Robert Kowal

It has come to my atten­tion that I have yet to con­tribute any com­men­tary on wine to this pub­lic mono­logue as the ban­ner of this blog promised — Words, Sounds, Wine.  I herein will redress this defi­ciency with an unabashedly apophenic post:

The actor is a grape, the soil is truth.

As may be gath­ered from my bio, I have worked in three areas pro­fes­sion­ally: words, sounds, wine.  Each has been an abid­ing pas­sion through­out my adult life (my Schwinn five speed sport­ing a banana seat and sissy bars along with my 4th-grade crush Paige Costa, occu­pied the bet­ter part of my childhood).

Each has risen to pri­macy and sub­se­quently receded into the back­ground, dis­placed by the exi­gen­cies of sub­sis­tence (pay­ing the rent) or nar­cotic intro­spec­tion (hid­ing from the land­lord). ^[1].  Nev­er­the­less, these remain the trin­ity from which my focus has rarely drifted.   As com­monly occurs when sub­ject inti­macy is cou­pled with idle time, one spon­ta­neously gen­er­ates grand(iose) uni­fied the­o­ries from one cra­nial hemi­sphere and reduc­tion­ist dogma from the other.   Per­son­ally, I lean towards the for­mer if only because it allows for more dis­cur­sive expres­sion. To wit:

When asked what wine is my favorite I most often reply: “Ries­ling;  not as a ‘favorite’ per se, but because if I were con­demned to drink only one vari­ety, it would be Ries­ling.” The variety’s ver­sa­til­ity is unmatched.  It can make delight­ful light-bodied wines as exem­pli­fied by Mosel Kabi­netts as well as the rich­est dessert styles – the unc­tu­ous tongue-twisting Trock­en­beer­e­nausle­ses.   Great Ries­lings from Alsace and Ger­many are among the most pro­found and longest-lived white wines and rival Bur­gundy as expres­sions of ter­roir. ^[2].  In addi­tion, Ries­ling has migrated suc­cess­fully to the new world.  There are many ter­rific and region­ally dis­tinc­tive (gen­uine ter­roir takes decades or cen­turies to rec­og­nize) wines from Aus­tralia, New Zealand, South Africa, and from across North and South Amer­ica.  Hell, Ries­ling even makes a respectable sparkling wine.  I find the range of expres­sion and charm of this grape irre­sistible, which leads me to Ms. Claire Danes.

I, to my cha­grin, have only recently “dis­cov­ered” Danes’s work.  Many years ago some­one rec­om­mended My So Called Life (1994), but it was only a few weeks ago that I pulled the DVD col­lec­tion off the library shelf on a whim.   I was vaguely aware of the series and of its pitiable demise.  I under­stood that it was con­sid­ered to be well writ­ten and that it pre­sented ado­les­cent life hon­estly and can­didly (how many shows of any genre could be so described?).  This was suf­fi­cient inducement.

I found the series and Ms. Danes in par­tic­u­lar, utterly enchant­ing.  Her per­for­mance is tech­ni­cally mod­ern – the emo­tional nat­u­ral­ism of Stanis­lawsky via Strass­berg – but she simul­ta­ne­ously dis­plays the histri­onic ^[3] phys­i­cal­ity of silent cin­ema.   Her elas­tic coun­te­nance shifts so flu­idly and com­pelling that her scenes hardly need dia­logue: the story is in her face.  To be more pre­cise, the story is expressed through her phys­i­cal­ity, since the actress employs ges­ture, pos­ture, and move­ment with preter­nat­ural pre­ci­sion. ^[4]  In this she is the Ries­ling actress; the story of the grape, the vine­yard and the vin­tage  is embed­ded within the very sub­stance of the fin­ished wine just at the story of the nar­ra­tive is embed­ded within the actor’s body.  In this sense, dia­logue is equiv­a­lent to the wine label: it may pro­vide details and accred­i­ta­tion but with a great wine, the story is sim­ply in glass.  With Ms. Danes, the story is on her face.

Para­dox­i­cally, I sus­pect that this may be a pro­fes­sional hand­i­cap for the actress for just as there are few truly great vine­yards with a story of their ter­roir to con­vey, so too is there a dearth of sub­stan­tial sto­ries for actors.  Given the poten­tial of Ries­ling is it tragic when it is made as an insipid wine.  I sus­pect Danes’s expres­sive coun­te­nance and emo­tional authen­tic­ity may clash with the trite scripts churned out by com­mer­cial media.  Some actors have a remark­able abil­ity to make the most implau­si­ble line palat­able (Nathan Fil­lion and Bran­don Frasier come to mind).  I believe this to be a com­plic­i­tous act between actor and viewer pred­i­cated upon the acknowl­edg­ment that the nar­ra­tive is intrin­si­cally men­da­cious.  A line deliv­ered with a slight self-mocking inflec­tion or accom­pa­nied by a ges­ture allud­ing to extra­tex­tual tropes gives the viewer license release the actor (and the drama) from the implicit bounds of char­ac­ter integrity and nar­ra­tive hon­esty.  I doubt if Danes is capa­ble of such duplicity.

I have seen few other of her films (I did attend Romeo + Juliet (1996) upon its release but at the time I was more inter­ested the Bard and Baz Lurhmann than the cast) but I shall seek out her adult work.   I sin­cerely hope that she has encoun­tered wor­thy projects.

An ’83 Gun­der­loch Nack­en­heim Rothen­berg Spätlese sounds like the per­fect match for my vin­tage 1974 Swanson’s Sal­is­bury Steak TV din­ner and a screen­ing of Shop Girl tonight.

1. ^[1] I do not imply sub­stance abuse.  Rather I refer to the addic­tive and ener­vat­ing cycle of self-analysis (or pro­fes­sional ther­apy in some cases).  See The Ham­let Syn­drome — Over­thinkers who Under­achieve, 1989, Adri­enne Miller & Andrew Gold­blatt  ↩
2. ^[2] ‘Ter­roir’ is the notion that each spe­cific site (soil, slope, expo­sure, cli­mate, vine, vin­tage, viti­cul­tural tech­niques, etc.) com­bine to express a con­sis­tently unique char­ac­ter through the grape and fin­ished wine ↩
3. ^[3] ‘Histri­onic’ in the his­tor­i­cal not the cur­rent pejo­ra­tive sense. ↩
4. ^[4] Tellingly, Ms. Danes’s bio states she stud­ied dance. ↩