Wine Snobbery: A Glass Half Full, by Wiggia

This title was conceived after a conversation a couple of weeks back with an  acquaintance who likes to drink and is interested in wine. He was referring to a tasting he went to at a local wine merchant's and the customer there who appeared to be blinded by wine speak and elitism; I am not fond of isms but know what he was getting at.

Anyone who has read my articles on wine realises I do enjoy it and the whole history of wine, how it is made, the grapes used etc etc. It is a hobby that I enjoy as I do talking about it. Many talk of their love of wine, I certainly have loved a few great bottles in my time but love ! As in all-consuming, no; others may see themselves differently. It is all a matter of perspective, which brings us back to the conversation I had with this fellow drinker.

In many people's eyes wine does invoke this image of someone slathering over a glass and using terms of endearment more suited to something else that you would only use in private ! There is a whole lexicon of strange words and phrases used to describe wine. Many by leading wine critics are pure fantasy, used to convey a sense of superiority in these matters. Terms that suppose the human faculties can discern inert substances in wine are plainly ludicrous but are used nonetheless in the attempt to make that critic's review stand out from the mob; tasting notes by their nature are limited and therefore repeated, hence this fantasy-speak.

Still, all this this quite correctly conveys to an outsider the impression that there is an awful lot of snobbery and elitism within the wine circle.

If anyone goes onto a wine blog - and there are many - there are reams of quotes and statements supporting this view about wine; which is strange in a world that is dominated by supermarket wine buyers who couldn’t give a monkey's what some double-barrelled wine critic wrote about their plonk, all they care is it fits the budget and fulfils their taste requirements.

So does this snobbery and elitism exist. To a large degree yes, even now. The forums for wine drinkers show this trait all too well: whole threads become more than 'this is what I drank last night', they become 'what I drank last night was more expensive and rarer than that which you drank', that old world wineries are the only place to buy ‘fine’ wines from and the new world is fermented gnat's piss; and many in direct conversation will do the same. This moment scotched that thinking some time back, yet many still believe……..



There is absolutely nothing wrong in people who have the spare income to spend it in a way they enjoy and if that means a £500 or more bottle of wine then that is their choice, but often the writing on the same wine belies the truth about it. Whatever the cost, whatever grand name on the label, whatever the vintage, you still have to like it and we all have different tastes, so there is no greatest or there shouldn’t be. Wine is a food. Some will love a style, others will wrinkle their noses and reject it, it is that simple; but not for a wine snob, who will defend his bad bottle with a litany of excuses, many invalid. None, or few, seem capable of saying 'that was bloody awful' or simply 'I didn’t like it', they will have a whole lexicon to use of words that describe their disappointment and how the next bottle will be wonderful.



The correlation in people's minds of qulity to price is shown here, nothing new in this but it does show how you can fool some of the people...



'Great wine' is a much-used term usually attached to a tasting of a top-rated Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Barolo et al., but a great wine is one you enjoy whatever the provenance or price. I myself have been fortunate to drink some very high-ranking wines and many I have enjoyed; the best are memorable, but they represent a fraction of what is out there and among the lesser lights are bottles that have brought equal enjoyment. Thinking about the price clouds your judgement as in the videos here, it really does; yet the wine snob will never admit to enjoying a cheap wine, even if it is good.
Victoria Beckham was quoted as saying she would never drink a wine under £10 a bottle. Well, she doesn’t have to, but the assertion was it would be a poor wine, and that is simply not true: many £10-and-up bottles are not that good either and many even more expensive bottles have proved a let-down.

The wine snob will never ever admit to drinking anything popular. The rise in popularity in a grape variety will coincide with the wine snob deriding it and promoting an unheard-of wine from an unheard-of village made under a waning moon and a thunderstorm; these things bring great kudos to wine snobs and they will promote the same, until they have to move on because the unheard-of wine has become ‘popular’.

I read an allied thread on a wine forum where someone said in effect you had to take such and such courses on wine to be able to appreciate the finer points, implying those who didn’t were somehow inferior in their take on a wine - “how could they possibly know?” If that is not wine snobbery I don’t know what is. I have never taken a wine course. Would I? Not now; a basic course is not a bad thing for a beginner to simply understand the basics, but I am too old and it would add little, at great cost, to what I have picked up over decades of consuming, reading, travelling, tasting etc. What more do I need? Yet so many of those who take these courses love to tell how, hundreds of pounds lighter and now on Diploma level or whatever, they are more knowledgable than those who have not taken that route and they all clap like seals when one of their soulmates achieves a pass. Wine drinking is a pleasant pastime, not a civil service exam - and do they go on!

