mondosapore

Qualcosa di nuovo

Something new

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the first podcast of a series that Susannah Gold and I are planning to create over the next fews months. 

 Susannah is based here in Manhattan but she lived in Milan as a financial reporter for 12 years, meanwhile discovering a great affinity for all things Italian -- not least of which was the wine.  She studied hard, became a certified sommelier there (and here) and now uses her wine knowledge to act as PR counsel to various branches of the wine trade here and in Italy.

Each in podcast we'll take on a different topic -- this outing devoted to a discussion of organic/biodynamic viticulture and wine-making in Italy, next time (unless we change our minds) one devoted to aging wine, specifically if wine people have made a fetish of older wines.  

We'll plan to publish every two weeks but, then again, it might not quite work out that way.  

Click here to listen to Dom & the Somm 1.  (26:23).  

Buon ascolto!

Hello, walls

Kids, precious kids, I haven't posted plastered -- or, really, just a bit high -- in a long time.  See, this is why I keep mondosapore going, albeit on life support.  I need to fucking vent, ragazzi miei, I need to display to you the Full Terry.  

I confess my guilty secret. After dissing the late, would-be great Michael "Call me Diana" Jackson on Facebook, I broke down and bought Thriller at the iTune Store ce soir.  But, to be fair to me, I also downloaded the Michael Stanley Band and other such 80s dreck and effluvia. Not to mention Echo Beach by the inimitable and rare Martha and the Muffins and -- hold your breath the first Pearls Before Swine album.  "The past is broken.../Life in our time is..."  Ferkakten?  Mayhap.

And double BTW, the wine of cherce ce soir was the Greco di Tufo from Angelarosa. A 2007 that's losing its youthful bloom and acquiring a more mature, nutty, savory nature.  So sue me, Polly Pure.  

To quote that great Michigander, "Fuck you Tipper Gore, fuck you, Ms. Cheney...." Very amusing, non?

I think you'll see what I mean if you follow a linklet or two.  

Finally, to quote the New Beatles, the Bay City Rollers, "Saturday Niii-hiiiiiiight, Saturday Niii-hiiiiiiight." 

Oh, baby, you KNOOOOOOOOW what I like. 

This one reminds me of me daughter when she was little and we had fun and the family was happy and mental illness and

cancer had not entered our innocent lives.

 

A Muddy Boots controversyette

Clash of philosophies here in Domenicoland

Originally posted on Muddy Boots.  Not in this version

My weak-kneed partners are telling me to lay off the personal, "qualitative" observations.  Present only the facts or, to put it more bluntly, only the facts that are pointedly self-interested.  

For example, they jumped all over me after I posted the one about the wines I'd never import.  (Here.)  And Ken thought a throwaway line was inappropriate here.  "Put that stuff on mondosapore.  That's your safety valve.  You can say anything you want there.  It doesn't directly reflect on Domenico Selections.  That's what you've always used mondosapore for anyway."

They're wrong.  I'm right.

My retort is that if such light-hearted comments aren't thrown in once in a while, Muddy Boots becomes just another boring, smarmy corporate blog: one-note and conventional.  What the fuck's wrong with a little inappropriateness every now and then?  Are we in Victorian London?  Edith Wharton's New York?  Khamenei's Teheran?

Or anywhere there's W?  By the way, I put no stock in the official story that he doesn't drink.  If he truly doesn't, then he really is as stupid as we thought.  

What would you readers, all six of you pathetic dupes, say to support either side?  

The Babbo Effect

En bref, click here.

 

This is like Frank Sinatra's tenth farewell tour, isn't it?

Back by popular demand?

It seems I can't give up mondosapore entirely.  My partners are begging me not to.  My sense of loyalty to a vehicle that's helped change my life is a factor too.  Anyway, you know, I need to vent and be my untrammeled self.  

So I'll post maybe once a week.  Or twice if I get a bug up my ass.  (Italians, note that widely used and rather vulgar American expression.)  Simply taking this blog out of the category of must-dos to an elective relieves some pressure and enables me to approach it with some of my old insouciance.  (Hm.  Since when have I ever been insouciant in my entire life?)

Allora.

That's really it for now.  Sorry it's not too momentous, but there's plenty of momentousness going on these days, and all the turmoil, pain and hope can be summed up in one short name: Neda. 

