Daily Archives: December 22, 2021

Purity, sweetness and entrancing textures: the prized virtues of mature Scottish grain whiskies.

At their best, aged in good quality American oak casks, brimming with vanilla and echoing rich pastry cream on the finish, grain whiskies are amongst the most delicious whiskies in the world.

They are the perfect whiskies to name...Hedonism.

Hedonism will always be lush, soft and creamy but each year we use different whiskies, in different combinations, to achieve this. To learn what exactly is in your bottle of Hedonism, click the RECIPE & FACTSHEET download link below and check the code on the back label.

The inspiration behind our whisky HEDONISM is just that pleasure, enjoyment, a celebration of that ideal marriage between distilled spirit and high quality oak maturation.

The aromas and flavours hint of vanilla, caramel, a delicate fruitiness, accented by flashes of coconut in the finish.

This is a whisky that will appeal to both the ardent whisky enthusiast and newcomers to whisky alike.

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Compass Box Whisky - Whiskies - Hedonism

The National Gallery in London's exhibition Poussin and the Dance (until 3 January)the UKs first significant show of the 17th century French painter for nearly 30 yearsclaims to reveal a new fun-loving side to this most erudite of artists artists. But while many of the paintings on show feature Dionysian revels and Bacchanalian cavortings, these shenanigans of gods and mortals are organised with a meticulous precision that seems the opposite of exuberant abandon.

A more hedonistic sensuousness is to be found in the stunning antique pieces which have been juxtaposed with the paintings inspired by them, most notably two vast marble vases from the first century CE: the Salpion of Athens, on loan from the archeological museum in Naples and the so-called Borghese Vase loaned by the Louvre. These are adorned with friezes of sensuously carved nymphs, satyrs and maenads who, several centuries later, crop up rather more clinically in Poussins compositions.

Poussin's Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term (1632-3). Courtesy of National Gallery, London

But while we might admire Poussins carefully choreographed frolickings, or appreciate the more ancient renderings of flesh into stone, its also impossible to ignore the dark side to all this mythical merrymaking and figurative grappling, where female flesh is served up in abundance and hedonism so often tips into orgy, abduction and rape.

Of course these old- masterly conundrums play out way beyond Poussin and the Dance and run throughout the entire National Galleryand indeed every museum in the Western world. Before so many of art historys greatest hits we now have to negotiate uncomfortably mixed feelings as painterly brilliance and sculptural gorgeousness distracts from what is actually being depicted, and the circumstances and value systems that shaped their form and content.

Performance of Florence Peake's Factual Actual (2021). Courtesy of Florence Peake

It was therefore an utter joy to see these vexed issues getting a robustly irreverent seeing-to in Florence Peakes Factual Actual (2021), a live work which involved striking and unexpected physical encounters between paintings, performers, and audience members. This multilayered performance took place upstairs from the Poussin show, in a gallery that, deliciously, was directly adjacent to Velazquezs Rokeby Venus (1647-1651). Here five dancers interacted with four giant vivid canvases painted by Peake, which were first suspended from the ceiling before being winched down to the floor to be dragged, crumpled, propped and used to cover, hide and house the performers.

Liberated from their gold frames, these giant lumps of cloth, which Peale had emblazoned with colossal tumbling multi-gendered figures bearing all manner of body parts, became further reanimated as active participants in the piece. No longer passive objects of veneration, the paintings took on a new role, getting down and dirty with the dancers and even, at one point, having their surfaces bumped and scratched with a microphone to form an aural backdrop to the action.

Here, despite being at the heart of the National Gallery and in close proximity to so many precious and revered masteryes masterpieces, nothing was sacrosanct: not even the audience, which often became engulfed in, or touched by, all the swooshing canvas-action. At times spectators were even forced to budge up to make room for one particularly disquieting performer, an impassive adorned and slightly sinister paint deity, covered Samurai-style in vivid scale-like armoured plates of painted canvas.

Factual Actual is part of Dance to the Music of Our Time, a programme of live works commissioned by National Gallery curator Priyesh Mistry in response to their Poussin exhibition. The other artists exploring assumptions around art history and messing with the canon are Hetain Patel, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo and all of their performances as well as Factual Actual can now be viewed here.

Dance to the Music of Our Time is one of the many inventive initiatives take by the National Gallery in recent years to involve contemporary artists in its collection, with Kehinde Whileys exhibition The Prelude (until 18 April), a reclaiming and reframing of the sublime landscape tradition, another notable example.