You can add to the swot, the idolator: the drinker who believes that certain wine makers deserve sainthood, so wonderful are their products and so dedicated are they to their winemaking that they deserve special status. The bottom line is, they are farmers making a product for consumption by the public. Yes, many enjoy what they do for a living, as with others in life in different occupations, but it is a commercial enterprise, and some are better at it than others. It is that simple, whether it is the small village winery or the giant conglomerates.

But you would never believe that if you heard the wine snob speaking: they and the whole wine world belongs to them and their self-belief.

Even the storage of wine becomes the cellar-owner's world of right and wrong. If you wish to store decent wine for long periods then a cellar with a fairly constant temperature is a plus. As very few people own a cellar now the wine snob will buy a wine storage cooler and if they really believe all the hype then it will be the one with two or even three different temperature zones for all those wine type variations. That is, of course, only if you believe this, which is mainly twaddle: it has been scientifically shown that all wines will survive quite a large temperature fluctuation with no ill effects. Serious wine snobs will talk about various serious faults a wine can develop if you don’t have the perfect storage facility. Most of these faults are one-in-a-thousand cases: I have never suffered any of them. You are far more likely to have a faulty bottle because of a manufacturing fault, dodgy cork or some form of taint getting into it. For all but the wine snob, a place under the stairs will be adequate in most cases, and being an expensive wine will not alter how it reacts to heat or cold.

Many years ago I went to a wine tasting put on locally by a very good wine merchant. It was only because it was local that I bothered to go. On arrival there were about 50  people already tasting the wines on three long joined tables in the shape of a horseshoe. We started out behind two or three couples armed with notepads and clipboards to make notes of the tasted wines. For me, if I liked a couple of wines I was well capable of remembering them and cannot see the point on notes of a raft of wines I don’t like, but each to his own.

We got about half way round and I had heard the wine-speak of the group ahead as they scribbled their notes, and as we reached roughly the halfway point they all tried a well-known red wine, mumbled approvingly, scribbled and moved on. I poured a tasting measure, and smelt and tasted, and the wine was very obviously off; I called one of the organisers over who agreed immediately, took the bottle away and changed it. Now you might say 'clever dick', but the truth was they were wine snobs in front of us trying to impress each other with their knowledge of wine but could not tell a totally flawed/awful bottle.



There are a whole list of things that divide the wine snob from the wine geek. Geeks are wine drinkers obsessed with vineyards, latitude, soil and obscurity etc.; they can also bore the arse off you given the opportunity, but they are not snobs.

Snobs obsess about the glass they use, unless it is Riedel or similar, very costly and very easy to break; no wine can be drunk and enjoyed without them. They actually believe this. They buy expensive wines and collect to such a degree that because the drinking ‘window’ is so far in the future their collection just grows and grows, never to be drunk, just admired.

If there is one item that epitomises the wine snob it is the corkscrew. The wine snob only ever uses the “waiter's friend” or sommelier's corkscrew; for some reason it has come to distinguish the ‘serious’ wine drinker from the others. Its only real value is the space it uses and for wine waiters that is why it is used: it fits in the pocket. However, for the wine snob, difficulty in learning to use it is points gained; all other corkscrews are for amateurs, despite the fact I have used a winged corkscrew for over thirty years that has never failed to extract a cork other than a couple that simply crumbled to nothing. That really is of no consequence to the wine snob: a waiter's friend it has to be, or nothing.
Naturally it follows that the obsession with removing a cork ‘correctly’ means that any bottle fitted with a screw cap is instantly fit only for the proles: no self-respecting wine snob would entertain a bottle with a screw cap on the table, God forbid; even the devil's spawn, a non-100%-natural cork, isn’t on the same level of evil; the mere thought of not being able to show your skills learnt over many years with the waiter's friend is too much to bear.

The ability to swirl everything, tea, coffee, water like a nervous tic is a skill well-learned by the WS. It is a forerunner to over-emphasised sniffing; side-on gives you extra bonus points, and slurping with much exaggerated jowel movements.

