Beer Friday: Where I am now the Zizek of Zymurgy

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There’s a lot embedded in this little one off rambling by Alan McLeod–a lot of stuff to chew on. And I keep going back to it over and over again. He wonders as prelude to the rambling he quotes from a comment left at another blog, whether there’s anything to what he has to say. And I think there is. Too much really.

What is the quality and nature of the craft brew movement, how is success defined, is there a pop cultural achievement separable from “achievement” in a broader sense? All fine questions. I think the one Iam most enamored of though is the the one near the end where he sort of mumbles into his glass whether any achievement at all is possible or is there just a constant moving of the goal posts, redefining the movement exogenously and end0genously of its ever-shifting cultural and historical context.

There’s something Foulcautian in there and once that happens future beer blogging will be full of questions like do beers (re)present their own styles? To what extent does a beer present not just its own style but act as criticisms of all beers preceding? To what extent is each beer a failure of itself, de-tasted before it’s ever tasted? Is it possible that each beer carries in it a nightmarish disassembling of its constituent parts, rendering all subsequent beer tasting meaningless? Is this the endgame of our always-misguided search for objective mouthfuls of truth where there were only ever effervescent dreams now corrupted by too much th(dr)inking?

Am I destined to be the beer world’s Samuel Beckett?

The Article Gladwell Should’ve Written; Non-Football Horrors

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You know a Serious Sports Issue is gaining momentum when ESPN acknowledges it. Like steroids before it, the relationship between football and debilitating brain injury is going to be examined – in detail, and maybe soon.

Malcolm Gladwell’s take on this material was not to my liking, so I’m glad that someone (ESPN Page 2′s Tim Keown) is taking a more direct tack.  It may not be the kind of writing that wins awards and prompts lots of furious blogging, but Keown deals simply and straight-forwardly with the obvious:

1. The long-term impact of playing football – at any level – is a more serious problem than we thought, and warrants in-depth examination.

2. We may be approaching a point that football as we know it becomes not viable or sustainable.  Maybe the future of football lies in some altered form (like without most special teams play, especially kickoff and punt returns, where many of the worst hits occur); maybe a sport recognizable as football has no future.

3. The NFL has a huge interest in controlling the damage done by this emerging story, and may be poised to become the next Phillip Morris or major league baseball.  They are commissioning a big study (results due years from now), the outcome of which we should probably take with a grain or two of salt.

If you have any interest in this subject, read Keown’s article, and keep an eye out for more journalism on the topic in the coming months and years.  Football may have to evolve to survive.  Or it may not survive.  The Colts fan and the alarmist humanist in me are at war.

–

This being Halloween month, and in fact Halloween week (October goes so quickly), I thought I’d append a lighter bit of content here at the end.  These are a handful of horror movies I recommend that are not exactly classics, but still worth your time.  So if you’ve exhausted the likes of “Halloween” and “Night of the Living Dead,” maybe you’d enjoy one of these.

~ Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. This movie was new to me when I popped in the Netflix disc a few nights ago – I’d heard the title for years but never had much interest for whatever reason.  It turned out to be an atmospheric, creepy, sort of surreal movie about a woman who may be going out of her mind (shades of “The Haunting” and “The Innocents”) or may be stalked by a female vampire and her town full of loony slaves (maybe “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by way of every Hammer Horror vampire pic).  Slow, not gory, but good.

~ The Deadly Spawn. I am of two minds about this no-budget creature feature.  On the one hand, the acting is abysmal, the non-monster scenes feel painfully long and pointless even though the movie is under 90 minutes long, and the visual style is non-existent.  On the other hand, the alien monsters (that emerged from a meteor in the opening scene, naturally – see also “Slither” and “The Blob”) are pretty cool, like a much more malevolent take on Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors”; the gore effects are surprisingly over the top; and the ending is both bleak and ridiculous.  If MS3TK ever did this movie it might have been their most enjoyable episode ever.

~ Teeth. A sort-of satire that got a lot of press on initial release because of its misogynist-or-maybe-uber-feminist premise: a girl who has a literal vagina dentata, and manages to remove the fingers and penises (penii?) of some overly aggressive suitors.  I wasn’t totally smitten with it despite a lot of good ideas, but my girlfriend dug it.  Worth checking out for anyone who liked “Ginger Snaps” or “May,” both of which I found similar in tone and substance.

~ Burnt Offerings. I am a haunted house movie freak; unfortunately most of them suck hard.  Apart from the aforementioned “Haunting” and “Innocents,” and a few other gems (“The Changeling,” “The Others,” and of course “Poltergeist”) this is a sub-genre that suffers more than is reasonable from non-sensical plots and indifferent writing.  “Burnt Offerings” is a good second-tier movie – maybe a notch below “The Changeling,” with Oliver Reed (he of “The Brood” fame) standing in for George C. Scott.  So basically, the same movie.  And might I add, the much-hyped “Paranormal Activity” is a pretty decent little haunting movie as well; I saw it twice and it’s a rung or two above “Blair Witch” for me.

