All posts by Alec Silverman

Wine ─ To the Corps!

The downtownster faithful have no doubt noticed the absence of “Hello Wne Lovers” of late.  Our champion of the corkscrew and wine glass, Mike Berger, has been called into even more pressing service at Ralphs downtown than his usual 60-hour workweek and apparently he has to blog on his own time.  Since he has so precious little of that, he hasn’t been able to schedule blogging.  This is not to say that the wine tastings at the famed “rolling wine bar” have slipped.  Au contraire, mes amis!  They are as wonderful as ever and still in our top three recommendations for happy hour.  
 

Tonight, the focus will be on French wines and, as this is an immense subject, I cannot predict what to expect.  Suffice it to say that France produces the crème de la crème of sparkling wine (Champagne) and dry Chardonnay (white Burgundy).  Beyond that they also make some of the finest Pinot Noir (red Burgundy), dry Sauvignon Blanc (Loire Valley wines) and blended red wines driven by Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot or Cabernet Franc (red Bordeaux).  “But, wait!  There’s more.  If you order now…”  Seriously, I could go on for hours. Continue reading Wine ─ To the Corps!

A Poem By Jeannine Hall Gailey

Female Comic Book Superheroes

are always fighting evil in a thong,
pulsing techno soundtrack in the background
as their tiny ankles thwack

against the bulk of male thugs,
They have names like Buffy, Elektra, or Storm
but excel in code decryption, Egyptology, and pyrotechnics.

They pout when tortured, but always escape just in time,
still impeccable in lip gloss and pointy-toed boots,
to rescue male partners, love interests, or fathers.

Impossible chests burst out of tight leather jackets,
from which they extract the hidden scroll, antidote, or dagger,
tousled hair covering one eye.

They return to their day jobs as forensic pathologists,
wearing their hair up and donning dainty glasses.
Of all the goddesses, these pneumatic heroines most

resemble Artemis, with her miniskirts and crossbow,
or Freya, with her giant gray cats.
Each has seen this apocalypse before.

See her perfect three-point landing on top of that chariot,
riding the silver moon into the horizon,
city crumbling around her heels.
 
“Female Comic Book Superheroes” was published in the book Becoming the Villainess from Steel Toe Books. It apeared on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
 
Jeannine Hall Gailey’s first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, and Rattle. She lives in San Diego, where she volunteers with Crab Creek Review and teaches at National University’s MFA program. You can learn more at her web site, www.webbish6.com <http://www.webbish6.com/> .

How New Words Are Born

Stan Lerner is a rarity
Well known for his gregarity
 
When my friend Stan wrote “…I know gregarity isn’t a word, but it ought to be…” he inspired me to write the above iambic couplet.  You see, he coined the word in a post in this blog and, if it eventually makes into widespread usage, you will see it in dictionaries.  Although hardly immortal verse, my finding an application for it immediately is helping to get it into the lexicon.  Similarly, when I used and defined the word oenophiliac in an earlier post (a made up extension of oenophile for comedic purposes) I took the term for a wine lover and stretched it into the realm of hyperbole to mean, a lover of wine.  Like some wines, the humor was too dry for some tastes.  I also had to entertain that some of my friends might have thought I was serious, given the robust ebullience I exhibit when tasting fine wines.

The whole business of how words and phrases come into common usage has always fascinated me. I discovered, early on, that if an important enough writer makes up a word, it becomes a word as soon as they write it. Continue reading How New Words Are Born

Elementary, My Dear Watson

I had decided yesterday to use this headline regardless of the result in the history-making run by Tom Watson at becoming, among other things, the oldest golfer ever to win a major championship.  The famous Sherlock Holmes quote was first used to describe Watson’s amazing skill on the links en route to claiming his first British Open Championship by the brilliant English broadcast commentator Peter Arliss.  Arliss employed a unique vocabulary for his profession quite artfully.  Back when I was a “weekend duffer”, my friends and I would take turns imitating him ─ after each of our respective shots ─ as we played our pathetically inept rounds of golf:  “Oh, that is a bold undertaking indeed.  He takes a full rip at it with a driver, right into the teeth of the wind!  That’s a treacherous little putt he has left…” and so on.  We had a lot of fun, in a juvenile way, with our British accents nearly as bad as our games.