All wines without exception have to be decanted, sometimes for days, this goes with the 'all must be kept forever' syndrome before it is ready to drink, often to the extent that a case of wine will be opened and bottles drunk at strategic points in time, none of which are the correct time. Is the correct time for the perfect bottle ever reached? Probably not, such is the snobbery about drinking windows, the endless imagined aromas and tastes and the vocabulary. This is a true note by a wine reviewer heard at a tasting regarding two different Champagnes: “ 'One can always tell Krug from Roederer,' he said, 'by the sound of the bubbles.'  Give me strength, if ever there was a phrase to differentiate between the drinker and the wine snob, that just about takes the biscuit.



Things are not as obviously elitist in the wine world as in years gone by, when any self-respecting wine merchant had staff that all wore tweed jackets, bow ties and looked down on the customer if he didn’t fit a certain profile with that something-on-the-sole-of-my-shoe look, and many did.

More importantly, I have hardly ever met a wine-maker with that same attitude. Even the more famous ones have all been down to earth and would engage about their wines with you without any silly embellishments. As the late Vincent Leflaive said at a dinner and tasting of his sublime but hugely expensive white Burgundies after being questioned by a diner on the style of his wines vis-a-vis someone else's: “If you don’t like them that way, don’t buy them.” It really is that simple.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ian Luther, by JD

I have no idea who he is except that he is/was a busker travelling round Europe but he seems to have carve out a little niche for himself. Definitely better than your average busker because he writes a lot of his own songs plus a hillbilly(?) version of Hey Joe!
https://www.ianluther.co.uk

COVID-19: look on the bright side

We might be all right, according to Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty on R4’s Today programme (Wednesday): China and foreign countries may succeed in containing the virus, with maybe ‘a little bit of onward transmission’ in the UK; and a change in the season may help.

That’s the picture so far and if you re-visit the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker you’ll see the death toll outside China has actually gone down to one: they’ve diplomatically hidden the other one, in Hong Kong, in the list of ‘mainland’ cases, presumably to avoid irritating the Chinese Communist Party as it addresses the protest-ridden colony and institutes a harder administration there.

On the other hand, we could be headed for pandemic, as Professor Ferguson told us on the same programme the previous day: ‘He estimated about 60% of the UK population in such a situation could be affected, which if the mortality rate was 1% could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.’ Given 66.87 million UK citizens that’s about 400,000 fatalities.

If you appreciate dark humour, you could reflect that it’s an ill wind… Like flu generally, this virus seems to be most deadly to oldies with chronic health problems. ‘Seniors’ (mealy-mouthed term) like me clog up the housing market: ‘Sixty-eight per cent of older homeowners live in a home that has at least two spare bedrooms, technically known as ‘under-occupation’, says Shelter. We’re a burden on the NHS and social care; and a good ol’ pandemic would cut a swathe through elderly, toad-like [© Phil Jupitus] Brexit supporters, so giving the better-educated and idealistic young an opportunity to demand a repeat EU referendum (assuming BoJo’s negotiations aren’t weak enough for their taste.) We’d be a great source of spare parts for transplants, now that the Government has taken possession of our very bodies; and as for the tricky business of reforming the House of Lords, the average peer is aged 70  – why not let Nature cut the Gordian knot for us? (It could even refresh the Chinese leadership, though on average (see Table 4) they’re younger than Their Lordships.)

On the other hand, if levity is inappropriate, consider that every death so far has been in China - except for the one in the Philippines, and he was Chinese. Spare a thought for the victims, and the millions now living self-isolated in ghost cities in the Middle Kingdom while they wait for the curse to burn out. In the West we are focusing more on the potential economic fallout from having become dependent on a globalist system that made coolies of a billion Easterners and billionaires of a few Westerners.

One way or another, we shall count the cost.

Coronavirus: a storm in a teacup?

Are we making too much fuss over the new virus? To date 910 people have died, which is less than half the annual toll from road accidents in the UK alone.

Provisionally, ‘2019nCoV’ seems much less deadly than SARS. Within China, the mortality rate is running at about 2.3% of the 40,195 infected; the two who died out of 378 cases abroad represent a rate of only 0.5%, though small figures are more likely to be statistically misleading. However, as business site Quartz warns, it’s too early for complacency: during the 2003 SARS epidemic the World Health Organisation (WHO) initially estimated a SARS fatality rate of around 3%, which later had to be revised to almost three times higher. Remember, 89% of coronavirus cases have so far neither died nor recovered.

