Category: Terroir

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A Drinking Man Arrives On Islay, Has A Pour Of Lagavulin, Watches Sea and Stone, Looks At A Thistle And Listens To Robert Fripp’s “Abandonment To Divine Providence.”

Water, grass, thistle and stones.  Rocks.  Arriving on Islay means close quarters with quartzite, limestone, slate and shale with many cresting intrusions called sills of metamorphic rock abundant through the southeastern part the island known as Kildalton.  As Andrew Jefford writes (and I’ll return to his wonderful prose often from Peat Smoke And Spirit) . … Continue reading A Drinking Man Arrives On Islay, Has A Pour Of Lagavulin, Watches Sea and Stone, Looks At A Thistle And Listens To Robert Fripp’s “Abandonment To Divine Providence.”

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A Conversation With Nick Cave In Stockholm. Raise Your Red Right Hand!

Tonight I’m going to attend a conversation with Nick Cave at the Cirkus Arena in Stockholm.  Well, me and hundreds of others. Läktare höger, row 6, seat 636.  Sixth row in the balcony to the right for a conversation.  What will we talk about?  Muddy-river preachers singing doom, while a woman in blue stockings walks … Continue reading A Conversation With Nick Cave In Stockholm. Raise Your Red Right Hand!

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Remembering Harvey / Chapter Two / Pulled Pork And Gin.

Storm coming.  Storms having come.  We made the decision not to leave the house, not to pull out on the highway in my 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier loaded with ourselves and the cats.  I strapped myself to the iron fence like Ahab lashed to the great whale.  Catastrophe in the air.  What would the night bring?  … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter Two / Pulled Pork And Gin.

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Cherry Blossoms At Kungsträdgården With Tulips, Blueberry Tarts, Cognac And Coffee And The Art Of Fugue.

Blooming.  They’re out.  A glorious walk through the King’s Garden in Stockholm to view the Cherry Blossoms.  From a a fifteenth century royal kitchen garden to an open space for military drilling in the nineteenth century to pavilions with cafés in the twenty-first century, the Kungsträdgården features Cherry Blossom trees blooming and signaling the beginning … Continue reading Cherry Blossoms At Kungsträdgården With Tulips, Blueberry Tarts, Cognac And Coffee And The Art Of Fugue.

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A Walk After Goulash With Brillat-Savarin, Blackpink, Walt Whitman And Tomas Tranströmer.

After a meal, a walk helps aid digestion, at least, that’s what I’ve been told repeatingly, and as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes, ‘Man lives not on what he eats, but on what he digests,’ says an old proverb.  We must therefore digest to live: rich and poor, king and shepherd are equal in the face of … Continue reading A Walk After Goulash With Brillat-Savarin, Blackpink, Walt Whitman And Tomas Tranströmer.

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Roasted Spring Lamb And Veg With Several Calls To The Suicide Prevention Hotline.

Five hours roasting at 150 Celsius or about 300 Fahrenheit and Maillard Reactions abound as lamb bone, flesh and skin browns, fat melts and a wondrous dark, umami aroma fills the kitchen and house.  Carbohydrate molecules and amino acids change and change in dry heat as colors and taste merge.  Fat molecules with the aid … Continue reading Roasted Spring Lamb And Veg With Several Calls To The Suicide Prevention Hotline.

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Spring Lamb With Roasted Vegetables, Agnus Dei, William Blake, the Tenebrae Choir, Broadway And Seventeen Years Of Therapy.

Spring lamb.  First born and first kill.  Three to five months old and now on our table, well one of its legs.  An offering for new growth and warmer days.  Flesh and sign of a flayed god and his ascendance into blue skies.  Once upon a time a celebration at the end of fasting. The … Continue reading Spring Lamb With Roasted Vegetables, Agnus Dei, William Blake, the Tenebrae Choir, Broadway And Seventeen Years Of Therapy.

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W.S. Merwin And A Walk Into The Deep

Still a ring of water, a mirror for the sky amidst the ice, but more and more melts each day now and shadows have the sun to thank for shedding its grey veil.  A shadow now has its rock. In reading W.S. Merwin’s “The Widow” from The Lice, the first lesson is humility. How easily … Continue reading W.S. Merwin And A Walk Into The Deep

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Ghosts On A Walk And Premonitions Of April From W.S. Merwin.

The seeming definition of a ghost, someone there and not there–reflection in a shop window shading in a blurred face and dark suit through which paintings and photographs may be seen or not paintings and not photographs because it’s not that easy to say, and other blurred faces and clothes passing by and passing into … Continue reading Ghosts On A Walk And Premonitions Of April From W.S. Merwin.

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More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.

Last I left Love, I considered Nick Cave’s dark turnings of the lover’s call, playing off of Dante’s first sonnet of beatific and cannibalistic vision.  Yet, Dante a few sonnets on in Vita Nuova, also broods on the havoc Love causes, so one might say with Marc Antony in Shake the Spear’s Julius Caesar, “Cry … Continue reading More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.