Que Syrah Syrah ...

When I talk about this wine, I am supposed to put the winery name in all caps. SYZYGY. So there. It looks extra emphatic in bold.

It is harder to find a science-y wine in Fred Meyer than in Fremont, and harder in Fremont than it is in Kirkland, which shouldn't surprise me as much as it did. Of all the bottles I investigated, this was the only properly scientific-looking one, a dashing blue and orange label (here hot off the press) with a properly space-age sans serif font. The term 'syzygy' refers to the moment when three celestial bodies in the same gravitational system -- say, Earth, the moon, and the sun -- are in perfect alignment. (Among other things.) Supposedly this is when the winery harvests their cabernet sauvignon grapes, at a moment of eclipse in 2005. I mentioned this to friend Ray, who was properly (scientifically) sceptical: "It takes longer than the length of an eclipse to bring in a harvest." Nevertheless, the label pleases me, although it is less friendly than Educated Guess.

The new Cab Sauv is due out at the start of may -- the bottle I take home is a full, unblended Syrah from the -- say it with me now -- SYZYGY winery in Walla Walla. I spent my four undergraduate years in Walla Walla, and Syrah was one of the first reds I was exposed to, so I was hoping for something particularly special from this bottle of wine. It was pretty good -- rich, and full, and warming -- but it wasn't anything particularly stunning. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for the cabernet sauvignon in a month.

Syrah's history in the United States, interestingly, involves a group called the Rhone Rangers. They were initially formed in the 1980s, disbanded in the early 1990s, and revived before the end of the prior millennium. The entire purpose of this group appears to be the promotion of and education about the Rhone varietals in America, which includes links to various articles on same from around the country -- including this Australian article detailing how the source of Shiraz' peppery tone had been located by a group of Australian scientists. Considering this and the recent efforts to lock down varietal relationships with DNA tests in oenology labs around the world, a clear tension between Old World terroir-centered methods and New World science-tested methods begins to emerge.

In Vino Veritas: Science, Wine, and Science-y Wines

Obviously there is a lot to be said about oenophilia, and in particular about the delightful absurdity of its vocabulary. It is easy to get distracted when your technical terms are words like "supple" and "hollow" and "chewy" -- which rightfully have no place in beverage descriptions -- and before you know it you're slinging around your favorite uncommon adjectives -- wistful! sly! insouciant! -- with a complete disregard for accuracy and comprehensibility. Nor does it help in the quest for clarity to note that many varietals have specific aromas that have been identified seemingly at random: for instance, the pencil box note in a glass of Cabernet Franc.

Much as I love this mode of language, I need some sort of anchor if my oenological leanings are to progress. For a while I stood by the German Rieslings, which are invariably delicious, but now I'd like to investigate the reds and the drier whites as well. But where to start? Even if you ignore the less common varietal grapes (Carmenère, anyone?) there's still no obvious place to begin. All you have to go on is a hunch and the impression made by the design of the label on the bottle. Therefore I have decided -- where is my triumphant horn section crescendo? -- to investigate wines with science-y themes.

It is entirely appropriate that the first wine I choose is called Educated Guess, from the Roots Run Deep winery in the infamous Napa Valley. The label approximates an old blackboard, with hexagonal molecular structures and chemical processes chalked out attractively in white on the black background. The winemaker's description is as follows: "Rich, ripe and focused with juicy blackberry and boysenberry fruit, all tied together with a creamy french vanilla middle and a lingering finish." Mine is much less evocative: delicious. Of course, they're talking about the 2005 vintage, and the bottle I tasted was the 2006, which appears to have a much stronger spice than the earlier bottle. For the first time, I have a sense of how the spiciness of a wine can play with both its fruitiness and its sugar level: the peppery note here provides a sharp opening note supported by the rich velvet tone of the fruit, and a smooth lingering sweetness binds the two together like a silk ribbon tied around a stack of love letters. In fact, the more I drink of it, the more I like it -- so much so that by the end of the bottle I have bestowed upon it the title of Favored Red, a title heretofore only possessed by L'Ecole 41's Recess Red.

The varietal here is Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the reds I am growing more interested in, and one which for years was thought to be descended from Roman grapes. However, more recently its true lineage (a blend of Cabernet franc and Sauvignon blanc, just as the name would suggest) was revealed by, of all scientific things, a DNA test.

Diseased Ovines and Spilled Beer: Not a History of Scotland

The benefits of studying a foreign language are etc. etc. But also, there are tongue-twisters.

