Christie’s highest European pre-auction estimate is $45-$60 million for Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period portrait of party-boy artist Angel Fernandez de Soto visiting the Green Fairy. Disputed as Nazi loot, the 1903 Picasso brings up the subject of absinthe at Washington Post.

Absinthe is “falsely subversive” and “uncool” as of 2009 according to NYT (along with lower back tattoos and Interpol). The olde-turned-new trend has passed, friends (Mansinthe, anyone?).

But sure, the ceremony of it is nice: the flaming sugar cubes on porous spoons and drip-drip and sip-sip and all that. Then again, it’s sporadically priced, tastes like “bitter-licorice-anise-fennel” and has a worthless 10 parts per million content of wormwood active ingredient/hallucinogenic thujone across the board. Though I’m sure you kids can regale each other with fancy stories of ‘the real deal’ or ‘that one craaazy night in Amsterdam,’ mostly, it’s hard to enjoy absinthe without punching yourself in the face for pretentiousness and being called an asshole.

But it was a different time and a different set of slacker Bohemian fads back in 1900s. Plus, Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.