Are you busy May 22nd? Buy this

From my inbox. I can't help but share with my fatheads this look into another world.

 

Concierge Auctions announces auction without reserve of “World’s Best California Property” in Napa Valley

 

Featuring antique, handcrafted details coupled with modern amenities, the 32-room
Spanish-Mediterranean estate on 20 acres offers the best of private, wine country living

 

  

St. Helena, California (April 11, 2014) –

 

Concierge Auctions, a luxury real estate auction firm serving high-net-worth individuals worldwide, today announced the auction of Villa de Montaña, named “World’s Best California Property” in 2006 by London’s World’s Best Magazine. The property, originally offered for $22.5 million, will be auctioned without reserve on May 22nd in cooperation with Daniel DerVartanian of Sotheby’s International Realty and Steven Gregory of Coldwell Banker Brokers of the Valley.

 

The 20-acre, 32-room Spanish-Mediterranean estate is spread across a spectacular main house, guest cottage, and separate staff quarters. The property offers panoramic views of St. Helena village and Napa Valley and a private winding drive that is lined with antique limestone columns and mature olive trees.

 

Built in 1941, the house retains its elegant original features, including five antique, French wood-burning fireplaces. A 2001 renovation, however, introduced the finest craftsmanship of the current age, including custom-designed iron windows, French doors, and gates. One-of-a-kind wallpapers adorn walls throughout the interior of the house, and the main house kitchen includes an individually crafted cabinetry set between hand-painted Portuguese tile murals.

 

“Every fixture within Villa de Montaña features details that are at once intricate and timeless in their elegance” said Gregory. “As the rooms of the house reveal themselves, guests are overcome with a sense of wonder and amazement that is palpable.”

 

"Just as the Napa Valley is recognized as one of the world's premier and most beautiful wine regions, Montaña is recognized as the region's premier and most beautiful estate with privacy," added DerVartanian. “What’s more, Villa de Montaña’s splendor is complemented by seamless functionality. Its three offices and exercise room, not to mention the speakers throughout the house, make it an utterly practical space for modern living.”

 

The exterior of the house is built of stone elements from France and draped in ivy, a marriage of nature and artistic faculty that underline the property’s calming effect. These stunning walls are arranged in an octagonal shape to frame a meticulously coiffed courtyard that is designed for entertaining in luxury. An expansive pool and spa within the master suite garden area offer complete relaxation for guests who wish to retreat from social and gastronomic activities at the house to a space of physical and mental relaxation.

 

“Villa de Montaña is the ultimate getaway for wine country living,” said current owner and renowned luxury estate developer Richard Wax. “After thirteen incredible years at the estate, my wife and I have reluctantly decided to say goodbye to the most beautiful place on earth in order relocate to where my business is based, Aspen, Colorado.”

 

While the courtyard’s treasures are most fully appreciated from the outdoors, the house’s two opposing towers, home to two grand grand master suites and the guest master suite, each offer breathtaking views of the landscapes and vistas below.

 

“Clients come to Concierge Auctions to buy and sell the best in luxury living,” said Concierge Auctions Founder and President, Laura Brady. “As one of the nation’s most renowned luxury real estate developers, Mr. Wax partnered with Concierge Auctions because he knows that the next owner of Villa de Montaña seeks white-gloved service in all aspects of life, including during the process of buying a home. We’re happy to help facilitate this auction to provide both him and the lucky buyer with an experience that matches the convenience and ease that they expect.”

 

The auction of Villa de Montaña, located at 2735 Sulphur Springs Avenue in St. Helena, California, will be held live on May 22nd. A 2.5% commission is offered to the buyer’s representing broker. The property will be open for preview daily by appointment. See Auction Terms and Conditions for full details. For more information, visit NapaLuxuryAuction.com, call (888) 953-1310 or join the social discussion at #ConciergeAuctions.

 

 

About Concierge Auctions

Concierge Auctions is a New York City-based luxury real estate auction firm founded in 2008. Concierge Auctions serves high-net-worth individuals internationally through an accelerated marketing process that obtains fair market value for high-end properties. The firm executes auctions typically valued between $2.5 million and $20 million.

In which we "take the cake"

Brief notes, my fatheads. The Josh sauvignon blanc is very good, not as powerfully grassy as our delicious New Zealand sauvignon blancs, but good. Retail, about $13.

Next, Aristophanes. And why not? Get a load of this.

EURIPIDES: He could sit in the assembly with all the women, and speak in my defence, if necessary.
MNESILOCHUS: What, openly? Or in disguise?
EURIPIDES: Disguised. Dressed up in women's clothes.
MNESILOCHUS: What a magnificent idea! That's really up to your best standard. For downright cunning, we take the cake, I must say.

This is from Aristophanes' The Poet and The Women, better known to Luciaphils -- lovers of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, circa 1939 -- and perhaps to the world as the Thesmophoriazusae, or "the women celebrating the Thesmophoria." The festival was one of those strange ancient ones in which women gathered to dance, praise a god or goddess, freak out, and maybe kill random animals or men. Luciaphils remember that Lucia reads the play and quotes it briefly in The Worshipful Lucia, when she is being superb about Mapp's "wind-egg" baby. My fatheads, you simply must read the books.

Anyway, we are much struck, aren't we? by Aristophanes saying, 2,500 years ago, that something "takes the cake." The translator of our 1964 Penguin classics edition, David Barrett, adds a simple footnote. He says, "The phrase is a literal translation from the Greek. Perhaps the only phrase from Aristophanes to have found its way into English."

Now how extraordinary. Or, "absolutely too straordinario," as Lucia would put it. What cake? -- a Greek cake? Made of what? Were there really occasions or ceremonies in ancient Greece when cakes were prizes, and so the image of being awarded one would be vivid in the language, and pass untouched to us?