More historic highlights include Michael Landys animatronic Saints Alive in 2013, Chris Ofilis 2017 Weaving Magic tapestry and wall paintings and George Shaws deliciously glum landscapes in 2016. However despite the debunking challenges to the white male establishment made by many of above, as well as Peake and her performers, the fact that the National Gallery saw nothing amiss in its decision to blow up Poussins postcard size pen and ink Study for the Abduction of the Sabine Women (around 1633) to more than metres high as part of its Poussin-themed caf dcor shows that there is still much work to be done.

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Liberated from their frames, paintings snap, crackle and pop in Florence Peake's irreverent dance performance at National Gallery, London - Art...

Theres a bit of a musical theme to this years fizzy Christmas gifts. Veuve Clicquot has gone retro, packaging up its Brut NV in a box shaped like a cassette tape that can be personalised with a message (its also 100 per cent recyclable); Krug has collaborated with Belgian musician and 3D composer Ozark Henry on an immersive audio experience that will tell you the story of Krugs Grande Cuve 169me Edition while you sip it; while Dom Prignon and Lady Gaga, straining every sinew of their shared belief in absolute creative freedom, bring us a 2006 ros and 2010 blanc. And for lovers of the visual arts, theres David Shrigley characteristically deadpanning it on two paper second skin cases for Ruinart: choose between You can judge the bottle by the label and Each bottle is the same. Each bottle is different the wrappers are recyclable, but maybe dont just toss them in the bin...

Krug Grande Cuvee 169me Edition, with a QR code for an immersive binaural sound experience telling the wines story by 3D music pioneer Ozark Henry, 174,clos19.com

Veuve Clicquot Brut NV in a personalised 100 per cent recyclable cassette tape box, 59.99, selfridges.com

Dom Prignon x Lady Gaga Dom Perignon Rose Vintage 2006, 380, harrods.com

Ruinart Blanc de Blancs NV with a second skin label by artist David Shrigley, 76, clos19.com

Louis Roederer Cristal Ros Vinothque 2000, 2,000, hedonism.co.uk

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Five limited-edition champagnes for Santas stocking - Financial Times

December marked the passing of Robert Michael Nesmith and Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare two musicians whose names, Im pretty sure, will be unfamiliar to most readers. I never met either man, but both had, upon reflection, pretty profound impacts on my life.

Nesmith is best known as the tall, wool-cap wearing guitarist of The Monkees, the 1960s bubble-gum pop group. Four actors were hired for the gig, each one to fit a type: Nesmith was the quiet thoughtful guy. They were to play the role of musicians in a TV show that would re-create each week the manic insanity of the Beatles movie A Hard Days Night. The joke may have been on the producers. While the four were actors, they were also real musicians who quickly tired of being the public face of a manufactured band that had no say over their material.

They soon staged a coup, kicked out the musical mercenaries some of the top studio talent in LA and started writing, performing and producing their own songs. Despite starting out with more sales than the Beatles at their launch, The Monkees flamed out after two years and Nesmith moved on to more challenging projects.

He quickly formed another group, the First National Band, which while short lived, is credited with creating the country-rock sound that the Eagles used to fill stadiums and establish an image of blue-jean hedonism that remains the standard. (Nesmith probably didnt worry too much about the financial success: His mother invented Liquid Paper, a correction fluid for typewritten copy that became a staple of office life in the pre-computer era. She left him a $25 million inheritance.)

Nesmith is also credited with pretty much inventing the music video. There is a hilarious backstage MTV interview with Nesmith when he reunited with The Monkees for the first time in 20 years, joining the band for the encore after a 1986 performance. The interviewer is seemingly incredulous that he didnt join the band for the entire tour, and that he turned his back on the chance to go onstage every night. He pointed out that he had a (very successful) business to run and couldnt just drop everything for a 100-date tour, no matter how many screaming fans. His attitude that fame and adoring crowds arent everything is utterly foreign to the interviewer and she seems a bit flummoxed. As I think about it, its also pretty alien to our current culture.

The really funny part comes when she asked him about his business, a video production company called Pacific Arts Corporation. It is often credited with inventing the music video genre in other words, it pretty much spawned the entire industry within which she worked. In response to her question, Nesmith says, with a tone of bemusement, ask your bosses.

I didnt identify with Nesmith: He was the guitarist (I play drums), he was tall (Im not) and he wore a wool cap. But he was part of the group, and that is what he and the rest of The Monkees gave me: a powerful desire to be part of a band. I loved music before I heard The Monkees but they were the first group that I encountered watching them on TV and I wanted in on that action. It wasnt the fame, the money or the chicks (I wasnt even 10 then), but I craved the feeling of being on the inside as the rest of the world looked on. I didnt have to be in front being in the back had its own attractions but I wanted to be part of the group.

