philipmartin’s posterous

LITTLE ROCK — Wine is not something that can be understood in the manner of Bernoulli’s principle or even Schrodinger’s cat experiment. There is little about it that can be proved and nothing about it to refute the authority of individual taste.

Wine is like music in that we like what we like. And while learning and exposure can lead us to appreciate that which we otherwise might not have, all of us have at our core a set of possibly immutable preferences that resist intellectual exercise.

Given this, you might think that people would simply be able to relax and drink what they like - and in the real world, this is what people seem to do. People happily consume white zinfandel and light beer, they eat chicken nuggets and watch American Idol, and they don’t much care that there are snobs who think these things declasse.

But people who drink wine seem especially attuned to brand names and the opinions of critics, so much sothat a wine writer like Robert Parker can amass enormous power simply by publishing his opinions. Parker seems to like wines with big fruit, high alcoholic content and low acidity, and he’s critical of “industrial” wines with little flavor and character.

In turn, Parker’s critics charge him with receiving what they consider fundamental flaws in wines - especially excessive oak and alcohol - as distinctions. Worse, they allege Parker is so powerful that winemakers - who stand to gain or lose millions of dollars or euros based on his reviews - purposefully make wines suited to his taste. The resultant “Parkerization” of wine has resulted in what some see as a homogenization of fine wines, with big, jammy reds with a kick as the dominant style.

Jonathan Nossiter is not a Parker fan.

Nossiter is a film director (with a film in production right now, Rio Sex Comedy, starring Matt Dillon and Charlotte Rampling) who has become one of the world’s leading exponents of a tricky idea called “terroir.”

Some people don’t believe in “terroir” and dismiss it as a primarily French marketing technique. The word itself refers to a confluence of factors, including but not limited to type of grapes, age of vines, climate, soil, elevation and sunlight, that go into producing a genuine first-class wine.

Nossiter is a true believer in terroir - his 2004 documentary Mondovino, whichwas nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was basically a brief for terroir, which Nossiter argued was being threatened by greedy globalists softening tannins by means of microoxygenation.

(While terroir is a mysterious concept, almost everyone who has a serious relationship with wine seems to believe in it to some extent. Even Parker, who seems dismissive of the idea when interviewed in Mondovino, pays it some credit. “No great wine can come from a terroir that’s not very good,” he told PBS chat presenter Charlie Rose a few years ago. “This is why you don’t have vineyards growing in the Sahara, and why you don’t have great wines being made in Arkansas. There’s no really good terroir.”)

Nossiter went on to expand Mondovino into a 10-hour TV series (which will be released on DVD later this month, suggested retail price $59.95).Now he has published Liquid Memory, a sort of memoir of wine that carries forth his case against the dark forces.

Part personal history (Nossiter began consuming wine “by the finger drop” at the age of 2), part subversive circuit of the most pretentious Paris wine shops and restaurants, and part heartfelt (and sometimes irritatingly self-aggrandizing) ode to the living creature that is wine, Liquid Memory is, well, quite a book.

Nossiter prefers leaner, more acidic and eccentric wines. He hates that Parker and his (slavish) followers have effectively dumbed down the market. Nossiter dislikes Parker’s proclivity for the big fruity boomers, but he really hates his famous 50-to-100 grading scale.

“To assign numbers to a wine, given that a wine is fully living and infinitely mutable,” Nossiter writes, “is almost as repugnant to me as assigning numerical worth to humans.”

Now, some readers may remember that - in my movie critic guise, I ripped off Parker’s grading scale for this newspaper’s film reviews. And you might also remember that I regularly complain about the inadequacy of the grades, and the absurdity of taking them too seriously.

As Parker himself has noted, often the grade itself is more an indication of the emotional experience than the actual quality of the product - what I might assign an 88 one day could be a 90 the next. We use such ratings for the same reasons we suspect Parker does - because people generally expect a verdict.

Yet while Nossiter’s criticisms of Parker strike me as valid, his apparent pathological distaste for the man strikes me as frightening and hilarious. Nossiter doesn’t like anything about Parker, he detests his writing style and his house. He probably hates the man’s dog.

Some of this may be understandable, given the vitriol that was heaped upon Nossiter after the release of Mondovino. (Parker didn’t like the way he was portrayed in the film and neither did a lot of Parker’s fans.) But it’s a little unnerving. I mean, I hope Nossiter doesn’t see this piece, or if he does, that he likes it.

Anyway, did I mention how much I liked his 2000 film Signs and Wonders?

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 55 on 11/01/2009

LITTLE ROCK — When Michael Jackson died June 25, a lot of people thought there was an overabundance of media attention given the event and the singer’s subsequent funeral.

They were probably right, for as noteworthy an event as death is to the individual, it is something that comes to kings and paupers. When we grieve for a pop star we’ve never met, the truth is we’re indulging an unseemly habit of self-regard. We’re really mourning ourselves and our mortality, or taking opportunistic advantage of the occasion to declare ourselves sensitive. Jackson was a thing to me, an image I saw moving on TV, a noise I heard on the radio.

Granted I had grown up with this image. I had been acquainted with Jackson’s sound and vision since both of us were 10 years old.(Does it mean anything that the three great transitional pop music figures of the 1980s - Jackson, Prince and Madonna - were all born within a few months of each other in the upper Midwest in 1958?)

And my generation’s relationship with television and pop music was such that we probably felt a greater intimacy with our rock’n’ roll heroes than prior generations - we had their lunchboxes, we watched their cartoon versions - but I had nothing like a personal relationship with Jackson.

