Old World Swine

Beer Summit Joke

President Obama met with his advisers before the Beer Summit last night - because, you know, they wanted to make sure everything went well and wanted him to be prepared. They suggested he go in with a joke, something everyone could laugh at and that would make everyone feel better about themselves...

... so he brought Joe Biden.

*Ewww...*

The Web is a strange and wonderful place. On the wonderful side, for instance, I was very gratified to see that Mark Shea picked up my "Beer Summit" post over at Jimmy Akin's blog. Having your stuff picked up by other bloggers you admire is just great fun.

On the other hand, while poking around in my stat counter, I notice that one of my posts has been linked by some kind of  Bondage/Domination/Fetish group.

The post is about Huntsman Cheese.

I don't even want to know...

Craig Ferguson - The Deification of Youth

Who said comedy had to be dumb?

Hat tip to the guys at What's Wrong With The World?

Sorry about the formatting of the video. I don't know how to correct it, and, well... I'm just too lazy to find out. By the way, if you have time, check out the linked video "Craig Ferguson Speaks From The Heart"... guy's a class act.

A Nation Divided!

The Beer Summit is upon us, and much as I have tried to avoid reading very much into this hastily manufactured CYA photo-op (where's Rodney King? Can't we all just get along?), I can't help but notice the deep and sobering fractures in our society that are revealed in the beer choices of President Obama, Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley.

Let me elucidate:

Is it a surprise to find the President choosing Bud Light, the most popular beer in America? On the contrary, it would have been a shock had he chosen anything else. Undoubtedly the product of fevered consultation and nail-biting among the president's advisers, and bolstered by some last-minute focus group data. To choose a beer with any real, determinate character might have been to risk alienating some other beer demographic... so, as he has done since the earliest days of his candidacy, Mr. Obama has chosen the path that is the safest politically, and that reveals the least about himself. As I have said before, Bud Light tastes as much like nothing as beer can.

Professor Gates, on the other hand, has boldly chosen Red Stripe, the beer of Liberation from White Oppressors. Think I'm exaggerating? The Red Stripe web site trumpets;

The birth of Red Stripe would later be considered a milestone in Jamaican history. When the island gained independence from Britain in 1962, a columnist for The Daily Gleaner wrote "the real date of independence should have been 1928, when we established our self respect and self confidence through the production of a beer far beyond the capacity of mere Colonial dependants.

Take that, Christopher Columbus! I tried Red Stripe a year ago, or so, and found it remarkably unremarkable (it tastes a lot like any American mass-market brew) and a good deal too expensive, to boot. Cool bottle, though.

Sergeant Crowley, of the Cambridge Police Department, has chosen Blue Moon, a mass-market brew from Coors, coyly and carefully marketed as a "craft" brew. The third best-selling "craft beer" in America, right below Sam Adams Boston Lager (which is getting into some big numbers).

An unfiltered, multi-grain Belgian style beer, lightly flavored with orange and coriander, it is a tolerable brew, more substantial than Red Stripe, but still tame enough to be welcome at any back yard barbecue. Your craft beer friends will still respect you, and your Lite-weight friends - unaccustomed to beers with a distinct flavor and color -  will (mostly) not make cringe-y faces and say things like, "Thanks... now, do you have any beer? This tastes like swamp water and Earl Grey filtered through a gym sock.". It walks the line between two worlds, that of the Trousered Ape and the Craft Beer Snob. The choice doesn't exactly peg Sergeant Crowley as a Complex Man, but he has chosen the best beer of the three, for my money.

Meanwhile, we all sit by as the fate of the free world hangs in the balance. What if there are fisticuffs? Will professor Gates pound his shoe on the table? What if it is just an awkward and embarrassing twenty minutes of forced smalltalk? Will Obama have some (carefully planned and professionally written) one-liners on hand to break the ice? If all goes well, will they stand together out by the fence in the back alley behind the White House and say "Yup" in turn, like they do on King of the Hill?

That would be sweet.

To Renew The Image of Adam Grown Old

From the Wednesday evening prayer of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary;

"...Therefore he came down, in a manner he knows,
he stirred and came in a way that pleased him,
he entered and dwelt in her without her perceiving,
she received him, suffering nothing.
He was in her womb like a babe,
yet the whole world was full of him.
Of his love he came down to renew
the image of Adam grown old."

- Saint Ephrem (c. 306-373)

It reminds me a bit of this;

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Art History Ain't What it Was

Between the obligations of paying work, family activities and the summer blogging doldrums, I haven't posted a lot lately, but it will be picking up from here on out.

I need to put something more definitive together about my thoughts on non-objective art, a project that has been brewing for years. What can I say? I didn't want to commit to a point of view until I had thought it out, and until it was coherent and based on principle rather than merely being a matter of taste or tribal loyalties (or rivalries).

I think I'm pretty close to articulating a position, but it will take some time to distill my disparate and colliding thoughts into something decipherable. Putting it nicely, to call the ordinary activity of my brain "non-linear" would be a colossal understatement.

In the combox for the previous post, I pointed out that architecture (like Chartres cathedral) is "non-representational" art, as is so much of the design work in illuminated manuscripts (Like the Book of Kells), or the patterns on a Navajo blanket. To talk as if non-representational art is something new and modern is to be ignorant of history. So, it would be irrational to hail non-representational art as the pinnacle of any sort of evolution or progression of art history. It would also be irrational to categorically dismiss non-representational art as merely modern decadence or perversion.

