Bold? Brown? Robust?: Chocolate Lab Porter by Wisconsin Brewing Company

Ten years ago Carl Nolen was president of Middleton's Capital Brewery and he was quoted in an article in the Wisconsin State Journal about the brewery's perseverance and longevity, "I think one thing we can be real proud of is that we stuck to our roots. We started out as a German lager brewery and we've morphed into a traditional Wisconsin lager brewery."

A year or so later he decamped to Verona to found the Wisconsin Brewing Company and took Braumeister Kirby Nelson with him. Since the brewery was under construction, Kirby concocted his test batches at the Great Dane and Vintage Brewing. With the "traditional Wisconsin lager brewery" having given their very tasty Bavarian Lager the boot plus a hoppy cream ale and a beer called Hopbock having been introduced as late-tenure brews from Kirby at Capital, it wasn't totally surprising to discover that, in addition to an amber lager, a couple of IPAs were amongst the test brews. A porter rounded out the line-up.

While it was not surprising to see the IPAs here – this was, after all, the time of the IBU arms race when hopping beers to death with bitterness was all the rage – it was disheartening. My plea to WBC to not abandon us lager lovers on the questionnaire served along with the test brews proved to be a mainly quixotic skirmish in my Kulturkampf with hop fetishism.

But the amber lager was tasty as was the porter. It seems that in its test phase it was known as "Bold & Robust Porter" but became "Brown & Robust Porter" when it graduated to production at the brewery and was bottled. When WBC's marketing stratagem was changed to give their brews a more rural identity/use names that went beyond style descriptions, it became Chocolate Lab. And somewhere along the way, I'd swear it went from being an American porter to something more English.

Chocolate Lab is a lovely clear mahogany and my pour produced a small tan head that seemed content to stick around for an average length of time. The first hint that something unexpected was in my glass came when I took a whiff. A bit of malt sweetness and stone fruit – think plum – were the most prominent aromas followed by some roasty grain smells. And here I was awaiting a more intense roastiness steeped in coffee and dark chocolate aromas.

A medium fizz played well against a nice smoothness – are there oats in this stuff? Where I was expecting the almost fuliginous, bitter flavors of coffee and dark chocolate my tongue received moderate malt sweetness like caramel and milk chocolate. A modicum of grassy hop taste also provided a mild bitterness.

The hops took on a slightly spicy hue at the finish which boosted the bitterness a tad. This combined with the fizz made for a goodly dose of dryness.

I sure hope I am not hallucinating the changes to WBC's porter over the years. Otherwise I am going to feel foolish. Regardless, this is a very tasty beer. I appreciate its moderate sweetness, smooth chocolate flavor, and the grassy hop taste.

Junk food pairing: Chocolate Lab goes well with taco flavored Doritos – the kind in that ugly 70s bag.

If you have a hound with you, it can get in on the action with Porter's Biscuits, dog treats made with spent brewing grains from batches of Chocolate Lab.

The Corona Diaries Vol 12: Winter Cinema

March 2021

Spring just keeps creeping closer. Soon it will be the one-year anniversary of starting to work from home. Tempus fugit! I am eagerly awaiting the return of the robins and red-winged blackbirds. And any other migratory birds too.

I know that I am not alone in wanting spring to arrive. My neighbor's chickens are also keen on its arrival.

I'm not sure what breeds they are. Perhaps heirloom ones? I know that, when the polar vortex was hanging around, the chickens were all huddled together in the coop trying to keep warm and I felt terribly for them. At least there were some windows to block the wind.

********

I don't make proper new year's resolutions like vowing to lose weight and the like but I do try to convince myself to do things that I'd been meaning to do but haven't yet done, generally because of procrastination/laziness. Although it's only early March as I type, I have accomplished something I've been putting off for nearly 20 years:

I have finally read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It came out in 2000 and, if memory serves, I heard about and bought it not too long afterwards. But I never read it until this year. Better late than never, right?

It's described as a piece of ergodic literature which, as far as I can tell, simply means that it's difficult to read. Another way to think of it is that it requires more effort to read than your average text.

House of Leaves (every instance of the word "house" in any language is blue in the book) is difficult to describe. It's presented as the writings of one Johnny Truant who came upon a manuscript written by his deceased neighbor, a guy named Zampano. Truant annotates the manuscript and adds his own tale to the mix. For its part, the manuscript is an exegesis on a movie called The Navidson Record which documents the mysterious events experienced by the Navidison family, namely dealing with the entrance to an eldritch labyrinth that appears in their house one day.

At first, they notice that rooms in their home are slightly larger than they were previously. Then a doorway appears which leads to a cold, dark hallway and in turn to various room and a grand staircase that takes days to descend. Something apparently lives in the labyrinth as growls are heard coming out of the dark as the rooms are being explored.

While the plot/structure of the story is convoluted, apparently what makes the book ergodic is the layout. For instance, you have text that isn't justified and is instead strewn about the page to reflect events in the plot.

There are copious footnotes in the book and sometimes the footnotes are footnoted. It makes for a reading experience that is a bit like surfing the Internet. You read the "main" part of the story which references a footnote so you read the footnote. This footnote has a footnote so you go to read it. These secondary footnotes sometimes go on for pages while other times they refer you to something in one of the book's many appendices. So, do you follow it to an appendix or do you stick with the "main" story?