Yes, it seems so, but you must dig a little to find out more. If you consult your dictionary under "cake" or "take," because sometimes dictionaries unpack idioms you know, -- or if you consult your Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Sir Paul Harvey, 1937 -- gad, how old my books are, but at least they are free of political correctness) under "Aristophanes," you find no asseverations that "take the cake" came straight into our language from the Thesmophoriazusae. Modern foolers-about with the Internet who notice the expression do a bit of digging of their own, and all seem to quote and re-quote two bits of information regarding it: one, that it comes originally from Aristophanes yes, but from another play of his called The Knights ("if you surpass him in impudence the cake is ours"); and two, that it also derives from 19th century southern American "cake-walking" dances popular among plantation slaves. These cake walks seem to have been exciting, intensely competitive, demanding country dances, in which finely dressed couples strutted and pranced on a strictly demarcated floor, and were judged for their grace and synchronization of movement. The winners took home a cake, sometimes presented by the visiting white master. Everybody who mentions the cake walk seems to tack on one more American source for our take-the-cake phrase, a sentence from an 1847 story about horse racing ("the winning horse take [sic] the cakes"). All seem to agree generally that "take the cake," even if birthed by a Greek comic master poet in antiquity, is mostly an Americanism.   

I use the term "foolers about with the Internet" to distinguish those who have uncovered these two items, from we who go deeper and are therefore -- I decree it -- researchers. Wondrous Google books will let you find two more things. It will let you have a look at The Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, published by Benjamin Bickley Rogers, MA, in 1904. Mr. Rogers doesn't even bother translating the play into English. It was a scholarly era, his publisher was Oxford: he intends you to read in Greek, he proffering notes, mostly about Greek usage but that is all. At their proper place his notes tell us "a πνραμους" -- transliterated, this I think is pnramous?-- "was a cake of which the principal ingredients were parched wheat and boiled honey, and which is specially known as the prize awarded to the man who in an all-night drinking bout, with all his companions asleep around him, kept awake till sunrise...." Query, then who awarded the cake? Ah, perhaps that is the point. You took it ... Mr. Rogers does allow Aristophanes borrowed the phrase from his own Knights. When wondrous Google books also lets you peek at A Dictionary of Cliches: a Word-Lover's Guide to 4,000 Overused Phrases, by Christine Ammer, you find there the drinking-bout cake and θεζμοφοριαζουςαι, the Thesmophoriazusae, again. We painstakingly type out Greek letters here because we think Lucia would happily and loftily do so. Typeit is as wondrous as anything else online. I wish it had more than 1,100 likes on Facebook.

So should we conclude that both foolers-about and researchers are right about the origins of "take the cake," and that it comes from Aristophanes, after "a strange lapse" of millenia, via the American south? Or is it possible that two civilizations thousands of years apart happened to coin an identical idiom, because both sometimes gave cakes as prizes?

And we would perhaps like to know how to make this antique cake. Alas, it seems we are fated only to learn that its ingredients were the parched wheat and honey. We should remember that parching means to dry out through exposure to heat, not -- as we might intuit -- to parboil. The purpose is to slough off indigestible husks from wheat kernels. James Augustus St. John, in his History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 3 (London, 1842) calls the mysterious Greek cake "the Chaerine," and the all-night festival the "Panuchia." In her chapter on baking Madeleine Kamman in The New Making of a Cook tells us that parched cereals, perhaps eaten out of the hand like nuts or in time crushed, mixed with water, and drunk, represented mankind's earliest steps on the road to bread making. For that matter it was also the road to beer.

This leads us back to drink, and to that photo above of the nice Josh sauvignon blanc, and our asseveration that we were going to just do "brief notes." We intended to unpack other topics of interest but we got -- like a suitcase? -- carried away. Here is a new beer for you, to sip while you ponder whether or not to finish reading The Poet and the Women. Very strange. At the end there is a character called simply a Scythian, whom the translator makes to talk like Chico Marx, in non-stop "I break-a you face" style. Perhaps Scythians were the roughneck immigrants of ancient Athens.

Round Barn Brewery Kolsch style ale. Sweet, fresh, not too bitter, and from Michigan. Retail, about $10 for a 6 pack. 

Gratin of ...

Sometimes I get annoyed with political writers, especially conservative ones, because it seems to me all they really do is to keep their careers alive chronicling the slow disintegration of the status quo -- whereas at least leftists have a passionate agenda. John Fund at NRO wrote a long article about the SWAT teams that various government bureaucracies now have, and then completely gutted his article of any meaning by saying at the end, of course it would "be politically impossible" to dismantle the SWAT teams. Of course, because everyone knows new government activities are never challenged, and no elected politician would ever try what an intellectual wouldn't.

Then again, just when I think I'm through with these idiots, let them talk to each other and I'll survey the fashion blogs, it tends to happen that I read something stronger the next day. Something written by someone who doesn't necessarily insert "the weasel clause" -- as another frustrated NRO reader put it in a recent comment on the site -- into his allotted three pages of punditry. Today's "Brazen Bull," by Kevin Williamson, is one such. When that happens, I decide to go on keeping abreast of political chronicling, of Majesty's loyal opposition, after all.

Politics is everywhere around us but it introduces such a jarring, uncreative note that I feel I must give you a recipe now, or something about a new scarf or shoe, plus a little more Byron. Here is Don Juan again, from Canto the Third, LXXXVIII. It seems to be about pundits.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper -- even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his!

