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.// “Shortly before Christmas 1936, George Orwell stomped into the office of The New English Weekly in London, dressed for an expedition, bearing a heavy suitcase, and declared, ‘I’m going to Spain.’ ‘Why?’ asked Philip Mairet, the magazine’s urbane French editor. ‘This fascism,’ said Orwell. ‘Somebody’s got to stop it.’” In the wake of Trump’s election as president, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 rocketed, and I recently picked it up again for the first time since school. As a companion, I also picked up Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, billed as a biography of the novel that breaks down both Orwell’s work and gives some vital context to the horror show all around us right now.
LOOK.// We’re all looking for moments of escapism. Recently, I discovered the hysterical short satires of comedian Alasdair Beckett-King. His utterly silliness is balanced by a very sincere amount of detail and clear love of the movie themes he takes down. This is my favorite one.
DRINK.// Heretic Brewing Co.’s California IPA
The U.K. is still in thrall to the Hazy IPA, and while I love that style, I got into craft beer for the variation. There are some great British-made West Coast-style beers coming out, there’s still something special about drinking one direct from California. This beautiful beer, imported cold-chain by homebrewing website The Malt Miller, was just perfection—all pine needles, caramel, and sticky resin. It was like being transported out to the redwood forests.
READ.// “How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley.” London’s lockdown, begun on Jan. 4, wears on, and like many, my daily “silly little walks” are a form of temporary escape. I particularly like gloaming strolls, when night is coming over the city and lights start coming on in the houses, and each apartment feels like a small diorama ready for my discovery. I’m in good company, it turns out: Going down an internet wormhole recently led me to “Street Haunting,” a 1930 essay by Virginia Woolf about her own phantasmagoric, after-hours London walks. Parts of the essay feels very dated indeed, but much still resonates for all of us tromping around the city in 2021.
LOOK.// Every year, the New York Times rounds up what its critics and contributors describe as the most important songs of the moment. The latest edition of this interactive feature, 19 Songs That Matter Now, contains everything from certified disco-pop bangers to loopy French jazz. Scroll, read, listen, and prepare to argue about what was (or wasn’t) included.
DRINK.// Westmalle Extra
This week I was lucky enough to try samples (sent by U.K. distributor and importer James Clay) of the new Trappist beer on the block, Westmalle Extra. This 4.8%, straw-colored beer is supposedly the Table Beer for Westmalle’s monks, and I absolutely loved it. The balance is there: biscuity malt meets restrained Belgian yeast character, before winding down into a dry, bitter finish that almost demands the next sip. I’m drinking lower-ABV beers on average these days, and a sessionable Trappist beer feels pitch-perfect for this moment.
READ.// “Whoever you are: in the evening step out / of your room, where everything’s familiar.” Kristofor Minta’s translations of Rilke’s poetry seem imbued with an intimate understanding of his Paris years—that disorienting, deconstructing time that disrupted the otherwise bourgeois life Rilke was accustomed to. Offended by the poverty, suffering, and raw humanity of Paris compared to his regimented, military family life in Prague, this was a period that shaped the poet in both his humanity and aesthetics—it gave him a multitude of voices, and Minta seems to hear them all.
LOOK.// “His inspirations are the early-20th-century military sound locaters — some called war tubas — that were used to detect approaching enemy aircraft before the invention of radar. Parker’s instruments exude a similar gangly menace, with yards of Seussian tubing ending in the flared bells of trombones and sousaphones.” I take for granted that instruments just are, as if they were handed to us by the gods millennia ago and all we’ve done is electrify a few. But these tinkers, artists, and engineers, like Steve Parker, seem willing to engage in this god-like art of inventing their own.
DRINK.// Dwinell Country Ales’ Bumper Crop
Briefly, it was 60 degrees in Chicago, and that meant I got my drinking porch back. Bumper Crop, a Brett Saison from Dwinell Country Ales in remote Goldendale, Washington is the kind of beer I love to gulp—just take big chompy bites out of. And that’s the exact spirit such an early spring afternoon requires after sweeping off the season’s cobwebs and dead leaves, reclaiming my place in the sun, and thinking ahead to this year’s plantings.
Curated by The GBH Collective
