boringryan

I am starting yet another wine project. And this one is infinitely well received! Hoorah!

My new bilingual video blog is called Love that Languedoc. Odd episodes are in French. Even episodes are in English. It involves me scurrying around the region of France where I live and being really happy all the time. I interview wine makers, wine experts, wine drinkers, my family, local personalities, etc. We drink wines as we talk. We talk more. Then we drink more. And people are actually watching! And famous winemakers are like "Hey, Ryan. Let ME come on your show."

And there are occasional Bonus episodes that involve me eating cheese that tastes like goats or god knows what.
SNEAK PEEK:


So my life here has been really good because it's a beautiful region and the food is good and my wine is good and the work is fun. But NOW it's impossibly good. Because on top of all of that, I get to drive around and drink tons of other people's good wine. The Languedoc has so much to offer and I sincerely encourage you to check out the blog from time to time.

Or join
facebook for Love that Languedoc Wine
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or sign up for the bi monthly mailing list at the blog (right hand column)

Et buvez du vin Languedoc en moderation!

So I'm writing nerdy articles about wine and various topics.

The most popular so far have been
Wine and the Free Culture Movement
Wine and the Origins of the Chair
Indie Drinks and Indie Music - Why Pabst Blue Ribbon is bad

It's been getting a lot better feedback in quantity and quality than some of my other writing. So I would encourage you to go and enjoy some of those posts.  I start discussions on nerdy subjects, relate apparently arbitrary subjects to the world of wine, do little design and art projects, etc.  This week, I'm doing a shoutout for the G20 summit by posting a different Depression-era recording every day of the week (and a lot of them are related to the overarching themes of the blog like farming, wine, and being a hobo).  Doesn't that sound fun?

If you don't think hobo anthems that mention wine are "your thing", listen to this and your mind will be changed: HALALULA I'm a bum again!

Here's another little video about vine pruning. It's sort of a sequel to the video in my main lj blog that showcases those electric snippers. This one is about tearing down vines once you've cut them with the shears.

Fun.




More at the wine maker blog

This is one of the artsy fartsy videos. My dad didn't feel like narrating the tedious process of winter pruning so I let the camera wander much as our minds wander during this numbing task.

Basically we just go to every plant and cut off all of last year's growth at the spur leaving one short cane on each side of the plant. Then you rip down all the stuff you just snipped so as to clear the way for new growth!

So I hardly get to update this anymore, but I try to do regular updates over at my Ryan O'Connell winemaker blog.

I wanted to swing by here briefly to remind my LJ friends who tend to be younger and more Internet savvy that I made a fan page for O'Vineyards on facebook. If we're not facebook friends, we should be. If you're not a facebook fan yet, you should be. I think this link will work, but maybe it won't. O'Vineyards is delicious!

See my glamorous life as a winemaker in action. Oh, nothing better than a slow Saturday. Stand there, talk about myself, drink my own wine. Good day.

So I am getting paid to write about useless stuff that I know. I know about a lot of useless stuff, so things are looking up. The first such example is a comprehensive compilation of all my lock picking knowhow: Lock Picking Guide

Short little thing. Lots of videos. I get paid $25 for writing it which takes a couple hours and is sort of entertaining in a masturbatory appreciation of my own knowledge kind of way. And then I get paid more based on a lot of other variables that I'm not allowed to talk about.

Enjoy.

I'm becoming rather obsessed with creating an Internet meme. Or at least a good one-visit website.

I was looking at Google queries for my O'Vineyards website and a lot of people were asking goofy or interesting wine questions. They're flat out typing full sentences like "Why don't some people have vineyards?" and "Do French McDonalds serve red wine?" and I am answering those funny wine questions. The FAQ format is much easier to type up than full articles/essays because it's so short and conversational. Sometimes, it's downright jolly. I don't know that it's actually funny but it's at least trying to be a little funny.

Call me. Everybody in New Orleans: I will be there on Thursday, Friday and maybe a little longer. 813 846 8585. Make haste.

I botched my hair cut. We'll see if I can bring it back from the dead. I might have to just let somebody else touch my hair for once. The last time I really messed up a hair cut, I was at the start of my post-Katrina semester and I knew I didn't care. I remembered laughing and thinking it was wonderful to be so confident that I could do no wrong (especially in something as silly and unimportant as hair care). It sort of feels goofy to be in a situation where I don't feel that free anymore. But balance in all things. I guess it's good to care a little sometimes.

This weekend, I spent a lot of time with some very nice people who unintentionally made it very clear how affected my aesthetics are. I mean, I always know that it's a bit of a pretense to act like you have no pretense. I always hear DNR talking (he's got this lecture where some Greek boys walk into a theater and they're from a town where everybody wears jewelry and does their hair and wears pretty robes... and the famous greek guy in the theater yells "affectation!" and then these boys from another town come in and they're all muddied and sullied and intentionally dirty and uncaring about their appearance and odor, and the famous greek guy yells "MORE AFFECTATION!"). But it really struck home this weekend.