What changed in the twentieth century was our attitude toward representational art, non-representational art, decorative art ... all the categories of art, and I'm more and more convinced that this attitude shift was on the whole unnatural and unhealthy. It represented not the flowering of art history in the West, but the intentional repudiation and rejection of that history. It was cultural fracture, not cultural growth. It was a sign and a result of the fruits of Industrial Revolution.

But more on that later.

Belloc on The Church

For those who may despair over all the grievous flaws of the Church, take heart. Hilaire Belloc famously observed that the Church was... "an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.".

Don't Get Me Started...

Mark Shea posts a rant on modern church art. He is a little rough on the artist, but I can't fault him too much for that... something really must be done, and sometimes that means shaking people out of their complacency. Art is important, and when we fail at art it is a sign we have failed at some very deep, foundational level.

Steven Graydanus weighs in in the combox and asks the centrally important question of what is gained when religious art jettisons its representational aspect.

I reply;

See, that's the rub. Modern art focuses on reductionism, deconstruction and isolation, teasing out the various *elements* of art and treating them as if they have been the whole point of art all along... as if the cave painters of Lascaux were all a-twitter over "composition" or "color schemes".

As SDG points out above, this is all a completely negative process. Any decent traditional stained glass window will have all the beautiful colors with the light streaming through *AND* will also have the narrative element that modern abstraction lacks. It's like a two-fer!

It is also part and parcel of the mystery of art. The idea that we can represent some thing or story by means of an arrangement of lines and color and shade is powerful magic, like the mystery of verbal language. You pick up a book, scan some marks on the page, and worlds are opened. A painting is never about mere "marks" or "color", any more than a book is about "paragraphs" or "pages". Nobody reads a book because they love "chapters".

Not that there is no place for abstraction. Chartres cathedral is chock full of abstraction, interwoven with the figurative images, but it is an orderly and balanced abstraction, not the randomized stuff we see so commonly now. Order is a good thing in itself, and there is in the Rose Window a certain playfulness within the order that could never be discerned in a the random scatterings of color we now see put forward as "serious" art.

So, what does a stained glass window gain by losing the figures, the narrative and the order? Nothing. It gains nothing, and loses nearly everything. But working with narrative and doing a good job of it (not kitsch) is hard, and the modern abstractions are far easier. That's what it comes down to.

Incidentally, there has been a lot of theorizing about just why the cave painters at Lascaux and elsewhere painted their pictures, and these usually have a lot to do with completely specualtive and unproveable ideas about conjuring animal spirits or invoking the gods of the hunt, or some such. I will throw in, however, with G.K. Chesterton, who boldly theorized that the cave painters painted for the same reason that I do... because it was fun.

Meet the New Boss...

Golly Bob Howdy! Who could have imagined it?

"President Obama has irked close allies in Congress by declaring he has the right to ignore legislation on constitutional grounds after having criticized George W. Bush for doing the same."

That's It... I'm Moving to Spain

I listen to NPR (National Public Radio) quite a lot when I drive. I disagree almost entirely with their editorial slant, but one must admit that what they do, they do very well. If I could start my own Catholic radio empire, I would pattern it after NPR's Morning Edition, rather than after any talk-radio format.

The other morning I was delighted to hear a story by Jerome Socolovsky called In Spain, It Takes A Village To Babysit. It's only a couple of minutes long, and worth a listen. The story paints a verbal picture of a typical Spanish village after sundown... once the heat of the summer day begins to dissipate, people emerge from their houses and shops and make their way to the village square, which is blocked to traffic. They greet their neighbors, eat, talk and laugh over wine or beer. Children are everywhere, shouting, running and playing hide and seek under tables. Everyone watches out for everyone else's children, and even strangers treat them as if they were their own. This goes on until late into the night.

The scene reminded me very much of this post I put together on my recollections of last year's Chesterton Conference. We seem to have lost the knack for this kind of thing here in the modern West. One commenter on the NPR story described the silence of American suburbs as "sepulchral", and I think that is pretty much correct. The people of the villages of Spain are closer to the Chestertonian ideal of a civilized and contented peasantry... not especially impressed with the technological or cultural marvels of the age, and consequently still in possession of nine-tenths of their common sense. Who would not want to live as they do... and why don't we?

I was also gratified to hear NPR movie critic John Horn announce that the stupidly cruel (and already stale) ambush "humor" of the movie Bruno had flopped like an undercooked omelet. An unmitigated box-office disaster. I found it fascinating that the movie's demise was partly due to modern communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter;

"Even if they had a turkey, [studios] would know that they could maybe get two weeks of business before the stink really caught up to the film," he says. "Now they have 12 hours."

Sacha Baron Cohen's newest film Bruno is one such example. The film was marketed well, and audiences who were familiar with Cohen's previous film, Borat, gave Bruno big opening-night ticket sales. By Saturday, however, Bruno's box office numbers had fallen by 40 percent — an unheard of number, according to Horn.

"So what that says is that people came out of that movie and told their friends not to go see it," says Horn. "When movies are not recommended by their friends, they fall faster then they've ever fallen."

Horn says this phenomenon puts pressure on studios to make better movies, especially when ticket sales can go south within a matter of hours:

"People will come out of the theater so quickly, and share their opinion so fast, and that word will spread so virally, that if a movie is bad, the audience will know it by Friday night and the movie will be dead by Saturday."

Now, see? This internet thing has its redeeming qualities.