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Frank and his tanks (Anfore)
- Thread starter Matteo Mollo
- Start date
Thanks, don't kill yourself, it's my trivial bent.originally posted by Levi Dalton:
Still looking for the definitive answer.
But again, funny that his studio breaks the grid.
Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
Reinhardt put an address of 30 Gansevoort St. on the verso of one of his paintings. That is near Hudston St.
That (today) would be here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=30+ga...code_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ8gEwAA
There is a street (Little West 12th St.?) that comes diagonally to this point and then dead ends.
That (today) would be here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=30+ga...code_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ8gEwAA
There is a street (Little West 12th St.?) that comes diagonally to this point and then dead ends.
Joel Stewart
Joel Stewart
Bold post, Levi. Even with minor quibbles, delicious.
kirk wallace
kirk wallace
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
Reinhardt put an address of 30 Gansevoort St. on the verso of one of his paintings. That is near Hudston St.
That (today) would be here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=30+ga...code_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ8gEwAA
There is a street (Little West 12th St.?) that comes diagonally to this point and then dead ends.
As this is my 'hood, i can tell you the buildings in the pics are not anywhere near Gansevoort Street.
As coincidence would have it, i actually met the guy who took most of those pictures, John Loengard, at his brother's funeral last year. Unfortunately, i don't have any way to reach him. If i can figure out how to do that, I'll let you know.
Joel Stewart
Joel Stewart
Levi, I know both the feeling of wanting to leave the mark of a brushstroke and not wanting to. In making marks on a blank canvas, there is the potential for pleasure, pain, and plenty of room for doubt in between. Doesn't matter whether by brush, roller, machine, or by someone else even. Each mark is a decision.
Sometimes the mark maker wants to be invisible and sometimes not. Probably with a major exception of Picasso.
Did Ad feel he achieved his mission? That was my initial question for Frank in this thread.
Picasso would be hard to pin down as a winemaker. I am sure some vintages would rock and others would not, but he would slay RP in an interview.
You know that Matisse said that each mark laid down affects the next one. He should know. Artists have to deal with their medium at one point or another. So do winemakers. One stroke here affects the next stroke there. It is so true, it must be a template for life. Heaven forbid.
I think Frank has found Etna to be the medium that supports his creative urges. It would be interesting to see what he would do if he was given access to grapes and a cellar somewhere else.
Sometimes the mark maker wants to be invisible and sometimes not. Probably with a major exception of Picasso.
Did Ad feel he achieved his mission? That was my initial question for Frank in this thread.
Picasso would be hard to pin down as a winemaker. I am sure some vintages would rock and others would not, but he would slay RP in an interview.
You know that Matisse said that each mark laid down affects the next one. He should know. Artists have to deal with their medium at one point or another. So do winemakers. One stroke here affects the next stroke there. It is so true, it must be a template for life. Heaven forbid.
I think Frank has found Etna to be the medium that supports his creative urges. It would be interesting to see what he would do if he was given access to grapes and a cellar somewhere else.
Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
Did Ad feel he achieved his mission?
I think he definitely laid out the manifesto of what he was doing, but it is hard to know if he felt he had achieved his aim. He died too soon for us to know, and he was a bit apart from others in general.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
To me it's relatively secondary whether an artist feels they achieved their mission. What matters is what the work is capable of achieving in the mind/sensibility of the viewer. I attribute to Reinhardt's paintings the mission of enrichening my sensual and intellectual life, and that they achieve in spades.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
...painted with the palest impression of a club in an impertinent but not inconsequential bluey-pinky black.originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
and that they achieve in spades.
Joel Stewart
Joel Stewart
originally posted by Thor:
Thanks very much, all of you, for the reportage and the insights.
Could you (or anyone) interpret this? How does he think magnetism interacts with his wine?He felt that his wines showed better in Japan than on Mt. Etna, which he ascribed in part to higher magnetic energy from the volcano.
I can't interpret that, but yes, Contadino 6 2008 works very well in Kyoto, Thor. I have confidence the next bottle will too, but can't explain it. Put in an order now, and I'll stand the bottle up. It's the Ned Theory...
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
...painted with the palest impression of a club in an impertinent but not inconsequential bluey-pinky black.originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
and that they achieve in spades.
On Mt. Etna, ♣ + ♠ = ╬
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
random thoughts...
One stroke here affects the next stroke there. It is so true, it must be a template for life. Heaven forbid.
Very nice, Joel.