  

Wine blogs & the limits of fandom

Yes, my personal priorities and viewpoints have changed, as I expressed in the previous post.  Another factor in my growing disaffection with blogging is the enclosed nature of so much wine-blogging.  That is, the nature of single-topic blogging is to develop a set of cultural norms that create an echo chamber of sorts, in which the same subjects, opinions and valuations become pervasive.  Everyone seems to jump on the controversy of the day and worry it to death with undue passion, even ferocity; and of course, the less important the topic really is, the more it gets chewed to rags.  

So we have waves of memes sweeping through, some of them relatively sporadic ("ethics" being a recent example) and some endemic (especially that favorite on slow wine-news days, the anti-spoofilation preservation society vs. the evil empire of Parker, Wine Spectator and so forth).  After you've been swimming in those murky waters long enough, you want to get out, take a nice hot shower and throw your bathing suit into the trash bin.

When you start feeling that way, it's really time to move on.  

I exchanged a few emails with one of the Domenico Selections producers on my reasons for quitting mondosapore, at least as my main blogging vehicle.  She made some astute observations.

...tu hai fatto un grande lavoro con mondosapore, però bisogna fare delle scelte e focalizzare le nostre energie solo sui quei progetti nei quali crediamo profondamente. Per fortuna siamo "esseri dinamici" e i nostri interessi si spostano ed evolvono, dunque mi sembra corretto e responsabile (anche nei confronti dei tuoi followers) rimettersi in discussione.

Poi non è che lascerai nessuno orfano, semplicemente ci sarà un'evoluzione.

E poi lo sai come la penso: viviamo in un'epoca di eccesso di comunicazione/informazione/scambi tremendamente superficiali/ansia di guadagnarsi quei pochi secondi di visibilità che ci danno la fallace illusione di esistere....per poi scoprirsi incapaci di ascoltare, o immersi nella solitudine.

Dobbiamo imparare a selezionare: informazioni, affetti, amicizie, per ritrovare una dimensione più verticale (di profondità intendo ) che non orizzontale, ovvero conosco tutto e tutti, sono informato su tutto, ma rimango on the surface.

Sorry, I don't have the time to translate this whole email.  But the words scelte (choices) and selezionare (select) stick out, at least in my mind.

I will translate the summative last paragraph:

[In this age of information overload] We must learn to select information, feelings, friendships to get back a more vertical, deeper dimension in life rather than a horizontal one where I may know everything and everyone, I'm informed about everything but remain on the surface.  

I'll add that my brother John remarked to me last night, "You got what you wanted from mondosapore.  You don't need it anymore."

So there's that too.    

Bloomsday & Bloggings Wake

June 16, 1904.  The day reconstructed by a self-exiled Dubliner in Trieste and Paris, whose finished work after years of obsessive rewriting was both the pinnacle and the destruction of the novel.  I refer, of course, to that masterpiece by James Joyce, Ulysses.  

I read the book all the way through three times, twice in the same year.  I haven't got the patience to do it a fourth, and that's my loss.  

Then I think of his last work, Finnegans Wake, over which he obsessed for nearly twenty years, and would have obsessed over longer in new editions if he hadn't died right after his escape to Switzerland as the Nazis spread like ink over France and most of the Continent.  A mad book.  Some sort of mad apotheosis.  This I've never had the patience to read all the way through.  I suspect you need hallucinogens to do so.

There's been much about the changes in blogging of late.  I've weighed in on it.  Fredric Koeppel has. Lenn Thompson has, mostly on Twitter.  Alice Feiring has too, so much so that she's thinking about giving it up, or she says so at any rate.  I'm rather tired of it but now have to maintain not one but two blogs to connive at getting Domenico Selections a bit better known.  Blogging’s gone from being a labor of love to a labor. I think this is, to some degree, inevitable, not least because my goals and my energies are necessarily focused elsewhere.  But we all reach a point where what we're doing no longer seems to work as well as it did or we just grow tired of it.  

You know my heart's not in it as it once was.  The visits and page views numbers reflect the shift of my energies and interests going back to October.  I used to care deeply about the triumphant rise in the bar chart showing a growing readership.  I studied the figures and trends obsessively.  Now I barely look at them. I know the levels are lower than they've been in over two years.  

I do believe it's time to -- not exactly pull the plug on mondosapore, but to devote more time to Muddy Boots.  It means a narrower, less self-revelatory focus, of course.  None of my rants, drunk or sober, no wildly off-topic posts.  For such venting mondosapore will still be personally useful.

Short bursts of op-ed from me will generally suffice.  Twitter, Facebook, the usual minimicromedia.  

Will I really put this blog, the focus of so much energy and passion for so long, out to virtual pasture? Yes yes I will I said yes 

  

 

For the benefit of Mr. Wright

...There will be a show tomorrow night on trampoline..."  Sorry, I was channeling Sgt. Pepper.

