Behind the Scenes Minis: Blackouts and Funiculars

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. We had our live show from the Ace Hotel, Los Angeles, South Bay. We sure did shared this week. We think we are as we record this still reviewing audio to see what's workable from the live show and what isn't. Yeah, so we still don't know how much you're going to get that's actually from the event itself versus from us recording in the studios that are in our homes. What a fun night though, it was very fun. I wanted to make sure to thank number one, to thank Marriott for sponsoring the show. The Marriott AC Hotel where we had this live event was really nice. The whole venue was great, everyone we worked with was great. And then suddenly, in the middle of recording the episode, there was a flash and a pop and the power was out for the whole neighborhood. And it stayed that way. It stayed that way for a long time. I think when we left after everything was over. Uh huh, our hotel was still running on a generator. Yeah yeah, yeah, which I should say, even before any of that happened, AC Hotel South Bay was already being real flexible because originally we had at the end of this event, we had a cocktail demonstration, right, And originally it was supposed to happen on their rooftop bar, right, but it rained that day, so the whole thing moved inside downstairs to their lobby bar. And they were so accommodating with that. Yeah, And it was a beautiful setup, and I so like right out of the gate they were already rolling with some wild times and then it just got wilder for us. Yeah. Yeah, because La does not have a lot of rainfall. That rooftop bar isn't a bar that has an additional roof over it. I know a lot of the rooftop bars that I have been to in like Massachusetts or North Carolina or whatever, like it's sort of an open air bar, but there's also a roof, and this was more of an open space. So having the event there in the rain was not not feasible, not really feasible. So yeah, we had it downstairs instead, Yeah, which was also very very fun. Yeah, we had a great time. That was so fun. I love making a drink and I love making a drink with a big room full of people, and it was really really great. I will say I was kind of impressed and delighted with our listeners. I mean I always am, but I have done an event like that at other things that I was not hosting, but I was like part of. And it went on. They go off the rails really easily, where it's like once you say poor the first ingredient and everybody's kind of doing their own thing and it's all and our listeners would chat while they were doing the ingredient and they would all be ready to like be like, Okay, what's next, what's the next step? Yeah, And so it was really lovely because then when we all finished together, we got to toast together, and that made me very happy in my heart. Yeah, we had kind of prepared as we were doing our walkthrough for the possibility of going off the rails immediately. So when the power went out and it turned out that we were not going to have the amplification of our headset mics for people to hear us, I was like, oh, I'm not sure how this is going to go. But it went totally fine. Everybody, all the listeners, great fun. I think folks had a great time. All. We had a couple of other teams from iHeartRadio who were there with us as part of event. All of our colleagues also were great, so I wanted to shout out to all of them. There are so many. I don't feel like I even have everybody's names in my head. Yeah, I would start naming them, but if I do, I'll leave somebody out. Then I'll feel like a jerk. So we're gonna skip that. Just know that we appreciate you all. I do want to talk about some stuff related to our our actual topic content. We never told anybody what the Pierre Collins was. Oh no, we didn't. I have a guess. I was assuming it was going to be something that had Champagne in it. No, it has cognac. Oh wow, So it to Tom Collins with cognac in it. Okay, delicious, listen, I love a little coognac. There was also a thing that I wanted to mention because we talk about the origin of that Tom Collins hoax being attributed to a minstrel performer named Harrigan. Huh. That is a confusing point because that paper that we read from mentioned specifically that it is a black performer. Okay, I could not find any evidence of a black performer named Harrigan at that time that would have been well known enough to have the kind of pull that he could have gotten every service person in New York City. And on the joke, there was a performer named Harrigan who was white and I believe appeared in blackface as part of his show, And that may be where the confusion is. But just in case you're ever like, wait, what is this scoop with that? Or you know enough about minstrel history that that raised a little question for you, there seems to be confusion on the part of that paper, is my guess. The other thing I want to talk about maybe my most coveted thing in the world right now. Okay, that nineteen twenty nine book that we mentioned, Cocktail de Perie is very hard to get. Even a pretty beaten up copy is going to run you eight or nine hundred dollars, oh my goodness, because I think there weren't very many, and they just are not in rapid supply, and the people that do have them are probably people that are really really into Cocktail and bar his Way and are not going to part with them. Right. Are there scans of it? Well? I found one okay, and it will be listed among our show