Now we will cook something very simple, that you might whip up if you are deputed to "bring something" to an Easter gathering. What follows is a gratin, a dish of any parboiled vegetable layered into a casserole, coated with a cream or a tomato sauce, sprinkled with bread crumbs or grated cheese, and then briefly baked. All this is less a recipe than what employers might call a skill set, -- or just a useful technique to know. I'm sure it's to be found everywhere; I happened to learn it from Bon Appétit's French Country Favorites (Knapp, 1987). Of the scores of possible variations explained on pp.84-85, I opted for Savoy cabbage and the very basic cream sauce and Parmesan topping.

Vegetable Gratin

Parboil about 3 cups chopped Savoy cabbage 15 minutes, until tender. Drain and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 425 F. Butter a small, 1 and 1/2 quart casserole dish.

Make a cream sauce: melt about 3 Tbsp. butter in a small heavy pot, and when it bubbles a little add 3 Tbsp. flour. Cook and stir to form a simmering paste, without letting the roux turn color. Add about 1 and 1/2 cups milk, gradually, stirring to incorporate, until you have slightly thick, creamy sauce. Salt and pepper to taste.

Place the cooked cabbage in the casserole. Spoon the sauce over. Top with 2 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheese. Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, until bubbling, hot, and slightly browned. 

 

The dinner made about a hundred dishes; 

Lamb and pistachio nuts -- in short, all meats,

And saffron soups, and sweetbreads; and the fishes

Were of the finest that e'er flounced in nets,

Drest to a Sybarite's most pamper'd wishes; 

The beverage was various sherbets

Of raisin, orange, and pomegranate juice,

Squeezed through the rind, which makes it best for use.

 

Don Juan, Canto the Third, LXII. Who knew Lord Byron was such a foodie? And I'm sure he would love that word. Of all poets, he along with Shakespeare seems to have been able to unbend a little, and to have had an actual sense of humor. (On the other side of the scale, this week for the first time in thirty years I read again the dreadful "Richard Cory," by the dreadful Edwin Arlington Robinson. My son had to write a short essay on the poem. I probably had to do the same in my senior year, and probably got about the same remarks in blue pen in the margin from my teacher. I recall also being told that Robinson had a lot of ear aches as a child. Even then I thought he wrote like a poet who had a lot of ear aches as a child.) ... Anyway I feel sure at some point Byron will mention a gratin.

2013 Sottano chardonnay classico

Have you ever seen this on your grocery store or liquor store shelves? Perhaps not. It's one of those small-scale, graceful, toothsome wines from a fine maker who sells his product via a small-scale (graceful? toothsome?) distributor. Perhaps even an independent broker, about whom you, the buyer, wonder how on earth does he earn a living just from commissions? 

I don't know how he does, but selling Sottano chardonnay classico (there is also a cabernet, very good*) should help.

By the way I missed the lunar eclipse the other night, although I know what they are like. I stayed up once as a teenager to witness one from start to finish, a good six-hour process as I recall. Eventually the moon does turn a dark reddish color; more than that, it suddenly hangs there in the sky as a small three-dimensional object; you have the strange sense that now it is its right size, and that you could reach up and pluck it down. Then the shadow passes, the red tinge lightens to a yellowy ochre, and finally the moon emerges as usual, the bright flat little klieg-light disc that bloats and thins with a certain smug trickery from one month to the next. Very early in the morning these past few days it has loomed very large, glowing above a dark brown-ochre spring landscape that looks as if it was painted for the cover of an old Gothic novel: a mass of dim dark interlaced trees, the dark stubby feathered grasses of a dim sepia brown meadow, in the middle distance the dark block of sepia milk-washed air itself. A few last stars vanish, it seems, even as you look at them. The robins sing, timidly. They seem to be not quite sure the ghastly winter is over. The morning star, which I suppose must be Venus, glows in the east. Look as you may, you can't seem to find firm blazing and wintry Orion any more.

Lord Byron puts it well, don't you think? -- and even talks a bit about food and wine, too. We here at Pluot are very fond of opening great books at random. Here is Don Juan (Canto the Second, CLXX).

While Venus fills the heart (without heart really
Love, though good always, is not quite so good),
Ceres presents a plate of vermicelli, --
For love must be sustain'd like flesh and blood,
While Bacchus pours out wine, or hands a jelly:
Eggs, oysters, too, are amatory food;
But who is their purveyor from above
Heaven knows -- it may be Neptune, Pan, or Jove .... 

*Retail, about $12.

Double Decker red blend -- and Barzun's paragraph

I am no longer sure whether red blends really are all the rage, or whether salesmen tell me that because they know I got to liking red blends when they were all the rage.

This one is very nice, too. Brought to you by the Wente family, who make the Food Network's Entwine. Retail, about $12.

Now I must share with you a summation of a very interesting paragraph from a book I have owned for years, but that I have never read through because it's very deep and difficult. It has what the author himself, when he is talking about great books, calls "thickness," that is, not physical inches of paper but complexity of ideas and associations per page. "A physically thin volume can thus be 'thick,' " he says.

This particular book is Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present -- 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, published in 2000 when the author was no less than 93 years old. (Hear us Lord: we want to be like him.) Somewhere in the midst of it -- I brought it to work so I can dip into it on my lunch breaks -- he writes that profound self-consciousness is a characteristic of the modern age. No one can be self-conscious all the time, all during the conscious day; this is why antiquity advised "know thyself," precisely because it was a task, not a state of being. For its part the Church also demanded some self-consciousness, in the form of pondering one's sins, seeking absolution, and doing penance. But only the modern age came up with the practice of what Barzun labels "secular self-consciousness." This is the contemplating of one's thoughts and emotions, endlessly, with the same thoroughness that scientists at the dawn of the modern age were applying to plant life or gross anatomy, but without those disciplines' ability to find facts. All we can find in ourselves are endless plausibilities, because our thoughts and emotions will always bear some connections to some interpretations of some circumstances in our lives some of the time. In the margin of this one paragraph, which is shorter, better done, and "thicker" than the one I write here, I scribbled my distillation. "Endless navel-gazing leads to plausibility, not truth."    

