Memorable Glasses of Wine

           Since my wife and I are doing some wine tasting tonight, I thought I would post an article that I once published in the now defunct "Small Winery Magazine."  It's still accurate.

           When people ask about memorable wines that I have drank, I think they expect, even desire, to hear certain names dropped, like Opus One or Yquem or Bordeaux first-growths or prestigious Napa Valley releases.  If so, I disappoint them because the wines I remember most fondly aren’t identifiable by vintage or wineries.

            The first wine I ever tasted was at a neighbor’s house, the man that everyone, even my father, called Grandpa Joe.  A stone mason and carpenter, Grandpa Joe had helped build most of the houses, garages, and walls in the neighborhood.  Every weekend, you could hear a bandsaw keening in his garage, and, when he was in his eighties, one day it sliced his palm to the bone.  I remember that night he sat laughing on our porch and waving his bandaged hand around like a club.  The next morning, at breakfast, we heard the saw screeching into more wood. 

            Each Christmas my family would go over to give him a holiday poinsettia and a box of chocolate covered cherries.  He would invite us in to the small stone cottage that he had built, and, as we sorted out a seating arrangement, he would take out special glasses of cut crystal.  Then he would get a bottle of wine he had made that year and pour some for each of us.

            I don’t know what Grandpa Joe made his wine from, but it was orange, and it burned the throat.  I didn’t realize for years these weren’t typical characteristics.  I suspect that by almost any standards of taste no one would have considered this wine good, but even though it made me feel slightly sick, I loved it.  At the time, I couldn’t have said why; I have figured it out since.

            I was a shy kid who didn’t do much but read, and Grandpa Joe was an intimidating diesel of a man who seemed to be able to do anything.  I was afraid of him, and yet he always shook my hand and talked to me like an adult.  At Christmas he would give me a glass and include me in the toast without asking permission from my parents.  He never condescended.  He never winked at the other adults as if it was them against us.  He treated everyone as equals who, when they were under his roof, had a right to share what he had made.  As a result, my first experience with wine was as part of an act of generosity and inclusive hospitality.

            A second memorable glass didn’t involve a glass at all.  I was thirty and touring Spain with two women.  None of us had known each other for long; we were all in the same exchange program in France, and we had decided to pool our money and take a road trip together.  One day, we planned a visit to the Benedictine monastery Mont Serrat near Barcelona, and on the way we stopped to have a picnic.  We had sandwiches, cheeses, a good bottle of wine, but we discovered that we had forgotten glasses.  To me, the obvious solution was to drink right from the bottle.  One women, however, suggested that we not open it.  Her hesitation wasn’t because of health concerns, but etiquette.  She felt if we didn’t have glasses, we shouldn’t drink.  The other woman and I uncorked it anyway and began swigging like sailors.  Eventually the first woman joined us, but each time her turn came, she would look around, then crouch beside the car door and quickly take a sip.  She found it almost unbearable that people might see her drinking like this.  We stopped hanging out soon after this journey, but the second woman and I continued traveling to other places together, including a trip to Las Vegas where we got married.

            The third glass of wine involved a glass, but it wasn’t a wine . . . yet.  My wife and I had stopped at a small North Carolina farm house that two artists were renovating and had converted into a winery.  We walked around the grounds, and at the crush pad a man wearing dirty clothes and a backward baseball cap was directing grapes into a crusher.  Without saying anything, he motioned us over, dipped a plastic cup into the just pressed juice, and handed it to me.  It was delicious.  We later learned that he owned the winery – Hanover Park – with his wife.

            My good memories of wine all involve people rather than flavor profiles.  That, to me, is what wine is about.  I often don’t remember the taste of a wine, but I remember the taste of generosity, adventure, improvisation, spontaneity, connection...

Getting Knocked Sideways

Occasionally I write about interesting interpretations and misinterpretations of works:  Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" or the Village People's "YMCA."  As we head into the wine festival season, here's a brief consideration of an oddly influential film.

            I love the paradoxes and ironies of the wine industry.  For example, I’m delighted that the bubbles of champagne – that romantic image of luxury – are formed by the microscopic dirt in the glass.  And, it's funny that dust in a wine cellar becomes a mark of quality.  Everywhere else it’s an embarrassment, but in the basement, it shows that someone has had these bottles for a while.  I confess, however, that I’ve always been bewildered by the so-called Sideways effect.