For people in their late-thirties and, particularly past forty, athletic prowess has rarely been world-class competitive.  Especially with indisputable proof of being free of performance enhancing drugs.  The body gives out, not all at once but imperceptibly slowly to most.  This is, of course, not true of professional athletes whose performance and statistics are under microscopic scrutiny at all times. Continue reading Elementary, My Dear Watson

Reflections on the Life of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was the greatest dancer who was also a major singing star ever.  To find his equal you’d have to look at the two biggest dancing stars in film history, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.  (Michael reputedly idolized Mr. Astaire and was deeply moved when he was told by him personally that he was a “great dancer”.)  Mr. Kelly and Mr. Astaire, though popular as singers, could not be considered big singing stars. Continue reading Reflections on the Life of Michael Jackson

The Third Area Poetry Readings

Part One – May 21st 

To a certain extent poetry has become like a tree falling in the forest: usually there is no one around to hear it.  This is further evidence of the decline of civilization and – make   no mistake – by extension, this area of decline is everyone’s loss, just like the ice sheets falling into the sea in both of our world’s hemispheres.  I recently had the great privilege to hear the work of eight superb poets when I serendipitously arrived at the Pharmaka gallery to do research on the Downtown LA Art Walk.  These writers are like magicians of language and I am humbled to attempt to express how enriched I am for having heard them read their work.

First, let me tell you, dear reader, when and where you can derive the same benefit as I have done. Continue reading The Third Area Poetry Readings

GOT POETRY

Mexican Light
a poem by Kate Gale

Went to Mexico.  Curved sweet tequila light.  Lay on blankets on the beach, washed our mouths in the morning.  Ate olives with sunshine.  Avocados.  Street vendors sold popsicles.  If someone had a hotel room, we all showered.  Our spectacular young bodies curved under water.  Our breasts moons.  The room was white stone.  We would start with beer in the afternoon.  Hit the cantinas in the evening.  My friend would find weed and Lily would breathlessly come back to my table and say, Katie, I’ve found you a dyke, the cutest one in Mexico.  We would begin shots, chased with lime, tomato juice, the whole evening a tremulous tequila bubble.  They played our rock music in Spanish.  My boy would dance with me while Lily and I kissed the girls one right after another.  Mexico was like that.  When I arrived blue, I would find a blue world.  Time moved the craziest of clocks.  Stretched on sand we waited for the end of loneliness.  Night flies, gulls and beyond them the sea.  The sea spoke low sweet Spanish we could almost understand.  That was when I noticed what I liked best about you was that you kissed like a girl, looked at me like a girl, danced like a girl; the mescal was thick and smoky, your thin arms came up around me as the sun rose.  You said, I’ll be whatever you want me to be.

Kate Gale is the Managing Editor of Red Hen Press.  Author of several books of poetry including Mating Season and Fishers of Men, a novel and librettos, she received her PhD in Literature from Claremont Graduate University and speaks widely on publishing, editing and writing.  Her Opera Rio de Sangre with composer Don Davis is being released as a world premiere at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee in 2010. To contact Kate and to find out more about her writing go to her blog at http://kategale.wordpress.com/     

 

Administering My Dog’s Cancer Therapy I Think About My Sons

a poem by Cati Porter

My thumb and forefinger pinch a pill as I thrust my fist
            back into his throat. His teeth, a bracelet of blunt
           tines, rake gently over my wrist.
           I pull out my hand sticky with his saliva
           and hold his mouth closed
           and stroke his neck
           until I am certain he has swallowed.
           
