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It was probably sometime in April, back when I was trying to wake up at like 5 AM to blog for an hour or two before the children woke up and I spent another quarantined day with them, as COVID spread on the other side of our doors and my employer temporarily elected to pay us and keep us home than have us risk our lives coming into the crowded office to blog on work computers—I was typing, half-asleep, probably putting together the fake Your Favorite Movie interview or some shit, and a thought occurred to me: why the fuck am I doing any of this?

Oh, there are reasons. I just don't think many of them stand up to scrutiny. I could say that it was a New Year's resolution, to write every day, but then one has to question my sanity in making such a pledge in the first place. I could say that it only felt like a difficult task because I had planned on doing a lot of writing at work, and work kind of fell apart for a good six months this year; however, now that I'm back full time, it's still kind of a pain in the ass. I could say that it was in service of improving my writing skills, but for what, exactly? This is a hobby. There are no stakes. No one is judging my writing. Plus, you gotta wonder if it actually improved, or if writing two millions words about useless bullshit just served to stagnate my lazy, typo-ridden writing style.

The best reason I can come up with is that maybe there are some people out there who find the tiniest, most fleeting joy in reading my pop culture thoughts and emo-drenched feelings. Occasionally, those people tell me, out there in the real world, that they read such-and-such blog post, and that always humbles me. Even if there are people out there who are reading Puke on Your Birthday and thinking to themselves "This is the dumbest fucking bullshit I've ever read," then at least they are reading, ya know?

PoYB gets about 50-100 hits per day, and while I'm sure a lot of those are bots from Russia, there are also must be real life humans clicking on the link. I will further assume that the vast majority of those humans who visit this blog are those who have an active interest in helping shape it. I'm talking about the contributors, those friends of mine who also enjoy writing and want to publish that writing somewhere (or, at the very least, they are the friends who don't flinch as I hold a gun to their temples and yell at them to start typing right now goddamn it).

It is through these loyal contributors that Puke on Your Birthday actually earns any sense of meaning and purpose. PoYB was founded originally on the idea that we all have worthy but often different opinions, and it's worth having somewhere relaxing online where all the opinions can hang out and bounce off one another and create a sort of melting pot of ideas. People not named Joe K*** contributed 194 blog posts in 2020 alone, which is incredible. PoYB would be a lonely place without all y'all. Thanks to everyone who had a part in shaping this community. A special shout-out to Sunny, Nate, Sam, and Rachel S., all of whom contributed in the double digits (honorable mention to Sara, who would reach that benchmark if we count her interview).

I would be lying if I said I didn't get any satisfaction at all from writing. I love the feeling of hitting "publish" on a blog post that I am particularly proud of and maybe even a little surprised how well it turned out. There's been a few times this year when I felt that, and I am grateful for each time it happened. But also, the sheer quantity of writing required to fulfill my self-imposed goal really put a hamper in achieving that feeling for the majority of what I wrote. Much too often, it became a matter of "I have to write this" as opposed to "I want to write this." And even when I actually did want to write something, I was also writing thirteen other blog posts that week, and so sometimes it became rushed and was published without so much as a cursory proofread.

In other words, I lost a lot of the passion that I had previously felt for blogging prior to 2020. The passion isn't necessarily gone for good—it will most likely return when I actually have some fucking time to relax and create an album review or a movie essay with tender care. Honestly—please don't roll your eyes over this simile—it's like that episode of Spongebob Squarepants, when Spongebob is in the Krabby Patty-making contest. The demigod he's up against makes thousands of Krabby Patties over the course of the contest, but Spongebob spends the allotted time creating one perfect Krabby Patty. He wins, because the Patty that he cultivated and perfected tasted a lot better than any other Patty that his opponent had made. I want to be more like Spongebob next year. I want to write the blog posts worth writing. I'm tired of pretending to be a content factory.

Something else to consider as we look ahead—my ability to write at my leisure is wholly dependent on the downtime I have at my job. I am fortunate to have had a position at work these past almost four years that allows me to type as much as I have. On the horizon, however, is an opportunity to simultaneously switch to another position, as well as head back to school to get my Master's. Both of these propositions are important for my personal, career, and emotional development. Neither of these propositions are necessarily suitable for my blogging development.