I don't know if you will agree with me but I found Barzun's paragraph carries possibilities of liberation. Someone once said to me kindly, at a time when a life crisis of mine was becoming a bit threadbare, "at some point you have to stop contemplating." That was true, but Barzun's paragraph explains why, technically. It's not that you should leave real inner problems unprobed and unsolved. Self consciousness is a part of life, although women, especially, tend to brood. But, done endlessly so that it becomes a state of being, -- it won't get you to the truth. Perhaps we grasp this, weakly, when we yearn after the frustrations of "closure."

The great Jacques Barzun died in October, 2012, at the age of 104, about a month shy of his 105th birthday (hear us Lord). Of his many, many books, I have read only two or three. Which means that I should properly never lack for something to do, even if I live to be ... well, you understand.   

2011 Bread & Butter chardonnay

Ooooh.

Exactly what the name suggests: butter (and maybe bread), vanilla and cream, mangoes and I don't know what all. Also, a lesson in restaurant versus grocery store markups: a glass of this delicious liquid may cost you $10 at a local bistro. A whole bottle, at the supermarket down the street, may relieve you of $12. Now I understand. The restaurant is recouping the cost of the bottle every time it sells one glass.

And I've decided against abandoning you, my fatheads, while I work on all my projects. As Lucia would say, "it is just busy people who have time for everything." I also decided against abandoning dear Blogger for WordPress, even though Blogger did pull the plug on At First Glass, and even though WordPress, with all its sleek gray and blue bells and whistles, looks as though it is meant for cool people, not moms and retail floozies. No matter, or "je m'en fiche" (I don't give a damn) as I learned to say by watching a French film in a college French class some years ago.

(It was a crazy movie, all about a young Parisienne who searches out some deep dark secret about her father, or was it grandfather? -- a man whom she suspected might have been a collaborator with the Nazis in World War II but who turned out to be not only a member of the Resistance but also a man who left France for Algeria after the war and then ... converted to Islam and stayed there! Insane. At a time -- 2006 or so -- when, so we read, Islam was and is slowly strangling western Europe, filmmakers producing introductory things about French culture for American college kids felt some deep need to show that, well, a Resistance fighter circa 1946 would naturally flee from victory in the land of Chartres, Voltaire and Montrachet to Algeria to embrace the god of female genital cutting. The only character any of us liked was Bruno, the Ken-doll television anchorman who was the pretty Parisienne's best friend.)

Yes, je m'en fiche. Blogger still has way better customization features, for free, than grim cool WordPress offers for money. 

I'm so relieved at it all that I must give you some music. Last night even in the middle of the pledge drive I heard something wondrous on our dear WFMT. This is Liszt's "Fountains of the Villa d'Este." In the very lovely French language it's called "les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este," les jeux d'eau literally meaning "games of water."




We can also enjoy a Bread & Butter pinot noir, retailing for about the same as the chardonnay, $12. 

Projects

Now, my fatheads, you mustn't be appalled if I leave you to your own devices for perhaps long stretches in the next few weeks or even months. I have so many projects I am working on. (Projects is such a nice strong word. It calls to mind not only paper and ink and ideas but maybe flower pots and twine, or buttons and glue, or hammers and determinedness. I borrowed the word from another blogger.) I am compiling my second book of essays from the vanished At First Glass, this compilation tentatively called If No One Minds, and have decided also to take my first compilation, Prose Food, and break it up into chapbooks. This decision was almost thrust upon me after I explained to a friend how long Prose Food is, and that I was submitting it to various publishers but had heard nothing in response. No surprise there, of course, since I wasn't born yesterday. But when my friend said, "three hundred pages is a big investment for any publishing company," I suddenly saw things as it were from the other side. Yes, that would be a big investment for an unknown food and wine blogger.

Very well, why can't I make chapbooks and bring them to local craft fairs and village fests this spring and summer, and see if people will buy them? I'm thinking $4 each, or three for $10. This means I am learning how to prepare a chapbook using Microsoft Word '03 and my own printer. You stand warned: in case you ever try it, know that double-sided printing is a bit tricky. Quickly I've learned I either have to invest in a long-armed stapler or an awl and some twine (aha!) when it comes to the project of binding. Prose Food #1 is already 78 pages long. 

Then there's the novel about divorce in the age of the internet. And there's photography. Why can't I bring my photos to the local library and ask if they will display them on their ever-changing art exhibit wall? And the spring is coming so I never know when I have to rush out and take shaky pictures of sandhill cranes whirling overhead while they decide, en masse and "kk-rrool" -ing, which way is north. Actually they seem to fly west a lot. Below I include the near-to-bud-bursting branches of the maple trees, to give an idea of scale. I like the freakish, Wizard-of-Oz effect of the blurred birds.

I am also still determined to at least occasionally be a fashion blogger, since it won't do to leave that niche entirely to the dewy-skinned young girls who take endless photos of themselves wearing the same new dress and boots. I can't decide what they've got the most of, ego, looks, pin money, better cameras, more friends to leave gushing comments, or clothes. Having a tripod for the camera also helps. Here I'm trying to show you my pink and beige leopard print "infinity" scarf. Indoors, without a tripod, and without focusing just on my neck. If you want to see how this is really done, go to Vixen Vintage, or Delightfully Tacky. Or pick from among the greats at Signature9's top 99 fashion blogs from around the world. There's no end to the cascading style sheets -- Shop, Sponsor, Life and Family, Spirituality and Wellness, Home and Garden, Art and Design, etc. etc. Food and Wine. Yes, they dare to poach on our territory.