The camaraderie was always a big part of the attraction when I played music. I founded bands, joined groups that cycled through drummers, and was a hired gun for specific gigs, but the most important thing for me, regardless of the music and I played just about every genre was the degree to which I felt like I was part of the group. Watching The Monkees helped crystallize that desire and showed me what it meant to be part of something bigger than just me making noise, no matter how therapeutic it was to bang on the drums.

Robbie Shakespeare showed up in my life a decade later. He was a Jamaican bass player who teamed up with drummer Lowell Sly Dunbar to form Sly and Robbie, a rhythm duo that helped make reggae accessible to the world and transformed that genre in the process.

After the two men met in 1972 they were inseparable and indefatigable. Shakespeare once estimated that they had taken part in 200,000 recordings in one role or another, from musicians to producers. Their collaborations ranged from Bob Dylan to Peter Tosh. They are perhaps best known for their work with Grace Jones as disco raised its ugly head, but their rhythms defied easy categorization and they backed performers like Joe Cocker, Carly Simon and even Yoko Ono.

Sly and Robbie opened my ears to the possibilities in blending musical forms and styles. I had long been a fan of reggae, but it was, for me, a separate genre. Their ability to go into any studio and turn out something recognizable you can tell when they are playing without even seeing their names and simultaneously new was jaw-dropping. They had played with the hardest of the hard rockers in Jamaica, yet they could then go into a studio with Mick Jagger or Madonna and fuse their island-honed chops with the lead singers more traditional rock n roll inclinations. As one critic explained. Their whole career has been geared toward creating new stuff, what no one else had done before.

I saw Sly and Robbie a couple of times when they backed Black Uhuru, the group that they produced and whose 1983 album Anthem won them a Grammy. Dunbar had long been an inspiration, but I didnt appreciate the power of the partnership between drummer and bass player until I saw them perform. Good drummers are one thing, good bassists another; put them together as a single unit like those two, however, and its new musical territory.

I spent a lot of time trying to find my partner but it never happened. But they gave me a sense of what was possible and the fact that it remained beyond my reach may have been one of the frustrations that prompted me, like Nesmith, to move on from music.

I apologize to readers who have stuck with this contribution to this point: I dont have any profound insights, just a thank-you to two musicians who had an impact on my life that went well beyond the rhythms and the melodies. Funny, how music can do that.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions (Georgetown University Press, 2019). His musical ambitions remain unfulfilled.

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A fond farewell to two musical inspirations - The Japan Times

Penfolds has released a stellar line-up of reds and whites for holiday quaffing, says Des Houghton.

A tasting of two supremely glamourous superblends of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz was one of the highlights of my wine year.

Penfolds was in a creative mood designing both these experimental blockbusters to stand alongside its iconic Grange.

Penfolds 2018 802A Cabernet Shiraz (68% cabernet, 32% shiraz) was unashamedly bold said the firms chief winemaker Peter Gago. 802A components were aged separately in new American oak for 22 months prior to blending.

There are scents of cola and exotic spice leading to a palate of blood plum, fig and goji berries that add notes of cranberry and cherries.

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Penfolds 2018 802B Cabernet Shiraz (55% cabernet, 45% shiraz) was treated entirely differently with the components co-fermented in French oak for 19 months.

Scents of blackberry, spice and milk chocolate billow from the glass. Gagos tasting notes speak of a fruit-driven wine with a savoury demeanour; a textural dryness and a sprinkle of chocolate dust and sweet paprika.

The superblends were released in Adelaide alongside the 70th anniversary vintage of Grange.

The Grange ($950) may be this nations ultimate expression of hedonism, but there are more affordable options.

A personal favourite is Penfolds Bin 150 Marananga Shiraz 2019 ($99.99), an unashamedly old-fashioned Barossa shiraz with sweet, inky, juicy fruit with spicy oak and fine tannins.

Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2018 ($135) is a multi-regional blend and this is a superb vintage, effortless, and mouth-watering.

Penfolds Bin 28 Shiraz 2019 ($45) is another gutsy, old fashioned offering to be devoured by red meat lovers.

Some said Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2019 ($175) was the white wine of the year. Agreed. Its elegant and refined.

On the nose Yattarna delivers a wet stone minerality. On the palate there are citrus, white peach, pear and nectarine flavours. While Yattarna is a multi-regional blend the Penfolds Reserve Bin A Chardonnay 2020 ($125) is solely from Adelaide Hills fruit.

Bin A is more ostentatious. It and the Yattarna will improve with age. There was more peach and nectarine on the palate and a talc and chalk minerality in Penfolds Bin 311 Chardonnay 2020 ($50).