But we'll deal with that when it arrives (most likely in September, though who knows, things change). In the meantime, I'm looking forward to having some free time in my life and some free space in my brain. It's going to be relaxing to not have to stress about how I'm going write about whatever beer I'm drinking. It'll be delightful to be able to watch a movie on the train ride to work just to watch it, instead of having to finish and immediately turn to my keyboard. And fuck, man, I might even read some books this year!

The bottom line is this, and it is a two-pronged bottom line: one, I am so proud of what happened on Puke on Your Birthday this year; two, I am so glad it is over. To all our readers out there, thanks once again for reading everything you read this year. Whether you read eight posts (hi Pam!) or all 1000, I am so goddamn happy that you found something here that allowed you to while away a few minutes of this wretched year.

I guess I'll see you around on the blog sometime, whenever I get around to blogging again. Ha, I'm kidding, I'll see you tomorrow morning for the next round of Record Club reviews... and Saturday for a short review of a Rolling Stones album... and Sunday for next week's Album of the Week... okay, but on MONDAY, I swear to god you're going to visit Puke on Your Birthday and, for the first time since December 30, 2019, you won't see any new content published. It's going to be a good day.

Love,

Joey

This Is My Blood: Chimay Grande Réserve

I took one of those personality quizzes last week. You know the kind—you answer like 30 questions about yourself, and then it spits out an analysis of what those answers say about your overall personality. For this particular quiz, there were four different scales for which you were rated 0-100, from "not like this at all" to "very much like this indeed." I scored around 50 on three of the four quadrants, but a full 100 out of 100 on one quadrant. It is scarily accurate:

I mean, this pretty much sums of the purpose behind wanting to do a beer-a-day project and the wherewithal to finish it, doesn't it? I have a curious mind, I want to explore something that I'm not familiar with, I have a wacky idea, I weaponize my curiosity to see that idea through, and, oh, also, I have a propensity for substance abuse.

So yes, if you know me as well as this online personality quiz knows me, then you shouldn't be surprised that I spent the entirety of 2020 drinking a different beer every single day. And while you'd be excused in thinking that I did this just to have another excuse to fill this blog with hundreds of thousands of additional words of nonsense (because that's mostly true), I also had two concrete goals for This Is My Blood.

The first was that I wanted to "understand beer." What I mean by that is, I wanted to appreciate beer for what it is, not what it does. I've known what it does since I was sixteen years old, and I don't need to spend another entire year exploring the dark corners of that part of my psyche. No, what beer is, besides an intoxicant, is an ancient art form, crafted in a myriad of many peculiar and specific and unique ways, and meant to be tasted. It's the only art that you can consume with all five senses (okay, "hearing beer" is a stretch, but the carbonation does satisfy the ears to an extent). Just like you can technically burn a Pablo Picasso painting for warmth, so too can you drink beer just to get drunk. But that's not why it exists!

For the most part, I believe I achieved this goal. I can look at and smell and taste and feel a beer, and use those clues to tell you about the beer, tell you where it came from, and what it means, and what joys it possesses. I'm not good at it—i.e. I won't be judging on any beer competition panels any time soon—but I can at least perform the task in an amateurish way. And of course there are many mysteries that were not solved in 2020—e.g. okay but so like what really makes a Belgian beer Belgian, and is it something besides crude geography?—but I've long come to the realization that beer tasting requires mystery. If every question had an answer, then the journey would be over, and when it comes to drinking beer, the journey is the best part. No one wants this quest to end.

The second goal for This Is My Blood was more substance abuse-related and thus much less interesting. This goal was to limit my alcohol intake to 550 servings of alcohol over the course of the entire calendar year. The thinking was that a 60% decrease year-over-year would be enough to prove that I could cut back, and the fact that I was handcuffed to beer-every-day meant that I would be limited as to when I could consume more-than-one-beer-per-day within the confines of a 550 hard limit.

