Burnin’

If you enjoy wine, Mondovino, a documentary by Jonathan Nossiter, is a must see. The film has a fascinating cast of characters, and its central theme explores the mounting tension between local producers and global behemoths like Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Sons.

Aimé Guibert of Languedoc and Hubert de Montille of Bordeaux, both determined believers in terroir–the sense of place that gives wine its true character–are the clear heroes in the film. Michel Rolland, a wine consultant who espouses the values of modernization and the Mondavi family who value globalization are the villians.

Hubert de Montille told The Telegraph, “I am un partisan du terroir. But you have vin terroir all over the world, including the United States - wherever you have people who cherish diversity and individuality in wine. For me, the battle isn’t between Europe and the US. It is industrial wine against the culture of wine, that’s the real conflict. These big companies are so powerful and their ambition is so great that they may not keep a space open for vin terroir, for all wine that has a sense of place, rather than just a sense of marketing.”

Southern France’s Languedoc region is one of the places where this conflict was most recently fought. Mondavi had identified forested land in Aniane as suitable for making world-class wine, but citizens of the town with the aid of their Communist mayor rebuked their advances.

According to Wine Spectator, Mondavi had planned to spend about $8 million developing the vineyard and building a showcase winery, which would eventually produce up to 20,000 cases per year of high-end Syrah.

But the site they chose was on the 2,200-acre undeveloped massif, which is flanked by woods and nearly impenetrable bush (known as garrigue), and topped by 750-foot-high plateaus with sweeping views. Hunters, ecologists and naturalists fought against any development in the area, which they consider an environmental shrine.

Mondavi was in part attracted to Aniane because it is home to one of the finest wineries in southern France, Mas de Daumas Gassac, which makes a long-lived red wine in Aniane. But the winery’s founder, Aimé Guibert, criticized Mondavi for wanting to develop a winery on public land.

Paul Ford is a great writer. Evidence for this theory exists on his website. He’s also employed by Harper’s Magazine and he has a new novel out. Like I said, the guy can write.

Here’s something he wrote last fall that I find funny.

Back in 1995 Jerry Garcia died. I was just finishing up college at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. I never really cared about the Grateful Dead all that much. Some of the Dead’s music is okay if you don’t have anything better to listen to, like, say, silence, or the sound of flies buzzing. I don’t really have a problem with it, but I do have a problem with pious hippies. They get on my nerves in the same way that, say, Objectivists do. And I like all the stuff that hippies hate, like wearing solid colors, and living in a house that’s not made of corncobs, and Western medicine.

My roommate in college had the same problem with hippies that I did. So we decided to put together a one-hour radio program for the college radio station, WALF, about the assassination of Jerry Garcia, complete with commentary and analysis and a slowed-down, audio-processed, totally fake bootleg of the song Sugar Magnolia to which we added fake gunshots. We played it one night and our friends were amused.

This was the early days of the web, and I figured I might as well put up a few pages about our assassination theory with some audio clips and see what happened. What happened is that Jerry fans sent me long emails explaining how important Jerry was to the world and that my theory was insanity and should be removed from the Internet immediately. Sometimes people would ask to speak to my supervisor.

I’d always write back. I’d send a fake email from the Internet Management Council, an organization that does not exist, telling the complaining party that their Internet would be shut down from this day on. And then they’d write back even more full of burning rage, telling me that they were going to write the Internet Management Council as well and have my Internet revoked. Sometimes I’d let them in on the joke, reminding them that Jerry Garcia had been in close contact with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and wasn’t afraid of a good prank himself. They didn’t write back. I did it over and over, and I was happy.

I share Ford’s distlike of pious hippies, but I like Grateful Dead music. And I like hippies when they have a sense of humor and adventure.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, explores our comfort with Wikipedia, Google and “that whole blog thing.”

When professionals–editors, academics, journalists–are running the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it, Wikipedia “should be the first source of information, not the last.”

Mike Wallace spoke to The Boston Globe earlier this month. Here’s some of what he said:

Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance?

A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn’t have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

[via Kottke]

Adelsheim is one of Oregon’s outstanding pinot producers. If you can locate their wine, buy it and toast to your good fortune.

Here’s the winery’s origin story:

On a beautiful June day in 1971, David Adelsheim and Ginny Adelsheim stood above an open field and were taken with the beauty of its orange and purple wildflowers.

Five hundred feet below, Oregon’s north Willamette Valley stretched out in a patchwork of orchards, pasture and native trees. The field, rich with clay-loam soil, had a gentle southern exposure and was sheltered by the Chehalem Mountains. The Adelsheims had dreamed of planting a vineyard in the area since returning from a summer in Europe, where they were inspired by the hand-made foods and wines they encountered.

In 1972, the Adelsheims began planting their original 15-acre vineyard at Quarter Mile Lane with Pinot noir, Chardonnnay, Pinot gris, and Riesling.

Relying on family and friends for assistance, they battled weeds, mildew, birds and deer — and the widely perceived futility of growing wine grapes in northern Oregon’s cooler climate.

Having enjoyed several bottles of Adelsheim Pinot Noir over the years, I can attest that the winemaker’s passion comes through loud and clear. It’s great stuff.

A note on the labels: Drawn by Ginny Adelsheim, the Oregon Series wines feature full-color drawings of family and friends who have worked in the original estate vineyard and winery at Quarter Mile Lane.

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols explore the values of a partisan press in In These Times:

It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the notion of objectivity or simply professional journalism is a relatively recent development in the United States. In the first one hundred-plus years of the republic, journalism tended to be highly opinionated and partisan. Indeed, the first few generations of U.S. journalists–the years from Madison and Jefferson to Jackson and Lincoln–were diametrically opposed to what many Americans think is intended by the First Amendment: a commitment to neutral, values-free news reporting.

The key to having partisan journalism promote democratic values, rather than repress them, is to have a wide range of partisan viewpoints available, and for it to be feasible to launch a new partisan newspaper or magazine if one is dissatisfied with the existing range of options. One way to view the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment is to see that it protects the right of citizens to launch their own publications, even if they are opposed to the political views of those holding political power at the time. That radical idea was mainstream thinking at the time of the country’s founding.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, as publishing became an increasingly lucrative sector, market competition generated innumerable new newspapers, with publishers seeking profit as much or more than political influence. This was a classic competitive market, where new entrepreneurs could enter the field and launch a newspaper with relative ease if they were dissatisfied with the existing publications. Major cities like New York or Chicago or St. Louis tended to have well over a dozen daily newspapers at any given time, reflecting a fairly broad range of political viewpoints. The system was far from perfect, yet it worked.

On the other hand, as newspapering became big business, markets became much less competitive. By the early twentieth century, there were fewer and fewer newspapers in any given community, and in many towns there remained only one or two competing dailies. Barriers to entry emerged that made it virtually impossible to launch a new newspaper in a community, even if the existing papers were highly profitable. In short, newspaper publishing became monopolistic, far more so than most other major industries.

This led to a political crisis for journalism. It was one thing for newspapers to be stridently partisan when there were numerous competing voices and when it was not impossible to launch a new newspaper if the existing range was unsatisfactory. It was altogether different when there were only one or two newspapers and it was impossible to start a new one.

Professional journalism was the solution to the crisis. It was the revolutionary idea that the owner and editor of a newspaper would be split, and a “Chinese Wall” put between them. News would no longer be shaped to suit the partisan interests of press owners, but rather would be determined by trained nonpartisan professionals, using judgment and skills honed in journalism schools. There were no such schools in 1900; by the end of World War I nearly every major journalism school in the nation had been established, often at the behest of newspaper owners. Professionalism meant that the news would appear the same whether the paper was owned by a Republican or a Democrat.

Now that we’re in the age of citizen media, we’ve returned to the multiplicity of voices ideal. Except we’re on a global stage today, and there aren’t a dozen “papers” in a given market, there are thousands of “voices” competing to be heard. The more eloquent and trustworthy these voices become, the more readership they will garner.

At opus:creative in Portland, Oregon, 13 of their 31 employees ride their bikes to work.

Outside of opus:creative, bike commuter numbers are exploding throughout Portland, as profiled recently in an Associated Press article that credited cycling — and the City of Portland’s emphasis on livable urban design that encourages such activities — for helping keep Oregon’s adult obesity rate stagnant, while other U.S. states continue to climb steadily. The obesity statistics come from a study conducted by an organization called Trust for America’s Health; Michael Earls, co-author of the study, describes the relationship between urban design and fitness: “If a city or town is built in such a way that it forces residents to drive long distances instead of walking or cycling, then physical activity becomes something that has to be planned rather than an activity which can be woven into the fabric of everyday life.”

Bike Portland is a great bicycling blog and it lists several other local bicycling blogs, all of which points to just how pervasive the riding ethos is in Puddletown.

And for those who must drive, Darrell Plant says there is biodiesel for sale at Jay’s Garage, on the corner of SE 7th Ave. and Morrison St.

National Geographic: Archaeologists revealed the final section of the earliest known Maya mural ever found, saying that the find upends everything they thought they knew about the origins of Maya art, writing, and rule.

The painting was the last wall of a room-size mural to be excavated. The site was discovered in 2001 at the ancient Maya city of San Bartolo in the lowlands of northeastern Guatemala.

The mural was painted by skilled artisans and reads like a Maya book, telling the story of creation, the mythology of kingship, and the divine right of a king, according to William Saturno, the University of New Hampshire archaeologist who leads the San Bartolo excavation project.

The painted wall dates to 100 B.C., proving that these stories of creation and kings–and the use of elaborate art and writing to tell them–were well established more than 2,000 years ago ago, centuries earlier than previously believed.

[via Boing Boing]

Editor and Publisher has a telling piece on the pointless divisions between old guard White House reporters for the Washinton Post and new school WP bloggers.

A debate is raging at The Washington Post, pitting the newspaper’s traditional print staff (and newly appointed ombudsman) against a representative of a new generation of journalists who work for the company’s Web site.

Newly appointed Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell kicked off the debate Sunday in a column titled “The Two Washington Posts.” In it, Howell looked to distinguish between the Washington Post’s print newspaper, with its weekday circulation of 671,322, and washingtonpost.com, with its 8 million unique visitors a month. In the process, Howell took particular aim at washingtonpost.com’s popular “White House Briefing” columnist Dan Froomkin, who tracks the key stories on the Bush administration and links to them, often adding pointed commentary and context.

“Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s ‘White House Briefing,’ which is highly opinionated and liberal,” Howell declared flatly. “They’re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.”

Before ending her column with a recommendation that “the Web site should remove the ‘White House Briefing’ label from Froomkin’s column,” Howell quoted John Harris, a national political editor at the print Post, who complained that the title of Froomkin’s column “invites confusion” and “dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters.

From Dan Froomkin’s own fingers:

Regular readers know that my column is first and foremost a daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers. When my voice emerges, it is often to provide context for those writings and spot emerging themes. Sometimes I do some original reporting, and sometimes I share my insights. The omnipresent links make it easy for readers to assess my credibility.

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny.

While it’s easy to understand the need to drag the old guard forward inch by inch, what’s odd about this development is the fact that The Post is light years ahead of most newspapers when it comes to adapting their product to the tastes and needs of today’s news consumer.

In related news, USA TODAY tore down the walls between its print newsroom and its online newsroom.

Sam Sacks writing in New York Press laments the state of American fiction today.

I was reminded of Narayan’s machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006, an anthology edited by Jane Smiley. The book gives such a desultory vision of the future of American letters that one can only hope its title is wrong. Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree. None of this much matters anyway, because the things the characters do are always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts. From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty, but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found.

Even the style of writing displays a numbing verisimilitude. The first-person voice is always a lazily generalized vernacular, jazzed up at significant moments with consciously poetic frills in the exposition.

It should be no surprise that every one of the writers in this anthology have one more thing in common: They have attended writers’ workshops, either in graduate programs or in similarly organized writing conferences.

Writing workshops, for their ubiquity, are currently the most significant phenomenon influencing American literature.

The best advice I ever received regarding the writer’s path, is, “If you want to write, write.” That is, don’t go to school. Write.

[via One Pot Meal]