I've never met Ektoras Binikos, but his cocktail recipes have been intriguing me for many a year, and I'm sure that you, too, would be pretty fascinated by a guy who tried to incorporate dried blood into a cocktail.
The people who hired him to create the drink wouldn't allow the blood, so he tried to add some tears - a specific woman's tears, of course - to the drink, but they didn't go for that, either. It was back to the drawing board.
Ektoras is a Greek born artist who tends bar in New York City, and any decent search engine will lead you to sites where his work is on display. I'm particularly fond of his video, "Explaining an Image to a Stuffed Hare (After Joseph Beuys)," though I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste.
The "blood and tears" drink was created for the 60th birthday party of performance artist Marina Abramovic. She's a woman who is fond, it seems, of freezing herself onstage, and she incorporates other acts of self mutilation into her art form, too. It's not actually my cup of tea, but the world would be oh-so-boring if people like this weren't among us, right?
Being denied permission to use human body fluids in his drink, Ektoras went for cayenne pepper, instead. Good choice, right? But this wasn't any old cayenne pepper. It was cayenne pepper that Abramovic had placed under her pillow and slept on for seven nights, "so that it would absorb her auratic energy," he told me.
The birthday party was a big hit. People such as Lou Reed and David Byrne turned out for the event - it was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York a few years ago - and Binikos' cocktail was a big hit, too. "As everyone toasted her, a strong auratic energy vibration simultaneously connected Marina with everyone in the room," he said.
More currently, Binikos sent me a recipe for a drink that he calls the Milkmaid. He created it to celebrate the painting of the same name by Johannes Vermeer. There's no milk in Biniko's Milkmaid cocktail, and there's no bread pudding in there, either - the maid in the painting is sometimes thought to be making that dessert - but there's an ounce of geneva from the Netherlands in there, so the ever-so-Dutch Vermeer would probably approve.
Although you'll have to go to the bother of making a citrus-mint syrup to make this baby, give thanks for the fact that you don't have to track down Marina Abramovic so you can persuade her to sleep on some cayenne pepper for you.
The people who hired him to create the drink wouldn't allow the blood, so he tried to add some tears - a specific woman's tears, of course - to the drink, but they didn't go for that, either. It was back to the drawing board.
Ektoras is a Greek born artist who tends bar in New York City, and any decent search engine will lead you to sites where his work is on display. I'm particularly fond of his video, "Explaining an Image to a Stuffed Hare (After Joseph Beuys)," though I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste.
The "blood and tears" drink was created for the 60th birthday party of performance artist Marina Abramovic. She's a woman who is fond, it seems, of freezing herself onstage, and she incorporates other acts of self mutilation into her art form, too. It's not actually my cup of tea, but the world would be oh-so-boring if people like this weren't among us, right?
Being denied permission to use human body fluids in his drink, Ektoras went for cayenne pepper, instead. Good choice, right? But this wasn't any old cayenne pepper. It was cayenne pepper that Abramovic had placed under her pillow and slept on for seven nights, "so that it would absorb her auratic energy," he told me.
The birthday party was a big hit. People such as Lou Reed and David Byrne turned out for the event - it was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York a few years ago - and Binikos' cocktail was a big hit, too. "As everyone toasted her, a strong auratic energy vibration simultaneously connected Marina with everyone in the room," he said.
More currently, Binikos sent me a recipe for a drink that he calls the Milkmaid. He created it to celebrate the painting of the same name by Johannes Vermeer. There's no milk in Biniko's Milkmaid cocktail, and there's no bread pudding in there, either - the maid in the painting is sometimes thought to be making that dessert - but there's an ounce of geneva from the Netherlands in there, so the ever-so-Dutch Vermeer would probably approve.
Although you'll have to go to the bother of making a citrus-mint syrup to make this baby, give thanks for the fact that you don't have to track down Marina Abramovic so you can persuade her to sleep on some cayenne pepper for you.
