“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 June 2018

THIS WEEK IN BARREL STACKS

It's been a big week for barrels. 

First, Christo completed the construction of his floating monument, The London Mastaba on the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. That used 7,506 steel barrels, which will be recycled when the mastaba, or bench, is removed in a couple of months. 

To match the green grass and grey-blue sky, Christo chose red, mauve and blue for his 600 tonne stack. 

With Jeanne-Claude, his partner (since deceased), Christo confounded Australia with Wrapped Coast in 1968 when they prophetically covered a million square feet of Sydney's Little Bay Pacific cliffs in plastic. 

The Barton 1792 Bourbon Distillery near Bardstown in Kentucky could have used some of Christo's stacking and packing skills later in the week when about half the 20,000 oak barrels in one of its chaise stacks fell during the repair of a wall. 

While much whiskey spilled, the distillery says it wasn't enough to reach the creek, hoping some barrels remained intact and full.

You can see here how much money the mash whiskey men save stacking barrels up in the southern humidity like this, rather than digging proper cool cellars.

This photo by Bardstown Fire Chief Billy Mattingly, Christo at top by Simon Dawson

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