Still, only two deaths have happened outside mainland China. It would be nice to reassure ourselves that ‘it can’t happen here’ and there is a suggestion that some ethnic groups may be more susceptible. Russia Insider cites a Chinese scientific study on the 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic that felt ethnicity might be one of the factors determining vulnerability to the H1N1 virus; and a new piece of research has tentatively (awaiting peer review) indicated that the alveoli (lung cells) of ‘Asian males’ have more receptors to which 2019nCoV can bind, so making those people more likely to succumb.

However, there may be other and possibly more significant predictors. A 30 January paper in The Lancet, looking at 99 ‘Wu flu’ patients in Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, noted that they tended to be older (average age 55 years) and predominantly (two-thirds) male; and half of the sufferers had existing chronic illnesses. The risk pattern resembled that for viral pneumonia generally, and as with the latter, smoking may be a factor (52% of Chinese men smoke; among women, only 3% but they are often exposed to second-hand smoke.) Anybody here fit the profile?

The spread into the rest of the world is in its early days. The symptom-free incubation period is said to be about two weeks and although it’s currently thought that the virus can’t be passed on during this stage we are still learning. Besides, when exactly does one move onto the infectious stage? Charles Hugh Smith, who was predicting a pandemic a week ago, repeated his warning on Sunday, suggesting that governments are concerned to pretend for the sake of economic stability that everything is under control. In that context, it seems both understandable and yet near-insane that the WHO should urge that travel restrictions not be imposed.

Smith’s article gives reasons to disbelieve official assurances. It’s also worth noting that part of the Chinese strategy for containment was to extend the Lunar New Year holiday to 10 February in many local areas, so what happens now the great back-to work has begun? Many people must be desperate to start earning money again and so they have an incentive to ignore a ‘bit of a sniffle’.

Even if the fatality rate is indeed relatively low, the rate at which infection can spread appears to be high, so that a small percentage of a large number could result in a high victim count. In this country we have very good medical facilities but even the best could be overwhelmed by demand, as happened in Wuhan. The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock is therefore right to label the risk to Britain as ‘serious and imminent’ – a declaration that empowers him to use force if necessary to prevent individuals absconding from 14-day quarantine, as one of them was reportedly threatening to do.

A stitch in time… if the crisis got out of hand stringent measures would demand to be employed. There are allegations that the quarantine effort in China extends to welding sufferers’ house doors shut, and herding others into guarded camps with inadequate medical care, just to stop the viral wildfire spreading. One Twitter user claims that a Hubei woman was shot dead while trying to get through a protective blockade. What would we do?

Let's do whatever we can not to have to find out.

Hey Joe: Evolution of a folk song

The Wikipedia entry on this famous song is here. It names three other songs as inspirations:

1. Niela Miller: 'Baby, Please Don't Go to Town' (1955):



Lyrics (found here):

Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
I’m gonna sit at a bar with my feet tucked in,
Drinkin’ all the beer and whiskey and gin,
And I’m lookin’ at the young men always hangin’ ’round,
Lookin’ at the young men always hangin’ ’round.

Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
Baby, what you’re gonna do in town?
I’m gonna talk to those young men very soon,
All to-night till to-morrow noon,
And tell ’em how my man, he puts me down,
Tell ’em how my man, he really puts me down.

Baby, please, don’t go to town.
Baby, please, don’t go to town.
’Cause when you’re flirtin’ and full of gin,
One of those boys is gonna do you in,
And your man, he won’t be around,
Your own man, he won’t be around.

2. Boudleaux Bryant's 'Hey Joe', recorded by Carl Smith in 1953:



Lyrics (from here):

Hey Joe, where'd you find that pearly-girly?
Where'd you get that jolly-dolly?
How'd you rate that dish I wish was mine?