It's true for other things as well, no doubt. Music's what I know far better than paint, and the next note is not only a result of the ones before it, it's affected and sometimes significantly changed by them, even though it's technically the same note. Also, the next note is heavily suggested -- "mandated" would be too much, but "influenced" isn't strong enough -- by the medium (voice, keyboard, wind instrument, stringed instrument, percussion, etc.), and further influenced by the specific entity within that medium (the next note on one keyboard could be different than on another keyboard, assuming the musician is having a proper dialogue with their instrument).You know that Matisse said that each mark laid down affects the next one. He should know. Artists have to deal with their medium at one point or another. So do winemakers. One stroke here affects the next stroke there. It is so true, it must be a template for life.
The more I read about Cornelissen, the more I think he's going through that essential stage musicians go through when they finally learn how to play silence. The interesting contrast, however, is that when musicians learn silence, their intent becomes clearer, but Cornelissen's wines are even noisier (not a value judgment) than they were before he started discovering the winemaking equivalent of silence. Maybe this is the musical equivalent of what Eric was suggesting by "Baroque." Obviously, we'll see what the future brings.
originally posted by Thor:
The more I read about Cornelissen, the more I think he's going through that essential stage musicians go through when they finally learn how to play silence. The interesting contrast, however, is that when musicians learn silence, their intent becomes clearer, but Cornelissen's wines are even noisier (not a value judgment) than they were before he started discovering the winemaking equivalent of silence. Maybe this is the musical equivalent of what Eric was suggesting by "Baroque." Obviously, we'll see what the future brings.
I hesitate to wade in, as I could easily step off a ledge and find myself in over my head. I wasn't able to try any wines prior to the "4s", so I'm lacking some firsthand experience of the early wines. It's not clear to me what you mean by "noisier", and by "playing silence" do you mean the minimalist approach?
I'll try to explain, Ned. No, I don't mean minimalism. Musicians spend their formative years learning technique, and as skill is layered upon skill, the natural inclination is to put those skills to use as often as possible. This goes along with the brashness and aggression of youth, and so you've got all those shredding 80s guitarists, or the younger Christina Aguilera, and so forth. Some never grow out of it, especially if they achieve early success, which is why the field is littered with (for example) blues musicians who were "can you believe this kid?" sensations when they were 14, and now that they're 34 are performing to no one at Club Nowhere. At 14, blazing your way through the most difficult Stevie Ray Vaughan licks is impressive. At 34, if you haven't learned how to sell the blues whether or not you're playing a guitar solo, you haven't learned anything.
Eventually -- and this comes with both physical and musical maturity -- a musician learns that just because they can do something, doesn't mean they should (or, as it seems sometimes, have to) do that something. Learning to not play is itself a skill, and it has a lot of very positive effects. It makes what's played more significant, more meaningful. It increases the chance that what's played will say something other than "look, I've got talent!" It allows space for the musician to think and feel their way into their music. Perhaps most important, it allows the musician to listen...not just to their bandmates, if they have any, but also to themselves and their instruments. It's impossible to play truly exceptional ensemble music without listening (and this is true whether the music's improvised or not), but it's also nearly impossible to play truly exceptional solo music without listening/feeling to one's self...the muse, the inner voice, whatever you want to call it...and to the music itself.
I've often thought, listening to the seemingly endless stream of young female singers who can bring the house down with pyrotechnics, that I'd like to lock them in a room with three dozen Aretha records and not let them out until they've learned how to not sing. Every once in a while, we get one who learns this lesson. Most often, they don't, because the market rewards Star Search/American Idol-style wailing, as if the only type of singing that's worthwhile is a 30-second audition for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But the ones that learn it are the ones our kids and grandkids are going to know. It's not that bringing out the fireworks is bad, if you've got 'em and know how and when to use 'em. (Aretha does, Jeff Beck does, Coltrane did. Mariah Carey doesn't, Al di Meola doesn't, Evgeny Kissin doesn't. Aguilera, against all odds, seems like she might possibly be learning. We'll see.) It's that an endless display of fireworks is an attempt to control, rather than inhabit or be inhabited by, the music. The winemaking analogy is obvious.
By "learning to play silence," I don't mean 45 minutes of recorded silence or statement-making nonsense like that. I mean something more like letting the music play itself, rather than playing the music, though that's not quite it either. The "quiet" may be only a note or two, or it may last for minutes at a time, but it's a quantum leap forward for a musician to learn that silence is something they can actively play, rather than just passively wait out. The result, most often, is music that speaks much more clearly and pointedly than the blizzard of notes that any talented youngster can produce.