Schroeter and his team were also responsible for the Penfolds Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling ($40). Cool fermentation and early bottling preserve the fruit quality. Bin 51 smells vaguely of lemon curd, honey and poached pears, and delivers attractive lime and barley water flavours..

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Penfolds releases glamorous holiday line up of red and white wines - Sky News Australia

What explains the lasting wonderment of French rococo, the theatrically frivolous, flauntingly costly mode in art, ceramics, furniture, dcor, and fashion that flourished in mid-eighteenth-century aristocratic circles before, having gradually given way to sober neoclassicism, being squelched utterly by the Revolution of 1789? And why did that bedazzling visual repertoire recur in twentieth-century America as a species of imitation artkitsch, in a word, although managed with undoubtable geniusin animated films branded by Walt Disney? Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, a fun show at the Metropolitan Museum, answers the question by conjoining the pleasures of authentically froufrou historical objects, mostly from the museums collection, with their styles application in production drawings and video clips from Disney movies. The films include an early short, from 1934, called The China Shop, in which porcelain figurines have come to life and are prettily dancing minuets; two classics of the nineteen-fifties, Cinderella, released at the beginning of the decade, and Sleeping Beauty, which came out at the end of it; and, forming the pice de rsistance, an extravaganza in which atavistic pottery and candlesticks and clocks athletically celebrate a romance for their owner in Beauty and the Beast, from 1991.

Walt Disney himself had admired the look from early onas witness amateur footage in the show of him with his family prowling Versailles in 1935and he came, shrewdly, to grasp its viability for his coming revolution in popular culture. At the age of twenty, in 1922, Disney had founded a studio called Laugh-O-Gram Films, in Kansas City, with aid from the artist Ub Iwerks. It soon went bankrupt. Within a year, he started up again in Los Angeles. Brief comic animations that came to star Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in 1928, and the growing cast of the amiable rodents animal pals delighted moviegoers worldwide. But Disney aspired beyond that rudimentary success and began to produce feature-length narratives of folklore provenance, often with grippingly sinister elements. I believe that his breakthrough in this regard, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was the first movie I ever saw. I was told that I screamed at the first appearance of the witch-queen and kept it up until my removal from the theatre. (And dont get me started on the trauma, shared with other former tykes of my generation, of the killed-off mother in Bambi, from my birth year of 1942.) The Germanic source and pictured artifacts of Snow White would eventually be displaced by more reassuring enchantments of French origin, with an instinct that was sagely politic.

Disney steered his studio to exploit rococos gratuitous swank, emulating the feckless hedonism of the court of LouisXV while chastely suppressing its frequent eroticism. The language of antic curlicues, increasingly abstracted from film to film, blended smoothly into the insouciance of Disneys fairyland fantasies: escapist worlds, complete in themselves. Though thoroughly secular, like his nostalgic evocations of circa-1900 America, the pastiche has something churchy about it. Under the pretense of entertaining children (if childless, borrow one), I have enjoyed visits to the consummately engineered Disneyland and Walt Disney World while noting a peculiar solemnity in their transports of innocence. The impunity of a justly doomed French regime (not our problem!) translated perfectly to fabricated realms that are carefully alien to anyones troubling reality. Cinderellas castle, at Disney World, is modelled on Versailles, among other French chteaux. Centering Disneyland is a materialization of a related, crowning folly, the mad German king Ludwig IIs fantastical Neuschwanstein Castle (1868-92), which Disney adopted as the template for his studios logo. Nightly, Tinker Bell descends on a wire from its peak.

The Met show is replete with demonstrations of wizardly animation techniques, pre-digitally antique now, that take a viewer from sketch to cel to excerpted film. Notably transfixing is a pencilled sequence of the Beasts physical transformationairborne, cyclonic, a claw becoming a handinto a dashing prince in the 1991 movie. But the keynote is industrial. A few eccentricities briefly beguiled Disney, such as gloomily stylized settings for Sleeping Beauty, by one Eyvind Earle, which distressed some fellow-animators with backgrounds that distracted from their characters. More typically, Disney subsumed the talents of his crews within uniformly anodyne schemas, where they register, if at all, like bumps under a blanket.

The sameness of calculation wearies after a while. This redounds to the comparative advantage of such juxtaposed French authenticities as a Svres vase, made in 1758, with handles in the shape of elephant heads. Sconces make a very big deal of hoisting candles aloft, and furniture hardware ennobles the act of opening drawers. In no milieu before or since have accoutrements of daily life, for those who could glory in affording them, been so systemically saturated with beauty. Rococo design complemented figurative, architectural, and vegetal allusions with gorgeously lapidary patterning, slipping between representation and abstraction in ways that, as we experience them, are a joy forever.