notes. Okay, this show and it is spectacular because this is I'm trying to figure out where this is housed, because I kind of stumbled upon just the active live page scam where you can flip through the whole thing. Oh sure, and I will say this is one where you really want to flip through the whole thing because it's illustrated beautifully in you know, this art deco style. They have a great page turning noise that I don't normally love when things do that, but theirs is extra good and you just see the layout because this was also I presume sponsored by a lot of spirit brands, because there are things like you know, hand drawn ads for quantrolle and whatnot in it, and it's all quite beautiful and I'm obsessed with it and I just like looking at Even if you don't speak French, you don't really need to. It is all in French, but like you can translate these recipes pretty well, and it's just a good insight into how like cocktail books were working at the time. And I love it and I covet it now. So I will be that weirdo who's searching for a a copy that magically does not cost nine hundred dollars. Sure, but I love it. This is my new white Whale perhaps of books. It's just a I don't know, I just love it. It's adorable, it has some little notations in it, this copy. I'm into it. I'm super into all of it. And it's also just a good record of what was going on in Paris in the nineteen twenties in terms of, like it's party culture. So I'm in. I hope if you go looking for this you are as charmed by it as I am. You know. This was also an interesting episode in that we don't often talk about alcohol on the show. Right when we do, we try to talk about it. Historically, we don't advertise alcohol on the show. Sure, So this was a little bit of a tricky one to figure out the right path, and hopefully it was enjoyable and fun and thinking about how how these things come to be rather than the idea of getting drunk. Please drink responsibly. If you drink, will be a fun ride for other people. I love this particular area of history. I love talking about where cocktails come from and how they've changed, and who invented them, and that most of them are as you know, because we've talked about some of them on Eponymous Foods before. It's contentious. There are people who really believe one version or another and they will fight about it online. So tread carefully if you go wandering into any discussions. But it is a super fun space and I really just I like how it traces human history through the ways we have, you know, engaged in social scenarios or tried to relax through the imbibing of spirits or not. I still really love that Jerry Thomas has a temperance section. Yeah, and I'm going to call them temperance drinks going forward. We talked about the monastery at Montserrat a bit. Yeah, you did different stuff there than I did. I did totally different stuff there than you did. Yeah you did the funicular, right, Yeah, we we. This was one of two funicular trips that we took on our trip to Barcelona. Took the funicular up to the top of It's not the very top. You can climb farther up from there. But when you look at that finnicular from the ground, it looks terrifying, like it looks like a sheer vertical climb, which it does not feel that way really when you're on it. But yeah, we took the funicular. We walked around at the top. There's there are some like pilgrimage paths up there, and we walked a bit and then we came back down and we were going to get lunch. The restaurant seemed to be having some issues that day. It looked like maybe they were having some kind of plumbing struggle, so the restaurant was closed the I don't think you were at the same restaurant that well. There was also a cafeteria that had a very long line, and so we made a meal out of things that were sold in this little like sort of tent market there where people sold a number of locally made things. So there's a cheese that's kind of like a ricotta that's served with honey on it. I had some of that. I had some candied almonds, and I had some of these little fig cakes. And there are names for all of these that I don't remember, and I did not look up before we came to record this. It's called a circle of flavor. Yeah, that's described them. I loved our guide in Barcelona she was amazing. Unlike prior trips that we've done, we had the same guide with us for most of the things that we did the whole time. There were a couple things that we had, like a guide that was like for like, we had a different right Segretta Familia has its own guide structure, so she couldn't be our guide in there. Yeah, so we had a different sogratta familiar guide, and we had an audio tour at the Picasso Museum and not a like human guide guiding us. But she was with us the rest of the time and was great with some hilarious language difficulties is not even the right word, the things that translate a little bit differently than you would say them if you grew up speaking English as your first language, exactly. Her command of English is just fine. I don't want to make it sound like we're in any way, like I don't speak Spanish that well, and I certainly don't speak Catalonian. So she was amazing, But there were a couple times where it was like, this is not quite how we would say that. Yeah, I would say we spent more time on the bus, like talking about the English word for wingsuit because she told us the story about a wingsuit diver who had famously done a dive at Monserrat and also at some point died doing a dive, but like