Surplus crops sat around and fermented, and soon the magic of alcohol struck the ancient world as a “supernatural inspiration, a blessing draped simultaneously over the peoples of the earth.” From here, Holland races through the ensuing 10,000 years of booze-pickled history with taut, conversational prose… click to continue reading

Mug Shots
by Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, February 2008

The classic black-and-white headsot is dead, and its mausoleum is Duke’s Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip–not to mention countless dry cleaners and body shops scattered across Los Angeles.

Duke’s walls are a timeline of the once ubiquitous symbol of showbiz, from Frank Sinatra in his Rat Pack suit to Stephen Baldwin with a dangle earring and three-day stubble. “I haven’t had a new one in two years,” says Beverly Pittman, manager and 30-year veteran of Duke’s. “It’s like they’ve stopped making them.” click to continue reading