Word: connoisseurs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than pleasure sans pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is O.K. not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living...
...Zigzag Way (Houghton Mifflin; 159 pages), the connoisseur of displacement takes her sharp eye to Mexico, though all her main characters, as always, come from somewhere else. Eric, a mousy innocent abroad, has followed his grad-school girlfriend across the border and there runs into a fellow refugee, Dona Vera, who presides over a salon of sorts called the Hacienda de la Soledad, concealing her European past behind flamboyant displays of Indian folklore. In the third panel of the narrative's triptych, we travel back to 1910, when the British came to the area to exploit its mines and miners...
...what we love, then Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is exactly like the wine he most treasures: Pinot. He loves that the grape is quirky and vulnerable--that it grows only in certain climates, that it tests the nurturing patience of its growers. And the flavor! For the connoisseur: haunting and thrilling. Which is just what his friends might say of the divorced, depressed, chronically romantic Miles...
...weeks ago, Carlos Lopes, the managing director of the Hotel Bel-Air, visited a fancy Los Angeles fireplace store accompanied by a renowned architect. A connoisseur of hearths and a frequent guest at the Bel-Air, the architect hoped to use his clout to persuade Lopes to buy a state-of-the-art gas model for the suite he always books. Lopes says he will probably grant the wish, just as he does nearly every request from his best customers...
...might think only a true connoisseur could discern, or care about, the nuances of different superpremiums, in the same way fans of single-malt Scotches and small-batch bourbons latch on to favorite labels. But the goal is to add more cachet than character to the drink. Training drinkers to call for your brand when ordering a cosmopolitan is the industry's Grail. By submerging the vodka in cranberry juice, the consumer is effectively paying for nothing but the brand...