So many winemakers, like the talented young musicians, are meddling and adjusting and crafting, vs. letting go of the reins wherever possible. It's not as simplistic as "letting the wine make itself," but what I read here and elsewhere about what Cornelissen is doing suggests that he's looking for ways to relinquish control where possible. A winemaker can try to create complexity in the cellar, or they can let go and see what happens. As can a musician.
So here's what I was getting at: in music, letting go often results in a more direct and purer connection between music and listener, and even if the overall work becomes more complex, the simplicity of meaning within each note/phrase is often increased. (Obviously, there are exceptions to every generalization.) 71 unquestionably impressive notes become five really great ones. Seven-movement concept pieces become one great chorus you can't get out of your head. The music no longer drops jaws within the first twenty seconds, but it modifies the heartbeat (and maybe the tear ducts) by its end. It's not that any of these forms are invalid as music, it's that by learning silence, musical forms other than constant control become possible.
With Cornelissen's wines, the searching, seeking, and testing has been reduced, and the result appears to be wines with a lot more happening within them. I don't mean complexity as such, but rather a sort of cacophony of organoleptics that is appealing and baffling (to judge by people's notes) in equal measure. There is an awful lot going on in these wines, for good or ill (or both). That's what I meant by "noisier." With the musician learning silence, we get a cleaner aural picture. With Cornelissen, we seem to be getting the opposite. It doesn't mean we're not getting a clearer picture of his intent -- on the contrary, I think we are -- but that that picture is surprisingly fractal.
Does that help at all?
Eventually -- and this comes with both physical and musical maturity -- a musician learns that just because they can do something, doesn't mean they should (or, as it seems sometimes, have to) do that something. Learning to not play is itself a skill, and it has a lot of very positive effects. It makes what's played more significant, more meaningful. It increases the chance that what's played will say something other than "look, I've got talent!" It allows space for the musician to think and feel their way into their music. Perhaps most important, it allows the musician to listen...not just to their bandmates, if they have any, but also to themselves and their instruments. It's impossible to play truly exceptional ensemble music without listening (and this is true whether the music's improvised or not), but it's also nearly impossible to play truly exceptional solo music without listening/feeling to one's self...the muse, the inner voice, whatever you want to call it...and to the music itself.
I've often thought, listening to the seemingly endless stream of young female singers who can bring the house down with pyrotechnics, that I'd like to lock them in a room with three dozen Aretha records and not let them out until they've learned how to not sing. Every once in a while, we get one who learns this lesson. Most often, they don't, because the market rewards Star Search/American Idol-style wailing, as if the only type of singing that's worthwhile is a 30-second audition for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But the ones that learn it are the ones our kids and grandkids are going to know. It's not that bringing out the fireworks is bad, if you've got 'em and know how and when to use 'em. (Aretha does, Jeff Beck does, Coltrane did. Mariah Carey doesn't, Al di Meola doesn't, Evgeny Kissin doesn't. Aguilera, against all odds, seems like she might possibly be learning. We'll see.) It's that an endless display of fireworks is an attempt to control, rather than inhabit or be inhabited by, the music. The winemaking analogy is obvious.
By "learning to play silence," I don't mean 45 minutes of recorded silence or statement-making nonsense like that. I mean something more like letting the music play itself, rather than playing the music, though that's not quite it either. The "quiet" may be only a note or two, or it may last for minutes at a time, but it's a quantum leap forward for a musician to learn that silence is something they can actively play, rather than just passively wait out. The result, most often, is music that speaks much more clearly and pointedly than the blizzard of notes that any talented youngster can produce.
So many winemakers, like the talented young musicians, are meddling and adjusting and crafting, vs. letting go of the reins wherever possible. It's not as simplistic as "letting the wine make itself," but what I read here and elsewhere about what Cornelissen is doing suggests that he's looking for ways to relinquish control where possible. A winemaker can try to create complexity in the cellar, or they can let go and see what happens. As can a musician.
So here's what I was getting at: in music, letting go often results in a more direct and purer connection between music and listener, and even if the overall work becomes more complex, the simplicity of meaning within each note/phrase is often increased. (Obviously, there are exceptions to every generalization.) 71 unquestionably impressive notes become five really great ones. Seven-movement concept pieces become one great chorus you can't get out of your head. The music no longer drops jaws within the first twenty seconds, but it modifies the heartbeat (and maybe the tear ducts) by its end. It's not that any of these forms are invalid as music, it's that by learning silence, musical forms other than constant control become possible.