Stylistic excess, wretched or otherwise, comes and goes in art history, almost always in periods of complacent political stability. This is no paradox. Worldly crisis tends to foster disciplined expression. Relative tranquillity tasks artists with reminding people, for their amusement, if not as a moral caution, of the ineluctable chaos of human nature. The show, as organized by Wolf Burchard, who oversees British decorative art at the museum, adduces prior examples of determinedly over-the-top seductiveness as old as an early-sixteenth-century, amorous tapestry, Shepherd and Shepherdess Making Music, that was probably designed in France and woven in the southern Netherlands. Disney and his staff funnelled centuries of serious artistic precedent into their rote stylings. Flowing out, the results wereand remainfleetingly delectable mush.

Before seeing the show, Id had misgivings about the august Mets hosting of what boded to be cynically corny corporate artifice. These faded, so engaging is the installationand far be it from me to snoot a dreamy concept rendering, by the designer Mary Blair, of Cinderellas pumpkin carriagebut the qualms reinfected me in the end. While we have grown used to crossovers of high and low in contemporary taste, the difference isnt meaningless when any use of the past not only sterilizes its original import but makes a fetish of doing so. The payoff is diverting and may seem funny. But it lacks fundamental humor, which cant do without at least a whisper of irony. We arent party to the Disney creative sorcery but only passive consumers of it. More humanly complex long-form animation arrived with the ongoing triumphs of Pixar, which the Walt Disney Company had the timely wit, in 2006, to acquire from Steve Jobs as a subsidiary.

How come I had never before now heard of the commercial poster designer E.McKnight Kauffer, the subject of a startlingly spectacular show, Underground Modernist, at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum? I guess its because Im used to tracking raids by art on popular culture but less so the other way around. Kauffer, who died in 1954, was a magus of boundless resourcefulness in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. With assistance from his second wife, MarionV. Dorn, a master of fabric design who survived him by ten years, he minedand evangelized foradventurous aesthetics to change the street-level look of cities, invigorate book-cover design, and inflect theatre sets and interior decoration. He insisted on working directly with clients, intent on persuading them to take risks in far-out geometric and surreally contorted imagery. His influence proved so infectious that it was swallowed up by successive generations in a profession whose manufacture is inherently ephemeral.

Starting as a restless lad from Montana, where he was born, in 1890, the then named Edward Kauffer spent his childhood in Evansville, Indiana. He dropped out of school at twelve or thirteen with aspirations to paint and, while still a teen-ager, went West, working odd jobsbouncing from a travelling theatre company to a fruit ranch. Then, in San Francisco, he began an education in advanced art while working at a bookstore. His work caught the attention of a regular customer, JosephE. McKnight, who so believed in Kauffers abilities that he offered to sponsor the young artists studies in Paris. Kauffer altered his name in homage to his benefactor. He furthered his schooling in Chicago (where he was exposed to the avant-garde marvels of the 1913 Armory Show, after its New York unveiling), and then Munich, before arriving in Paris. Based in England from 1915 to 1940, he became a live-wire cosmopolitan. A vast chart spanning a wall of the Cooper Hewitt show amounts to a name-drop constellation, with lines of association that radiate from a portrayal of his handsome face to the likes of, among other starry personages, Alfred Hitchcock, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and Sir Kenneth Clark.

Another factor obscuring Kauffers reputation is his practically exotic integrity, public-spirited in service to civic and political causes and holding that a proper designer must remain an artist. Working mainly with small agencies, though winning commissions including the creation of some hundred and twenty-five posters for the London Underground, he denounced, in a lecture at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art in 1948, the recourse of the dominant firms to the usual methods of appeal through sex, snobbism, fear and corruptive sentimentality. Never settling on a signature style, he said that his criteria for posters were attraction, interest, and stimulation, deeming no means too arbitrary or too classicalApollonian values.

Moving with Dorn to New York in 1940, he had intermittent success with campaigns for such businesses as American Airlines and with distinctive cover designs for modern classics published by AlfredA. Knopf, Random House, and Pantheon, including James Joyces Ulysses (the fat white U and the skinny blue l, both radically elongated, seize attention) and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (a shadowed face crossed by white lines and granted one staring eye). But he suffered declines in both his health and his productiveness. He never felt at home in his native land, he said. Sorely missing his overseas friends, estranged from Dorn, and alcoholic, he came to a sad end. Even then, his prestige among colleagues who had known his work lived on long afterward. You will see why if you attend this show.

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When Pop Culture Raids Artand the Reverse - The New Yorker