At seven years old he is two years older than
            my oldest son. He is my oldest son,
           I tell myself, but of course, he is not.
           He is just the dog, I remind myself daily,
           because, if he were my son,
           I would okay the endoscopy, biopsy
           the lining of his stomach. I would make the drive
           into the next county for intravenous chemotherapy.
                       
Once he ate reluctantly from my hand chicken breasts
            boiled for him on my stove. If he were
           my son, I would not hand-feed him
           the breasts of dead chickens. I would slice
           off my own, boil them
           pink to white in my very best pot.
           I would shred them, feed them to him
           warm, if only to keep him through the night.

Winner of the 2006 Gravity & Light Poetry Competition, first appearance in the anthology White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (Demeter Press/York University, Canada), and reprinted in my book Seven Floors UP.

Cati Porter is the author of Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press, 2008) and small fruit songs: prose poems (Pudding House, 2008). Her poems appear in the recent anthologies Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel — Second Floor (No Tell Books), White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (Demeter Press/York U., Canada), and Letters to the World (Red Hen Press). She is associate editor for Babel Fruit, and founder & editor-in-chief of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry. After ten years of childrearing, she has returned to school and is currently pursuing her MFA through Antioch University, Los Angeles.  To contact her and find out more about her writing go to her web address at editor@poemeleon.org

HELLO, WINE LOVERS!

Hello, Wine Lovers!  It’s 10a.m. Monday, June 15, 2009 and Mike is running late to work so he asked me to post something about tonight’s wine tasting at Ralph’s downtown (on 9th Street between Flower and Hope).  To those of you who don’t know, Mike Berger hosts the tasting from 5p.m. to 8p.m. and it’s an unbelievable value.  Tonight, the featured category is Italian red wines.  The two most internationally famous regions in Italy will be featured; they are called Piedmont (Piemonte in Italian) and Tuscany (Toscana in Italian).

Piedmont is an absolutely beautiful region in the northwest of Italy whose name means “foot of the mountain”, (from the Latin, pied for foot and monte for mountain), due to its proximity to the majestic Alps.  There are three major red wine grapes planted there, the most vaunted of which is Nebbiolo (named after nebbia, the Italian word for fog, which is integral to the ripening of these grapes).  Mike will be serving a Barolo tonight, one of the two great Nebbiolo-based wines of Piedmont.  Barolos are known to be among the longest-aging wines of Italy, many drinking well after more than fifty years.  They are dark and chewy with flavors of chocolate and anise leading to a deep raspberry center.  There can be prodigious complexity in the bouquet beyond the classic signature notes.  The Barolos under ten years of age require hours of breathing time to reveal their flavors and aromas.  To this end, Mike always pours his selections of “big reds” into decanters in advance of the wine tastings.  What this does – and what “breathing” means in the jargon of wine connoisseurs – is accelerate the aging of the wine through exposure to the air.  Very old wines should be drunk immediately as they are fully aged and exposure to the air deteriorates their quality, sending them to a premature end.

Tuscany is notable for its pastorally beautiful countryside and its spectacular capital city Florence, which dates back to 59 AD. Continue reading HELLO, WINE LOVERS!

Bottle Rock Media Dinner Review

Upon entering the downtown Bottle Rock we were struck by stark modernity.  The room is made of cast concrete: bearing walls, interior walls and both cylindrical and square pillars supporting a twelve foot-high ceiling.  Straight ahead was a twenty-stool bar, half of which is dedicated to a show kitchen with pristine half-inch plate glass separating bar guests from the white-jacketed culinary staff.   The three-inch thick slab of bar top itself, as well as the low cocktail tables in the lounge and the bathroom counters, is made of a material we guessed could be the source of the wine bar’s name.  It is a sort of “bottle rock”.  This grey-based composite looks as though semi-precious stones are mixed in, such as tiger’s-eye, Lapis Lazuli and malachite but actually, it’s all recycled wine and beer bottles.  There are eighteen carefully chosen beer taps featuring several selections not even found at The Yardhouse. Continue reading Bottle Rock Media Dinner Review