I simply consumed his music and the proffered gossip, legends and hype. I grew up a little and considered his music a little more seriously than perhaps people should. Over the past 30 years or so, I’ve probably written as much about Jackson as I have about any performer save Elvis Presley. I’ve thought about Jackson professionally, which, when I think about it, is an odd thing to have done.

LOVING THE ALIEN

As early as 1984, it was difficult to write about Jackson without introducing a note of melancholy- without wondering if we all didn’t bear some collective responsibility for his overweening strangeness. Jackson has been famous for most of his life; celebrity descended upon him when he was a child and took him in its talons. He had no chance - he was singing ballads to rats, he’d been molded into a Saturday morning cartoon, before he was out of middle school.

A friend of mine had a chance encounter with Jackson - and his bodyguards - in a New York record store that year. Jackson was already wearing his ridiculously ineffective disguises, as well as a medical mask over his face. But what struck my friend was that Jackson’s face was a peculiar shade of gray - the color of cigarette ash, he said.

Jackson was a pop force from the very beginning, an acceptable, purifying filter through which the raw and dark roux of black sound could be forced. Jackson was, in the beginning, a kind of anti-Elvis, a polarity reverser who reclaimed pop and soul and infused it with a kind of kiddie innocence. He made good bubble-gum music - it might not have been hip to love the Jackson 5 but the singles “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “I’ll Be There” were sublimecounter-insurgencies against the sorties of the colonizing faux-soul Osmonds.

“Puppy Love” wasn’t a bad record. But compared to MJ’s early solo work - songs like “Got to Be There,” “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” even the aforementioned “Ben” - Donny was definitely dealing derivative greasy kid stuff.

Those early records with his brothers are enough to credentialize Jackson. He could have retired at 14, spared us the spectacles and been remembered as one of the all-time greats, the successor to Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles - a great song and dance man.

But he wasn’t inclined to retire, and though The Jacksons era can now be read as an awkward age, it still produced the fantastic “Dancing Machine” single, the pleasantly inane “Enjoy Yourself” and “Shake Your Body.”

In retrospect, the Quincy Jones-produced albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad that kicked off his full-fledged adult solo career must be considered some of the finest American pop music of the past century, as important and influential as Presley’s Sun recordings. Hear those albums now, and they sound better than they did then, like a dose of the real thing after a couple of decades of imitation funk rock. They pushed through the confining envelope of conventional pop thought.

They kicked out the jams and kicked down the doors where the cross-pollinating Eddie Van Halen was waiting in the wings, strangling his Frankenstein Kramer. Jackson opened up MTV for black - or, as they had it, “dance” - artists with “Beat It.” A lot of MJ haters owe him big time, for he was the one who gave hip-hop access to the suburban bedrooms of white-flight kids.

But if Jackson was a mature artist at the onset of his solo career, like Peter Pan with whom he famously identified, he was determined to never grow up. At the cusp of the 1980s, despite his years of showbiz success, Jackson seemed as naive as he was famous. He seemed to consciously adopt the aura of an alien - he seemed to bean asexual and untouchable creature not unlike E.T.

It says something about our collective mental health, the world’s mental health, that we could embrace such a synthetically sweet being, that we could find ourselves loving this alien. The Michael Jackson of Thriller and “We Are the World” was a fantasy being divorced from messy carnality, suspended in a chilly, self-constructed image cocoon.

In the decade of the AIDS plague, Jacko provided the safest sex of all, a vague, prepubescent tingle of mysterious longing - he was the Jonas Brothers without the promise rings, or maybe more to the point, a kind of Edward Scissorhands figure - an unembraceable, artificial man possessed of the will. (And who, Jackson apologists might point out, was falsely accused of a sex crime.)

Of course, Jackson was not the same as his image. By the end of the 1980s his private life was meat for the tabloids, and his serial “friendships” with children were already inviting scrutiny. (Though, like any savvy celebrity, he had a complicated relationship with the vulgate press - Jackson himself was the source of a lot of the tabloid gossip. He floated the false rumor that he was trying to buy The Elephant Man’s bones and leaked the sensationally creepy photos of himself sleeping in something called a hyperbaric chamber to the National Enquirer.)

BELOVED IMMORTAL

I never came up with anything like a unified field theory of Jackson. He was damaged, he was crazy. There is a lot of evidence that suggests he was a criminal. He was a spendthrift and a deadbeat. What had that to do with me? He was brilliant, he was an otherworldly performer. I liked - I still like - a lot of his records. I never saw anyone who did what he did better.

I am sorry he’s dead, because 50 seems to me a cruelly young age at which to die. Because I believe that people are capable of doing amazing things at any age, that genuine genius is rare and we ought to appreciate whatever gifts are bestowed on us. I am not prepared to argue that Jackson was a good man or a bad man. I only know he had a gift for lifting hearts and we can use that sort of thing around here.

On the other hand, the people at Sony have hinted that there are hundreds of finished yet unreleased Jackson songs sitting in their vaults. It seems likely that Jackson will enjoy a long and prosperous posthumous career. He will in all likelihood be the best-selling recording artist of 2009; before the release of the concert film This Is It and its obligatory “soundtrack” (made up mostly of previously released versions of the hits performed in the movie) album, Jackson had already sold nearly 6 million solo albums since his death. That has injected the flagging industry with a boost similar to the one his Thriller album provided back in 1982.

Jackson may be dead, but the image and noise with which I am acquainted is likely to abide. It may well outlive us all.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 27 on 11/03/2009