You will understand, then, if sometimes I just hurtle in with a quick picture of a wine label, or a dashed-off recipe. Lately I find the comfort of meatballs appealing for relaxed Sundays, so you may find lots of those. Food & Wine's January 2014 issue still sits propped open to page 96 on my desk: Herbed Lamb Meatballs with Rich Tomato Sauce and Ricotta. Delicious, made with almonds soaked in milk. I also made April's Veal Meatballs with Mustard Greens (p.104), but was too busy yesterday to get a chance to try the March issue's Beef Ricotta Meatballs with Braised Beet Greens. (Memo to Food & Wine, let's lay off the endless greens, shall we?) Perhaps there's a meatball chapbook idea here. 

Tin Cup whiskey, plus The Bee Gees

The newest thing. (One prides oneself.) Tin Cup whiskey, from Colorado. Yes, the little "tin cup" cap is a perfect jigger.

And, very delicious -- do we detect more than a hint of sweetness? -- in a whiskey sour.

We here at Pluot like to do more than just eat and drink. We like to tell stories, too, or perhaps relate a little something about what books lie stacked on our bedside table. At the moment our reading is not anything culinary or serious, but rather a biography of The Bee Gees by David N.Meyer (Da Capo, 2013). Though much of the book's length comes from old newspaper and fanzine articles quoted verbatim (harrumph, we could do that), still it moves along well, is often insightful and always passionately done. Here is an author who knows something about modern music-making, and who for example, for the sake of fleshing out minor characters just as a novelist would do, has actually bothered to research subjects like Victoria Principal's career in agenting circa 1975. You'll remember she had a late-'70s fling with the ill fated youngest Gibb brother, Andy.

Condensed version of The Bee Gees: Barry Gibb, force of nature, "centaur," drags his less than prepossessing brothers along into a multimillionaire's career in pop music, not a one of them being able to read a score or hardly play an instrument, but Barry having a sort of medieval stonecutter's vocation for making the sounds in his head become art. He also had that glossy mane, those "shining equine eyes and Roman nose with its great horsey nostrils," a description which seems to me exactly right  A primal, mythic animal.

I'm just at the chapter now where the Bee Gees' popularity has reached such a level -- circa 1979 -- that entire prime-time television specials, hosted by the serious David Frost no less, were devoted to them. These, I vow, I can remember watching when I was thirteen. I think I can even remember some of the long quotes from the fanzines. Barry told People he had tried coke only just the once, and that his nose felt like "a block of stone for a week." David Meyer sums up the band's strange place in pop music, mocked and hooted, but absurdly successful and embedded now in every grocery store's Muzak tape and every person's head. "Nobody moved more product," and nobody but Barry wrote more "purpose-built #1 hits for other people." Think "To Love Somebody," or "Islands in the Stream."   

"No wonder Barry was so driven and so resentful. His band -- his blood kin -- could not catch a break. The Bee Gees invented a new recording technology [the drum loop], defined the zeitgeist, converted a nation to their sound, broke every sales record there ever was and filled the charts with original material. Then the New York Times, hardly a cultural trend spotter, derides them as herd followers [the Times had just accused them, in 1979, of hopping on the disco bandwagon]." 

The Bee Gees is one of those fun to read, 'pop' books -- what other word suffices? -- that entertain and inform even while rather shocking the soul with a more than vigorous, with a sort of shotgun-blast prose. During the Gibb brothers' heyday, I was a freshman in an all-girls Catholic high school, slogging through a really superb mandatory writing program called Stack the Deck. I resented the program mightily at the time, but its strictures have stood me in good stead. To be obeyed: the following -- and we are not necessarily crabbing here that Meyer does not obey: we are, to use the pop term, just sayin': No four sentences in succession shall begin with the same word or phrase. There shall be no use of "I" in a formal paper. We shall write no contractions, certainly not "it's" or "what's," which author Meyer does use frequently. (Aside: a long time ago I was tempted nearly to throw With Malice Toward None across the room, because in that book author Stephen B.Oates actually contracted "Lincoln had" to "Lincoln'd." Many times. I wished I were Oates' editor, because if I was, I would have -- pardon me, I'd've -- gone through every single sentence of his manuscript and I'd've changed every single instance when he did spell out his little verbs correctly, so as to render them all uniformly sloppy, folksy, talky, and casual. I wonder what Oates'd've thunk.) We are permitted only three auxiliary verbs such as "am" or "was" -- or "did" -- in any six-to-ten page paper, the rest to be "action verbs." Teachers counted it all to make sure, bless them. Adjust those proportions for a 318 page biography and you will still see with how much imagination you must hunt for good verbs. 

True, sometimes the hunt can be a little too successful. It can bring down a thrashing, impossible beast. Stack the Deck would never have allowed us to write "Robin gacked himself daily" while indulging an amphetamine habit. We would have said he induced vomiting. One avoids colloquialisms. One also doesn't say that a certain producer or mogul "went batshit" when one means to say, he became angry. The sloppy "got" would have been another severely rationed auxiliary verb ....

Still. Of the three books I borrowed from the library two weeks ago, this is the one I finished. Among the shotgun blast prose and the sins against formal, tasteful writing circa 1979, there is also, I said, insight and passion. What follows is I think Meyer showing those traits at his best; he is chronicling the Gibbs' first appearance on stage. They were grade school children, getting ready to mime to a record that they had brought with them to a small movie house's weekly amateur hour. Barry accidentally dropped the record and smashed it. They decided to go on anyway and just sing. The pop biographer deconstructs.

