“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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23 February 2013

PUSCIFER : LIVE BECKWITH TRIBUTE

They're On This Planet Because
"Their Parents Drank Ray's Creations And Then Humped"
by PHILIP WHITE

Puscifer kicked off their sellout Australian tour last night in Brisbane.  Maynard James Keenan reports they performed Dear Brother, a work from their new Donkey Punch The Night EP.

"So we did Dear Brother for the first time ever in front of an audience," he told DRINKSTER this morning. 

"I dedicated it to Ray. Of course no one in the audience knew who he was, but that really doesn't matter to me.

"I know that most of them are on this planet because their parents/grandparents drank Ray's creations and then humped. "


He refers to Ray Beckwith, the great Australian wine scientist and DRINKSTER mentor who died at 100 years of age in November. 

Beckwith gets a credit on the EP cover.


Maynard and mates joined us for lunch last Saturday at Yangarra.  We toured the old (1946) dry-grown (never, ever been watered) bushvine Grenache vineyard, amongst others, munched bunches, kicked barrels in the winery, and enjoyed a politely riotous repast with wine-bearing friends from Marius, Ochota Barrels, La Curio, and Petagna.

Becky would have loved it.

It seems likely that there will be some interchange of dry-grown and bushvine vineyard ideas  between Yangarra vine wizard, Michael Lane, and Maynard's Caduceus winery and vineyard on Mount Mingus, at Jerome, Arizona. Maynard's already playing with Ochota in a Grenache JV.  Good people work together in this business!

That's Maynard's photograph of the Clarendon Vineyard above, and his view of the table.  And here he is at work on Mount Mingus:

Harvest has just commenced at Clarendon, with Pinot, Shiraz and Chardonnay coming off with brilliant vital statistics.  Stacey Pothoven's photograph of the High Sands Grenache vineyard is  below. The author's on the left, the weed-eating sheep are in the vines on the right, and Clarendon's in the hills you can see at the end of that track.

Click here to see an edited version of my last formal interview with Ray. And to hear Maynard discussing Puscifer's first two Australian gigs with the Doctor on the J, click here.

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6 comments:

Milton Wordley said...

Great afternoon whitey - might be a good time to remind people of tour interview with Ray - it's on line.

https://vimeo.com/54182290

Cheers

Milt

Anonymous said...

can you arrange me to meet maynard, can u post on here where will he be next, i want to go to hunter valley and meet him if he is taking a trip there???

jellous said...

you sure hang with some coolth dude

Anonymous said...

What a remarkable man was Beckwith. Thanks Whitey.

Alban_Ray said...

I met Slooppy Joe in Deer Valley next to Strides. Got me crazy. Made me burb a lot. No one warned me about the bubbly. I stayed for awhile playing catch with Yuton. Never figured I'd be probed like an innocent white boy aboard some alien mothership. It was life changing. I'll never sleep on that night of October 19th of January 2012. He used to beat off a lot. He'd sound like a spinner. He became programmable. The aliens still sodomize him. They think he's smiling whenever he grits his teeth. As for the wine, he's never tasted it without hunger. His body is now an archetype to surrender and docility. Let's go work out.

Akcesoria dla dzieci said...

Twój blog jest bomba ;)