I hear that someone I used to be friendly with (Strappo) is pouring Domenico Selections wines at this lovely wine shop on the Upper East Side tomorrow -- Monday -- evening. Do come, it will be such fun and you can drink and drink and drink for free. It's the Upper East Side, that's why.  

Mr. Wright Fine Wines

 

Pouring there this Monday, June 15, from 5 to 8 pm.  

1593 3rd Avenue
between 89th & 90th streets
New York, NY 10128
212-722-4564
Open: M-Sa: 9am-9:30pm; Sun: 1pm-6:45pm

Here's Eric. Or Erick.

My high-school friend Costanza (Cotita to her friends) asked for more pictures of my "handsome" son. Well, how I can I refuse an old New Rochellean?

Here are a couple of shots of Eric that I think won't embarrass him or anybody else, plus the cover of Golden Error's album.  These guys are pretty hardcore or old school or something.  It's in vinyl.  Also downloadable for those who have thrown out their turntables, given them to their son, or are too young to know what a turntable is.

A final thought: Be careful what you wish for.

Turntables and shitty low-res pix.  What a world my son lives in. 

Striking the rockstar pose.  It's either a) anthemic or b) he's telling a member of the audience where to find the bathroom.

Eric is the one on the right doing the early-Che Guevara impersonation.  I guess the other one's an avid fan (?!)

Another crappy low-res pic.  I think that crowd is too pure to use a digital camera.  

Seriously now, here are some lyrics he wrote a few years ago.  He told me the backstory and made me weep.  His Cleveland band, Tokyo Storm Warning, recorded it.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 

Sabotage on the Telephone Line They said you couldn't do it All that way across the ocean They said you'd never do it "There's too much water there" They said you'd never do it All that wire across the ocean They said you'd never do it But I've seen that look in your eyes before On that day, you sailed away Scotland to Newfoundland 1500 nautical miles Deepest depths charged On that day September 25th, 1956 Heard your voice Crackling down the line Everyday Mid-afternoon In the sun room Heard your voice Crackling down the line Everyday In the sun room Mid-afternoon Your voice like a ghost And then it.....stopped! SABOTAGE ON THE TELEPHONE LINE (x6) Miscellaneous anarchists Claimed credit for this ...................................................... Now they've got microchips A million words in half a second Now they've got satellites Control your thoughts in half a second Oh how I miss those days Of copper wire Oh how I miss your eyes But they are closed forever......

Pouring at two East Side wine shops next week

To see when and where Strappo will show up, click here.

Go taste and make the old boy feel the love.  

Typical upscale East Sider. Ignore the beer can.  It was a picnic.  

Poor Kiefer. And other tales of the bartender

I met Erick for dinner at In Vino a couple of weeks ago.  I hardly recognized him because I hadn't seen him in well over a year, and he had grown a "K" at the end of his name, which his mother and I wouldn't have considered for one second.  We discussed serious matters of family, health and money (or lack thereof), and then we talked about our economically productive lives.  Such as they are.

Erick/Eric's real vocation is heading up a neo-punk band called Golden Error.  One of their popular ditties is "Fucking in the Fitting Room."  Whatever you may think of the music (Eric writes the lyrics and...sings), I wholeheartedly wish him success.  My dream is that he will support me in a not-too-abusive nursing home some day.

To keep body and soul together, Eric works in the food-and-beverage-service industry, of late most often as a bartender.  He was at Employees Only on Hudson Street in the West Village after a couple of years.  Now he works at Dark Room on the Lower East Side -- on Ludlow Street just down the block from Katz's Deli!  He has many rollicking tales of the high life in the big city.

Eric says Dark Room is one of those places that is relatively cool on weeknights with lots of LES bohemians and NYU students and less cool but more remunerative on weekends, when the B&Ts (bridge and tunnel crowd) pours in from New Jersey and Long Island.  This group is young, rich and senseless, and they spend money like water.  They're also obnoxious.  Eric told me of one incident where the customer didn't think the bartender (Eric) was moving fast enough on his order. The joint was packed.  The guy started yelling at Eric, "Hey you fucking asshole, where's my fucking drink," etc.  At which point young Mr. Hughes pushes the guy off the stool, then runs round the bar to wale on him sprawled on the floor.  The bouncers toss the guy out and laugh when he screams from the street, "Come out here, you punks," etc., etc.  The guy eventually stumbled away, ears stinging with the sounds of much derisive laughter.