"As every great origin myth must, this tale features the perfect Jungian symbolic moment. Barry, the eldest, the Alpha, the most ambitious, the one with the guitar, bears the precious object -- the record. But that precious object also contains falsity -- under the spell of that falsity, the boys will deny their gifts and only pretend to sing. When Barry enters the temple -- the Gaumont Theatre -- in a moment of apostasy, he drops the sacred object; he smashes it to the floor. With that 'accident,' Barry frees himself and his brothers from imitation, from false performance ... from living a lie in front of the congregation."

Bravo. Stack the Deck did not forbid referencing Jung.

As I write this I am listening to Here At Last ... Bee Gees ... Live for the first time probably in thirty-five years, courtesy of remarkable YouTube. Every single minute is ingrained in my memory, to the last scream and handclap. Even the men yell "Go for it!" to the centaur Barry. Partly I marvel how my parents put up with this music, so much of it dull, creamy stuff, and partly I marvel that a lot of it is pretty damn good. Here, when it comes to the Alpha material, the actual music of the Bee Gees, author Meyer and I part company. He seems to have listened to their whole corpus in order to give thoughtful consideration to it all, Spirits Having Flown, "glossiness," production values, Still Waters, the famed "drum loop." I like "Fanny be Tender" and "How Deep is Your Love" best of all their songs, but Meyer says they both may have been snide jokes at homosexuals and "the less said of them the better."

Ohhh-kayy, as we moderns say now. By the way, we've come a long way from our taste of Tin Cup whiskey, haven't we? It really was very good. The Bee Gees once made an album called Life in a Tin Can. Mentioning that feels as though we have closed the circle, formally.

A quickie wine tasting, and notes on sweet and dry

2012 Fournier Père et Fils Sancerre "Les Belles Vignes." Finally! Yes, here the sauvignon blanc grape really does smell like cat urine (the common "p" word is so ugly). I didn't believe it. Easy to imagine the wine pairing well with the Sancerre region's "salty, powerfully goaty cheese" -- Hugh Johnson, How to Enjoy Your Wine.

2009 Château du Trignon Gigondas, Appellation Gigondas Contrôlée. Dry (French) earth, as opposed to a caramel-and-chocolate-covered (American) apple skin. Of Gigondas, in the southern French Rhône region, we know that its wines are "big and robust," and need several years' bottle aging to soften (The New Wine Lover's Companion).
 

2012 BV Coastal cabernet sauvignon. What the dry-as-earth Gigondas is aspiring to soften to. It's also the one I poured for myself, for pleasure. Ah, the sweet, fruit bomb American palate. Ah, the $8.99 price point.

Its sister, 2012 BV Coastal chardonnay. Sweet, sweet, sweet, butter and marshmallows and a bit of some tropical fruit cocktail. For the price, excellent and exactly what everybody wants. It may only seem strangely gluey, if sipped directly after a leaner, lither, more expensive chardonnay.

2011 Château du Trignon Côtes du Rhône red.  The younger brother of the Gigondas, above. Less earth, softer and simpler fruit.   

Now you may have the evening to yourself.

Buying Hever

Honest, I was just fooling around with the tag cloud and the layout, and this post from a summer or two ago ended up re-posting as though it were freshly done. Oh well, I kind of liked it anyway.

When I was about ten years old, I decided that after I had become a rich and famous author, I would buy Hever ("heever") Castle in England. My idea was to furbish it up and live there quietly, savoring the magnificent ghostly associations with Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, keeping everything authentically sixteenth-century, and of course fitting in superbly with the local people.

In time I discovered William Waldorf Astor had already bought the place in 1903. The rest of Hever's ownership chronicles come from its website, which wasn't up and running when I was ten. Here we learn that the family from whom Astor bought it, the Meade Waldos, had owned the castle since an ancestor of theirs purchased it in 1749. Even at that time the Meade Waldos preferred to live nearby and rent the castle out to tenant farmers, who occupied a part of it but allowed the public in to see the "historical" rooms. (Isn't it interesting to note when enough time has passed for a certain place to cease to be alive and commonplace, and become at once dead and historical. For Hever it took a bit less than two hundred years.) Before 1749, the castle was so very commonplace that it had begun to languish under a succession of owners; we must go back to the 1500s to find a named family really living there and using the whole place because they were Tudor gentry and they needed it all. These were the Waldegreaves, government officials who took over ownership after the castle's last actual link with Henry VIII was broken; for the king had given Hever to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, after their divorce and it remained hers until she died.

Before her, of course, comes the part that makes the castle "historical." Hever was a childhood home of Anne Boleyn. That's all: if you pass over with a smile the romantic novels and romantic biographies of her, and stick to a solid scholarly book like Eric Ives' Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (2004), you will find that the indefinite article is justified. It was a home of hers, not the home and probably not her birthplace. (When it comes to that perhaps "Hever, Kent" just sounds nicer than "Blickling, Norfolk.") Besides, as an aristocratic girl with a family to do right by, Mistress Anne was already living abroad at twelve or thirteen years of age, working as a maid of honor for other queens whom the general romance-reading public have long forgotten. She can therefore be associated with many places -- but what Boleynophile today makes pilgrimages to the palace of Mechelen in Belgium, where she waited upon the Archduchess Margaret of Austria? Or who thinks of her as a demoiselle d'honneur to the French queen Claude, accompanying her at state banquets in the Bastille, or living at Amboise and being therefore a neighbor of the pensioned Leonardo da Vinci?  "That Anne saw him [circa 1516] seems probable; whether it meant anything to her we cannot know" (Ives, p. 30).  

