Old Man Claret: Bordeaux at £10 - £15 per bottle

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." - Henry Miller

Why drink Bordeaux at £10-15? Many other wines stride in with hi-how-are-you blasts. At this price, there are many choices for a medium-bodied red wine from nearly every corner of the globe. That’s why some are asking, is Bordeaux even relevant anymore?

Lunch with Randall Grahm: Imagining Change

Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with darkpoles and belching volcanoes and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place. It’s a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth."

Environmentalist, Bill McKibben

To be honest, it took me a while to sit down and write this post after lunch with Randall Grahm from Bonny Doon vineyards. Why?

subatomic

"These days the scientists are looking for quarks, strange subatomic entities, having qualities which they describe with such words as upness, downness, charm, strangeness, truth, beauty, colour, and flavor." - Mu Soeng Sunim

Link: whisky river

crisp

Link: All things Quentin Crisp

10 things I wish I'd known 10 years ago

1. Three martinis are enough, really
2. Always leave parties before saying goodbye
3. Dawn is always going to happen again
4. Boring people are boring even if they speak a foreign language
5. Don't waste liver space on average wines
6. Memory is important, look after it
7. Cosmopolitans are sad-girl drinks
8. Champagne is excellent with food
9. Experience only creates deeper and better experiences...
10. No regrets - ever!

mindfucking

Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol's 1965 film, "Outer and Inner Space."

The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are.

– Iago in Othello, The Moor of Venice

Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation is the latest book by Colin McGinn, in a short 96 pages, McGinn defines what mindfucking is: from personal mind games to full-scale propaganda and mind control.

Hey, maybe it's just me, but I hardly use the word mindfuck in a negative sense! These are the two ways I use the word:

• "Wow, that (book, film, conversation) was a total mindfuck."
• "That relationship was a mindfuck. I'm glad it's over."

There has to be an emotional experience, after which your senses feel reorganised (or even, de-organised, like a suitcase of ex-boyfriend's clothes thrown out an 8- story window, "No more!").

McGinn argues mindfucking can be an intrusive and violating experience. Unless of course, you give your consent (!)

That's half the problem, like The Moor in Othello, mindfucking can make you feel like an ass if you are not careful. Or you ending up fucking yourself up.

Maybe if you read this book and know what's going on first, you can mindfuck back!!! OK, that's not the point... (be good, not evil!)

Link: Colin McGinn's blog with forum debate about title

another love letter

For more love letters on WWS, go to the Valentine poem that out-does every Valentine's poem: Valentine by John Fuller

Link: gapingvoid - cartoons drawn on the back of business cards

Derrida: "I fight for improvisation"

'It's not easy to improvise, it's the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one's place the schemas and languages that are already there.

There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already preprogrammed. It's already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can't say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse.

And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it's impossible.

And there, where there is improvisation, I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it's what I will see, no, I won't see it. It's for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no I won't ever see him.'


Link: Jacques Derrida, Unpublished interview, 1982

Go live, win and lose

"Go live, win and lose, smash your hands against hysterical constellations, your head against phases of the moon, and your heart against another heart. Find the leisure to contemplate the results. You will discover the human condition. Foolish people who say that they seek reality don’t know what they are saying. For them, the worldly, when they approach it, they tremble and feel weak, distressed, fearful, terrified and repelled. They reject the truth and turn somewhere else for it, an easier, a softer, lifeless one. Little do they realize that they have been through the door itself, and in error, stupefying ignorance, in that immensity, said "nothing is here", and stepped back to dullness. They may be less eloquent and merely realize the words "it is painful. I must stop it", and step back."

Link: The Lotus is born in fire, by John Brzostoski

advice

"You know what I would do if I were in your place? I'd drink from the milk basin of the Milky Way; I'd swallow comets; I'd lunch on dawn; I'd dine on day and I'd sup on night; I'd invite myself, splendid table-companion that I am, to the banquet of all the glories, and I'd salute God as my host! I'd work up a magnificent hunger, an enormous thirst, and I'd race through the drunken spaces between the spheres singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity."

From the spirit of Galileo to exiled writer, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) during a séance.

Good advice. Must start tonight.


Link: From Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo.
Link: Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths" 1967