that she didn't know the word for wingsuit in English. I would say we spent more time on that conversation on the bus, but we did clarifying the statue conversation that you and I and I know at least a couple of other people in the group were all similarly intrigued by. So yes, yeah, it was very, very fun. But yeah, I went. I went to the museum. Yes, because they have a lot of signs for the museum, most of which taut that it has a caravaggio, which it does, but it only has the one, which is right. Again, I don't own a caravagia, have no shade there. But like, I feel like that under sells what that museum actually is, because it's really quite an astonishing collection because there have been so many people that are just like art collectors, that have bequeathed their their stuff there that like, I mean, I was just a gog and so I was like, what is he? And while we were there, they also had a secondary exhibit that was going on. That was some of the art posters of like the poster work of Picasso. Oh, okay, which I will I will confess upfront, I had weird Picasso things on this trip, okay, because I just you know, now that I know that he was a jerk, his art is a little ruined for me, all right, And so like the Picassa museum, I was like, oh, like I just I was. I had a bad attitude about it. It was like not great, and so I didn't go look at the posters, but my good friend Kristen did. But again that museum, though, is really really beautiful and the staff is super nice. We just had a great time, and there were several of us from our little group that went there, and I really really enjoyed walking around because it was like, it's just it's a beautiful setup. The flow of it is quite nice. It's multiple floors. That Johnsinger sergeant that they have is gorgeous. Yeah, there was a lot of art that I was not familiar with from artists by artists that were from Spain, Barcelona and Catalonia in particular, that I am trying to figure out how to maybe do, hopefully an episode about but it's it's tricky. I will tell you. One of the things that I was really struck by in general on our trip, particularly in that museum, was the there is so much history to Spain and Cataloonnia that we don't ever get, No, we're really in English speaking countries, Like I don't know if it is as we have both encountered doing research on episodes since we have come back, that like it's a little bit hard to grasp all of the nuances of the way things have played out, because there are a lot of long, ongoing conflicts that aren't necessarily at fever pitch, but they just kind of simmer constantly in the background that are a little bit hard to grasp, like why something has or hasn't happened. And I don't know if that has made it harder for English language research or writing about it to happen. Yeah, I mean, I hope there's more. But it really was eye opening in that regard where it was like, there is just so much about Spain and Catalonia that I did not know had no grasp of, completely ignorant and blind too. And one of those was how many amazing artists have been part of their tradition that haven't really some of them. You'll see their paintings in museums in other parts of Europe or the US, but not enough in my opinion, because there's some really incredible art that I was not the least bit familiar with. Yeah, yeah, I so one time years ago, I was at I think it's just called the Philadelphia Art Museum, big Art museum in Philadelphia. I have not googled the name of it before coming in here to have this unscripted conversation. And there was some Spanish art that I saw in an exhibit there that I found so striking and I was so captivated by, and I was like, I want to do an episode on the person who made this art after I get back home from this trip to Philadelphia. And I similarly had just no success finding resources in English about this part, yeah, or even for me media enough resources that even if I managed to get them translated, would really offer more than like six bullet points, right right, Yeah, Yeah, we had very similar experiences regarding like that. We are recording another episode in this recording session today that's going to come out a little bit later that is literally inspired by the fact that I was reading the signage at the museum, a different museum, and was like, I'm clearly missing key context here, like something that's so basic that like the person who wrote these signs did not think it needed to be explained. And yeah, it this more, much more so than our trips to Italy or France. This trip really highlighted like big holes in what our education has focused on. I think, agreed, yeah, and I don't. I don't know how how that gets fixed. I mean, more people need to be researching and writing about Spanish history and Catalinian history. But that's easy to say because I'm like, not me. I'll do what we can do here, but I don't have the linguistic knowledge or base to be able to go a whole lot further. So there's some other interesting things about Monsirat we did not talk about in this episode. We mentioned briefly that it had a history before the finding of the Madonna and the building of that monastery, like the Romans had a temple to Venus there, And I have to say, walking around up there, that makes all the sense on earth that it would be a temple to a Roman god, because it is, as I said at the top of that episode, you feel like you're on the top of the world. It's so beautif and the view is so vast, and it's just very striking. But here's the