No. If one is a Boleynophile one prefers the moated romance (and the easy access to London and Gatwick airport) of Hever. It seems too that half the moated romance of it comes from William Waldorf Astor's having spat on his hands and got down to it after 1903, laying out the "award-winning" gardens and the "Tudor village." I must admit that causes me a pang. If I owned it I would not have laid out a Tudor village. Rather I would have preferred to find out exactly what the building, grounds, and gardens would have looked like in Anne's time, and restore everything to that, even if it meant a property of empty rolling parklands, commonplace smelly stables or modest fishponds, and quiet woods. If people were living in a Tudor village right there already anyway, that would have been fine. And if the gardens were mine they would have been planted to whatever simple roses the sixteenth century knew, along with perhaps just violets and strawberries, or medicinal rue or lungwort. Though who knows? The Boleyns might have scoffed at such ignorant rusticity, and demanded palms, tigers, and lemon trees. In that case all their ghosts might have entirely approved William Waldorf's manmade lakes and fountains, and his Italian loggia and sculpture garden.

At any rate the Astor family in turn sold the whole thing off again, after being in possession for only eighty years. (About the same length of time the Boleyns held it.) Today, the castle is owned and  maintained as a tourist attraction by Broadland Properties Ltd., who probably took one look at the loggia and the Tudor village and thought, "thank God for the Astors, now let's make some money." Photos of what I must dare call Heverland -- it's practically my ancestral home -- show lots of people enjoying it and of course there is plenty of shopping. Bless them all.  

I bring all this up because I have a friend who likes to travel, albeit only to one place, and who encourages me to travel also. To Mexico. I'm sure it is indeed "a wonder," what with the greenery and the mandevilla and the iguanas boldly munching hibiscus flowers right out of vacationers' drinks, but last night in surfing through Mexican/expatriate living/travel blogs, I happened to come across one where the blogger's husband is pictured eating grasshoppers and ant-egg pastries at some food festival in what we'll have to gently call Le Mexique Profond.  You could positively see the searing humidity among other things. It forced me to think. Re: travel. Where would I really like to go?

What came to mind was Hever. It's not that I wish to get a passport, get on a plane and go. But at least the idea of seeing it is pleasing. Where else? The Cloisters, the museum of medieval art that is a branch of the Met in New York. Winterthur, near Wilmington, Delaware, which was a home of the DuPont family and is today a museum of fine decorative arts, a garden, and a library. Maybe Charleston, South Carolina. The ocean, certainly, but I think I'll take the ocean outside Florida, or Charleston, rather than any other. I read Marguerite Henry's Misty books years ago so I have thought I'd like to see Chincoteague.  

Most of what appeals to me are domestic scenes -- it's always someone's home, or a recreation of one. Always a garden, a library, a small landscape nearby for wandering, and all the connotations of privacy and leisure. From realizing this, it is but a small step to realizing that maybe I like the idea of looking at other people's homes because it's the next best thing to being home. Which may explain why I don't travel. Beyond a certain point one cannot blame circumstances, whether finances, health, job, spouse or ex-spouse, whatever. Beyond all that it is oneself making the choices. My parents took me to many nice places when I was growing up, but none of them gripped me, "inspired" me with a passion to go back. Not even Europe did. (My friend asked me. I found the question startling. "None," I answered, and he rolled his eyes. "Except Michigan," and he rolled his eyes again. I already have the cottage booked. The journey is two hours from door to door.)

When I am feeling huffy and defensive about not traveling -- when wine salesmen look at me as if I were a criminal and say "not even Napa?" -- I tell myself that someday future historians will look back at our time and agree that the social pressure to travel was very odd. Why did the wealthiest and most comfortable people, in any civilization ever, hound themselves into rushing about inconveniencing themselves and seeing things? Why the definite whiff of guilt and betrayal, as if you are doing what the English call "letting down the side"? Sinclair Lewis noticed it in Dodsworth (chapter 21, "it is the most arduous and yet the most boring of pastimes ... we travel in order to have something to do"). Years ago writer Lisa Medchill cagily speculated that what people really like is coming home and being able to say where they've been. "I just got back from Paris" mollifies the inquisitors and one's own conscience for a while. Much more recently, questioner Mark at ask.com gave us this cri du coeur, the prayer-like passion of which I hope will ring down the ages:

.I hate the expense, the trouble of having to pack and unpack, not knowing where I am, having to keep my passport on hand and worrying that if it gets lost or stolen I wouldn't be allowed back in my own country, putting up with rude locals, weird foods, and hoping that the weather is good during the trip and no emergencies come up while you're gone, tolerating drunk idiots who populate cruise ships and hotel lobbies, and in general the misery that comes from not having my stuff around.

Quite so. I would think for any sane person not already browbeaten into travel, "not knowing where I am" certainly constitutes nightmare.

Given all this, suppose we visit Hever in our own way.  If we could go back five hundred years to a July day in 1513, and see it as it was, actually a comfortable Tudor mansion inside a forbidding and much older medieval gatehouse, would we also catch a glimpse of a dark-haired girl of twelve or so, walking with trailing brocaded skirts among the roses and lungwort? Or had her parents already packed her off to finishing school at Mechelen? And suppose it's time for the mid-day dinner. What would we eat? 

If we dip into C. Anne Wilson's Food and Drink in Britain:from the Stone Age to the 19th Century  (1973) we will soon spot the dishes and flavors that would strike us as most foreign. Rosewater and almonds seem to have been in everything. So was honey. Fish and beer for a strange breakfast. (This is a world without coffee.) Everyone's diet was heavy on salted meat and salted fish, and on sweet creamy puddings as a foil to all the salt. Fine manchet -- white bread -- sweet dried fruits, and fresh venison were treats for the rich, albeit the venison was cooked with vinegar, pepper, salt, or cinnamon to disguise its "high" flavor. And the late middle ages did love its colorful salads, heaped high with edible flowers like dandelions, violets, blue borage, and daisies among the salted and vinegar-ed greens.

