You should read this for 6/6/2021: Art, Music, and Film H/T Kira Cee: That Fat, Jolly Fella Isn’t Buddha Biden Begins ‘I’m a car guy’: Biden zips around in electric Ford truck to boost clean-energy agenda The day revealed Biden not so much in rare form but in his truest form. His entire life has been crafted, in many ways, around cars. The affection for automobiles is as much a part of Biden as his Irishness and his love of ice cream, and it’s one that has deepened over the years. The event on Tuesday also married that longtime love…

The New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado is best known for their Fat Tire amber. But New Belgium makes a lot of beer as one of the first generation of commercially distributed American craft breweries, going all the way back to 1991; it’s now the third largest craft brewery in the United States. Their second most recognized beer was the second one released; New Belgium Abbey Ale. New Belgium Abbey Ale is a Belgian dubbel (that’s double in English) style beer. It’s called an “Abbey” beer because Abbey Ale’s creation was inspired by the beers brewed at Trappist monasteries…

New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado began as a local brewery.  Co-Founder and brewer Jeff Lebesch spent time in 1989 riding a mountain bike with “fat tires“ through Belgium, sampling the beers as he went. Inspired by the experience, the beers, and the Belgian malts, hops, and yeast, Lebesch returned to Fort Collins and began home brewing Belgian style beers. His first beers were a brown Trappist-inspired dubbel (later known as Abbey), and an amber that eventually became New Belgium’s flagship brew, Fat Tire. Lebesch, trained as an electrical engineer, turned his engineering know-how to brewing, creating a home-brewery…

You should read this for 5/08/2021: I’m still on hiatus, but managed to accumulate a short list of links. Art, Music, and Film Master of Catherine of Cleves: Acquisition of a Previously Unknown Illumination Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language The Philip Roth biography is canceled, Mike Pence’s book could be next — and publishing may never be the same It’s tempting to see this as just another isolated incident — like Grand Central’s decision not to publish Woody Allen’s memoir in 2020 or Threshold’s decision to drop Milo Yiannopoulos’s book in 2017. But I think this week marks a sea…

I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from regular posting to work on other writing. I may very well post a few things here, but I’m not going to be keeping a weekly schedule. Science and Nature Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Shane Gero overheard a pair of whales having a chat. Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica when two males, babies from the same family, popped up not far from his boat. The animals, nicknamed Drop and Doublebend, nuzzled their…

You should read this for 4/17/2021: Art, Music, and Film Beeswing by Richard Thompson review – beyond Fairport Convention Joss Whedon’s ‘The Nevers’ is a weak remix of his formerly good ideas With the latest application of his style, call it the Nevers configuration, it’s clear that Whedon has less of a creative signature and more of a single notebook page of ideas he’s been using since the late ’90s. Women take the floor: an exhibition that shifts the male gaze of art history Biden Begins A pair of misleading GOP attacks on Biden’s infrastructure plan In 2018, the Treasury…

You should read this for 4/10/2021: Art, Music, and Film ‘Some kind of modern day western’: inside the world of concrete cowboys Concrete Cowboy, which premiered last year at the Toronto film festival and is now available on Netflix, is a gritty drama about a father-son relationship set around the Fletcher Street Stables, one of the first stables in inner-city Philadelphia and now among the last. It dates back more than a century to when horse-drawn wagons delivered produce, laundry and milk. That era drew to a close in the late 1950s when cars and trucks took over but the…

You should read this for 4/3/2021: Art, Music, and Film H/T Anne Leckie: Berlin’s plan to return Benin bronzes piles pressure on UK museums Berlin is negotiating to fully restitute hundreds of the Benin bronzes in a shift of policy that has been welcomed in Nigeria but will put pressure on museums in London and Oxford to also return artefacts looted from Britain’s former west African empire in 1897. More than 500 historical objects including 440 bronzes from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, are held at the Ethnological Museum in the German capital. Half of…

You should read this for 3/27/2021: Art, Music, and Film Why are historical figures presumed straight? Francis Lee on causing outrage with Ammonite Lee considers himself an outsider. “There just aren’t that many queer working-class people in the film industry,” he says. So he was taken aback to be informed that he shouldn’t tell lesbian stories. “It’s been a real lesson for me in identity politics. I know I can’t talk for Mary because I’m not a 19th-century palaeontologist, but I do think I can talk with her. What I tried to do was to take this working-class woman, who…

Art, Music, and Film H/T : A 25-Year-Old PhD Student Just Convinced Lego to Mass-Produce Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ as an Official Toy Kit Podcast from December 2020: The Economist Asks: Viggo Mortensen How to talk about dementia—in real life and on screen The actor, best known for playing Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, talks about directing his first feature film on caring for his parents who suffered from dementia. Anne McElvoy asks him why he prefers cinema to home-streaming and whether he believes people will return to the big screen after the pandemic. Mortenson has some…