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. Further Doodles

. Favourite Beer of The Week

Today I cleaned the fridge. It's a big fridge and it takes a long time to clean.

While I was cleaning it, Nif was at the Berkeley Bowl grocery store buying beer (and some other stuff).

She was in the chutney aisle, examining chutneys, when some criminal type stole her shopping cart. She found it much later, two aisles away, recklessly abandoned beside the organic Zinfandels. Only when she got home did she realize that the perpetrator had made off with the bottle of Grand Teton Sheep Eater Scotch Ale that she had very kindly picked up for me. Grand Teton make "Howling Wolf" which as I'm sure you will recall, was my favourite beer on last year's favourite things of the year list.

Fortunately, the dirty shopping-trolly joy-rider did not rob the bottle of BrewDog Punk IPA that Nif had also picked up.



BrewDog is a Scottish brewery that make the 41% abv "Sink the Bismark IPA," a beer recommended to me by our good friend Erik Marr, who also promised to visit us this summer with his lovely family. Let's hope they follow through on that promise and don't leave us lonely and disappointed.



Punk IPA is a welcome change from all the strong beers I've been drinking recently. It's only 6% abv. But very flavourful. And very colourful. And very lacy, as they say in the beer world when they are describing the frothy bits that stick to the side of the glass, I think.



It came third in the Scottish division of the supermarket chain-store Tesco's 2008 World Beer Cup.


These days Tesco owns most of Britain. One pound in every seven spent in UK retailers is spent in Tesco. That's £1,117 every second.

Three years from now, Tesco plan to expand into Denmark.




Also today, I made Moussaka.


I've never made it before, and I think it came out okay. We didn't have any arrowroot powder for the pine-nut cream topping, but cornstarch seemed to do the trick. I think arrowroot might be cornstarch for the rich and famous.

You can find it in the baking aisle of a Tesco near you.

Just keep an eye on your cart.

And clean your fridge. It's filthy.

. My Nephew Ben

Here are some photos taken by my 3 year old Nephew, Ben. The kid is clearly a genius.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

Be careful of this beer.


It's another Mikkeller from Daneland.

This one's an Imperial Stout. It's thick like oil. And sweet like chocolate. And strong like a pint of port.

You've got to sip it slowly.

The day after I drank it I had a cold which lasted a week.

I'm not blaming the beer.

Just be careful.

. The Addict

This is the first bit of stop-motion I ever did, back in 1991.

Were you even born then?

It's quite awful.

. Book of the Month

I had read John Cheever's short stories. They reminded me a bit of Raymond Carver's. Carver is my favourite. Cheever and Carver were alcoholics together at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1973.

I didn't know Cheever also wrote novels, but I do now.


The Wapshot Chronicle was his first, and it starts off more like a bunch of short stories than a novel. The beginning 60 pages are not unlike last month's Book of the Month - they create and populate the world, and there's a whole load of begetting going on. Some seemingly important characters have entire chapters devoted to them, then they disappear, never to be seen again.

I'm not sure why that didn't annoy me. Maybe it's because I read most of the book while I was on holiday - a good chunk of it while I was hiding out in Chelsea Market waiting for the rain to stop.


When it does finally focus, Wapshot is mostly about two brothers growing up and going off into the world to discover life and love and all that. It's tragic and comic. There is a general tone of melancholy about it. The language is wonderful. It's hard to stop reading even when the weather clears up.

The only thing I did not love were the number of "wildly eccentric" characters. Being a grumpy old bastard, I have a hard time with eccentrics. I think that's why I don't enjoy Dickens.

Cheever wrote a sequel - The Wapshot Scandal. I might read it.

I still prefer the short stories though.

You?

Next month we will be reading New York Times bestseller "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave.

. intro/duction

With 4 weeks left in the semester, we slipped in a First Year MFA exhibition in a vacant 7 days at the Martin Wong Gallery on campus. This fleeting exhibition features free wine, and chips & dip tonight, followed by an artist talk in the lecture hall. Though, you don't need any more incentive than hanging out on a college campus on a weeknight, do you?

. NYC

Nif went to New York City for a week with her art school chums. See how arty they are.


I went too, and wandered the streets. See how street I am.


We blew all our air-miles on a schmancy hotel in Soho.


Then we stayed for a few days in Brooklyn with our lovely friends Tina and Colin and Una.


Here's a movie I made -

. Favourite Beer of the Week

This morning we went to see the friends and family screening of DreamWorks super new animated 3D glasses movie "How To Train Your Dragon" with our friends Ellen and Andrius.

The movie is all about Vikings (with curiously Scottish accents) so to stay in the Scandinavian spirit of things I am drinking a beer by Mikkeller - a small Danish brewery from Daneland.


I found it in the great big Berkeley Bowl beer aisle.


The woman stacking the shelves was raving about it to a friend, so I waited for her to bugger off and then grabbed one (beer, not friend).


