I’ve been reading a book on heraldry in honor of the Basquiat show at BAM. I wanted to know more about crowns and what the various shapes of crowns mean… well actually I found the book in the street and it interested me because of JMB. You see a lot of crowns on bottles of red red wine.
The brain dead lady couldn’t eat the host yesterday. According to NPR, she could only have a little bit of wine. It’s the only sustenance she’s had in days… Sounds like a real Parisean.
For the Easter Feaster we had sustenance: little lambchops in a balsamic reduction… couldn’t be beat. The wine was a Chateau Talbot (maybe a bit young… but still a real journey in a glass).
One of the initial inspirations for omEGG was Wine. I started this about a year or six months before I even heard of Sideways… me and the Zeitgeist… but anyway I wanted to talk about culture and vitriculture… about Romans and roads and arenas and aquaducts… and mostly wine. If you are a Eropean, wine is your culture. Without it there is no reason to organize anything (this reminds me of Herzog in the South American jungle for Fitzcaraldo trying to organize the native extra’s booze… A Burden of Dreams for sure). There’s no farms, no towns, no cities, no armies, no nothing without the grape.
The other vibe was that omEGG is set in the spring after 911… I don’t know ’bout you all, but I got to taste some good wine that year. There was a whole lot of carpé diem: let’s drink today for tomorrow we die and those about to die salute you going on. I kept all these labels and used them for background plates in omEGG. It is a habit I started in Paris. Labels are such the illuminated text by themselves… they contain hyper information… codes and clues. For instance, both the Chateau Talbot and Pichon seem to be from dukedoms…
at least judging from crowns, but it says Comtesse… well its a book on British Hereldry for children. I’m just saying the crowns can be deciphered along with chateau and region and varietal and on and on. They are like Tarot cards, you have to know how to read them and be a wine geek, which I’m not… just a wino. Still, I like the idea of illuminated bottles and this is why I paint them for the holidays, or to commemorate something like the gates, or…
I did a lot of bottles after 911 (just to keep from drinking everything in the house while watching the news). A year later my better half and I drank them in honor of the dead. You can still see some empties in the window of Blanc et Rouge in dumbo.