As for the wine. In mid-July Hever's wine was probably teetering in quality between the best to be had, and more vinegar. Wilson tells us that in those days wine was imported (most usually from France) three times a year, each successive batch the product of one Bordeaux harvest slowly being drawn down. In September or October when the grapes had just been plucked, it was little more than fresh juice and hardly fermented at all. In mid and late winter, the new shipment of "true" wine had turned somewhat alcoholic but was still "rough and raw." By spring and early summer, the third and best consignment had come in. It was called "wine of the rack" because it had been racked off its lees, the extra rest allowing more fermentation and a little mellowing. Real summer heat, though, meant the danger of nosing a glassful of vinegar. Useful for the venison pot and the salad, but for the guest at table in July or August it also meant a sigh, and a resigned wait until the new season's grapey-fresh import arrived. Romance novels todaywill take care also to mention hippocras or clary, both wines sweetened and spiced and probably comparable to our winter glugg or summer sangria.  

There.We've traveled, probably better than a lot of people, without all the trouble and expense. And no grasshoppers. And speaking of nature, here are the coneflowers in my garden, which, who knows? some wealthy industrialist in the year 2413 may want to know about because the house I lived in has become famed, and he has bought it and wants to attract tourists with a display of 21st century authenticity. I don't think they are edible. But they looked like this.

Total prosecco embarrassment! Oh wait

Once again I must write "in a tearing hurry," as Laurie the neighbor did in Little Women, because daughter is cooking dinner, which will be ready pronto, and tomorrow is my early day, which means I must get to bed early for my beauty sleep tonight. Of course I have WFMT all set up and ready to go, for the cats and me to fall asleep to. I only hope they've got something good lined up -- the radio station, not the cats -- for tonight's Tuesday Night Opera. I can only listen to WFMT, late night, a few nights a week, because so much of their after-10 p.m. programming is such dreck. I do love and admire the station as a regular thing, but really. I ask you. Friday night: Studs Terkel. If he does not mention both Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday in the first five seconds of some ancient archived show, consider yourself lucky. Saturday night: all folk music. Sunday night, "Pipe Dreams," an hour of organ music. It all sounds like a merry-go-round, and then it is so odd to hear the startled audience clapping in church. Monday night: some sort of intellectual program, usually involving "Chicago's blues history," not too far removed in emphasis from Studs Terkel. More white people on the North Shore, pretending they're hardscrabble and black. Wednesday night: I forget, but I think it's something else intellectual. Thursday night: the salvation of the after 10 pm programming week, -- "the Baroque and Before." Sheer delight.  

Anyway all that comes later. The point now is I must tell you some wine news which seems to be no more than five years old (! -- I ask you). Today in my professional capacity I happened to taste a very good Prosecco, and on the publicity sheet accompanying I noticed that the supplier boasted this wine was "100% Glera."

I was surprised, and asked the sales rep for clarification. "What does this mean, 'glera'?"

"That's the grape of prosecco," the beautiful young woman explained. Really, she was -- from the perfectly cut longish blond hair to the sun-washed complexion to the elegant jawline and chin to the mouthful of perfect white teeth, all strong full molars in the back and charmingly "off" but still straight white front teeth, -- to the chic beige-cream-and-blue top and jacket and the perfect makeup, all cream and subtlest gold eyes, brows, and beige-pink lips. One looks at oneself all in workaday black and thinks, I must get out of retail at some point.

Anyway I gaped not only at the beautiful young woman but at the information. "Glera" is the grape of Prosecco? "Good grief,"  I said. "I have been telling people for years that Prosecco is a grape. How embarrassing."

"Most Italian wines are named for a place, not a grape," the young woman explained gently.

I looked at the bottle I had just sampled. There on the label was "Prosecco D.O.C.," the D.O.C., standing for Denominazione Origine Controllata, being a dead giveaway that this is indeed a place, a denomination of controlled origin.  

Embarrassing. Think of all the customers I had misled, all the savvy ones being kind to me and not pointing out my ignorance. Where had I got my misinformation?

I went home and consulted old books. They all told me: prosecco is a grape, although it is also the name of a D.O.C. renowned for prosecco-making, and therefore cleverly called "Prosecco di Conegliano-Valdobbiadene." Prosecco, the grape, "is also known as Balbi, Glera, Serprina, and Tondo" (The New Wine Lover's Companion, 2003).

Enter the source wine-pages, which, no less than five years ago, told us that the prosecco grape had had its name changed to glera, "one of its historic regional names."  Also that the old D.O.C. region of Prosecco di Conegliano-Valdobbiadene had been legally upgraded to D.O.C.G. status -- G for garantita, meaning that prosecco wines made there would be subject to more rules which would in turn guarantee the customer was getting a more refined product -- and that a "large" area around the new D.O.C.G. would also get an upgrade to D.O.C. status and now be called simply "Prosecco D.O.C." If the prosecco grape was grown and vinified outside these two still-traditional regions, then it would be called "Glera." All this, wine-pages said in 2009, was done by real Prosecco makers to insure that growers of prosecco outside its traditional areas would not be able any more to bandy the famous name about as if they were within hailing distance of the Veneto (the part of Italy near Venice).  

So I am glad to know that I have not been misleading people for five years, but also a little embarrassed not to have known about these interesting legal changes until they are five years in the bag. Still. As soon as I learn anything vital, I am glad to pass it on to my fatheads, and no offense taken I hope.

Now off to bed, and to the opera. "In a tearing hurry,
"Yours ever."