These are the words, images, and beers that inspired the GBH Collective this week. Drinking alone just got better, because now you’re drinking with all of us.
READ.// “Would the problem you’re trying to address with your shopping cart be better tackled by a new rule, a new regulation, a ban, an incentive, a new social program, a different way of doing things? The answer is almost always yes.” Elizabeth L. Cline, formerly an advocate for ethical consumerism, writes about how the pandemic convinced her the movement is inadequate. So go ahead, she says, use plastic straws and buy cheap clothes—then fight to change laws and systems.
LOOK.// “There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.” Photographer duo Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera use these words from James Joyce to open the artists' statement accompanying their series, Kairos. The landscapes in this series have a Magritte-like, dreamy element that feels, to me, divorced from literal space and time. Needless to say, it really works for 2020.
DRINK.// Fair Isle Brewing’s Madame R. Galle Saison
The house yeast culture at Seattle's Fair Isle Brewing expresses itself beautifully in Madame R. Galle, a bright, vernal, Wallonian-style Saison that evokes fresh peaches and petrichor. Too Romantic? I blame these elegant but unfussy Franco-Belgian beers for making me wax poetic.
READ.// “That warning wouldn’t be necessary if the urge weren’t so pressing to rescue from history the heroic forebears it so often hides from us.” I’ve always found Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to be one of the most mesmerizing epics America has ever produced—in large part because he writes so much of it from the point of view of the body. It’s guttural and low to the ground as much as it is rising up and exalting. It’s profoundly different from the heady spirituality of his peers, the transcendentalists. It feels like an American voice from a parallel universe. It’s a rapturous, dissenting opinion. So when I saw it examined alongside a NYT Style shoot featuring Black faces and bodies, it took on that effect once again, in the context of 2020 when we’re all talking about, and in some cases drinking, the phrase, “Black is Beautiful.”
LOOK.// Co-founder of Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Oregon, China Tresemer, comes from a family of biodynamic farmer/philosopher types. In addition to her role on the farm, she shares a remarkable point of view on the practice of living with the land through her photos and watercolors. Everything she draws your attention to is so wonderfully small.
DRINK.// Walt & Whitman Brewing’s Oktoberfest
Last fall, I had the pleasure of visiting this little family-run operation in Saratoga Springs, New York, just as it was getting off the ground. And as the world fell off its axis this year, I worried about them, being as fledgeling as they were. To my delight, when I inquired, they had just finished brewing their Oktoberfest beer to celebrate the season and their uncanny perseverance.
READ.// “‘We have lived under economic terrorism for decades,’ said Georgia farmer Eddie Slaughter, one of the hundreds of Black farmers whose land is in foreclosure because of documented racist practices by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.” Growing up In South Carolina, I had an uncle that used to say, “No matter how thick you cook a pancake—it’s always got two sides.” COVID-19 is that pancake. On one side you have the unfortunate deaths because of the virus—on the other, you have exposed systemic racism.
LOOK.// Just to add salt to the wound, this video came out quite a few years prior to COVID. Gentrification in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina looks a little different than in most major U.S. cities—geographically and agriculturally speaking.
DRINK.// Brewery Ommegang’s Adoration Belgian Strong Dark Ale
The weather is beginning to cool down, which means I break out the Belgian Dubbels and Quads. This gem never disappoints.
Curated by The GBH Collective
