When Giotto revolutionized the world with his take on perspective, the established art milieu didn’t swoon, it gasped. They had never seen pictures in that light with those angels and in the foreshortened view he was championing.
And then, the art (and the nonsecular) world took notice and saw that this development would enhance its causes and present new opportunities to tell stories, to bring more souls into the fold and voilà, the world didn’t end. It just pivoted and moved on.
When I was a university student in Silicon Valley, teachers alerted me to the revolution of information that we were in, and the abyss we might be staring into. A Zen-like koan that moved through the circles I inhabited in California in those years went something like this: “Nothing above me, nothing below me, so I leap off.” So many of the popular thought leaders of the time, from Alan Watts to Bucky Fuller, jammed us into the small Mission church at Santa Clara and fed us with their ideas and words. Nearby Stanford and Berkeley added to the foment of the times with the never-ending mantra of “change, change, change.” Writers like Marshall McCluhan, Robert de Ropp, Hunter Thompson and Alvin Toffler crammed our unformed brains with notions of fundamental shifts in the world we came up in, with no end in sight to the convulsions we would face in a lifetime. A lifetime later, they were prescient in that, indeed, a lot of shit went down.
Back to that hill.
In the 20 years I have been writing on this blog, I’ve covered a lot of territory with regard to Italian wine. So much so, in fact, I often refer back to what I wrote years ago, as I have forgotten it. That too much information thing, with limited storage in a repository that is shrinking daily and heading off the cliff, eventually. I’m not ready to leap, nothing to worry about there. But I have thought about the many perturbations that are incurring the ire of those in wine writing circles. It seems like folks are planting their flag every day on a new hill to die upon. And like groundhog day, the next week or month, they’re back up and running, full mast in arms, ready to do battle again. Cue the bugles! It’s gotten a little like wrestling - which is real and which is simply more of the performative slop we are exposed to in the wine world and the greater beyond?
“During this lamentable period, a new industry arose which contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind. The idolatrous mob demanded an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature—that is perfectly understood.”
<!--[if gte mso 9]>Written in 1859 by poet and essayist, Charles Baudelaire, about photography and it’s incursion into the art world, it could as easily refer to AI in these times and the concern people have with it’s ability to usurp the established norms so many have grown comfortable with. But as my teachers repeated, over and over, 50 years ago, the curtain long ago was pulled back, and not only are we not in Kansas anymore, but this Brave New World is the de facto default world now.
Which hill will I choose to die on? Well, it ain’t on the natural wine hill. Or the over-barriqued one. It isn’t the “AI isn’t real” one. It’s real. And right now, to many folks it’s real scary. But do I worry about an LLM taking my writing gig from me? I do not. And an LLM isn’t going to harvest the 50 lbs. of Hoja Santa ready to harvest in my back yard, pesticide-free by the way (*cueing up virtue signaling*). As far as photography goes, I do find some of the LLMs to be interesting adjuncts to digital photography, much in the way all my darkroom tools helped me when I printed analog photos. And yes, like selenium toner and dodging tools, too much of anything can spoil the final result. In the end, from my perspective, what one creates, whether it is with augmentation or not, must be judged on the quality of the final product. Now, if the judges cannot tell if something, written or produced, is natural or made for the masses by the masses, that might be a hill worthy of a fight, for someone. But that isn’t my fight. Or so my little dog Rocco informs me, as he pulls me out the door with his leash for another walk around the block.
Today’s lagniappe of sorts.
I am the grocery shopper in the house, for the humans. One of my stops is the nearby Aldi, which is small and one can get in and out of quickly. During my last stop there I came upon a 2025 Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc for $5.99 and I had to try it. I like SB and with the temps here hovering in the 100°F for weeks now, a crisp, cool white always sounds good. I took this home, put a real good chill on it and let ‘er rip.
What I found was a relatively well-made wine – fresh, not sweet, but with a good layer of fruit. Dry – yes. Spicy? Un po. Decent balance, texture was not bad for a $6 wine. Nothing odd or off-putting in the finish. Not great, but I’ve been spoiled lately by a Verdicchio I have been enjoying and contemplating as my much more affordable (at $25 – 4 times the price of the Napa Valley SB) alternative to the Puligny-Montrachet I can no longer access because it is now 8x the cost of that Verdicchio (and 33x that of the NP SB, but now we’re into “apples and oranges” territory).
The good news? That NP SB for $5.99 is years better than the SB’s from Napa Valley when I was selling them in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s. So, that is progress, of a sort. My question is: How in hell did it go through all the channels to arrive at my local Aldi for $5.99? If we be slouching towards Bethlehem, what does this mean?
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