            In this Alexander Payne film, at one point, the main character Miles, played brilliantly by Paul Giamatti, insists not only that he won’t drink Merlot, but that he won’t have dinner with anyone who will.  He rants, “If anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving.  I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot.”  It’s a funny scene, and I know people who quote it with affection.  Sometimes they even substitute other popular varietals, such as Chardonnay. 

Miles loves Pinot Noir, a finicky grape that, like him, can be difficult to appreciate.  Miles speaks of it in beautiful terms, saying, “it’s a hard grape to grow… it’s thin-skinned, temperamental … Pinot needs constant care and attention . . . Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.”  Miles’ admiration, and the popularity of Sideways, created a surge in Pinot Noir’s popularity, and, for a while, a slight decrease in Merlot’s.

The irony of the Sideways effect is that Miles is clearly a wreck.  He steals from his mother.  He seems to be a functioning alcoholic.  He can’t maintain relationships except for his friend, Jack, who is also a loser.  A compulsive womanizer, Jack turns to sex, the way Miles turns to wine.  Miles even blows the one chance to drink a special wine that he has been saving.  He ends up sipping it out of a paper bag at a fast food restaurant.  This is not someone from whom we should be taking any advice.

            Sideways is a beautiful, sad, film, but like so many works of literature, it seems to have been misinterpreted.  If you’re inspired to hit the road after reading On the Road, you’ve misread the book.  If you think in the poem “A Road Not Taken,” that the narrator really takes the road less traveled, you haven’t paid attention to the lines that each path “equally lay” and were “equally worn.”  And, if you scorn Merlot and drink Pinot Noir because Miles does, you might want to see the movie again.

Filmmaker Julian Semillian Answers a Few Questions

Filmmaker and writer, Julian Semillian's most recent work is Gazing Oozing with Mendacity, a meditation on the works of Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, and Arthur Rimbaud.  His other films include Devotees of the Precipitate and Tear Void Insomnia Mist.  He joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 1998.

How did it happen?

 My right hand covers my mouth in what could be viewed as a posture of puzzlement.

Describe a dream.
Fish are circling my torso which is a field of dead soldiers' graves, who knows what war, stained by flames which mysteriously form the signs of an unknown alphabet, interrupted by oscillating compasses which appear at irregular intervals, but do appear regularly. In the background, parade the tools of another century.

What should you have done then?

 This question is the reason for my posture of puzzlement. Perhaps I should have taken notes.

What question are you afraid of getting?

 What would you do if you were unbearably thirsty and suddenly arrived at the Well of the Eternal?

Name it!

Here I must cover my mouth.

Joseph Bathanti: A (Quick) Appreciation

           I recently attended the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Library’s On the Same Poem luncheon.  Each year the library chooses a poem for the community to read, has teachers lead conversations about it, and brings the poet to town for a reading and Q and A.  Past writers have included Rita Dove, Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Tony Hoagland, and Kwame Dawes.  This year, for the tenth anniversary of the event, the chosen poem was “Entering an Abandoned House,” by North Carolina’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti.
           I’ve long been an admirer of Bathanti’s, and I often quote him, particularly an answer he once gave at a reading when asked what he thought about “so many bad poets” who were writing:  A bad poet never hurts anybody.  Corporate crooks steal millions. Bad doctors kill people.  Bad lawyers and bad politicians ruin lives.  A bad poet eventually realizes he’s bad, and, if he doesn’t, who is he hurting?”

I had the honor of introducing Bathanti at “On the Same Poem,” and I thought I would post a draft of my comments.

----

I’m jealous of the students here today, jealous that you’re discovering Joseph Bathanti’s work when you’re young, and in doing so, you’re discovering something else, something important.

            I was almost forty when I published my first book of poetry, and it confused my mother.  For one, the poems didn’t rhyme.  But, on a more fundamental level, she recognized some of the people, places, and events.  I was writing about things she knew, but how could that be?  How could our lives be poetry?

            It took me a long time to figure that out.  I grew up in a factory town where in school we learned about Shakespeare and Keats.  They were wonderful, but they seemed to have nothing to do with us.  Even those we had an easier time understanding, like Langston Hughes, were still “historical.”  Outside of school, there was no poetry.

In other words, I didn’t know poets like Joseph Bathanti existed.  I didn’t know about books like Anson County, Land of Amnesia, and This Metal.  I didn’t know that you could write about what he writes about.