I once came across a list of Finnish ones. Finnish is a tongue with a relatively limited supply of phonemes -- in fact, to the Indo-European eye it looks as though a typist has fallen asleep on the letters k, p, and t -- which means the potential for the kind of repetition upon which the tongue-twister thrives is fairly high. Reading the list (with its handy translations) was a delight, and one in particular was so appealing a sentiment that I promptly undertook to memorize it:

Ääliö, älä lyö! Ööliä läikkyy!

Idiot, don't hit! The beer is spilling!

Now, the Finnish front vowels -- ä, ö, and always y -- bedevil an English speaker such as myself, but still it took very little time before this phrase was tripping gaily off my tongue. Among other things, it seemed useful: the impulse to prevent some drunken, thoughtless partygoer from upsetting one's own beverage -- say, onto the shoes or shirt of a person with whom one aspires to hook up -- is an abiding human motivation. But then again, is this phrase actually practicable? Doesn't its nature as a tongue-twister prevents its use in real life? After all, in English, if one should turn to a friend and say to them, "Pass the peeled poached pears, please, Peter," it comes across as repellently, abhorrently cute (NB: not the kind with puppies -- rather the kind with lisping children of adorable precocity and cherubism). And honestly the Finns are much less likely than the Americans to respond favorably to cute.

Also at issue here is the ease of repetition, which at length began to puzzle me. Finnish tongue-twisters rattle easily from my lips, but telling a simple anecdote in the same language is fraught with pitfalls; on the other hand my English has native fluency, but I cannot opine about the sixth sheik's sick sheep with anything approaching reasonable speed. Is this due to the difference between vowel pronunciation and the damnable fricative "sh" -- or is there in fact an inverse relationship between comprehension of a language and facility with its most deliberately challenging form? I am able to memorize the Finnish sentence as a mere progression of syllables -- almost as a musical rather than a linguistic phrase -- while I am forced to deal with the English one as a set of discrete units and images. And something about my awareness of these images short-circuits the relationship between my brain and my mouth. Bizarre.

But now, having brought up the idea of meaning, we can't get away from it. The meaning of a tongue-twister is an inherently paradoxical business. On the one hand, what the phrase means is entirely subordinate to the sound: 'the sixth sheik's sick sheep' is not at all the same as 'the sextile desert chieftain's diseased ovine.' At the same time, no legitimate tongue-twister strings words together randomly. There is always the pretense of a story, even if that story makes no sense. Case in point: Peter Piper. How in the hell did the peppers get pickled before being picked? Or take sinful Caesar, in whose time snifters had yet to be invented. And what happens to those anachronistic snifters when he proceeds to seize his knees? A further sampling from Finland proves this odd quality is international:

Vesihiisi sihisi hississä.
The sea-monster was hissing in the elevator.

Höyhen löytyi yöllä työpöydältä.
A feather was found on the work bench in the night.

What is really at stake here is nothing less than the purpose of language. Generally our culture falls into two camps on this topic: 1) language as code, as a means of carrying information that is separate from mere human memory, and 2) language as fantasy, as imagination, as symbolic somehow of the real (or some unreal) world. What tongue-twisters point to is the elusive idea of language as specifically aural, a notion which only a very few poets these days really remember, in our world of type and text and videography. Sound, for all our musicophilia, is growing increasingly less important to language: it's strange even to think that the great poets of the ancient world wrote and performed works of staggering length and complexity without writing any of it down. (So far as we know -- but Milman Parry makes a good case.) And somehow -- and it necessitates stating at the outset that I still don't quite know how this tangent struck me as relevant, but I can't get it out of my head -- I thought about action movies. The lines we all remember, the quotes that become cultural currency -- it's at least partially because of the sound. Our greatest and most recognizable action stars: Sean Connery, Arnold Schwarzenegger (way less awesome as a politician than an actor -- a sort of reverse Reagan), Clint Eastwood, Sylverster Stallone, John Wayne, Robert de Niro, Bruce Willis -- all of them have something distinctive in the way they speak, whether it's an accent (Connery, Scwarzenegger, Wayne) or merely an inflection (Eastwood, Willis -- who, come to think of it, kind of sounds like Clint Eastwood). Lines that have virtually no linguistic content out of context -- "I'll be back," "The day is mine, Trebek!" -- become verbal milestones. The cinema studies world is crying out for an aural analysis of the action genre and its contribution to characterization. Maybe this also explains the lack of similar stardom in van Damme and Segal. Sorry, guys, you just didn't have the right sound.

