Obviously, Ive put a lot of work into this blog thing the last month or so, but as you can see it hasn’t stopped me from hanging loose sometimes. The last two days I was way north of New York in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts staying with Riesling fan Caitlin Harrison of Restaurant Mezze in Williamstown/MA. Hard as it may be to believe shortly after the above photograph was taken of me with Caitlin’s cat Scout I was almost bursting with excitement as we watched the 1971 James Bond film ‘Diamonds are Forever’. Although I’ve seen this, my favorite James Bond films, many times and know some of the lines by heart (“that’s a nice piece of nothing you’re almost wearing” Bond says to a beautiful girl in a neglige at one point) it was only the evening before last that I realized how it must have provided an important source of inspiration for Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ of 1972. As different as the two works are they both feature a “shark” of a red car driving too fast through downtown Las Vegas, an ape at a casino called Circus Circus and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t see how that can be mere coincidence with only one year between the two.
I’ve nothing startling to report on the Riesling front, but I do on the art front. Yesterday we went to MASS MoCA in North Adams, a remarkable museum of contemporary Art in an ex-industrial facility where there’s currently an astonishing show of work by the Chinese artist Xu Bing. It is named after a pair of monumental sculptures of mythological birds made from steel salvaged from Beijing construction sites titled ‘Phoenix’. My photographs barely hint at the scale and originality of this work. Thankfully my small camera did much better at capturing a piece by Xu Bing called ‘1st Class’ made up of half a million cigarettes forming the gigantic image of a tiger’s skin. I wish that there was some contemporary art of this quality which dealt with wine, but the lack of this is no big deal. Xu Bing expanded my horizons and I thank him for that!
Immediately before leaving for the beautiful Berkshires I managed to do some very interesting tasting of sweet Rieslings with blue cheese, which really is a food and wine marriage made in heaven. Tomorrow or the day after the report on that subject will go online. BEST WISHES FOR 2013 TO ALL RIESLING FRIENDS!
