It's raining out there and from what I hear that's the way it's going to go for the next seven days, and also that there will be lots of it. Angelenos + driving is a bad equation. Angelenos + driving + holiday shopping angst + rain is a very, very bad equation, so be safe out there.
I was perusing New Yorker Magazine earlier... weekends are a good time to catch up on The Cave links in the right column. Nick's blog over there at Bordeaux Undiscovered is always a good read. Nick's brain scares me a little, it's so fabulously comprehensive. Were I his footman I'd really just be following him around with some open newspaper hoping to catch whatever crumbs of brain might, by sheer abundance and inadequate housing, inadvertently fall away. Whenever anyone comes into The Cave at the base of their wine learning curve, Nick is where I offer they both start and stay, foremost. The other links over there are also good, to me anyway, and if I'm missing one that really matters let me know. (I was on one blog yesterday and they had nearly fifty other blogs linked up to theirs; we prefer to keep it necessary. Like the one you're reading right now.)
...and stumbled onto their 2010 Year in Review with such options as Top 10 2-Beer Arguments of 2010, Best Africa Stories of 2010, three different film lists, 10 American Whiskeys That Made the World News in 2010 a Bit Less Unbearable, The Top 10 China Myths in 2010, Poetry, Legal Stories, Arts, Personalities...in the season of Top 10 Lists I've decided it's the number one top 10 list of the year.
Two highlights. 2010, It Wasn't All Bad. Item 9, a snippet from Patti Smith's National Book Award speech: “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.” Amen! Now you may be thinking, well, aren't I reading this online? Yes! Am I not now writing this online? Yes! My answer to all this. (I'll buy.)
Here is the other one, Top 10 Would-be Words Submitted to Merriam Webster. These are all really good, but snirt and fext are lovely. With texting, language is on the move anyway; let's spice it up with some Dr. Seuss lexicon.
Entirely unrelated, this week's cool realization about wine.
It's nice that towns and cities all want art to show, and they build often beautiful museums hoping to lure the six people alive who actually care enough about art to voluntarily go see it on a regular basis. The drawback of this is, to get those six people to come to their town they think they need established and recognizable names in their collections. So now one artist's comprehensive idea is strewn across the globe and the painting you are looking at is minus context, intent, and motivation. Maybe not Mona Lisa, but if you have this piece in 32 different museums does it make a noise? Like Monet's Rouen Cathedral series, 16 paintings in 9 museums.
Sixteen moments of a day; isn't that cool? Those crazy Impressionists and their flux capacities, painting flux. Flux is interesting and the Impressionists were pretty good at delineating that. It occurred to me this week that wine is pretty fluxy. You think you've discovered your form or archetypal wine , staid and unchanging, and then you go to get it one day and it's done, all out, no more until next year...but even then it won't be exactly the same. No wonder they were whooping it up at the Moulin Rouge, they knew the value of the moment.