one that really got me. And I couldn't find verification of this, but it makes some sense knowing what we already do know about this particular chunk of history, and it lines up, which is that we know for a fact that Himmler visited Montserrat when Franco was in power. The part that is not verifiable is that he is rumored to have been looking for holy relics for the Third Reich, particularly the Holy Grail. Okay, we don't know. That's one of those things that pops up on like you know, underground Montserrat websites, like is the Holy Grail or really on Monserrat that we know that Hitler in particular was very fascinated by biblical relics and he kind of was thinking he would use them as like some sort of retroactive proof of divine provenance of the Third Reich. And so this was presumably if they were looking for the Holy Grail, they're hoping they would find another significant religious relic. It would presumably be in service of that goal, but it also just is like, yeah, yeah, Nazis. Yeah, I have the Indiana Jones theme in my head now, of course I always do. Just as a rule of thumb, we didn't get into it because again I couldn't find a I didn't have a lot of time to go down this particular side street. But that secret police officer who was murdered Manzanas was also, if not a collaborator, at least sympathetic to and friends with Nazis. So that too, is another element of nuance in that whole case, the ETA, which is I kept finding myself as I was writing that section, I'm like, I really we have to set up why this is all happening. But am I talking too much about this weird crime and murder case and this terrorist organization? But without any of that context, that sit in makes no sense right right right? And I had even told you before we started recording the episode that I was like, you know, this is this sit in is kind of blipped through on lists of things that have happened at at Monsterrat like it'll get mentioned, but not necessarily. And I think part of it is that it's hard to talk about it without going really into a good bit of detail about like the timeline and the process that played out there. Sure, but it is also very fascinating to read. In this case, we do have accounts in English some of the news reporting from that time, because that was, you know, nineteen seventy from American and British journalists who are like, what the heck is going on here? Like this is messed up and recognizing that like wait, this woman is here and she's on trial, but there's no actual charge. As we said in the episode, that did not go the way Franco had anticipated, right. He thought they were going to be like, yes, you will see my power, and it was like what we see is not what you want us say, right, which is kind of interesting. Anyway, Moncerot really really struck me. I loved. Here's another thing I loved. You know. We were there in the Basilica and it was absolutely beautiful. I am often very struck by religious art. I just think most of it is so incredibly beautiful because there's so much sort of pressure on it from the beginning to be that beautiful, because it has to be worthy of its location and whatnot. But what I really really loved particularly about that basilica was that they have a lot of art within the basilica that is more like museum pieces that are not necessarily what you would think of, Like some of them are very modern, some of them are. It just was very like the little side chapels off of the main area where you would get I don't know how many of those you popped into, but like several of them kind of had their own I don't know if you would call it a vibe their decor convention, or it'd be like this one is the very modern minimalist chapel, this one is the very Rococo looking child like. It was just all really really astonishingly cool and just images that I like, I said, I had never seen. I was blown away by the art. Blown away. Let's go back. I'll get on a plane tonight. It was monserrat. I sure liked it. Yeah, it was lovely. I sure liked it. Waiting on waiting on my cava to arrive. Oh yeah. We went to a vineyard where they make kava, which is in the sloppiest way I can put it, a sparkling wine that some people would probably compare to like their version of champagne or prosecco. Sure, there's certainly more nuance to it. But I ordered so much on the way out of there and it hasn't come yet. So I'm waiting. I'm anticipating, hoping for my cases of kava. When we left that lovely little tasting that we had, I thought our departure was imminent, so I got on the bus and then I was on the bus for a while because people were ordering a lot of kava, and I wound up having to get off the bus and go pee again before Yeah, I ordered a lot of kava. I hope it comes here. I literally just held up the thing. It was like dose dose dose, dose, dose, dose dose. Down the line, there are cases cases of cova. I can't wait, all right. We hope that if you are about to have a couple of days off as we head into this weekend, that you can enjoy kava or whatever beverage alcoholic or not is suitable for you and your tastes and your age. Please don't please don't drink if you're underage, and please drink responsibily. If you do not have time off, we hope that you still manage to get a little relaxation and just some me time and take some deep breaths and find some peace in your little part of the world. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday you'll have another brand new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.