One of my favorite tales concerns Kiefer Sutherland, aka "Jack Bauer" on 24. One night he walked into Employees Only very late, already drunk, and managed to be served a couple of drinks.  He stood up on the bar and sang, then fell off.  The staff told him to go home, but he went outside and was too fuddled to hail a cab.  They took him back inside and, though it was closing time, tried to sober him up a bit.  "Where do you live?"

"I dunno."

Finally they discovered his address.  But he couldn't stand up to go outside and hail the cab, so one of the staff did and took him home in the dawn's early light.  I just hope Kiefer paid him back.

Good times, everybody, good times.  

Aleatico & Soaves

Sorry, folks, another cross-post:

Here!

But of course, I'm not a mere blogger anymore.  I'm a Personage in Italian Wine.  

And how much time do you think I have to fart around blogging?!?!

I've just begun two sentences in a row with a conjunction.  I'm sorry, but I'm done now.  Buona notte.  

Cool places: Some new venues for Domenico Selections wines

It's happening, friends, step by step, resto by resto, wine store by wine store, consumer by tipsy consumer:

This is what I'm talking about.

The end of blogging as we know it, Part 2

A while ago I wrote a rather downbeat assessment of where blogging was headed, wine-blogging especially. (Here.)  I noted that short bursts of information were undermining the feature-article model that has prevailed until recently -- Twitter, Facebook and a raft of single-focus social networks as well.  

So I read with interest this article in the NYT, "Blogs falling in an empty forest":  link.  

Here are some crucial paragraphs from Douglas Quenqua's story:

...Many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

(My emphasis.)

Early in the article the author spoke with a woman who felt she had written too personally for her own good, or for the good of her relationships with friends and family. How odd.  If you're posting it to the worldwide web ... no?

The Times article also makes it plain that most aspiring bloggers want to be taken seriously -- seriously enough to, say, go into mainstream and into the money.  (Does this ring a bell, wine-bloggers?)  

I'm amused by the fatuity of people who started a blog expecting, eventually, to live off the income the blog generated.  (Off what?  A few banner ads?  Writing puff posts for your sponsors?  It is to laugh.)  Experienced journalists can scarcely make a living any more, let alone some geek with a dream.  

Blogging as bait for a book deal?  I'd like to know often that's worked out for the 7.4 million active/semi-active bloggers.  Has anybody taken a look at the publishing industry lately?  Dream on, geeklets.

And in the story there is an acknowledgment that Twitter and Facebook have indeed drawn away plenty of "old-style" bloggers as well as given new ones access to a pithier form of communication with a built-in readership.  Not that we've all ditched our Typepad or Blogspot accounts, but we are no longer using them as our exclusive means of communicating with our target audiences.  Facebook, Twitter and so on encourage brevity (aka "the soul of wit") and are having an effect on the length and types of posts that appear in the blogs or, to be more precise, the standard blog sites.

I think blogging will be around as long as the technology exists and the human need to express oneself must be satisfied.  But in a few years I think it will be roughly as mainstream as using a rotary dial phone. 

Let's hear it for lighter bottles

Senselessly heavy, expensive wine bottles are bad business and ecologically irresponsible. 

For a heartening development anent lighter bottles, please check out this post on Muddy Boots:  Click. 

"Wine-blogging used to be fun" & other comic laments

Thursday evening and the week should have ended already.  What's taking it so long?  Oh, right, the rotation of the earth, etc.

Well, anyway.  If you're as discerning as I think you are -- you read mondosapore, don't you?  -- you'll discern that it's been a less than stellar week. Not a truly bad one, just frustrating and less productive than one would like.  "Less productive" -- that tags me as 100% American, doesn't it?  An Italian would frame it in, say, terms of philosophy or politics (Berlusconi, they say, is a dynamo of productivity when it comes to picking up teenagers).

I was going to a blind tasting of Beaujolais at the new Snooth office on Madison Ave. (ladeeda), but I couldn't pry myself away from a stream of legally significant emails to do so.  Dealing with expensive lawyers and grasping State agencies.  A bit of comfortable numbness is in order.  

Pictured above:  Angelo Peretti

Some good things have happened -- new accounts, the ordering of a Kindle, the overdraft at CitiBank (God knows they can ill afford it, ha ha ha) -- where was I?  Oh, some of that will be found soon on Muddy Boots.  Or, as Angelo Peretti wrote on his blog, "Moody Boots."  I got a chuckle out of that one.  My reply in italiano was that it's not Moody Boots, although I am moody despite the high dosage of Lexapro, though my boots are joyous when they tramp around in Italian mud.  It sounded better in Italian. Really.