Adverjudgments.

So the love of my life and I were discussing Gmail's tendency to pluck terms from your email and regurgitate ads specific to those topics. Such as: Phillips Seafood By Mail. Cheerleading Software. Wholesale Japanese Koi. Some people, he was saying, find such things intrusive, an invasion of privacy. "It just grabs words. And besides," he said, "I appreciate the opportunity to learn that whatever it is I am writing about in my mail, I can get it wholesale. This cracker's defective."

"Use less pressure on the cheese. Besides," I replied, turning back to the matter at hand, "it isn't as though Gmail is actualling reading your mail. It isn't like it's judging you."

"What if it did?"

• Are You Sure You Need That Extra Piece Of Pie?
  
• You Really Need To Smoke Less And Bathe More.
  
• Man, You Sure Are Dating Out Of Your League, Aren't You. Try Women Your Own Age For A Change!
  
• Nice To See You're Doing Something With Your Degree.
  
• They Make Videos Of That In Germany -- Click Here So I Can Say I Told You So.

Charles thinks these could be called judgmertisements. I prefer adverjudgments. And this is my blog, so there.

Update: 4/22/08:
My Gmail account has starting feeding me adds in Finnish, based on the vocab lists I've been typing and mailing to myself from library computers. As attachments, mind. Gmail is spying on my Word attachments.

I've Always Wondered ...

Because I am incapable of enjoying any activity without indulging in the overanalysis of same, I have been researching academic criticism on karaoke as a social and cultural phenomenon. My latest discovery is a brief essay by one Casey Man Kong Lum entitled: "The Karaoke Dilemma: on the interaction between collectivism and individualism in the karaoke space."

The piece is interesting, though full of sentences like the following, found on page 173: "The dual role that people are expected to play in the karaoke space helps to facilitate an obligatory bonding among the participants." (Because we academics have to make sure to use long dry words like 'obligatory' when talking about fun things, so people can tell we are taking those fun things very very seriously.) The author's thesis is fairly plain and well-argued: Asian culture, with its emphasis on the group (be it family, company, or broader society) is more inclined to favor karaoke than what he calls Anglo-American culture with its emphasis on self-distinction and individuality.

Karaoke, of course, is both an individual and a collective activity; singers are individuals onstage, but group members when they melt back into the amorphous mass known as the audience (which can be very amorphous indeed). CMKL argues that the individualized aspects of the pastime provide a literal and metaphorical voice for people in group-centered cultures, giving them a sense of freedom and release. For Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, karaoke invades the peculiarly American notion of having privacy in a public space: in this case, a bar, where getting up to sing might in some sense 'expose'* the performer to the critical gaze of the audience. In shopping malls and restaurants and other public places, we try not to make eye contact or talk to strangers; we preserve the illusion of being alone even in the midst of a crowd. Maybe this is also why Christmas shopping is so evil to us -- we can't possibly preserve the illusion of solitude in such cramped conditions. However, the logic behind these twin points -- the crux of the argument, really -- seems suspect. It almost suggests that collectivist cultures long to escape that collectivism, while individualist cultures cling to their individuality. Seems a little bit like a value judgment on collectivism vs. individualism.

My favorite point is when the author talks about the peculiarly American karaoke habit of getting an entire group up onstage to sing. CMKL puts describes this tactic as: "an attempt to use the group on stage to shield the individual performers from the public scrutiny of the audience members, some of whom are likely to be strangers to the performers" (175). This is, in my experience, exactly right, and justifies both the custom of the Everybody Song (getting anyone at all up for a song of the KJ's mischievous choice), and my absolute hatred for anyone who gets up to sing with more than three people.

This essay therefore also justifies my even more vitriolic hatred toward those groups who flood to the edge of the stage to watch and photograph their friends while they perform. It turns the karaoke bar into their own private fun center and excludes everyone else. Makes us feel unloved. Narcissistic bastards.

*I initially typed 'explose,' which I really think oughta be a word. Explose: to expose someone in a catastrophic, damaging fashion.

Exit -- Singing!

Let's face it: my current unbridled enthusiasm for karaoke singing puzzles even me. I've long since passed my choirgirl years, and anyway in choir one voice is rarely distinguished. Mine certainly never was. The times that saw me singing solo in the past were few and far between (a gay bar in Pasco, Washington, the erstwhile Liquid Lounge at the EMP in Seattle) and while I had enjoyed it, the wait-to-sing ratio was fairly high, and to have that many people watch you singing alone on your first few forays brings out the old nerves like nothing else I know. And nerves + singing = crap.