There is text that offset from the rest and some of that mirror imaged.

Here the left-hand column is a footnote continued from the previous page, the right-hand column is the "main" story, i.e. – Zompano's manuscript, and the reversed text in the box is something I cannot recall. It may be another footnote. You get the idea.

I surely missed a lot of meaning when I read it. References here and there, reasons why text is mirror imaged, and so on. But the storyline of people exploring the labyrinth is creepy as all get out. Not scary horror but really unsettling. BBC Radio 4 dramatized this part of the novel to great effect. I listened to it at night and got pretty scared. I made sure I was tucked in tight.

Perhaps not my favorite book of all-time but I enjoyed it and finally got it under my belt.

********

I really miss going to the theater. A couple weeks ago I watched Ice Station Zebra and the opening credits noted it was shot in Super Panavision 70 and was presented in Cinerama. I sat there thinking about how good it must have looked up on the big screen. Thinking about the theatrical experience led me to becoming a bit sad at not being able to go to the cinema. Safely, anyway.

Instead, I have been taking advantage of the library's DVD/Bluray collection. My local branch is about a mile from home so I get in some good walking before and after sitting on the couch for a couple hours. You see, in addition to reading things I should have read years ago, I have also been catching up on my movie watching.

I admit to being a bit nerdy and keeping a list of films to see and have been maintaining it for a while now. Probably just shy of 20 years, in fact. It began life as a way to track new movies that I wanted to see but had never made it to Madison cinemas (and I didn't find the time to see them in Chicago or Milwaukee). Thusly it was fairly modest to start. Then I began adding other movies to it.

Sometimes they were older films recommended to me. Other films made the list because of their reputation. For instance, I learned that the lyrics to one of my favorite albums, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, were partly inspired by a viewing of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo so it was added. I saw A Field in England by Ben Wheatley in the theater and immediately added the rest of his oeuvre. And of course there are films that are just part of the cinematic canon that any cinephile should see.

My list is organized largely by genre the way our local video rental store, Four Star, does it. Slightly tangentially, Roger Ebert was a big fan of Four Star and would stop in whenever he was in town, usually as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I've been donating money to Four Star over the winter and plan on renting from them once again soon now that the weather makes heading downtown a bit more palatable. It is a treasure that no number of streaming services can compete with.

With the list having grown too large, I decided to spend this winter doing some serious movie watching from my couch and pare it down before I started adding a lot of pandemic-era titles. I started at the top with animation, moved on to documentaries, followed by silent films, westerns, short films, movies with folkloric stories, the two most recent James Bond films, horror, and, finally, war movies. Auteurs are next but they may wait until the fall when the weather is worse as I hope to get out and about as much as I can during the spring and summer.

There is one movie I regret having watched this winter and that is Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, a documentary made by a Russian fellow named Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog, one of my favorite documentarians. It chronicles the life of trappers from a small village in Siberia. I found it really interesting to learn about these guys and their lives spent trapping sable. There are themes of isolation, man vs. nature, rural vs. urban, et al. It was a wonderful film. But a lot of it takes place during the winter and I felt really, really cold on my couch watching it. I shivered.

In one scene, one of the trappers remarks that it's only 20 below so it's plenty warm enough to go outside and work on his shelter. Since I watched it during the winter, I couldn't turn my head and look outside at a nice, verdant scene. All I saw was snow, snow everywhere. A great movie but one I highly recommend watching on a rainy summer day.

I have also watched several silent films this winter, a cinematic blind spot for me. It's not that I haven't seen any – hey, I own The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – but there were just a lot of classics on my to-watch list. And so I finally got around to watching Steamboat Bill, Jr.

I'd seen the bit where the wall of the house falls over him many times but it was nice to see it in context of the film. The whole storm scene was really fun but I admit that it did not make me a big Buster Keaton fan. I am not sure why. The gags just seemed to be overly repetitive. But repetition doesn't deter me from being a big Three Stooges fan. Maybe I just need to watch more Keaton flicks. 

Similarly, I watched Safety Last! for the first time.

The Frau and I watched it together. We both hate heights and got very nervous during the famous climbing scene. She hid her eyes more than once and let out a breathless "No!" a couple times. For my part, I sat in silence twiddling my phone or petting the cat but I was scared sh*tless on the inside.

I watched my first Oscar Micheaux film, Within Our Gates.

I think I read that it's the earliest (feature length?) film directed by an African-American that exists (more or less) in whole. I have also heard that it was a response of sorts to The Birth of a Nation but I don't know if Micheaux ever made any comments to that effect or if that is shared critical opinion.

Wikipedia says it took 2 months in 1920 to get the OK from the Board of Censors in Chicago, who were apparently nervous that scenes depicting a lynching and attempted rape would inflame violence in the city which was still reeling from the race riots of the previous year.

It was definitely a whole different ball of wax after watching a few F.W. Murnau films which had no black people in them and the Keaton & Lloyd films where they were basically simpletons or fools in the background playing bit parts. Here black people were just people, not stereotypes. There were good ones and bad ones; some were successful, other failed; they fell in and out of love.

I look forward to seeing more Micheaux.

There aren't many westerns on my list but Tombstone Rashomon was one of them and it was a lot of fun.

It tells the story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral a la Kurosawa's Rashomon with the people being interviewed all recounting the same events and the motivations of those involved differently from one another.

One last film: Lucifer Rising by Kenneth Anger. I first heard of it while I was in high school as I'd read that Jimmy Page, he of Led Zeppelin fame, had composed and recorded a soundtrack for it that went unused. Anger is really into the occult and the likes of Aleister Crowley and I guess this is considered his masterwork in that vein.

It was a fun, colorful flick but, as the director commentary indicated, a lot of the details were rather esoteric. Actions, characters, bits of the set design wouldn't mean a whole lot unless you were familiar with the occult and Egyptian mythology. And so most of this movie went way over my head. Still, I finally saw a film that had been on my to-watch list for well over 30 years.

I highly recommend listening to Page's unused soundtrack and associated recordings. The 20 minute piece intended for the film is based around a drone with chanting, Mellotron strings, synths, and percussion added into the mix. It is moody - ethereal - with some great melodies. I love how it starts off based on the drone, goes off on tangents and then returns to it. And check out "Lucifer Rising - Percussive Return" with percussion that sounds positively proto-industrial.

Many more movies to come! The Heroes of Telemark is now available for me to pickup!

Bonus photo: On a recent walk I saw a crane in the distance. Spring is so close…

The Chip Quest of Unknown Brands: Deep River Sea Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips

And here I thought that I'd exhausted my salt & vinegar potato chip options in Madison and was resigned to either going out of town to seek out new chips or wade into the world of alternative salt & vinegar snacks like almonds and plantains. Truth be known, I have seen baked salt & vinegar potato chips but those just don't seem right. I mean, my tongue can be tempted according to nature or against nature. And it is not of the latter disposition. If you ascertain my meaning.

I made a visit to the Jenifer Street Market and noticed a new brand – Deep River. They came into view after I turned away from a shelf of bags that claim to hold the strongest coffee in all of Christendom. I looked the other way and there were Deep River snacks at the end of the adjacent aisle. Their chips may have been in that end cap for months with me simply being oblivious to it or it may genuinely not have been there the last time I came a-huntin' and a-gatherin' for the Precious. I hope for the latter.

I am quite unfamiliar with Deep River never having eaten their snacks previously. As I write their website has been down a few days and they stopped using Twitter in 2018 so we'll forgo company bio though I'll note they donate 10% of their profits to charity and wonder if this company exists anymore. Maybe they were bought by venture capital and were driven out of business.

The brand is named after the Connecticut town where the company is/was headquartered. Pictures of it show a quaint New England town – just like in all of those H.P. Lovecraft tales so you know that some horror lurks beneath the surface. These photos don't show many Deep Ones, er, Deep River dwellers which makes me wonder if they perhaps have narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes. The town is not far from Lovecraft's Providence. Hmmm…

On the ingredients label I noticed cane sugar. Now, I'm no food chemist but, when I see sugar used on salt & vinegar chips, I get suspicious. It's not unreasonable to think that the sugar is for something like enhancing color or some such thing but I instinctively assume it's to take the edge off of the vinegar tang.

I opened the bag and stuck my nose inside to find an aroma that was mostly oil – maybe a hint of spud. They looked good to me, that is, the color was more or less uniform with perhaps a bit of skin here and there.

These were kettle chips and they were definitely crunchy instead of being crispy. However, some of the chips had what I can best describe as an uneven crunchiness. It's difficult to explain and I fear the best analogy I could muster isn't very good. But here goes: bits had a texture that reminded me of unfried shrimp chips, those pastel-colored snacks you find at Asian grocery stores. Cooked, they're poofy but raw they are kinda thin with a smooth surface and rock hard. While the Deep River chips were not rock hard, they had a texture that was more solid than usual. Kind of like rigid leather but not chewy.

I warned you.

It's not that every chip had this texture but it was more than one. Not necessarily horrible, but oddly distracting.

Other than a nebulous crunch factor, they had a gentle saltiness and, unfortunately, a gentle tang. I've had chips with less vinegar, but Deep River certainly went easy on the acetic acid. There was a little sweetness but it seemed that the aforementioned cane sugar didn't so much add it as enhance the pleasant sweetness of the potatoes themselves. It just brought that flavor up in the mix. And so you get a potato taste that is both earthy and sweet but favors the latter just a tiny bit.

The eldritch texture on some of the chips and the paucity of vinegar were disappointing. But they did not render the chips inedible as my empty bag will attest.

Transport Is Arranged

Recently, say, in the past 2 or 3 weeks, my Twitter feed has had links to several stories about the construction of the interstate system and how many black neighborhoods were laid waste by its construction. I haven't been able to figure out exactly why these stories are suddenly being tweeted. President Biden acknowledged this awful bit of our history earlier this year. Perhaps his infrastructure plan has renewed conversation about it in anticipation that we might actually move forward with at least some of the massive rebuilding projects envisioned by the White House.

This article from February notes that there are movements afoot to remove segments of the interstate system rather than rebuild them. Although Montgomery is the focus of this AP piece, it notes:

In Miami, construction of Interstate 95 wiped out 10,000 homes and a black business district. Interstate 40 in Nashville destroyed 80 percent of black businesses in the city and 650 homes. In St. Paul, I-94 crushed the bustling black Rondo neighborhood and displaced nearly 3,000 families.

This is a good look at some of the displacement in Chicago when the interstates were built and here's one about the effects of I43 construction in Milwaukee. The article about Chicago notes that it wasn't just blacks who found themselves displaced by interstate construction. It quotes a Chicago Tribune story about the beginning of construction from 1949 and says of the neighborhood first on the chopping block, "Today the community population of 50,000 includes chiefly persons of Italian, Mexican, Greek, Jewish, and Negro ancestry." Historian Beryl Satter wrote of the route going through the Jewish neighborhood of West Garfield Park, "Its construction was a physical manifestation of Jewish Chicagoans’ political powerlessness."

Unlike Chicago, Madison has never demolished perfectly fine neighborhoods to make space for expressways. However, I learned fairly recently that there were plans in the mid-50s to run an expressway through our fair burg. To wit:

I believe it would have begun on the west side somewhere, come through campus/downtown, and then headed northeast up the isthmus. Thankfully it was never built as some wonderful buildings would have been sacrificed and neighborhoods scarred. The interstate runs on the far east side through suburban areas of town while an expressway was crafted from state highways on the south side of town.

I don't believe that any predominately black neighborhoods would have been devastated by the above expressway. Perhaps the long-proposed but never built expressway on the northside remains that way because people of means (i.e. - people with political power) would find it going through their front yards.

While traffic has gotten worse over the years, I still find it funny hearing people complain about it because it's not big city bad. One way to get traffic off your mind is to take public transit.

Back in 2012 a local artist imagined a subway system for Madison.

While we won't have a subway system here in my lifetime or in the lifetime of anyone currently alive, the city is moving to overhaul our bus system. Dramatically.

First of all, the city hired a new big cheese for Metro Transit. The new guy, Justin Somebody-Or-Other, headed the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit in Indianapolis. He's younger and from out of town so he brings a fresh perspective to our system which I think to be a good thing. I heard him in a meeting a few months ago say that, after moving here and taking the bus for the first time, he was surprised at how complicated the bus system is here. It was good to hear him say that and gives me hope that the situation will change.

Secondly, they've hired Jarrett Walker's team to completely overhaul the bus system from the ground up. Walker wrote a book and maintains a blog called "Human Transit" wherein he discusses his ideas about what makes transit good and current events in the industry. His company recently did a much-ballyhooed transit network redesign for Houston. Well, a few years ago.

I am confident that the Walker team will be able to come up with some designs which would make taking the bus here in Madison a less complicated endeavor and make it more useful, on average. Our bus network seems to be a patchwork of routes, very few of which run frequently (every 15 minutes or less). Every so often a new route is created which usually serves a neighborhood on the periphery. They usually run only every 30-60 minutes and sometimes only during morning and evening rush hours. Madison Metro tries to offer coverage even if it's not always very useful.

Since there is little to no new money dedicated to the redesign, there will be some tough choices to make. For instance, I can envision fights ahead about which far-flung, auto-centric neighborhoods get service and how much. There is an equity component to the redesign. Hopefully we won't be confronted by a Sophie's choice between, say, providing service to low density areas populated by minorities and service to areas with more or less guaranteed high and white ridership . 

Lastly, our new mayor has finally begun the process of implementing BRT.

As it stands now, the BRT line will be a short ride from home on the bus or a not bad at all trek on my bicycle. Three cinemas and my office are on or perilously close to the route. Not bad. Oooh! I forgot that there's another cinema at East Towne Mall at the route's northeast terminus.

Credit must go to our new(ish) mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, for pushing this forward. Our previous mayor, Paul Soglin, had, in my opinion, become hidebound and unwilling to take the leap. I heard him and my alderman, David Ahrens, say many times, "Well, of course we'd love to bring better bus service to Madison. But there's nothing we can do until the Republicans no longer control state government." I was unimpressed with their Hudson attitude - "Game over, man!" Of course, the implementation of BRT is contingent on federal funding. Back in 2010 or so as Madison and some surrounding communities (and Appleton, I believe) were moving to create a Regional Transit Authority, the Republican a**holes in the legislature proceeded to outlaw them. (So much for local control.)

Still, Rhodes-Conway deserves credit for starting a network redesign and for getting things going with BRT. Soglin and Ahrens didn't really seem to care about public transit to me whereas Rhodes-Conway is directing funding to it and actively seeking out public support and input.

If all goes as planned, we'll have BRT and a whole new network up and running in 2024. Hopefully the current plague will have been defeated by this time so I can start riding the bus again. I am always more than happy to let someone else drive, especially when the weather is lousy.

In other transit news, Amtrak's vision for 2035 includes a stop here in Madison.

This is really a wish list for Amtrak and we have no idea about priorities with regards to new routes. I suspect the northeast corridor will get a lot of attention and money, should Congress go in on the plan. That and the high speed route in California. Still, it'd be nice to argue about where to locate a train station here in Madison once again.

If all of the above happens, the remaining major transit project would be building an intercity bus depot.

The Broadsword and the Beast turns 39

Today marks the 39th(!) anniversary of Jethro Tull's 14th studio album, The Broadsword and the Beast. Here are a couple tunes from that album performed live on the tour in support of it. They are both from the 12 September 1982 show at Poplar Creek Music Center in suburban Chicago.

I have a fondness for The Broadsword and the Beast as it was one of the first Tull albums I got into. Back in 1987 or thereabouts. That was a really fun time for me and music. I spent a fair amount of time investigating older bands whom I only knew from classic rock radio. For example, I knew a few Rush songs such as "Tom Sawyer" and "Spirit of Radio" but I bought there then latest effort, Hold Your Fire, and my love for the band was a done deal.

Similarly for Tull, I knew the tunes you'd hear on the radio, mainly from Aqualung, and then decided I'd take the plunge with their 1987 album, Crest of a Knave. As with Rush, I liked their latest and went back to dig around in their catalogue. My brother had a tape which had The Broadsword and the Beast on one side and Thick as a Brick on the other. It took me a while to really get Thick as a Brick but I took to The Broadsword and the Beast instantly. With a song about Viking invaders and a cover with Old Norse runes, it's little surprise that Dungeons & Dragons playing teenager loved the album. It was also, unsurprisingly, a big hit in Germany, although it was a modest success elsewhere.

But it's not a concept album about Viking hordes any more than Led Zeppelin III is. For instance, "Pussy Willow" is about a young woman with a boring office job who longs for something different, something more. (Vaguely reminiscent of the Typist in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".) "Fallen On Hard Times" reflects the early 1980's recession while "Clasp" laments loneliness and the dislocation inherent in modern - especially urban - life. "Slow Marching Band" is an intimate song about a parting of the ways.

The album has a curious reputation. It is seen by many as a return to form with Martin Barre's guitar on full display, plenty of flute, and a mandolin showing up here and there. This is the tack taken by David Rees in his biography of the band. He says, "Broadsword was in many ways a very calculated manoeuvre to return to the traditional qualities that had endeared the band to the fans from the outset." On the other hand, it is recognized as Tull fully incorporating synthesizers into their sound and as a pre-cursor to their full-on 80s synth/drum machine fest, Under Wraps. Going back to Rees, he says that the synthesizers here "were used more effectively within the traditional Tull elements of heavy rock and Celtic influences..."

Perhaps my take on this is colored by the fact that I got into Broadsword early on and it was one of just, say, three Tull albums I was familiar with at the time. I wasn't a long-time fan who saw it in relation to all of their previous work. But it seemed unlike Aqualung and Crest of a Knave to my ears. To my ears, the synths, the songs, and the drumming really make it stand apart from what came before instead of being an act of atavism.

I suppose it's that I don't view 1980s A as being that great of a departure from the established Tull sound. And I don't think Peter-John Vettese's use of synthesizers on Broadsword  was all that different from Eddie Jobson's on A as they both inserted these little flourishes into the songs between the guitar and vocals. One of the reasons the synthesizers seem to fit in better on Broadsword is, I think, because there's more of those Celtic influences here. There's not much mandolin on A and acoustic guitar is limited as well so it wasn't like Jobson failed to meld his keyboards with that part Tull sound. It wasn't there to begin with. However you feel about this, there's little doubt in my mind songs such as "Clasp" and "Fallen On Hard Times" use synthesizers in ways that complement the flute and mandolin perfectly.

The songs on Broadsword are generally more straightforward than we're used to with Tull. There are no lengthy suites and the acoustic-electric dichotomy is less stark here. The dramatic shifts of tone and rhythm are here but are in smaller packages and don't come across as being so, well, dramatic. Part of this seems due to Gerry Conway's drumming which is more about economy than orchestrating drum parts. I don't offer this as a criticism because I love his drumming in "Clasp" and "Watching Me, Watching You" even though the almost mechanical precision of the latter has a tinge of drum machine to it. After several years of Barriemore Barlow's fancier and more seemingly composed drumming, Conway's work here seems new, not a throwback.

The Broadsword sessions yielded not only the 10 tracks on the album, but also an additional 15 outtakes that have come out over the years. Rumors tell of another couple songs from these sessions, "DJ" and "Dinosaur", so, if we get an anniversary box set, hopefully they'll be on there. The available outtakes show was a fertile period it was for Anderson and Tull. "Commons Brawl" was perhaps left off because it's pulsing synth was too similar to "Clasp" but it goes off in a different direction and feel. This song about governmental dysfunction was not only topical but also sees synths and mandolin and flute all living in perfect harmony. "Jack Frost And The Hooded Crow", a favorite Christmas song of mine, similarly sees the new and traditional come together in a most complementary way. A hold over from 1977, "Jack-A-Lynn" is a beautiful love song with a gentle acoustic guitar opening that gives way to a spirited electric guitar/synth finale.

Being a music nerd, of course I created an alternate Broadsword incorporating some of the outtakes.

So happy birthday to The Broadsword and the Beast.

The Spice Must Flow: Gose by Delta Beer Lab

Previously on this very blog I chronicled how a botched batch of Moroccan shrimp prompted a purge of my spice rack that would have made Joe Stalin himself envious. The difference is that I didn't replace the spices that met their fate that Bloody Wednesday with a bunch of aromatic apparatchiks. Instead, the replacements were of, at least, good quality. I have now cooked with juniper berries more in the past few weeks than the past many years.

That shrimp recipe called for coriander and so it's a good time to return to the seeds of the Coriandrum sativum plant which were the genesis of this mess in the first place. It also allows me to make good on actually making a trip to Delta Beer Lab, something I figured was a swell idea back in December when I reviewed a cranberry gose and lamented the paucity of the unfruited variety of the beer. While Delta's beer is on store shelves, I've only seen their mango gose and not their gose gose at my local bottle shop. Granted, it took four months but I finally lost my Delta Beer Lab virginity.

The gose is a sour wheat beer that originated in the German town of Goslar at some point in the Middle Ages. Water sources apparently gave the beer a bit of salinity and it was flavored with coriander. What I think of as less reliable sources say the High Middle Ages but ones I trust more dates it to the Late Middle Ages. For a long while it was a local delicacy until the first half of the 18^th century when it made its way to neighboring Leipzig where the inhabitants took to the beer style like a junkie to the needle. While popular for a good, long while, drinkers would turn away from it more and more as the years progressed with World War II and the Cold War doing it no favors. Eventually it died out in 1966. But 20 years later it was revived in Germany and seems to be hanging on to dear life in its homeland with a handful of German breweries making it.

Gose became something of a trend for American craft brewers around 2013 or so. I don't have numbers but it seems that it is less popular today. Even if true, there are still examples of the beer that are easily available such as Otra Vez (which has been reformulated, I see) from Sierra Nevada, Kirsch Gose by Victory, and a variety of gose iterations from Anderson Valley with their Blood Orange probably being the most well-known of them. I suppose it's arguable whether a gose remains a gose if you add citrus fruit, cactus, or agave to it in lieu of coriander. The addition of salt to a kettle soured beer is pretty much all it takes to be a gose in the States today, it seems. But the fact remains that Sierra Nevada has a beer on shelves year-round that says "Gose" on the packaging which is a lot of visibility for a beer style that was all but dead not long ago.

I have nothing against the fruited gose per se and have enjoyed those beers listed above, but in the rush to make everything that isn't an imperial stout taste fruity (the stouts get laced with lactose, coffee, vanilla, and so on), American brewers have made the ordinary non-fruited variety something of a rare bird. This is a shame because I am rather partial to coriander.

Thankfully the folks at Delta Beer Lab offer a more traditional take on the style in addition to one that's in the cult of tropicality.

The beer is a lovely light gold color with a slight haze to it. My pour produced a big, white head that made quite a racket as the bubbles burst. It was like listening to Rice Krispies. But louder.

It smelled first and foremost of that lemony sour from the lactic acid which gives the beer its sour taste. I also caught a little coriander and just a wee bit of sweetness – like honey.

While I have had beers that were more sour, Delta did not skimp on it here. It was very sour but fell short of a xenomorph blood level of acidity, thankfully. As you can imagine, it was good 'n fizzy with the salinity having an almost spectral presence. It didn't taste salty but I could tell it was there enhancing the other flavors. It adds a certain overall fullness. The coriander wasn't prominent but was there playing its role in generating tastiness. Some wheat and a slight grainy sweetness rounded things out. With all that sourness, some lingered on the finish and made it rather dry but I was also left with a wheaty taste and I could just discern some salinity too.

As Darth Vader once remarked to his son, impressive.

I really enjoyed this beer. It was good and sour, it had just the right amount of salt to enhance flavor, and a goodly amount of coriander. That is, I would have been happy with just a smidgeon more of the spice but it complemented the wheat very well and was still quite tasty.

Junk food pairing: I recommend pairing your Gose with some Carada rice ball cuttlefish flavored snacks. The beer's citrus sour complements the cuttlefish flavoring while also acting as foil to the snack's sweetness.

"A Female Sad Bastard" Playlist

Here's the playlist for episode 22, "A Female Sad Bastard", of Time Enough At Last, the podcast I do with my pal Old Man Schuck.

He and I kick things off by talking about the impending arrival of Starbucks in Stoughton. This is followed up by a rundown of some of the new buildings going up here in Madison, of which there are many. Old Man Schuck has been watching Snowfall and failing to finish watching Lovecraft Country. For my part, I recently watched Judas and the Black Messiah and a clutch of movies about World War II including The Heroes of Telemark which is, I presume, mandatory viewing for people in Stoughton.

Finally, we review Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers because Old Man Schuck noticed it on 2020 best of lists from unofficial show sponsors Mad City Music and B-Side.

House of the Frying Spud: Hy-Vee Sea Salt & Malt Vinegar Potato Chips

The humble potato made the news recently, kinda sorta. Toy mega-company Hasbro announced that they're changing the name of their venerable Mr. Potato Head toy to simply Potato Head. Seems a bit less genteel, if you ask me. Otherwise the toy remains the same – a bunch of plastic body parts you attach to a plastic potato simulacrum body.

One thing I learned in the ensuing brouhaha was that, when the toy was introduced back in 1952, you only got the parts with the expectation being that you'd provide a real spud to attach them to.

This was a very American toy in that the potato is an American vegetable. If you see a potato being eaten on television by medieval knights before they go a-jousting, you know it's bunk. Potatoes didn't make it over to Europe until the 16^th century. They grew wild for who knows how long around parts of South American until they were domesticated in a region that is now part of Peru several thousands of years ago. The Incas believed in a potato goddess named Axomamma which makes me think the Grateful Dead might have been tripping and eating potato chips when they came up with the name of their third album.

Highly unlike Peru, however, Iowa is not generally associated with the potato. However, it is the home of the Hy-Vee supermarket chain. Iowa is the land of corn so how good could Hy-Vee potato chips be, you ask. Like I noted, Hy-Vee is a chain of supermarkets so they contract the production of their house brand of chips to a neighboring spudsmith to the north in Minnesota, Old Dutch. Ironically, Minnesota is a state equally unrenowned for their potato crops. Then again, Idaho, the state most closely associated with potatoes doesn't seem to have a potato chip maker of national repute.

I believe that this is the first house brand I've encountered and suspect there will be more when I go to schwankier stores like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. I have no idea what the logicistics and economics of a house brand are. Are Hy-Vee and Old Dutch making out like bandits on them? Or is it more about getting the Hy-Vee logo more exposure and earning a few pennies along the way?

Although the Hy-Vee bag is a little on the spartan side, it does feature a reusable seal, a new feature for potato chips bags in my experience. Once opened, the chips smell like a pan full of fried potatoes that you're going to have with some schnitzel. They look to be of a slightly thicker cut than normal.

These are kettle style chips but have a moderate crunch to them. I found them not to be particularly salty and have a slightly greasy taste, not unlike the way I make fried potatoes for my schnitzel. They tasted just a little mealy which is how I find most Old Dutch chips to be. Most importantly, they had what you might say is an assertive vinegar tang to them. Probably the most vinegary chips I've had in a good, long time. But they didn't taste malt vinegary to me – just plain old white vinegar. The fact remains, though, that my mouth got rather numb after a serving of these chips.

In addition to loving all that acetic acid, I was really surprised that some muckety mucks at Hy-Vee actually approved these potent potatoes. They are really, really good.

As I write, this review is the end of phase 1 of my salt & vinegar potato chip quest. Or maybe it's phase 2 since I did a few reviews back in 2005 or so. Anyway, I've been to 5 different grocery stores as of late and have now sampled every salt & vinegar potato chip I've come across. Well, that's not true. There is an organic version of one brand's chip that I haven't tried. And, no, I don't consider Pringles to be potato chips. They're like a processed potato food product, the Velveeta of potato chips. And so, it may take me a little while to find some new chips to review. There are more grocery stores to scour and convenience stores galore.

On the Eve of Self-Destruction: Annihilation

Annihilation was another winter Blu-ray purchase for me and I finally watched it recently. Released in 2018, it is based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer which came out in 2014. I do not recall how I first heard about the novel but I immediately fell in love with it and was excited to hear that it was being adapted for the big screen by someone who had written and/or directed science fiction tales that were more cerebral than shoot 'em up.

The book is often categorized as weird fiction and, while I am less than certain what criteria are used to define that genre, Annihilation is very weird indeed. It tells a story of four women who are never named and only known by their occupations: a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor. They go on a mission into Area X, an area free of human inhabitants and blocked off from the general public. (Very much like Tarkovsky's Stalker.) Other expeditions have preceded this one – it's the 12^th – and they have all ended disastrously. What happens in Area X stays in Area X. Those who return suffer from amnesia and virulent cancers that cut their lives short.

I think the best way to explain my affection for the book is that it appeals to my love of unheimlich, a German word that denotes, as I understand it, discomfort and fear. I don't take it to mean sheer, abject terror; more like low level dread. I was uneasy reading every page of that book. Sometimes the unease was slight while at others it had been transformed into something more like terror. Annihilation has definite Lovecraftian sensibilities. VanderMeer doesn’t gives us much certainty in his world – characters don't have names, Area X is on planet Earth but we're not sure where, we don't know the genesis of Area X, et al. So much is unknown in the story. What we do know is that humanity is dealing with a force that it does not and perhaps cannot understand much less exercise even a small degree of control over. We are at its mercy. And while it may not be malicious, it certainly poses a threat.

And, honestly, the tower scared the crap out of me. Inside a structure is a tunnel with a spiral staircase ominously leading down which the biologist calls the tower. On the walls writing consisting of a plant-like material spells out a lengthy phrase that makes me imagine what T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" would be like if he had co-written it with Lovecraft. It begins:

"Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places…"

And, down in the dark depths of the tower was the Crawler. Let us not go there.

For his film, writer/director Alex Garland took VanderMeer's novel as the basis of a story and went off in his own direction. Despite the changes he wrought, Annihilation the movie kept me uneasy almost the whole time and I descended into terror on the odd occasion as well.

There is much more clarity here as we find out at the beginning that a something from outer space crashes on Earth, more specifically, into a lighthouse. Four intrepid adventurers becomes five with the addition of a medic. And they are given names: Dr. Ventress (psychologist), Lena (biologist), Radek (physicist), Sheppard (geomorphologist), and Thorensen, the medic.

Here in the film, Lena's relationship with her husband is more fleshed out and the central motivation for her entering the Shimmer, Area X in the book. Instead Ventress, a cold, stoic face to a nameless bureaucracy is perhaps more like the novel's biologist.

Whereas VanderMeer focused on the fellowship's descent into madness and dissolution, Garland emphasizes body horror. The Shimmer is where DNA gets shoehorned where it not only just shouldn't be but where it cannot be. It's almost a Dantean journey but instead of going deeper into hell and meeting souls who committed ever more heinous crimes, we see relatively minor feats of genetic splicing and dicing become more severe until finally our protagonists destruct.

The first step is a single vine sprouting a variety of disparate flowers and this is followed by an alligator with shark-like teeth. The gator, which briefly threatens our adventurers, is almost a cheap horror movie trope. As Lena says during her debriefing/interrogation after emerging from the Shimmer, the mutations got more strange and severe the closer they got to the lighthouse and that's when things get really creepy.

For me this is because human bodily integrity is breached as categories of creatures are violated. Plants take on human shapes which leads the physicist to declare that they contain human hox genes, the genes that direct the development of an embryo into the bilaterally symmetrical, bi-pedal shapes that we humans have. Did the plants grow that way? Or are the results of some horrific human transmogrification? Then there's a bear with no flesh on its head that is able to mimic the death screams of its last victim, who just happens to be the geomorphologist. But is it mimicking or has it somehow absorbed part of Sheppard? After all, we see that her body has had its throat mangled. How do we know that it didn't appropriate her vocal cords in some grotesque manner? I have to say that watching a bear with a bare skull scream like a human being is deeply disturbing.

Even more disturbing for me was the section of the film at the Army base. They come across an abandoned Army base and discover that a previous expedition had bivouacked there. A memory card from a camcorder was left to be found and on it is footage of Lena's husband cutting open the gut of a fellow solder to reveal a worm-like parasite writing in his abdominal cavity. They find the setting of this video – in a pool – and see that the poor guy's body had been ripped apart and stuck to a side of the pool via the rainbow moss that is seemingly everywhere in the Shimmer.

In addition to enjoying the feeling of unheimlich, I had fun trying yet again to figure out the film's ending. Who is the Lena that emerged from the Shimmer? During the debriefing scenes, we see that she has a tattoo of what appears to be the symbol for infinity on her left forearm. Later we see that same tattoo in the same spot of the medic's arm. It also appears on the arm of the soldier who ends up plastered on the wall of the pool but not in the video - rather on his remains. I tried on this viewing to pinpoint when it is first seen on Lena's arm chronologically in the world of the story but failed. I'd swear we see it on her at some point as she's making her way to the lighthouse. The film makes no attempt to answer how it got there. Since tattoos aren't encoded in DNA, it seems likely that the tatted Lena is a doppelgänger just like the Kane that emerged from the Shimmer. But the scene in the lighthouse seems to show that the "real" Lena gives the phosphorous grenade to her doppelgänger.

The left forearm is the site of, not only the tattoo, but also a bruise on Lena. Plus it is where we notice plants growing out of the physicist's body. It's the place on the body where markers reside, markers indicating something is wrong. Ultimately, though, it's just a leitmotif with little inherent meaning. I suppose the tattoos themselves are much the same. There's no discernible pattern to their appearance but viewers come to understand that their presence means something is amiss. Its purpose is to induce a certain sense of unease rather than give a definitive explanation of how the Shimmer works.

Lastly, I have been thinking about the theme of self-destruction in Annihilation. The psychologist tells Lena at one point:

Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job... and a happy marriage. But these aren't decisions, they're... they're impulses.

After Lena cops to not understanding, the psychologist answers:

Isn't the self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

There are many examples of self-destruction in the film. The physicist cuts herself while the medic is an addict. We learn that the psychologist has cancer – her body is literally killing itself. And Lena has an affair which jeopardizes her marriage. Plus there's that tattoo which is the Ouroboros snake in the shape of the infinity symbol perhaps saying that self-destruction is a never-ending process.

But these are all from our viewpoint. The being behind the Shimmer seems to think otherwise.

During her debriefing, Lena's interlocutor describes the genetic mutations happening within the Shimmer as "nightmarish" but Lena retorts, "Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful." Later she says of it, "It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new." I am reminded of something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack-Up":

A man does not recover from such jolts—he becomes a different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

The movie seems to argue that, at least sometimes, self-destruction is really out with the old and in with the new.

None of this is to say that I think the film is a visual disquisition on the theme of self-destruction. It's more of a meditation.

So that's why I love Annihilation. It's sublime in a more Burkean sense for me, that is, since so much is unexplained or obscure, it evokes potent and terrific feelings of confusion as well as the uncanny and I use "terrific" here in its old meaning of causing terror. There's trauma here but it transcends the mundane. It makes the horrible beautiful in its own way.

Time Enough At Last Episode 22: A Female Sad Bastard

On the latest episode of Time Enough At Last, Old Man Schuck and I talk about the impending arrival of Starbucks in Stoughton as well as some of the new construction here in Madison. After boggling at all of the new buildings, we proceed to discuss what we've been watching. It's mostly been newer stuff like - Snowfall, Lovecraft Country, and Judas and the Black Messiah but Skip has also been watching World War II movies like The Heroes of Telemark which features a bunch of crafty Norwegians - just like you find in Stoughton.

Finally, we review Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, her album that unofficial show sponsors Mad City Music and B-Side named one of the best of 2020. Old Man Schuck was also attracted to the album because she is Ryan Adams adjacent having dated him briefly several years ago.