I always kind of just guide myself on comfort level. I feel comfortable looking a certain degree of sloven. It's just my zone. But then I wasn't really comfortable this weekend. And I'm not really comfortable with this botched hair cut. What if I'm changing? I'm cool with waking up in a year and being a guy who cares a little bit more about how he looks, but what if it's some wild spiraling descent into being a douchebag? So here's the thing, livejournal friends: if I look like I'm in a downward spiral to becoming a tool, stop me and say something like "Hey, Ryan, are you really comfortable with the person you're pretending to be?" If I forget that I wrote this post, I will probably be like "Whoa, you are like a voice inside my head that has captured my gentle, critical tone perfectly!"

I took a bite of my bagel with peanut butter and apple butter. Then I walked to my room and almost fell over. It was too quick to feel like dizziness feels. It was not clumsy enough to be a trip. It just felt like everything I knew about walking was wrong for a few seconds. . . hmm.

Carson and I made our own books out of trash and recycled paper. We sewed the binding with some thread and tada. I am so happy that I have my own books. Now I fill it with nonsense. I am making it an Illuminated Book of Days. The project goes well.

I woke up and went to the bathroom. Directly outside my window, a partially deflated red balloon hovered with white block letters printed right there in front of me. The balloon could have landed anywhere, but then again, it had to land there eventually. It is the only place that balloon will ever have landed. That tense is something I like because it is so fatalistic.

Hell, even after the balloon gets trapped in the bush outside that bathroom window to be the first thing I see this morning, it has to be trapped just right so that the text is facing me. So that I can read what I already know.

"STOP WORRYING
AND START CELEBRATING"

This is the best balloon. Thank you, balloon. I think I believe in magic.

My day really picked up. I went to an art expo opening at a new art space in Montolieu. I ran into a lot of friendly people and some mentioned that they were planning to be in the Place Carnot where I was already thinking about going. So then I went there and met up with them and other friends. They were televising the rugby finals on a big screen in the square and a lot of tents were set up where local winemakers and foodmakers were stuffing people full. I knew a lot of people because of the wine thing and the big market environment and casual happiness of it all reminded me a lot of the glorious New Orleans days.

Also, my flight is on Sunday so I will get to see my friend in Toulouse before taking off.

And I think I'll land in time to rush to Gainesville and see Inertia and The Dry County as well as anybody else that night. Isn't that wonderful?

You guys, it's wonderful.

PS - Dumbledore is gay? I'm pretty sure that is also good news.

I just heard that I have a plane ticket for Saturday, but the date says the 28th, so I suppose that's actually Sunday. I'm not sure what is going on. I may be at a day or two of the Fest. This might mean that I don't get to see my friend from harvest before leaving. This would be tragic. But I will be in good company in Tampa, and that will be glorious.

To all of the people planning on going to Gainesville for Fest. Don't get tased (w t f ).

presiding thoughts:
"I've got tears in my 'fro/'cause I'm standin' on my head over you."
--Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo/Wes Anderson fame) or maybe Tracy Torme [Rembrandt Brown, Sliders]

I stood above vat number 8 the other day, my stomach reeling. My peripheral vision has a weird way of staying perfectly still while the things in the forefront bulge and recede in an awkward wavy pattern that makes me think I have vertigo. I can handle it though.

As I stared over the edge of the vat at the winery's darkened cement floor, the bulging mass of vision before me took shape for a moment. We had recently moved some empty vats around, and this involves a fair amount of dragging. The feet dragging 'cross the cement clear out thin lines of cleanliness that ring a bright gray contrast to the otherwise purpled, bruised floor.

Well from up on that vat, the bulging mass of clean drag marks on the cement floor looked REALLY familiar. It looked just like the lines on the palm of my left hand. The kind of lines gypsies peer at before telling you how many kids you'll have. My winery had a life line and a love line and all the lines AND THEY WERE THE SAME AS MINE. Dun dun DUN.

Also: I've been remembering dreams lately. Some of them are about a friend, but most of them are terrifying anxiety-laden nightmares that involve rivers of corpses and whatnot. Some of them are both. I wonder why I'm remembering them all of a sudden.

PS - Maybe a wizard did it.

I have been receiving reminders from 43things.com every couple of weeks for about a year and a half about how I should make my own oil paint. Well, a few weeks ago I saw linseed oil and paint pigments at 60% of the normal superstore price at the cultural section of the local Wal*Mart equivalent. You better believe I made the hell out of some paint. It was pretty sweet, but it got sweeter. Just a little bit before I found that linseed oil, I had collected some wine musk on a hunch that I might use it as some sort of pigment. So I just made some oil paint out of wine musk (from wine that I made) and I painted a rock from the vineyard. Pretty sweeter, right?

