We rolled up on Methven Family Vineyards, south of Dayton, on this brisk, slightly wet Saturday to find an open but empty tasting room.
Will Kobyluck, General Manager, greeted us and poured us two whites and four reds, while sharing stories and generally extending a warm sense of hospitality.
All the wines at Methven are estate wines, which means the fruit is grown on the property. For me, tasting and learning about the wine while visiting the land where the grapes grow is an important part of understanding the vineyard’s terroir.
Darby and I purchased a 2007 Citizen’s Cuvee Pinot Noir and a 2006 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. Here I am trying to figure out the ’06 on camera, on the fly.
Correction: In the video, I gave the wrong price for the 2006 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. It’s $25, not $22. The 2007 Citizen’s Cuvee Pinot Noir is $22.
For the past five years I’ve been keeping track of the trips I make during the year as a way to celebrate (and make note of) the people and places I/we had the good fortune to visit.
This year I spent at least one night in the following places (other than at home in Portland, OR):
Gregg Allman’s new record, Low Country Blues, his first solo-project in nearly 14 years comes out January 18th on Rounder Records. It features 12 tracks — 11 blues classics and one new song written by Gregg and Warren Haynes. The players include Dr. John on piano, guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, bassist Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose.
The album was produced by T Bone Burnett and recorded at Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles.
All the album photographs are by Danny Clinch, one of the top photographers in the music industry. They were all taken in the Low Country, around Gregg’s current hometown of Savannah, GA.
Representative Peter DeFazio, from Oregon’s 4th District, bravely faced down President Obama and the Republican Party yesterday. He wants a better deal for the American people and he’s willing to stick his neck out to get it.
DeFazio introduced a resolution yesterday to bring the GOP’s tax plan to a grinding halt. In a raucous meeting, the House Democratic Caucus rejected Obama’s comproÂmise with the GOP, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring the bill to the floor for a vote without changes.
DeFazio, in a telephone interview with The Register-Guard, said he was just trying to help the president keep his campaign promise of ending tax cuts on those whose income exceeds $250,000.
“We’re trying to give the president the opportunity to reclaim what he ran on,†DeFazio said.
DeFazio scoffed at the threat from Republicans that they would block the extension of unemployment benefits if the Bush tax cuts weren’t extended for two years. “They’re going to cut off unemployment benefits before Christmas? That’s a big bluff. If you are going to cut off benefits, hey, make my day. We’ll savage you,†he said.
The Bush Administration tax cuts are set to end by the end of this year, which means the extension needs to be approved by December 31st. This lame duck Congress is run by Democrats and they ain’t havin’ it, even at the urging of a Democratic President.
DeFazio, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, worked as a gerontologist before he took elected office. It’s safe to say he’s kicking it old school now.
Today in Washington, DC, Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal asked President Obama how he would respond to Democrats who think he’s compromised too much in agreeing on a two-year extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts. Obama responded forcefully, saying that the positions of such people on the left would result in getting nothing done, except having a “sanctimonious” pride in the purity of their own positions.
He has tried to be both pragmatist and progressive savior. And even when he stopped trying to be the savior after he was elected, he was at a certain level content to let supporters continue to project that persona on to him.
Today, he very clearly and loudly said: that savior persona is not me. I am the pragmatist. And you know what, I don’t have a whole lot of patience for the idealists. I share their ideals, but I don’t share their approach and I’m not going to get bogged down in recriminations over not living up to some abstract ideal.
Here’s the problem. When you compromise away what you stand for because it is the expedient thing to do, you’ve robbed yourself of the one thing that matters–your integrity.
I might add that Obama’s fiery defense of his need to be pragmatic in the face of mounting opposition makes for good C-SPAN material, but that’s about the only positive I can find in it. Republicans put a bumbling fool in the White House for eight years and proceeded to mow down the Constitution like an overgrown field–with ZERO compromise–but when the other team finally gets its chance, the highly educated, skilled orators end up looking like political buffoons.
I understand the need to get things done, but the fact is small steps in the right direction is not a winning defense for the Obama team. They better come up with something better and fast, or their feeble attempt at wielding real power is over.
Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government, in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media—and for good reason.
The marketing obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State’s increasing power. You can’t have it both ways, but the adolescent response is to whine and cajole Mom and Dad (or the State) for more allowance and more “freedom.†But freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it’s simply an extended childhood.
President Obama must be seeking re-election because here he is earlier today advocating for the continuation of the status quo:
I wish Obama wouldn’t concern himself with re-election and instead do the right thing for the country every day for two more years. But he won’t, because he’s stuck inside the two-party system, which is a prison of our own making. I’d like to think that one day we might break free of this prison, but to do so we will have to stop feeding the guards.
“Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range … come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River.” -Ken Kesey
According to The Register-Guard in Eugene, Faye Kesey is negotiating the sale of Ken Kesey’s library to University of Oregon, where the great American writer went to school and later taught creative writing.
The typed manuscript of “Cuckoo’s Nest†is among thousands of documents from Kesey’s literary life being stored by the University of Oregon library’s special collections department while the UO and the Kesey family negotiate the permanent acquisition of the material.
“This is the guy who took us from the beats to the hippies,†says James Fox, head of the UO’s Special Collections and University Archives.
From a literary perspective, Kesey is so much more than “the the guy who took us from the beats to the hippies.” He’s a 20th century master, who wrote not one, but two Great American Novels, then followed those with Sailor Song and other works.
Bob Keefer of The Register-Guard got a look at some of the documents in preparation for his article.
A quick tour of the contents of some of the boxes produced such treats as a September 1959 letter that Kesey sent to friend Ken Babbs. That was the year he wrote “Cuckoo’s Nest,†but had not yet found a publisher.
“Thus my plight,†the young Kesey typed. “A failure at 24, impotent both physically and artistically. If I haven’t taken a Gilette to my wrists by the time you people get here in March to cheer me up there may be hope. But I doubt it.â€
It’s funny how we don’t think of our heroes or iconic Americans as people who had doubts and intense struggles en route to their success. Clearly they did struggle and did doubt. That’s the human condition, but it’s also the human condition to believe and to overcome.
According to The New York Times, Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time.
Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends.
Naturally, this isn’t good. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,†said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.â€
“The headline is: bring back boredom,†added Dr. Rich.
Novelist and NYU creative writing professor, Zadie Smith, went to see The Social Network and came away with some thoughts on the film and Facebook that she shares in a New York Review of Books piece called Generation Why?
Smith is a fan of the film but she doesn’t “Like” Facebook.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
In other words, you can’t reduce the richness of life into a series of posts to one’s Wall. That’s what literary fiction and films are for!
Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com thinks he understands Smith’s aversion.
When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.
In other words, professional writers are elitists who can’t relate. Which is odd, given that it is a writer’s job to relate and to retell what people (real and otherwise) are going through with compassion and sensitivity.
Bottom line, it’s not the platform but the people who use it who are responsible for content. I wonder if storytellers from the oral tradition long ago vehemently resisted the use of writing to falsely preserve what was meant to be an organic experience. Probably. And how did the 19th century’s literary masters see the arrival of the telephone? Was it viewed as an imminent threat to the written form? Most likely.
I understand that Smith and others are attempting to confront what they see as frightening changes to our concepts of personal identity and privacy. But this is also about the exchange of ideas through writing and I think we need to recognize where the literary opportunities lie in new media. Facebook and Twitter are platforms for “talking,” not writing. Blogs on the other hand are ideal for writing. A blog post unwritten is the exact same blank page writers have faced for generations. The big difference is the expedited publishing available that electronic media provides. But even this is by choice. A writer can choose to save draft after draft until she is ready to push “Publish,” just like the craftsmen of old. Of course, not every writer does this–I for one unwittingly publish misspelled words and other grammatical errors, and that may well be a blemish on my writing house, but I see electronic media as flexible, and fixable. Unlike print, it’s not “done” when it’s printed. Electronic text can be updated, or rewritten as needed. I hope that’s not seen as an excuse for sloppiness, because that’s not my intention. I merely want to point out how each medium a writer works in has its own rules, and we’re still finding our way through this seemingly infinite new galaxy.
Portland writer Donald Miller, author of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is actively using social media channels to promote his work. But he’s considering quitting his blog in order to concentrate on writing more books.
Miller also notes how the instant publishing format is changing the literary landscape.
There may never be another John Steinbeck, because the next Steinbeck won’t be able to sell enough books to pay for a year or two of writing the next book. He’ll need to speak, and in order to speak he will have to hire an accountant and a travel agent because God knows his creative mind can’t manage a checkbook or get to Detroit by Thursday. And then he’ll be treading water, not honing his craft. And he will never become the next John Steinbeck.
I also recently came across a 2009 essay by Lauren Kessler, the head of the literary nonfiction program at University of Oregon’s Journalism School.
Kessler isn’t wild about filling content holes on blogs. This is why:
It is a burden to produce posts that enhance – or at least don’t scuttle – your reputation as a writer, a burden to produce posts you won’t regret, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day and for the rest of your life.
Personally, I don’t like the concept that blogs aren’t for “real writers.” In my view one of the things real writers do is adapt to the needs of the medium they’re working in. As someone who has written several thousand blog posts, I don’t feel that my reputation as a writer is diminished. Of course, I’m not an academic, nor an author. I might see things differently if I were.