With Cornelissen's wines, the searching, seeking, and testing has been reduced, and the result appears to be wines with a lot more happening within them. I don't mean complexity as such, but rather a sort of cacophony of organoleptics that is appealing and baffling (to judge by people's notes) in equal measure. There is an awful lot going on in these wines, for good or ill (or both). That's what I meant by "noisier." With the musician learning silence, we get a cleaner aural picture. With Cornelissen, we seem to be getting the opposite. It doesn't mean we're not getting a clearer picture of his intent -- on the contrary, I think we are -- but that that picture is surprisingly fractal.
Does that help at all?
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Great, Thor. Puts me in mind of a long quote -- that I cannot easily locate -- about learning and playing Dixieland jazz. Something on the order of: We played only three songs all night but we played them differently each time.
I don't often consciously think about it but I've long understood the idea that more or faster does not equate to better in music. That combination of talent, skill and maturity that allows one to play
intuitively or unconsciously, the "letting go" part. FC has been acquiring and developing the wisdom and trust to know when to let go although he was seeking to achieve that from the start if I understand correctly. I had the "hands off" (for lack of a better term) concept incorrectly equated to minimalism.
As to the noise description, I see what you mean now. By pulling away from the obscuring or masking effects of "winemaking", more of the true potential of the land and grapes are revealed or expressed. The intensity of what's revealed may strike some as a cacophony or it may be a complex polyphony.
A different way to think about it might be to use the terms differently. If what exists there to be expressed
is the signal, the various inputs and manipulations by man could be called the noise. People have often used the word pure when describing his wines, by which I think they mean lots of signal and very little noise. I have experienced that sense on rare occasions from other "natural" wines. It seems to require
truly masterful levels of skill and discipline to craft with "no hands".
intuitively or unconsciously, the "letting go" part. FC has been acquiring and developing the wisdom and trust to know when to let go although he was seeking to achieve that from the start if I understand correctly. I had the "hands off" (for lack of a better term) concept incorrectly equated to minimalism.
As to the noise description, I see what you mean now. By pulling away from the obscuring or masking effects of "winemaking", more of the true potential of the land and grapes are revealed or expressed. The intensity of what's revealed may strike some as a cacophony or it may be a complex polyphony.
A different way to think about it might be to use the terms differently. If what exists there to be expressed
is the signal, the various inputs and manipulations by man could be called the noise. People have often used the word pure when describing his wines, by which I think they mean lots of signal and very little noise. I have experienced that sense on rare occasions from other "natural" wines. It seems to require
truly masterful levels of skill and discipline to craft with "no hands".
I did spend too long in that post contrasting a lot of notes with fewer notes, when I meant to be contrasting a lot of notes with better notes by understanding the role of no notes, but oh well. You got my point.
As for Cornelissen's (or anyone's) wines and noise, you might be right that terminology trips us up here, but I think we were already there when we started discussing and diverging on what Eric meant by "Baroque." What I mean by "noisy" is indeed the cacophony/polyphony tension you reference. I understand what you mean by separating signal and noise, but I'd instead say that for me, winemaker control is cleaning up (e.g. Pro Tools) or modifying (e.g. the level-boosting everyone uses to compensate for the lousy sound quality of our portable/digital music fetish) the signal. I sometimes feel, with many of these edgy (even if they're ultra-traditionalist) natural wines, there's often a lot to deal with before one can even start understanding the wine within. Like needing to understand and accept twelve-tone scales, or improvisation, or distortion, or microtonal vocalization, before one can embark on a journey of appreciation for the music itself. And that's aside from also having to deal with a predilection for instability, which must also be dealt with from time to time.
As for Cornelissen's (or anyone's) wines and noise, you might be right that terminology trips us up here, but I think we were already there when we started discussing and diverging on what Eric meant by "Baroque." What I mean by "noisy" is indeed the cacophony/polyphony tension you reference. I understand what you mean by separating signal and noise, but I'd instead say that for me, winemaker control is cleaning up (e.g. Pro Tools) or modifying (e.g. the level-boosting everyone uses to compensate for the lousy sound quality of our portable/digital music fetish) the signal. I sometimes feel, with many of these edgy (even if they're ultra-traditionalist) natural wines, there's often a lot to deal with before one can even start understanding the wine within. Like needing to understand and accept twelve-tone scales, or improvisation, or distortion, or microtonal vocalization, before one can embark on a journey of appreciation for the music itself. And that's aside from also having to deal with a predilection for instability, which must also be dealt with from time to time.