2009 Chateau Pesquié Terrasses

Robert Parker —

Rating: 90 points

Another of my favorite estates in the up-and-coming Cotes du Ventoux appellation… Composed of 70% Grenache (from 60-year-old vines) and 30% Syrah (from 30-year-old vines), aged in neutral oak, and bottled unfined and unfiltered, this 10,000-case cuvee hits every sweet spot on the palate. Tasting more like a Chateauneuf du Pape than an inexpensive Cotes du Ventoux, this dense ruby/purple-colored wine offers up scents of licorice, black cherries, raspberries, pepper, and meat juices. Medium to full-bodied with a structured, well-delineated mouthfeel, good freshness, a heady finish, and firm, but well-balanced tannins, it should drink nicely for 2-3 years.

On sale at the government store for 17.99!

Pat Methany's Orchestrion

The Night of the Iguana

How calmly does the olive branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever
And from thence
A second history will commence

A chronicle no longer gold
A bargaining with mist and mold
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth, and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene corrupting love

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Oh courage! Could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me.

Happy Birthday Myra

100 Years Ago Today, Marshall McLuhan Was Born

Marshall McLuhan's legacy: 
Don't downplay the comic books

By Andre Mayer, CBC News
Posted: Jul 21, 2011 7:19 AM ET

"What makes Understanding Media vital is not that McLuhan was always right, but that he was engaged enough to seek meaning in seemingly ephemeral art."

Two Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank

Nanaimo Museum
May 20 to August 21, 2011

This compelling collection of photographs is a travelling exhibit from the Japanese Canadian National Museum and presents two views of internment and incarceration in the early 1940s. This exhibition provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of forced separation and uprooting and the effects this has on its victims. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, both the Canadian and American governments forced the relocation of citizens of Japanese descent from the coastal regions. Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans and 22,000 Japanese Canadians were affected including Nanaimo’s small Japanese community.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is usually thought of as a landscape photographer, a maker of images that blend drama and contemplation. From 1943 to 1944, Ansel Adams made a number of trips to Manzanar War Relocation Center. His powerful photographs capture the harsh daily life and resilience of the 10,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated there during World War II. When he offered the collection to the Library of Congress, Adams wrote, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.”

Leonard Frank (1870-1944) was hired by the BC Security Commission to record the removal of Canadians of Japanese descent from the BC Coast. In 1942, he was contracted as the documentary photographer of the BC internment. Frank’s documentary photographs of the Japanese put into Hastings Park temporary holding areas, are both stark and shocking. The images of the cavernous buildings give a unique perspective, focusing on the bureaucratic systems in place rather than the suffering of the community. Frank also documented the moving process and visited several camps in the interior of BC.


― text: Nanaimo Museum website.

Everything Happens to Me

I make a date for golf, and you can bet your life it rains. 
I try to give a party, and the guy upstairs complains. 
I guess I'll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains. 
Everything happens to me.

I never miss a thing. I've had the measles and the mumps. 
And every time I play an ace, my partner always trumps. 
I guess I'm just a fool, who never looks before he jumps. 
Everything happens to me.

At first, my heart thought you could break this jinx for me. 
That love would turn the trick to end despair. 
But now I just can't fool this head that thinks for me. 
I've mortgaged all my castles in the air.

I've telegraphed and phoned and sent an air mail special too. 
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due. 
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you. 
Everything happens to me.

(skat)

I've telegraphed and phoned. I sent an air mail special too. 
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due. 
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you. 
Everything happens to me.


 — Tom Adair and Matt Dennis,1940

Miral

Julian Schnabel and Rula Jebreal discuss the film with Charlie Rose.

A lad is sent off with a memento of his visit to the family in Bray from Paul's father: A copy of Patrick Kavanagh's 1973 Collected Poems. A gesture appreciated still by the lad now in his 60s.










On Raglan Road of an Autumn day
I saw her first and knew,
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might someday rue.
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way.
And I said,"Let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day."

On Grafton Street in November, we
Tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion play.
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay;
Oh, I loved too much and by such and such
Is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind,
I gave her the secret signs,
That's known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone.
And her words and tint without stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there and her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now,
And away from me so hurriedly
My reason must allow.
That I had loved, not as I should
A creature made of clay,
When the angel woos the clay, he'll lose
His wings at the dawn of day.

— Patrick Kavanagh

Werner Herzog: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS
4 LUNI, 3 SĂPTĂMÂNI ŞI 2 ZILE
Romania 2007

Romania, during the final days of Communism. Otilia and Gabita are students; they share a room in a hall of residence in Bucharest. Gabita is pregnant. The girls arrange to meet a certain Mr. Bebe in a cheap hotel. He will perform Gabita’s illegal abortion. But Mr. Bebe refuses their money and demands to be paid in kind. –Cannes FIlm Festival

Karlheinz Weinberger – Presentation House Gallery

Karlheinz Weinberger, Knabenschiessen, Albisguetli, Zurich 1961, vintage black and white photograph, 50.5 x 60.5 cm. Copyright: The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich. Image courtesy of Artist Resources Management and Anna Kustera Gallery, New York.

Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver