Burnin’

We dabbled in delicious wines over the Christmas weekend. Mostly from Oregon. One stood out from the pack. Rockblock from Domaine Serene—a syrah from the southern part of the state, hundreds of miles from the Willamette Valley.

Grapes for Rockblock are sourced entirely from Del Rio Vineyard in the Rogue Valley appellation of southern Oregon, just north of Medford, overlooking the Rogue River. The vineyard is planted to the Noir clone on 101-14 and SO4 rootstocks. Soils are rocky clay loam, very well drained and planted 1088 vines per acre.

We found it on the wine list at Bateaux on Lady’s Island and ordered two bottles. Now, I’m going to have to ask Claude, our local wine retailer, to bring it in for us.

Zack Klein and Jason Kottke have both recorded lists of the cities they visited (and spent at least one night in) this year.

I think it’s a good way to look back at the year, so here’s my list of cities:

• Asheville, NC
• Charlotte, NC*
• Athens, GA
• Winston-Salem, NC
• Live Oak, FL
• New Orleans, LA
• Chicago, IL
• Lyons, CO
• Boulder, CO
• Jacksonville, FL
• Atlanta, GA*
• Charleston, SC*
• Las Vegas, NV
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Macon, GA
• Kansas City, MO
• Marco Island, FL
• San Diego, CA
• Los Angeles, CA

*Visited more than once

Peter Kann made a list of 10 disturbing trends in mass media today. Kann is chairman of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Here are two that stand out for me:

• The blurring of lines between news and opinion. Newspapers have a format that helps maintain the distinction. The Internet, TV and most magazines have neither that format nor that tradition. The result is a blending of news and views. The two are not ingredients to mix together for a tastier meal, they are different courses. Part of the problem here lies in fashionable new philosophies that argue there are no basic values of right and wrong, that news is merely a matter of views. It’s a dangerous philosophy for our society and a dagger at the heart of genuine journalism.
• The blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships. The resulting porridges may be called “advertorials” or “infomercials”; they may be special sections masquerading as news, news pages driven by commercial interests, or Web pages where everything somehow is selling something. Without clear distinctions between news and advertising, readers or viewers lose confidence in the veracity of a news medium. And advertisers lose the business benefit of an environment of trust.

Clearly, Mr. Kann is a purist. And there aren’t many of those left in our mashup culture.

Miriam Jordan, a Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reporter published a feature last week on illegal immigration’s adverse effects for entrepreneurs. The story takes place on Hilton Head Island, which is why I’m featuring it here.

About five years ago, the journey of Starletta and William Hairston from the underclass to the upper class hit a roadblock.

Both were born to poor black Southern families. William, a stucco subcontractor, built a thriving business beautifying houses in the gated communities on this resort island, a magnet for wealthy retirees seeking a laid-back lifestyle by the sea. Starletta, a former flight attendant, won accolades for her community activism.

Then Hilton Head suddenly saw a wave of illegal immigrant workers from Mexico. Mr. Hairston, 54 years old, initially hired the Hispanic newcomers for his stucco business, helping it flourish. But soon, some of those same workers splintered off to form their own businesses, undercutting Mr. Hairston with lower bids to capture jobs.

The Hairstons’ saga shows that the issue is not just about low-paid workers, but also entrepreneurs who set out to make their own fortune.

William Hairston has since moved his business to North Carolina. Meanwhile, his wife, Starletta Hairston is a Beaufort County Council member actively working to stem the tide of illegal immigrants in the county. Naturally, the business community opposes the actions, for it would place hardships on construction companies and the service sector.

The two sides hammered out a compromise known as the “Lawful Employment Ordinance.” Final vote on the ordinance takes place at a special meeting of the council on December 27th, just days before six new council members will be sworn in on Jan. 2.

“All Cats Are Grey at Night” by Sam Gilliam

This afternoon with Stefania in town we opted for culture, which brought us to The Telfair Museum’s exhibit on contemporary American visual artist, Sam Gilliam. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective, organized and circulated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. is an interesting collection of draped art, sculptural pieces and paintings that benefit from unique use of materials. I particularly liked seeing how much paint the man places on a canvas. For Gilliam, in many cases paint becomes a structural element, like wood or metal.

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) established himself as a major artist in 1968 when he jettisoned the wooden stretcher bars that had previously determined the shape of his paintings and allowed his vivid, sometimes ecstatic, rushes of color-stained canvas to hang, billow, and swing through space. This was not the first time an artist working in the venerable tradition of painting had decided to abandon the conventional rigid support. But it was the only time someone had done so to create a complete painterly environment. Gilliam’s idea that modernist painting could be sculptural and, moreover, theatrical, radically distinguished him from his contemporaries, including minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, color-field painter Helen Frankenthaler, and the artists associated with the Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Since that time, Gilliam has gone on to create work in an astounding variety of styles and media. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective explores many of the artist’s most important innovations while highlighting the aesthetic ideals that have remained constant throughout his career. Most important among these is his consistent disregard for the boundaries that have traditionally separated the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Science Fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, wrote a piece for Forbes on the business value of giving his work away for free on the internet.

I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.

How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It’s not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They’re the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they’re a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They’re not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them.

Doctorow argues that eBooks are viral artifacts that want to be passed from one friend to another. He also says they are, in essence, ads for the printed and bound versions of his work, which many of his readers eventually purchase.

There’s something befitting about a preppy storyteller wandering his way toward a storybook marriage with a member of America’s most famous media family. There’s also something very Hemingway about it.

According to today’s New York Times, McInerney, 51, has wed Anne Randolph Hearst, 48. The bride’s father was the president of The San Francisco Examiner and the chairman of its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, which was founded by the bride’s paternal grandfather, William Randolph Hearst.

Mr. McInerney, 51, is the author of seven novels, including “Bright Lights, Big City” (Vintage, 1984) and “The Good Life” (Knopf, 2006). In October Knopf published “A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine,” a collection of Mr. McInerney’s wine columns for House & Garden, a Conde Nast magazine. He graduated from Willliams and received a master’s degree in English from Syracuse.

The bride’s two previous marriages ended in divorce, as did the bridegroom’s three previous marriages.

I don’t often link to the National Review (in fact, I never have), but I’m compelled to do so today.

According to Think Progress, right-wing radio host Dennis Prager wrote a column earlier this week bitching about U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) intent to take his oath of office not on the Bible, but on the Koran. Ellison is the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. Prager claimed this “act undermines American civilization,” and compared it to being sworn in with a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Thankfully, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, has a much more measured approach to the subject.

The U.S. Constitution is a multiculturalist document. Not in all senses, of course: It tries to forge a common national culture as well as tolerating other cultures. But it is indeed multiculturalist in important ways.

The Constitution expressly authorizes people not to swear at all, but to affirm, without reference to God or to a sacred work. Atheists and agnostics are thus protected, as well as members of certain Christian groups (like Quakers, who don’t believe in swearing oaths). Why would Muslims and others not be equally protected from having to perform a religious ritual that expressly invokes a religion in which they do not believe? Under the Constitution, all of them “are incapable of taking an oath on that book,” whether because they are Quakers, atheists, agnostics, or Muslims. Yet all remain entirely free to “serve in Congress.”

Presidents Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover (a Quaker) didn’t swear at all, but rather affirmed.

Clearly, knowledge of American history and the U.S. Constitution are not prerequisites for being a radio talk show host.

Maybe we can change that.