Like many of you, I've been sucked more and more into the world of Twitter.  

It's at once amusing, boring, informative (un poco) and once in a blue moon revelatory.  I'm following some famous personages now - Ana Marie Cox (the ubiquitous TV commentator and the founder of Wonkette), Rachel Maddow, James Suckling, etc.  Only Ana Marie's tweets sound like the real thing. They're so full of Washington insider allusions that they elude me, unfortunately.  She's doin' a heckuva job, sticking the voodoo pins of ridicule into every waxen appendage and orifice of our undead political culture.

Here's Ana Marie...in low res!

It seems that my recent advice to Italian wine producers has caused reflection and even a sea change among at least a few of my target audience.  I received an email from a Veneto producer that he has taken my advice to heart.  I had earlier this very day received an email from Lucia Raimondi of Villa Monteleone of her concrete steps to reduce costs for herself, us and you, gentle tippler.  I'll write it up on Muddy Boots soon.  Really. It's done:  here's that link.

Rachel, looking a bit less butch these days: network TV glamour treatment

James Suckling, looking a lot more butch

 

Finally, there was a long thread on Twitter this week in which Lenn Thompson (chronicler of Long Island and other New York state wine happenings) lamented that "wine-blogging used to be fun."  Naturally he wants to return to those early days when no one thought about ethics (Q: Should I accept junkets to Spain or California?  A: Don't be a moron!) and before a notoriously disturbed wine producer upstate began his disinformatsya campaign against said Lenn. The man in question has already been booted off any number of wine forums, on which he posted an endless flow of information and opinions, beginning genially and veering into the belligerent and unhinged.  Even the tolerant Jancis Robinson expelled him after a while.  

Lenn, old boy.  You've worked hard for recognition.  You too have done a heckuva job.   As Lily Tomlin's father told her at the beginning of her career, "Babe, you gotta learn to be popular."  Cranks like "Don Giovanni" go with the territory. 

 

 

    

"Noo Yawk is a Summuh Festavull"

My title refers, with my typical lightly ironic touch, to the infamous slogan that New York City used for several years in the 60s. It was meant to convince people not to scamper off to the beach and mountains for the summer but to stay and enjoy the recreational and cultural opportunities of a racially divided city that was beginning to come apart at the seams. I think they abandoned the slogan after three "long hot summers" in a row -- an endlessly invoked journalistic cliche that was code for "the niggers are trying to destroy everything." And in the 70s the town's population fell by about a million. 

Well, as I walk from Penn Station to my shrink appointment near Union Square, it really does feel as though New York has become a summer festival. Oh, I don't mean cornball stuff like face-painting and crafts fairs. It's the whole look and feel of the place that suggests festivalhood. Lots of incremental improvements like the closing of Broadway to traffic, the pocket sitting and gathering areas at a lot of major intersections, complete with chairs, tables, umbrellas. No vandalism either. 

All the parks are safer and better maintained. Even Thompkins Park downtown, which was a drug supermarket for years, and never a place you'd take your toddler for some fun on the swings. (What swings?) 

There's far more common courtesy now, and it extends across racial and ethnic/religious lines as it did not 40 - 50 years ago. There's no longer that instinctive frisson of fear and guardedness when you see a group of black kids after school. They may be boisterous but they don't threaten as they used to, whether intentionally or not. A lot of people say that it was 9/11 that broke many of those old barriers down. If anything good came of that horror, that may be it. There was and remains this sense that "we're all New Yorkers and we're in this together." A sea change for sure. 

But as I was riding the subway Saturday and walking all over Midtown yesterday, I was struck by a huge development that we no longer much notice -- and it occurred to me only because I was trying to see New York through the eyes of a tourist. Immigration, and lots of it, from all of the nations of the world, has altered the racial/ethnic profile of the place so that the rigid, defining categories of US and THEM of the 70s and earlier no longer make sense. How can you stigmatize (say) Dominicans or blacks from South Carolina when they're just a small part of the human river that courses through these streets? When a flood from Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, China and everywhere else mingles with us every day? It makes no sense. It no longer computes. 

Here is a new New York moment from yesterday, as stunning a day as today: Two little Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes were buying halal treats from an elderly Muslim at his cart on Park Avenue. The brothers were young, maybe 8 and 10. They were sweet kids, and they were both happy and polite. The pushcart man was enchanted by them and beamed as they devoured their snacks. He blessed them in broken English. So, yes, this is a movable summer festival. 

And for all its hassles, this is why it is (again) the best place to live in the United States. 

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry