Bad Beer

Proust had his madeleine and I have the bad beer of my youth. In his case it was the taste of a fragment of buttery madeleine soaked in tea that evoked a forgotten memory. Luckily I didn’t have to taste any of the aforesaid bad beers since they mostly disappeared several decades ago. It was an article (you may have to endure an ad) in Salon.com that triggered my memories.

It turns out that with the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgians, Pabst is the largest American owned brewing conglomerate. According to the article they’ve also acquired many of the national and regional cheap beers and, if they don’t retire them, they keep the label and fill the bottles with something made by Pabst.

The only Western New York label they mentioned in the article was Genesee Cream Ale but it got me thinking about driving up a two lane highway, maybe an hour outside of Buffalo, heading to graduate school in that city in 1968, and seeing a weathered sign for Topper Beer, with the silhouette of a dapper gent in a top hat. I’d never heard of it but it seemed to announce that I was in new territory now. I really had left the Washington D.C. area where I had spent my life so far.

America at one time had hundreds of brands of beer but by the late 1960s they had mostly disappeared, victims of their inability to compete with the big national brands. Of course they really didn’t have much of a basis for competing since all American beer tasted pretty much the same, except for some that tasted particularly bad. American beer was a universal anodyne lager and the national brands had more money for advertising to push their imaginary unique qualities.

When I got to Buffalo I found that Topper was not generally available (it was actually a Rochester beer) except on tap at a particularly low dive on Allen St. that was briefly popular with grad students from the English Department I was part of. I’ve forgotten the name of the bar and the beer tasted like all the others. Iroquois Beer was local but wasn’t very good and the label featured a painting of a Native American wearing the war bonnet of the Plains Indians, which had nothing to do with the Iroquois.

A friend and I took up Stroh’s. It was made in Detroit and, in an effort to get it into the Buffalo market, was selling for 99 cents a six-pack. Plus it was “fire brewed”, although if that process added anything extra to the taste of the beer, I could not detect it. We did discover a great selling point with a select audience, but societal prejudice would have kept the brewery from advertising it. After taking acid that was far too powerful, out in the wonderfully named Zoar Valley, the same friend and I made a hallucinatory and dangerous trip back to Buffalo and, lacking Thorazine©, drank a ridiculous amount of Stroh’s. It smoothed out the rough edges and brought us back to “normal” reality.

Even back then I really liked the idea of regional beer, beer rooted in the history of a place. Maybe at one time the various beers of America did taste very different from region to region but refrigeration and industrial methods had robbed them of any uniqueness. A decade later I made it to San Francisco and tasted Anchor Steam. It didn’t taste like anything else. Within a few years it was joined by other beers from small regional breweries.

Today we have battalions of artisanal beer and, although they probably represent a tiny fraction of the beer sales in this country which is still dominated by the horsemen of the “Lite” brewing apocalypse, many are delicious and they don’t taste like each other. Bravo!

The logo below doesn’t really equal my vision on that country road but I thank this web site for it.

Lola Montez

When I watched Max Ophuls’ “Lola Montez” (1955), I was delighted to find a shout-out from the 1950s to my adopted city of San Francisco. There’s a scene where the ringmaster of an American circus (Peter Ustinov) offers Lola Montez (Martine Carol) a job as the main attraction---a sort of freak/fetish object whose scandalous life story will titillate the audience. In listing his own résumé the ringmaster mentions that he found the three headed woman for Barnum, booked the only elephant that could play the piano and, in New York, filled the house for four weeks with the anarchists who killed the Sultan of Turkey. In San Francisco the run was five and a half weeks. Bravo! We’ve had our reputation for a long time.

Speaking of reputation, the film has a good one with many critics and I was primed to like it, but ended up enjoying it more as an introduction to the historical Lola Montez than as a work of art. The central conceit of the film is that Lola has finally taken the job with the circus and we cut between the big top show that tells the story of her life and the actual scenes of it. This framing device is interesting initially but increasingly serves to distance the viewer from the material. It doesn’t help that Martine Carol is not a good actress. I wanted to be moved by the material but was just occasionally amused.

The film is an odd mixture of the modern and the old fashioned. Ophuls’ cynicism about human beings oozes out of every frame, resonating strongly in these degenerate times. He also shows a feminist understanding of how Lola’s beauty and fearless pursuit of sexual affairs fascinates society at the same time that it causes it to want to destroy her. In the final scene of the film Lola kneels in a decorated cage with her hands through the bars, so that two lines of men can file by and kiss them, having paid a dollar for the privilege.

On the other hand, the story telling in the vignettes that make up the tale seems a bit musty. It has a whiff of Ruritania or “The Student Prince” about it. Of course a supporter could argue that this is completely appropriate given her affaire with Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.

The film is finally more fun to think about afterwards than it was to watch but does make me want to see some other of Ophuls’ works. As I said before, it also got me interested in the real woman. I can recommend the Wikipedia article on her. Did you know the only house she ever owned was in Grass Valley, CA?

Decalogue 5

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Decalogue” is a remarkable collection of odd shaped objects. Madame Le Chef and I have watched the first six commandments and they are not a walk in the park, unless it’s a park that’s dark, rundown, confusing, sad, but also very beautiful.

I choose to talk about Decalogue 5 (Thou shall not kill) because it concerns a murder and the execution of the murderer and seems the most straightforward of the episodes. It’s clearly against capital punishment---it’s hardly happenstance that both the murder and the execution are initially botched strangulations. But we wouldn’t expect Kieslowski to make a tidy polemic and, of course, he doesn’t. Yes it’s crime and then punishment but what about the communion picture of the little girl, the mean cab driver, the dog, the sandwich, the other half of the sandwich? He leads us all over the place between beginning and ending with the young defense attorney.

I’ve mentioned before that I have nothing against beautiful messes but this episode is not really a mess. Instead it’s a crafty puzzle that never answers all your questions. The cinematography is beautiful. It tends towards sepia but also has an overexposed look in some exteriors that is reminiscent of Carl Dreyer’s “Vampyr”. The acting is excellent as usual with Kieslowski. The more of his stuff I see, the sadder I am that he died at 54.

Lust, Caution

When I was an undergraduate in Washington D.C., during the Johnson Administration, the Circle Theater had an Ingmar Bergman Festival that ran for several days. I remember cutting classes to go to double and triple features of that great director’s films in hopes of seeing Harriet Andersson naked or Bibi Andersson naked or any other actress, named Andersson or not, naked. Such delights were still a few years away in mainstream American movies. Amazingly enough, I absorbed bits of Bergman’s cinematic vision along with visions of the glorious Anderssons, and my interest in foreign films began.

Sex in non-pornographic movies is problematic. You risk taking the viewer out of the narrative and into contemplating an actor or actress’s normally covered bits. Ang Lee manages not to do this in “Lust, Caution”. The actors are naked and the sex is realistic enough that it got an “NC-17” rating from the MPAA (they’re particularly down on thrusting and there’s lots of that) but the sex is not arousing and it absolutely furthers the plot in a way that is rarely seen.

The film is set before and during WWII and is about a young woman (played by Wei Tang), an idealistic student supporter of the Chinese Nationalist Government, who takes on the task of becoming the mistress of an official (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) in the Chinese Collaborationist Government, a torturer and executioner, so that she can set up his assassination. She succeeds eventually in becoming his mistress but through watching their sex together and other aspects of their relationship we see the complications developing. No spoilers!

People who don’t like the film complain that it takes too long getting to the sex but I think the pace is necessary to build the tension. The rest of the cast is as good as the principal actors and the film is beautifully shot. I find it a minor masterpiece and wish that it had been seen by more people last year.

The San Francisco MOMA – August 7, 2008

We went down to see the Frida Kahlo show. She’s like Jack Daniel’s Whiskey, very popular but also very good. It was crowded but we are museum members and could walk in.

Over the years Madame Le Chef and I have seen several shows of her work, and her paintings reproduce well, so there were few revelations, although there was great pleasure, in seeing the actual pieces.

What was a revelation were some unfamiliar photos of her and Diego Rivera and a delightful home movie of them. There is a long tradition in Western Art of a court painter doing a portrait of some misshapen royal and making him or her look godlike. Frida Kahlo did the exact opposite thing to herself. In the photos and the home movie you see just what a beautiful woman she was but when she painted herself, she was unmerciful to every defect.

There were major revelations to be had on the same floor as her show. We had forgotten that there was a show of contemporary Chinese Art at the museum that was all from the Logan Collection. In this case it was very important to see the actual pieces, most of which are large.

There is a wonderful piece by Sui Jianguo that consists of a collection of several thousand brightly painted toy dinosaurs with a life-sized Chairman Mao asleep on top of them. It’s called “The Sleep of Reason” (shout-out to Goya). The same artist also has a large piece called “Made in China” out on the 4th Floor terrace, which is the only piece one can photograph and we did.

There are also a lot of very interesting paintings. Not everything is as Pop as the two pieces I’ve mentioned but there is very dark humor manifested in a lot of them.

I definitely recommend the show to any of my Bay Area readers.

I Am The Odd Shaped Object

The morning of July 3rd was cold and gray in Paris. I tucked in my canvas overshirt for warmth and put on my straw hat. We took the Metro to the Concorde station to change to the Number One line. As we walked through the connecting tunnel it occurred to me that the crowds were getting thicker and that I should move my wallet from the back pocket of my jeans to the front. I didn’t.

A train was pulling in as we arrived at the platform. Madame Le Chef was trailing slightly behind me in the crowd. I stepped onto the train. A short girl with black hair and a pink top suddenly stopped in front of me, blocking my way. I assumed she was unsure if she was on the right train. I had the impression she was a young teenager. I never saw her face.

She was violating the unspoken rule that one moves rapidly on and off the Metro. The trains do not normally linger in the station. I was trying to figure out how to get around her without pushing when she turned and left the car, just as the doors closed. I turned and found Madame Le Chef who immediately asked me if I had my wallet. I put my hand back. It was gone.

I felt sick as the train accelerated. It was a fait accompli. We got off at the next station, thought briefly of notifying the police and rejected that idea. We headed back to the apartment where I got on the phone and canceled my Credit and Debit cards. We were out over 120 Euro and my driver’s license, which meant that Madame Le Chef would be the chauffeur when we rented a car.

Since she was behind me, Madame Le Chef saw much more of the robbery although she did not realize at the time that that’s what it was. While the first girl blocked me, her identically sized confederate came up behind me. Madame saw her put one hand on my back but did not see her other hand pick my pocket. I never felt anything. The teenage Artful Dodgers exited the train with military precision.

Everyone I told the story to said, “Oh, Gypsies”. Apparently Les Gitanes have the franchise for petty thievery or, at least, are widely perceived as having it.

I realized in retrospect that the pintsized felons probably first noticed me because of my straw hat and then registered the wallet shape in my back pocket. Maybe I even sensed them watching me and that caused my inkling that I should move my wallet. As an American, everything has to be a learning experience, so the moral of this tale is: if you have an inkling, act on it. (Unless it’s an inkling telling you to take off all your clothes and start screaming about Earth’s imminent collision with an asteroid.)

The Myth of the Super-Pigeon

You may ask, who was promulgating this myth? I have to admit that it was me, le chef de bureau. The apartment in Montmartre that Madame Le Chef and I had rented in years past was not available and so we rented an apartment on one of Paris’s other (barely perceptible) hills, Montparnasse.

The apartment was in an architecturally dismal but actually comfortable 60s high-rise on the totally un-photogenic rue de Vaugirard (the longest street in Paris). The apartment was in the rear of the building and its small balcony overlooked a green courtyard that was enclosed by some other high-rises and by the tall brick wall of the Institut Pasteur. We could see the roofs of the 19th Century institute buildings above the wall.

A flock of pigeons occupied the top of the wall, the roofs of the institute and the vegetation of the courtyard. These were not your raggle-taggle everyday city pigeons, subsisting on a diet of used chewing gum and Snickers wrappers. No! These were huge, sleek, robust pigeons with white markings on their necks and wings. Their deep calls echoed between the buildings in the early morning and they apparently let none of their lesser pigeon brethren in their territory.

I didn’t know what they were but enjoyed speculating that they were a new evolutionary branch thrown up by Paris’s enormous pigeon population or, even more fun to speculate about, an experiment from the institute next door. The truth was simpler but still interesting.

At the end of our Paris visit we took a train to Tours, rented a car there and headed off for Chinon. As soon as we got out into the country, we began to see the “Super Pigeons” everywhere. It turns out that they are the Wood Pigeon (Columba Palumbus) and are a very numerous inhabitant of rural woods and fields in a large part of Europe. Of course the question remains as to why that flock in Paris abandoned their usual habitat and colonized that particular courtyard. I’m still entertaining the Institut Pasteur experiment theory.