Notes and Details: I messed up the reduction process and left the musk on the burner too long so it sort of turned to charcoal. Then I had to crush the charcoal into a fine black/purple pigment, which turned out to be exactly the color I needed to make this trophy I had promised to make. So I just finished the first ever Petiole d'Or award. A petiole is a type of stem which commonly appears on the sorting table when we machine harvest. It's sort of the most important thing to remove from the table. The trophy is a stone that looks like an isosceles triangle that goes about an inch deep with relatively straight edges on the other three sides. The stone is painted black/purple and has a single petiole (that I actually pulled off the sorting table this year) affixed in the center. The petiole is shaped like a check mark and it is painted a glittery metallic gold.

So I was googling O'Vineyards too see what was what. This is something I do every couple of months because it's good to know what is being said and it's important to make sure the Internet is working for you.

Today, a new result appeared at the very end of the search results (page 7 of the results for "o'vineyards").

"Celeberty Look A Like Porn - Porn Celeberty Videos - Free ..."
Color me intrigued. What pray tell is the verbal excerpt that flagged this site as o'vineyards-related?

"And now, position me, O vineyards that reappear your grenades on Mays, how fire was thrown upon the mats of the Kissin After this, the baci still redoubling ..." That is poetry.

If you wanna see you sum celeberties, you've come to the right vineyards. How fire was thrown upon the mats of the Kissin after this! The Baci still redoubling!

Today was the last day of harvest, and I crashed. We have been down to a skeleton crew of people camping out on the vineyard for a week and some. These people and I had a lot of fun. A few of them were set to leave yesterday and so yesterday felt very much like the end. Sometimes, when you're really into something, you can work and work without noticing how much you're tiring out. And then once it feels like it's over, you can crash and burn and get sick. Well, it felt over, so today I was burnt out. Also, it's a little sad losing one of my few French friends to the scholarly rentree. And last but not least, I drank too much on Saturday night. All these equal a very exhausting last day.

Tomorrow is cleanup which should be a little fun and breezy compared to the bitch that is harvest. Within a week, we'll probably be working on decuvage and all sorts of winey stuff. My parents are leaving town which makes me stuck at the vineyard for a while. Sorry, Tampa. I guess you'll just have to be added to the long list of people who will not see me for a while. On the bright side, maybe I won't be unbearably lonely in France anymore now that I know some kids my age!

Furthermore, what the fuck is up with being crazy? I really like the moon. I spend a lot of time looking at the sky now. And sometimes I wake up and I have to go outside and just wait outside.

Harvest continues. Machine harvest days are gruesome 10 hour struggles of sorting deshelled snail sludge and other creepy critters out of an ambiguous black mass of grapes trudging down a vibrating table in a pile thick enough to hide wasps where your fingers have to go. But after all that work, we all took an hour or two break before meeting up at the vineyard again and barbecuing in a wheelbarrow. And every time the wind changed directions we'd move the fire so it wasn't blowing smoke at us.

It's a good team. There one person I like in particular, but it's hard to actually hang out with people after you've already been together for like 12+ hours that day. Sunday is much needed rest and catch up.

Two days ago, I woke up at 5 AM and I had this urge to go outside (which is crazy because it was really, very cold outside). I got dressed and walked out and there was a full moon. There was a brilliant rainbow halo around the moon the likes of which I've never seen. I understand that moonbows are exceptionally rare because the sun's light isn't usually strong enough to make visible prism after it's reflected off the moon. The moon's rainbow halo was beautiful. I just sat there and stared at it, Orion to the left and the Big Dipper to the right. It's so strange to be able to see distinct constellations and not just light pollution. I think of the moonbow a lot.

Yesterday was the sort of day when magic things happen. An extended set of street theater, painting suitcases with my fingers, discovering that Fellini made a comic once, and Stephen Fry is blogging (about smart phones).

It was hard to tell when a show was beginning because everybody was a little strangely dressed and a few strangely dressed fellows emerging from a crowd and shouting at each other in French could easily pass for a normal occurrence. Oh, but that man is climbing the facade of a building. And all these women leaning out their windows to watch: they are part of the show as well. This man climbs the old crumbling bricks of a narrow village street, the walls bent with age, the shutters hardly supporting his weight. In such a romantic scene, he delivers flowers and lightly playful kisses to all his ladies in waiting, straddling anachronistic wrong way signs and trying not to tug too hard on any satellite or cable wiring.

Then it's off and we're waiting at the beginning of a parade route where a man is sloppily dressed as a copper. He blows his whistle and stops traffic, asking cars to park, telling them they're not close enough to the curb, and then shouting that they are parked in a no parking space! before waving them on their route. These poor folks, none the wiser, drive away from Alzonne never realizing that there was a performance that day or that they were part of it. Just some disheveled, probably drunk gendarme. And then it's the parade, and we march up and down the cordoned off streets of the town, towing suitcases that we were handed. We say goodbye to the monotony of sedentary French villages, industry jobs and dried up farms. It's like a Disney ride with no track, little regard for liability insurance law, and a message of hatred for the establishment. Children giggle in glee at every curse word and dropped suitcase. Take your things! We need nothing, but we could sure use socks and underwear! And their shouts ring true as they mingle with the peculiar odor of French B.O., heavy in the air.

Then I painted a suitcase with my fingers.