Hey Joe, she's got skin that's creamy-dreamy
Eyes that look so lovey-dovey
Lips as red as cherry-berry wine

Now listen Joe, I ain't no heel
But old buddy let me tell you how I feel
She's a honey, she's a sugar-pie
I'm warning you I'm gonna try to steal her from you

Hey Joe, though we've been the best of friends
This is where our friendship ends
I gotta have that dolly for my own

Hey Joe, come on let's be buddy-duddy
Show me you're my palsy-walsy
Introduce that pretty little chick to me

Hey Joe, quit that waiting, hesitating
Let me at her, what's the matter
You're as slow as any Joe can be

Now come on Joe, let's make a deal
Let me dance with her to see if she is real
She's the cutest girl I've ever seen
I'll tell you face to face I mean to steal her from you

Hey Joe, now we'll be friends till the end
This looks like the end, my friend
I gotta have that dolly for my own

3. A song generally known as 'Little Sadie' but appearing under various titles, the earliest being a lyric from the Ozarks,  'Bad Lee Brown' (1922) partially written down in 1948:

Last night I was a-makin' my rounds,
Met my old woman an' I blowed her down,
I went on home to go to bed,
Put my old cannon right under my head.

Jury says murder in the first degree,
I says oh Lord, have mercy on me!
Old Judge White picks up his pen,
Says you'll never kill no woman ag'in.

and another version recorded in 1930 by Clarence Ashley as 'Little Sadie'



Lyrics (from Lyric Find):

Went out one night for to make a little round
I met little Sadie and I shot her down
Went back home and I got in my bed
Forty four pistol under my head

Wake up next morning 'bout a half past nine
The hacks and the buggies all standing in line
Gents and the gamblers standing all round
Taking little Sadie to her burying ground

Then I begin to think what a deed I'd done
I grabbed my hat and away I run
Made a good run but a little too slow
They overtook me in Jericho

I was standing on the corner, reading the bill
When up stepped the sheriff from Thomasville
He said, young man, ain't your name Brown?
Remember the night you shot Sadie down?

I said, yes, sir, my name is Lee
I murdered little Sadie in the first degree
And first degree and the second degree
If you got any papers, won't you read 'em to me?

They took me downtown and dressed me in black
Put me on the train and started me back
They crammed me back in that Thomasville jail
And I had no money for to go my bail

That judge and the jury, they took their stand
The judge had the papers in his right hand
Forty one days and forty one nights
Forty one years to wear the ball and the stripes

'Little Sadie' is a narrative and focuses on the murderer's escape, capture and trial; Bryant's 'Hey Joe' is cast as a one-sided conversation but is about the lust for someone else's girl, without the element of tragic consequences (though we don't hear the boyfriend's response to the proposition!)

Of the three, Niela Miller's seems closest to what came next, because it includes themes of infidelity and death, encapsulating them in a moment of foreboding. Her rendition conveys that histrionic note of an almost unavoidable tragedy about to occur, although as she herself says in a comment thread on Youtube (ranging from 2017 to late 2019), comparing her song to Billy Roberts':

"... my song ended with hope. His ended with murder."

Billy Roberts - see also https://heyjoeversions.wordpress.com/more-about-billy-roberts/

'Hey Joe' was written in Greenwich Village, New York and copyrighted in 1962 by her one-time boyfriend, Billy Roberts. All the elements are here: infidelity, jealousy, murder by pistol, conversation (this time two-way, with a bypasser). The narrative is crisply contained in two snapshots: the moment of intention, and then after the event. Roberts was then busking on the streets and in the coffee houses of New York.

He then moved to San Francisco and in 1965 discovered that his song had been pirated, adapted and commercially released by a Southern Californian 'garage' band called The Leaves. The odd riff is echoed in Hendrix later.



Lyrics ( from here):

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
I said hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
I'm going out to find my woman now, she's been runnin' around with some other man
I said I'm going out and find my woman now she's been runnin' around with some other man

Well hey Joe now what are you gonna do?
Well hey Joe tell me what are you gonna do?
Well I guess I'll shoot my woman now, that's what I'll do
Well I guess I'll shoot them both before I'm through

Well hey Joe tell me where are you gonna go?
Well hey Joe I said where are you gonna go?
Well I guess I'll go down to my place in Mexico
Said I guess I'll go down to where a man can be free
And there ain't gonna be no hangman's ropes put around me

The rendition - thrashy - is at odds with the melancholy essence of the lyric.

