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"Certain elements of the goth community read their Oscar Wilde, their Baudelaire, their Rimbaud, then they see Trent Reznor and they think absinthe is nothing short of ecstasy, nothing short of LSD. "There's a lot of knuckleheads," he said.
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"No! Can we distort your voice? No!" Oliver has nothing but contempt for the "ridiculous resurgence" of absinthe among the underground. "Can we pixel out your face?" he said, mocking the tabloid's producers. Though an absinthe aficionado, Oliver had emphatically refused to participate in the program. "The show's producers were disappointed that we weren't piercing each other's nipples," Mattis said. The show featured a staged absinthe party at the home of Upside editor Michael Mattis, a gaunt man in black leather pants who stood smirking in the corner. Music from Tracy's 1995 album "Quintessentially Unreal" served as the soundtrack, playing over a clip of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails imbibing absinthe in his "Perfect Drug" video. Many of the people in the room were on the screen.
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Everyone gathered in the living room to watch a Hard Copy segment from last summer, a reefer madness-style report on San Francisco's absinthe subculture called "Strange Brew." After more people had arrived, most of them musicians, Tracy produced a videotape. One Saturday in November, Tracy brought me to an absinthe party in Noe Valley at the home of a gourmet named Oliver. "It's an instant connection to many of the visionaries that have inspired me as an artist." "There's a whole mystery and allure surrounding it," Tracy said. Absinthe is the illegal, allegedly hallucinatory liquor beloved by such gods as Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe, now much sought-after by San Francisco goths, gourmets, aesthetes and aspiring writers alike. Tracy is a San Francisco chanteuse whose decadent "creepy ragtime" music appeals both to black-clad romantics in love with the Victorian era and to tweedy literary types nostalgic for the jazz age. No drink looks more natural in Jill Tracy's thin, white hand than an irradiation-green glass of absinthe. Absinthe Aficionado: Jill Tracy, a San Francisco chanteuse who drinks the emerald-green, hallucinatory liquor absinthe, says, "You see it and you think, 'What is the magic of this elixir?' "