Part of it does seem to be slightly competitive -- given a mic and a screen with the lyrics, how close can your voice get to Janis Joplin's? At the same time, hey, nobody seriously expects me to be Janis Joplin -- it's karaoke, for crying out loud. Mere adequacy is considered overachieving.

Maybe that's the appeal: high potential for success with no penalty for being second- or even third-rate. That's the same reason I played on the drama department's intramural softball team three years running in college: we were so collectively bad that no one single individual could possibly be charged with ruining it for everybody, no matter how poorly one played. Every dropped fly and bobbled grounder was par for the course, while every caught ball and solid hit was cause for celebration.

Also, games with the Screaming Makitas (namesake rusty backstage electric drills which we used to build and strike sets) and karaoke can both be enjoyed while drinking -- the softball team's best and most practiced move was as follows:
1. Catch ball in left-hand mitt
2. Crouch
3. Place beer on ground with right hand
4. Emerge from crouch while pulling ball from left-hand mitt with right hand
5. Throw ball
When thoroughly practiced -- and we did drill this one -- this smooth maneuver was almost poetic in its graceful debauchery. Had Roman emperors played softball, this would have been in their playbook. Other intramural teams, though their score might double ours, were reluctantly impressed.

For the record, unlike softball, karaoke comes pretty naturally to me: I have a decent enough voice, and usually the wisdom not to afflict my audience with either lengthy, dull songs (I'm talking to you, Pink Floyd) or awkward, annoying ones (performing "Summer Lovin'" is, I believe, grounds for execution). But then, the hardest part of karaoke isn't the singing. That's just the most noticeable bit. Actually, the hardest part is the song choice. Not only range, vocal quality, volume, and mood must be considered: you also have a responsibility to your audience, to pick something with at least a minimal entertainment value for the listener who could care less who you are or where you trained or how much you've had to drink. Because this is not your insulated single-occupant bathroom shower on a late-slept Sunday morning: this is a bar with other people who came out to entertain and be entertained, and if you don't respect that it tends to show. Like the guy who thought it would be a good idea to knock back twenty Irish car bombs and then sing "Baby Got Back" despite never having learned all the words. Sir, you are a douchebag of the highest caliber, and if ever given the opportunity I will exchange all the whiskey in those car bombs for tequila, and then we'll see how you feel come morning. That pounding in your temples and the fuzziness on your tongue? It's called regret.

***

Karaoke tends to toy with the notion of celebrity. An example: Cher's "Believe" an artfully digitized product of one of those famous people with whom society has something of a love-hate relationship. We mock her, but we know her name. And when someone who looks kind of like Cher sings a terrible, catchy as hell song by Cher to which everyone has a reaction, be it affection or loathing -- well, there aren't many who can't get behind that at least a little bit. Think about it: you see the song choice on the monitor is "In the Ghetto." Wouldn't you prefer that guy with the wavy black hair sneering into his sideburns than the guy in the t-shirt with cutoff sleeves, his blond hair spiky and bleached to within an inch of its life? Wouldn't you rather that second guy sing "White Wedding" instead? Believe me, I've seen a Billy Idol lookalike sing Billy Idol, and it's a pleasure everyone should have at least once in their lifetime. It means that right there in front of you is a person who at least has a vague, instinctive handle on relationship between actuality and appearances.

Then again, having that Billy Idol lookalike sing "Hound Dog" or "Heartbreak Hotel" would be pretty good, too. There's always something to be said for playing with expectations. A good song choice is nearly always a good song choice regardless of the vocalist.

Singing a song that's as famous for the performer as for the performance also strangely reclaims popular music for the masses. Take that, Bon Jovi, it's our song now! And good karaoke songs almost have to be from the genre of popular (or at least semipopular) music. A song only you know is usually dull as dirt for anyone else to listen to, unless you're the absolute be-all and end-all, vocally. And even then, no guarantees.