Then we come to Hendrix - the version everyone remembers, first recorded as a single in October 1966 with his band 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience'; melancholy, dramatic, with backing vocalisation and the superconfident, powerful electric guitar of the master musician:


Lyrics (from Musicmatch)

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Alright.
I'm goin down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
And that ain't too cool.
(Ah-backing vocal on each line)
Uh, hey Joe, I heard you shot your woman down
You shot her down now.
Uh, hey Joe, I heard you shot you old lady down
You shot her down to the ground. Yeah!
Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught her messin' 'round
Messin' 'round town.
Uh, yes I did, I shot her
You know I caught my old lady messin' 'round town.
And I gave her the gun and I shot her!
Alright
(Ah! Hey Joe)
Shoot her one more time again, baby!…

AFTERMATH

In this later (can't find exactly when) version by Roberts himself, the introductory chords are as used by Hendrix, and the song ends with more instrumental, wordlessly savouring the tragedy.



Lyrics (selected from here):

Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
Hey Joe, I said where ya goin' with that gun in your hand

I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man
I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man
Huh, and that ain't too cool

Hey Joe, I heard you shot your woman down
You shot her down down
Hey Joe, I heard you shot your lady down
You shot her down near the ground

Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught her messin' 'round, messin' 'round town
Yes, I did, I shot her
You know I caught my old lady messin' 'round town
And I gave her the gun, I shot her

In 1968, Frank Zappa's The Mother Of Invention parodied the song, the Leaves' hasty tempo, the Beatles' 1967 'Sergeant Pepper' album cover and the by then well-established 'flower power' culture of San Francisco, in their own album 'We're Only In It For The Money', as 'Flower Punk':


Lyrics (from here):

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that flower in your hand?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that flower in your hand?

Well, I'm goin' up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band
I'm goin' up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that button on your shirt?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that button on your shirt?

I'm goin' to the love-in to sit & play my bongos in the dirt
Yes, I'm goin' to the love-in to sit & play my bongos in the dirt

Hey Punk, where you goin' with that hair on your head?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with that hair on your head?

I'm goin' to the dance to get some action, then I'm goin' home to bed
I'm goin' to the dance to get some action, then I'm goin' home to bed

Hey Punk, where you goin' with those beads around your neck?
Hey Punk, where you goin' with those beads around your neck?

I'm goin' to the shrink so he can help me be a nervous wreck .

... dissolving into aimless mumbling hippie-chatter at the end.
_________________________________________________________________________

Finally, back to Niela Miller: here are some of the things she says on that YouTube thread.

We have to remember that Roberts didn't simply purloin her song but adapted elements in it, and musicians have always been inspired and borrowed from others (and even their own previous works), so as I once saw (on TV) Mick Jagger explain to a child, once you've made a song other people can do what they like with it... but at least we can credit Miller with her part in the evolution of this wonderful piece:

Niela Miller3 years ago

Thanks for recognizing my song as the original impetus for Hey Joe (stolen from me by Billy Roberts, an old boyfriend)

The Tone Poets3 years ago

Awesome until now unknown story. Where can we hear more of your work?

Niela Miller3 years ago

www.numerogroup.com SONGS OF LEAVING. (LP for collectors, or mp3 if you want to download). Album of my songs written around that time Also, if you are interested in my composed piano music and arrangements, or some of my choral pieces, you can hear them on my website:www.peoplesystemspotential.com

.........

Niela Miller5 months ago (edited)

Hi all-- thanks for all your interesting comments about my song, Baby, Please Don't Go to Town. Just for clarification, Billy Roberts wrote the original Hey Joe and sold it to Dino Valenti. The Leaves made the first recording but Hendrix made it famous. Billy lived with me for a few months during which time he learned many of my songs (if you are interested, you can download my album at numerogroup.com or Google SONGS OF LEAVING by Niela Miller). He stole the chord progression, the question-answer format, the echo of my melody, and the idea of a relationship mess. But my song ended with hope. His ended with murder.

................