It is called "Big Worst" and it is another Barleywine style ale, 17.6% abv. I am enjoying it with a sensible snack of carrot-miso-tahini dip (plus celery sticks and multigrain crackers).


Vikings were big in my home town in the 9th century.


They made York the grooviest place outside London for several decades. It's clearly where I inherited my red hair and large brutish physique.


In the early 1980's someone in York knocked down a chocolate factory and found 40,000 Viking remains under it. And there they built the Jorvic Centre - a museum of Vikings, complete with the authentic smells of toilets, dead fish, and pig shit.


The last Viking to rule York was a man called Eric Bloodaxe. He was driven out in 954 AD by this man:


which must have been quite embarrassing.

. HolyFuckingShit

. The Lanyard

It's Mothers Day in the UK. Did you forget?

I didn't. My Mothers Day gift is right here, 5 thousand miles from my mother.

Oh dear.

Well, here is a poem by Billy Collins:

The Lanyard
(click here mum)

And here are some nice little animated films of some of Billy's other poems.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

On Sunday I made a shopping list and went to the grocery store and when I got there I found that the shopping list was still in the kitchen, so I had to go up and down every aisle to try and remember what was on the list, and so eventually I found myself in the beer aisle looking at a bottle of Lagunitas GnarlyWine.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

GnarlyWine is a barleywine. A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Fuzzy Nuggz had some complimentary things to say about a barleywine he drank at Magnolia on Haight Street. I didn't even know barleywine was beer. I thought he had ordered a wine, which was strange. So I guess I've learned something this year. And it's only March!

Apparently barleywine is called barleywine because it is as strong as wine, but it's made from barley.


This one is 10.85% abv. It's a very pretty copper colour, and it tastes very tasty, and a bit thick in the mouth (for a liquid), and quite alcoholy, but not too much.

I would take this beer to a party if it was the kind of party where you can be sure no one else is going to steal your beer, and you can have it all for yourself, or share it with the people at the party that you genuinely like, or would genuinely like to impress with beer. Alternatively I would drink it at home on a Sunday afternoon, because let's be honest, I only go to about three parties a year, and Sunday afternoon is the time I do all my cooking for the week, and sometimes I need a little incentive.

. Book of the Month

I know it's only the 8th of March, but I finished reading this month's book, and let's face it, you're not going to read it. You didn't read Candide, and you didn't read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, unless you are Oliver, and then you probably just fell asleep again on page 16.

So why don't I just get it over with.

This month's book, as you recall, is "The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb"

R. Crumb is famous for his underground comix.


He has also made more "serious" books.



"The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb" is a comic book version of the first book of the Bible. Which is a lot of stuff.


I like that God is all crazy looking with wild hair and mad staring eyes, because God was pretty crazy in the beginning.


I'm sure I would not have read the Bible if it didn't come with cool pictures, although it turns out I already knew all the basic stories in Genesis from those interminable mornings at Clifton Methodist Church Sunday School.

The Creation


Adam and Eve

Noah's Ark


Abraham and Isaac


Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat


There's also a lot of sex and a lot of violence, which they tend to gloss over in Sunday School.


And then there are some surprises.

For example, after the flood, when the ark is safely parked on dry land, Noah grows a vineyard, gets blind drunk, and passes out naked in his tent. It is not clear whether he was drinking while naked, or gets drunk first and then gets naked, but however it transpires, he is unconscious on the floor with it all hanging out when his youngest son stops by. The boy sees his father's exposed manhood, and because of that, Noah turns him into a slave.

People were living for about 900 years back then. And this was Noah's youngest son. So say he was about 200 years old. That's 700 years of slavery for accidentally looking at his drunk dad's dong. Seems a bit mean to me.

Actually slavery in general seems a bit mean to me. God seems to have been okay with it.

And what is the lesson there? Do not under any circumstances ever, ever look at your pissed pop's penis, or suffer centuries of familial servitude?

And then there's Jacob's two wives, the sisters Rachel and Leah, who have a comedic baby-making competition. It's hard to keep count, but I think Leah wins 9 to 3 - although 4 of the children are born to the sisters' slaves who are also dragged into the contest.

And there are some dull bits. Characters have a habit of describing what they plan to do, describing it again as they do it, and then describing to someone else what they've just done. And there is way too much blah about who begot who and where they moved after they'd been begotten.

In the back of the book, Crumb offers possible explanations for some of the more confusing passages in Genesis (such as why men keep pretending their wives are their sisters). One proposition is that some texts in Genesis were based on older stories from a more matriarchal period of history, which were then "twisted around to fit the later patriarchal paradigm."

I'm boring you, aren't I? You've stopped reading this. You're just skimming to the end to see if there are any more pictures of tits and bums.

I understand.

Well, I enjoyed it very much. Except for the begotting.

As always, I very much look forward to hearing your opinion.

Next month we will be reading The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.

Order yours today!