The above are just the ones I’ve watched this month, but you may also like:

~ Carnival of Souls. Creepy and otherworldy B&W movie shot on a shoestring budget with amateur actors.  And better than I just made it sound.  This is another “is she cracking up or is something supernatural really happening” movie.

~ Slither. I just mentioned it above, but where’s the justice when this movie flops, while the entire “Saw” series and both “Hostel” movies rake in the dough?  I could give a crap about torture scenes – give me a horrible half-man, half-latex-tentacles monstrosity, and I am in.  “Slither” followed in the footsteps of venerable gore-and-prosthetics classics like “Re-animator,” “From Beyond,” and “Evil Dead II,” AND it has Nathan Fillion in it, dammit.

~ Tombs of the Blind Dead. The Knights Templar are blood-sucking zombies roaming the countryside on their zombie horses in slow motion looking for living prey.  In other words it’s a typically insane Euro horror “classic.”  I quite enjoyed this although honestly, I think out of all those Spanish and Italian horror movies of that vintage, only “Suspiria” is an undeniable masterpiece.

A Sunday at Schlafly Bottleworks

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Normally it’ s the summertime that interferes with the blogging. Late evening plans make for tardy mornings, long sunny afternoons strip fingers away from keyboards and lure them outside where they make much mischief with creepy-crawlies, gardens, and–at time–an athletic ball of some type (I would prefer the one known as “pigskin” in some circles but friends in the heartland tend toward the orange one known colloquially as “the rock.”)

But it’s been this Fall that’s seen me distracted beyond measure. Work has picked up substantially and nearly every weekend sees me going out of town for a minute or two. This weekend we went to St. Louis for a wedding and then spent basically all of Sunday at the Schlafly Bottleworks. I love Schlafly, and that’s that!

We sat there, the SLF and I for a good few hours watching the Indianapolis Colts at first underestimate and then thoroughly destroy the painfully awful St. Louis Rams while dejected Archians (is that what you call people from St. Louis?) sat in various states of fugue. Some, it seemed, did not even still recognize the be-purpled NFLers on the screen as “the football team from St. Louis” and for them they could not even explain the overwhelming sense of loss and sadness they felt. They were like all the characters at the end of Donnie Darko, waking up from a strange dream with unexplained tears running down their faces. Sad, really.

But good for me.

And also good for me was beer.

As with my last marathon session at the Bottleworks I was able to sample every beer on tap including an Old Ale commissioned for some wedding or other. The bride was in my tour group. The only thing on the board that I didn’t have was the No. 15, which I’ve had before and they were out of.

The SLF’s favorite beer was the Pumpkin Ale. In my opinion it’s a good beer, not necessarily a standout beer, but a solid performer. It had all the trademarks of a well-crafted pumpkin beer. A creamy body, rich reddish hue, a firm tawny head and all the major pumpkin pie notes in the aroma. Where Schlafly went right that so many others go wrong is that the pumpkin pie notes are heavy in the aroma but not so cloying in the actual flavor profile. Cloves, nutmeg, etc, tend to degrade in the boil adding astringency and changing flavor. Schlafly escaped these common errors and created a great holiday beer with just the right amount of  pumpkin pie flavor.

I thought the Coffee Stout was the standout beer. We’ve come a long way from the days when “coffee” was a note that could be discerned in certain very dark stouts with caramel heads. This beer, and I’m afraid this description will undersell it, tasted…like….coffee. Again, all the hallmarks of a great stout were present, color, tone, head, but the flavor profile was less complicated. Gone were the competing flavor values that one might seek out in a stout: nuts, chocolate, currants. Instead it was just coffee.  Normally I would be tempted to say that a beer that tastes this much like coffee is giving the imbiber a worst of both worlds scenario–coffee is good at being coffee with it’s own complexities that are more discernible at higher temperatures. And beer is really good at being beer with a good beer reflecting an artist’s sense of balance in tone and mood . Coffee is not particularly suited to being beer. But what can I say, I liked the Coffee Stout, a lot. It was very much like drinking an iced coffee. But it was also like drinking a wonderful, smooth, stout with a familiar roastiness, a hint of tart acidity around the edges of the tongue and a dry-ish finish. In other words, a great stout.

As always we had good too. Nachos and Pizza. Honestly, if you’re in St. Louis, you do yourself  a disservice by not spending some (a lot of ) time there.

Right where Southwest splits from Manchester. Get going, yo.

Emergency Beer Wednesday

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I was due to blog on this here… blog yesterday, and I failed in that mission.  To make it up to you and my magnanimous benefactor, Sir Porchy, I pass along this little gem.

Original video – drunkest guy ever goes for more beer.

What makes this worth your time – the silent movie remix of same.

Can’t blog

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I’m hiking  until (at least) Monday afternoon. And one of the porch’s co-bloggers is with me. Maybe Dale or J will step up once or twice in our absence, but if not I’ll be back to my regular blog production next week.

If I live. Southeastern Indiana isn’t friendly hiking for the faint of heart, y’know.

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