Niela Miller 5 months ago (edited)

I am blown away by all the supportive comments I have gotten about my song. Here's what Billy appropriated: the chord progression, the similarity of the tune in the first line, the question-answer format, the repetition of the first line and the idea about a tension between a man and a woman but, in mine, the man cares and doesn't want his woman to get hurt! Now I am meeting with a guy right in my town who has written a film script based on Hey Joe and is giving me credit for its inspiration. (Who knows when or whether it will be produced but it is an interesting addition to this Whole Story Line!) For those of you who haven't heard my album of songs written around that same time (late 50's early 60's) it is called SONGS OF LEAVING and has a lot of interesting songs on it in addition to this one. (www.numerogroup.com)

Hypocrisy Means Nothing to the Bubble, by Wiggia

"John Prescott takes seat in House of Lords. The new peer, previously opposed to the Lords 'flunkery', justifies his move because 'there's a lot to hold the government to account for' "   

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/08/john-prescott-peer-house-of-lords

One of the obvious pluses of social media is the alternative version of an event being given air, something the MSM would only show with a big prompt to show they are still on top of a current story.

Many cases of redacting, for that is what it is, are carried out with orders from above. For example, the Gilets Jaunes movement would be all but invisible were it not for social media. The scale of a near eighteen-month old protest has never been given any coverage except on social media, as Europe-wide a 'D notice' was issued preventing anyone else from getting ideas above their station. This was not the fault of the media as they had no say in what was a covert instruction.

Yet despite small cracks opening in the media over this movement they still treat it as a minor irritant ‘last weekend in Paris’ as if the other eighteen months of protest had never happened.

There's nothing new in any of this other than the world wide web reveals another side to many stories that is in direct conflict with the mainstream news, something that pre-web we would  have remained in blissful ignorance about and just accepted what was put before us.

The grooming and rape of young girls in many English towns by mainly Pakistani muslim men was a classic case that was kept under wraps for reasons that only those doing so could really believe was for the ‘good’. Chiselling out the truth took bravery and a lot of work by an individual newspaper, The Times, and a few individuals that were pilloried for telling the truth. Politicians still want it to go away for reasons various, the hypocrisy in their statements on the matter is something to behold.

It could be said that social media creates a situation where those found wanting in the truth stakes are revealed and they then revert to outright lying rather than give cogent reasons for their past inactions. It now seems this behaviour is endemic within the bubble of public servants, and yet despite the evidence that they are lying or at fault over cases in many fields, they still refuse to do the decent thing and resign or even show contrition. The web has revealed these people but failed to remove them or even stop their continuing malfeasance going forward; the bubble protects them against all.

Students have always had a rebellious side which was backed up by action of some sort or another, and if they were not rebelling they were seeing how many of them could be fitted into a Mini or a telephone box - the latter is now sadly so much last year - and they engage in some of the most ridiculous acts without any sense of shame at all. This is wonderful, the reverse ferret afterwards from so-called educated students beggars belief .

Two students at St John’s College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters’ demands, which are that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”. They said that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.

Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer: “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”

One of the students wrote back and said he would present the proposal but he didn’t think Parker was being appropriately serious. Professor Parker responded to that note saying, “You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal).” The best part of the story is the response from the organizer of the protest:

Fergus Green, the organiser of the wider protest, who is studying for a master’s degree in physics and philosophy at Balliol College, said: “This is an inappropriate and flippant response by the bursar to what we were hoping would be a mature discussion. It’s January and it would be borderline dangerous to switch off the central heating.”

The late Tom Wolfe was brilliant in his writings exposing hypocrisy in the political classes…

https://capx.co/rip-tom-wolfe-the-writer-who-exposed-the-hypocrisy-of-the-left/

As before, politicians say one thing and do another on such a daily basis it has become nigh impossible to believe anything they say. The latest cause célèbre for politicos is climate change: in the short time since the election and the beginning (?) of Brexit there has been a big hole to fill in the news agenda and climate change is the chosen hobby horse. Boris has already done a volte-face on several items - hardly surprising to us - but his sudden affection for all things green is all-consuming: probably he is keeping his green girlfriend happy while impoverishing the rest of us if it all comes to pass. I particularly liked this passage as an example of how hypocrites block out the obvious to suit their agendas…..

“We are told that to be healthy we must sacrifice, discipline ourselves, that we must effectively be athletes in training (or, in Greek, ascetics): no saturated fat, no high fructose corn syrup, stay away from carbohydrates and gluten, no GMOs or pesticide-laden crops—instead, eat large quantities of kale and sustainably-harvested saltwater fish, and you will live forever. In fact, they say, we ought to tax or outright ban certain foods that are less than healthy, and suddenly the price of your large soda goes up 12 percent. But any suggestion that other appetites might need to be curbed or controlled—that, say, the sexual appetite, which affects not only the health and well-being of the parties involved but also has the awesome potential to bring new human beings into the mix—is met with howls of “Keep the government out of my bedroom!” When asked why the government should be allowed into your kitchen but not into your bedroom, they will only scoff."