It's an added complexity that a good song is not necessarily a good karaoke song, and vice versa. Examples of good songs that are terrible karaoke songs: "Orange Blossom Special" (all those musical breaks!), "Baba O'Reilly" (same), and just about every rap song ever recorded. (Because even when people think they know how it goes, they rarely do.) Examples of terrible songs that are good karaoke songs: "Believe," "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)," and anything by Wilson Phillips. Examples that fit both circles of our Venn diagram: "Son of a Preacher Man," "London Calling," "I Will Survive," "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," "The Gambler," "Space Oddity," and "Fat Bottomed Girls." But by far the title for Best Karaoke Song in America today is split between two contenders: "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Don't Stop Believin.'" Not only are these songs common in karaoke books, well-known, catchy, nostalgic, and easy to sing -- they are top karaoke songs because everybody on earth will sing along with either one. The entire bar. No matter if they're drunk or sober or tired or grumpy or whether they intend to get up onstage themselves. It's an amazing experience of unity and cohesion, small groups of total strangers coming together briefly for a common, albeit ridiculous, purpose.

***

Anyone who's a karaoke regular inevitably develops a signature song or two. My friend Colin has "Sweet Caroline" down to an art form, and Binah can lock down "Brian Wilson" and "Walking in Memphis" with the best of them. In the past I have tended to default to "Bobbie McGee" because it's a showstopper and singing it as loud and as well as I can is something of a rush, provided I've had at least one good solid drink (even Janis couldn't sing Janis sober). Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why" has been getting a lot of play as well, because it is a song with the perfect ratio of effort (zero) to quality (lots). However, my current fanaticism for the karaoke art has led me more and more into new and uncharted territory. I tire of singing the same old things; instead, I have been branching out into songs that make me nervous (Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas") or which I love but am not sure I can sing (Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", "If You've Got It, Flaunt It" from the Producers) or which I've had to badger the host to get into the book (Indigo Girls' "Galileo") or which I've just plain never seen anywhere before ("Mr. Cellophane"). Not all of these have been wild, runaway successes, but the risks have paid off enough to keep me trying.

The signature song and/or repertoire is not necessarily a motto, but they do tend to indicate certain things about a personality that might otherwise be unutterable. For instance, the list of songs I've heard Colin do more than once: "Wicked Game," "Sweet Caroline," "Mmm Mmm Mmm," "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon," and "Melt With You." Binah: "Brian Wilson," "Faith," "Walking in Memphis." Teman: "Sympathy With the Devil," "The Gambler," and "London Calling." Charles: "Benny and the Jets," "Sledgehammer," "Kissing a Fool," "Mama," and "Believe." Me: "Son of a Preacher Man," "Galileo," "Bobby McGee," "Don't Know Why," "Long As I Can See the Light," and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" Themes develop with alarming rapidity, and one's musical knowledge and tastes are exposed to other regulars, who may or may not feel compelled to judge you on that basis.

If a regular patron at a karaoke bar has a regular song they perform, the other regulars almost entirely -- in, say, roughly 99% of cases -- will deliberately not sing that song (though exceptions can be made in the case of a regular's absence, or in a pair of regulars who trade turns on a particular song). It's considered poaching, and poaching of course is considered bad form. It doesn't matter if you do it better; it doesn't matter if you do it worse. It is simply not done.

At least, it's not done by those in the know. The quickest way for a regular to find out that another singer is a newbie is to hear them poach a regular's standard tune. I recall one time at an erstwhile karaoke night I heard some tone-deaf drunk guys -- and oh, the bane that is the tone-deaf drunk guy with poor song choice capabilities -- poach David Allan Coe's "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," usually performed late in the evening by a regular known affectionately as Big Al. Now, for one thing, Big Al sings this song beautifully, in a rich full velvet voice. For another, I'd never heard it until I started coming to karaoke, but thanks to Big Al it is now one of my favorite songs, one which causes everyone else in the bar to sing along. There are backup lyrics and everything. So to have this newbie, this rube, this asshole, show up and crap all over one of my favorite karaoke numbers in the most egregiously unentertaining way possible ... Well, it gets my dander up.

But now, I have to go sing. Further bulletins as events warrant.

God, how I miss sleep ...

Nothing feels quite as luxurious as as new bed, particularly one that is significantly larger and higher than your old, with acres of haremesque sheets. Spring green stripes on the comforter cover, gold-embroidered edging on the sheets ... the thing looks good enough to eat. Somehow the colors remind me of food, but a delicious, fruitish kind of thing that is both soothing and refreshing.

I wish I was in that bed right now. It has not been a cozy day out here in the world.

On a side note, for those not in the know, there is a wonderful book out there called The Secret Language of Sleep, which may be sampled by taking this quiz to find your own couples' sleep pose. It's weird and odd and addictive. Here's mine:

Find your own pose!