Joseph Bathanti writes about abandoned houses (and exploring them), baseball, bars, bathrooms, single mothers, proms, weddings, factories, the tangled relationships between parents and children, the town and county and state where people live.  In doing so, he writes about desires and ambitions and brokenness and how much we long to connect and how much we misunderstand.

He writes about our lives.  And, with empathy and compassion, with a wonderful eye and ear, he shows us that our lives are poetry.

It’s a gift.  It’s a gift he has, and it’s a gift he gives us.

And the importance of his work has been recognized, he has received numerous prestigious awards, fellowships, and prizes.  You can look them up and see, but I’m particularly glad that his work is being recognized here.  In a library.  In a project dedicated to the relationship between poetry and community, poetry and our lives.

My jealousy at the students discovering him when they’re young is dwarfed by my appreciation of his work and by the privilege in being the one to introduce him.

Ladies and Gentleman, our state’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti.

A Few Links to Bathanti’s biography and work

http://www.press53.com/BioJosephBathanti.html

http://www.ncarts.org/freeform_scrn_template.cfm?ffscrn_id=603

Our Other National Anthem: YMCA

            We’re at our town’s minor league baseball team’s season opener, and the Jumbotron begins to play YMCA.  People around us get up, and my seven year old son is confused.  He knows what the Y is; he goes there to swim and play basketball.  But, he doesn’t understand this Pavlovian reaction to the song and the way people are twisting themselves into shapes that are similar to, but not quite, dancing.

            “Why are they doing this?” he asks.

            It’s a question that I’ve had myself.

I was in college before I encountered people who were openly, comfortably, playfully gay.  Not coincidentally, that’s when I learned about the concept of camp and I realized the Village People, who I had loved since I was young, were gay and were mocking stereotypical American masculinity.  It startled me, and it was one of those realizations where you feel stupid afterwards because it’s so obvious.

What’s odd is how over the years YMCA has gone from being a popular song to being an iconic one.  It’s an American folk song.  It’s played at ballparks, arenas, weddings, schools, parties.  People with strong “family values,” who believe America will crumble into the sea without the Defense of Marriage Act, will stand, shape themselves into enormous letters, and sing about how there’s a place for young men to go and be with other men and have fun and do what they want they feel.   Such people might angrily point out that the C stands for Christian, and that claiming the song was originally a gay anthem disparages a wholesome charity social organization.   Perhaps they don’t know it appeared on the album, “Cruising,” (along with the other hit, “Hot Cop”).  Perhaps like the younger me, they simply haven’t thought about it.

            There are plenty of cases of music getting mainstreamed, sanitized, and made acceptable.  The popularity of “YMCA” isn’t any odder than ice cream trucks playing Ragtime melodies and tunes that used to be considered the devil’s music.   In the 1920s, people feared that hearing ragtime and jazz was going to provoke you to jump into someone’s car, go somewhere, smoke reefer, and get busy.  Now it’s a pied piper tune for children.  Or what about those cheery kid’s songs like Ring Around the Rosy which is about the plaque or London Bridge Is Falling Down?  Or there was the McDonald’s ad campaign years ago -- Mac Tonight -- which reworked Weill and Brecht’s “Mac the Knife” from Three Penny Opera, a song about a serial killer, into a jingle about dinner.

I answer my son’s question.  “People are doing this because it’s fun.”  He looks around and says, “It looks like when we got here.”  I know what he means.  We had arrived at the playing of the national anthem, and he had wondered why everyone was standing up together.  It occurs to me that the two songs you’re guaranteed to hear at sporting event in the U.S. are The National Anthem and YMCA.  And one of these is joyful, inclusive, makes you want to move, and suggests the messy ironic complexity of what it means to be an American.

Reckoning

The taxes become more and more

difficult to do, a result, perhaps,

of my life becoming more full,

more rich, although frankly

it feels more as if I’m being

wrapped up, thread by thread,

form by form, like Gulliver,

or a fly about to be eaten.

No.

            That’s not right.

Let’s be somewhat honest today.

I’m neither hero nor victim.

I wasn’t forced to wed, have kids,

buy a house. But, I must give

an accounting of my actions,

and this, I suspect, is the source

of our resentment each spring,

how we must provide a reckoning,

even as we understand the numbers

don’t explain what we’ve done or why,

and no matter what the tally says

it’s far too soon to know just what

it is we may have gained or lost.