Should we be surprised? Hardly; it is meat and veg to these people; or should I have said just veg and 'got down with' the 'woke'? The recent Davos meeting was a wonderful example of a gathering of those who would have us do as they say yet not conform themselves. The speeches themselves were  an example of the art of the hypocrite at its zenith: all arrived by private plane and when called on it, all said they had no other way to get there in their busy schedules. Many of course retreated to the phrase of ‘ it will be offset by buying carbon credits’ - so that is all right, then; we of course without the  wealth to buy carbon credits will have to stay at home, wear hessian shirts and rub sticks together, and power will be generated by us all having personal hamster wheels. Not that anyone actually knows what carbon credits are but they sound good and the wealthy can buy them.

This is Elizabeth Warren aka Pocahontas after making a speech on climate change and urging us all to climb aboard the green bus: ‘it is real,’ she said.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/02/warren-ducks-cameras-as-she-gets-off-private-jet.php

You really couldn’t make it all up, or could you !

ART: Art Forgery, by JD

This post originally appeared on Nourishing Obscurity in 2011

This is El Quitasol by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828)

It hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Or is it?

The more perceptive among you will have realised that there is something not quite right about it, apart from the fact that it is not finished.

In fact it is a copy which I did a few years ago and it is stuck with blu-tak to the wall of my studio.

You can see the real thing in the Prado web pages.

Reproductions of paintings, whether in books or on your screens, are all reduced to the same size, more or less. As well as being difficult to judge the scale of any picture it is also hard to discern the qualities which make great art great art.

This is very useful for forgers because most people have never seen great art in the galleries of the world and most people, if truth be told, cannot tell the difference between an original and a copy.

It may surprise you to know that art experts very often cannot tell the difference either.

During the 1980s, John Myatt became involved in “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century” after he had advertised in Private Eye offering ‘Genuine Fakes for £150 and £200’.

This turned into a legitimate business until Professor Drewe turned up……



After spending time in prison, Myatt continued painting in the styles of famous painters and has been rewarded with his own TV shows ‘A Brush With Fame’ and ‘Mastering The Art’.

The message is clear- never trust an ‘expert’!

A more important message is: if you buy art as an investment, you are buying it for the wrong reason; remember that investments can go down as well as up. And if you lose money as a result of fraud then you were a willing accomplice in that fraud, as with any fraud, believing that you were somehow going to be enriched from your ‘investment’.

If John Myatt deserved a prison term for his ‘crime’ then the ‘experts’ who authenticated his work should also have been imprisoned alongside him.

The greatest forger of them all was Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989).

He was a forger of paintings and prints by none other than Salvador Dalí. The Artexperts website explains how two Spanish painters, Manuel Pujol Baladas and Isidor Bea, worked for Dalí and his wife Gala in creating many of his paintings from 1955 onwards.

They also attempt to explain the difference between a forgery and a fake:

'The difference between a forgery and a fake in the case of Dali is quite simple…in the case of the forgeries, Dali did not consent for the art piece to be made, and most likely knew nothing about it. In the case of fakes, Dali most likely approved of or requested that they be made in his name. Neither are as valuable as a genuine Dali, however, a fake may hold some significant value if it was created under his direction and bears his authentic signature.'

But they are using the signature as a validation. They are not evaluating the artwork itself and are assessing artistic value, and hence financial value, on the basis of the signature alone.

So, are art collectors nothing more than very rich autograph hunters?

The question that is often asked is why would Dalí do such a thing and the answers most commonly given are his greed and vanity. It was a fellow surrealist, the poet André Breton who gave him the name Avida Dollars, an anagram of his name.

But I believe the answer is much simpler than that: what could be more surrealistic than colluding in the forgery of your own artworks? Is that not exactly what a Surrealist artist would do, it being perfectly in tune with the spirit of Surrealism!

Footnote:

I have a Renoir for sale. It is unfinished but you can make me an offer.