A recent meeting with colleagues over at the West End Tap & Kitchen gave us an excuse to sample the house cheese board along with some indigenous IPA.
We made quick work of this, and a few other libations. In the wildly popular Ingalls St. complex, next to a long line of great micro wineries.
Mystery and Wonder fills the UCSC Recital Hall this coming Saturday as the Concert Choir performs a cappella motets from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Included in this program of mystically-inflected music are avant garde 20th century chants and antiphonies from Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener and Arvo Paert. Monteverdi’s Baroque classic Magnificat Secondo, the neo-Romantic O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen, and its Renaissance counterpart by Tomas Luis de Victoria are also on the program of haunting harmonies and unusual chromatics.
Conducted by Nathaniel Berman, performed by the UCSC Concert Choir. 7:30pm Sat. Dec. 7, Music Center Recital Hall. For info and tix.
Also this weekend, the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus directed by Cheryl Anderson, will perform Bach’s Magnificat and other gorgeous music of the season, Friday and Sat, 9pm, and Sunday Dec. 8 at 4pm. @ Holy Cross Church.
Or not. But by any name the delicate, luscious Muscat Canelli from Birichino is an enlightened way to end a meal, holiday or any day.Think honeysuckle, clementines, and perhaps a hint of apricot. Mostly a captivating dessert wine that far exceeds that description.
Thirteen percent alcohol, eighteen dollars. Available at Soif, and other fine wine retailers.
Third generation winemaker Andre Beauregard has hit his stride with a new 2012 bottling called Monarch. A blend of grenache, syrah, and cabernet sauvignon, the appealing medium-body red wine weighs in at an easy access 13.9% alcohol, and a very appealing $14.99 pricetag.
Perfectly made to partner with food, Monarch offers up an abundance of raspberry and spice, on a firm yet pliant backbone of light tannins. If you’re looking for holiday table wine, your search might just be over. Even better the second day—yes it IS true that letting wines breathe is key to unlocking fuller flavors and nuances—Monarch is the latest wine to bear the feisty red and gold West Cliff Wines label. Available at Shoppers, of course.
How might it look and feel to have lost all personal freedom? To be completely at the mercy, and whim, of another human being? This question forms the cinematic subject of 12 Years a Slave. The answer is not pretty. It’s not even bearable. British art film director Steve McQueen takes it on nonetheless.
And to be sure the film succeeds in offering up horrific scenes of how it—slavery in the American south circa 1850— very likely was. Hollywood’s down-home stereotypes of the happy dark folk and the benevolent massah are blown to smithereens. The film fails however, despite its insistently right-minded efforts. The repeated scenes of brutality inflicted upon the helpless slaves ultimately deaden the very consciences they are intended to arouse (recall your response to the scenes of Christ at the hands of the Romans in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ).
12 Years a Slave rests almost entirely on the sturdy shoulders and despairing face of Chiwetel Ejiofor, an actor of clear gifts and appealing presence who simply isn’t (more…)
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.