As you can see by the final count of today's beers below, I achieved my goal by drinking 550 servings of alcohol throughout 2020. This is good. I definitively drank many fewer beers than I had in most or all of the previous individual fifteen years or so. At the same time, I have some mixed feelings about the whole thing, and question whether it's truly an impressive achievement, or if I found too many ways to bullshit around with it.

Primarily, I'm talking about the ambiguous ways in which I determined what "one serving of alcohol" meant throughout the course of the year. Of course, if I drank a full beer, then that counted as one serving. If I split a beer with Pam, then that was 0.5 servings. But without other clarifications, I found myself taking advantage of those definitions. If Pam and I split a 12% ABV beer, then I'm drinking 0.5 beers technically, but that's still the same amount of alcohol as two full Miller Lites. Or if one cocktail is going to be one serving, then why not pour like 3.5 servings of vodka into it so it still only counts as one? In other words, I was taking advantage of the murkiness of the rule to still get as drunk as I possibly could under the circumstances. 

 

And that defeats the whole fucking purpose! The purpose wasn't to "drink fewer than 551 drinks," the purpose was to get rid of that innate need to get drunk. Getting drunk by sipping on fifteen Miller Lites and getting drunk by sipping on four Rude Elf Reserve Dark Belgian Ales is the same fucking thing. If I technically drank nine fewer beers under the latter circumstance, then that means I'm just cheating the system. I thought that I could use the constructs of a hard yearly limit to be able to limit myself day-to-day as well, but that didn't end up being the case. Instead of, ya know, not drinking so much on any particular day, I just found myself "saving up" extra beers for the days when I knew I was going to be drinking a lot. 

Plus, consider this: it's very easy to imagine that I would not have been able to stay below the 550 threshold if there wasn't a global pandemic to keep me at home. Now, obviously there's still the matter of the children, but even if there were an additional five Saturday nights in this hypothetical universe without COVID, theoretical nights when Pam and I got a babysitter, that's five additional Saturday nights when, instead of drinking 0.5 beers at home, I'm drinking 5.0 beers while at a bar or restaurant. I don't know how I would've done it without COVID. In a way, you could say that I'm only successful because the world was so screwed up this year.

So maybe the achievement of drinking less comes with two or more asterisks attached. I guess that's just something I have to accept. It's also not something I have to dwell on, ya know? Because I also had a ton of fun completing This Is My Blood! It was a very large pain in the ass sometimes, but also, how cool was it that I got to drink a new beer every day? And then use that as an excuse to occasionally stretch my writing muscles? Looking back, despite the labors of writing every single fucking day and the cringey ways in which I found a backdoor for my alcoholism, for the most part I actually do believe that this was a worthwhile endeavor.

Beer, as you may have noticed by this point, is very important to me. It's not a coincidence that I named this column after a church sacrament—beer is a ritual that in which I have partaken for half my life now, and it is very much a part of me, and the name was specifically chosen to reflect that. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to know more about something that you love. Through this daily ritual, I was able to consider beer creatively, artistically, intellectually, nostalgically, academically, and self-deprecatingly.

I am historically known for my affinity toward alcohol, for better or worse (probably worse). But now, I think I can confidently explain why that's the case. Yes, I very much enjoy the act of getting intoxicated, but there's more to it now. There is that extra layer of appreciating. I can now say that I like beer for what it is too, and not just for what it does.

Cue the notes, one last time.

NOTES

BEER: Chimay Grande Réserve

STYLE: Belgian Strong Dark Ale

ABV: 9.0%

BREWED BY: Bières de Chimay

LOCATION: Baileux, Belgium

PURCHASED AT: Foodery Rittenhouse—I picked this bottle up yesterday, and it was the first time I actually used this place as a bottle shop as opposed to a lunch spot. It was nice getting the opportunity to wish the manager a happy new year, though.

PAIRED WITH: pear cobbler

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 550

 

I wrote all this and scheduled the publishing in advance, before even drinking the beer, which was the first time all year that I did that. But I felt like it would've been weird writing this post in 2021 and backdating it to the previous year, especially if I'm mostly just writing the conclusion essay anyway. But I did, however, map out specifically what beers I was going to drink today. 

 

Chimay was the centerpiece, the only new beers I was trying (didn't want to complicate things too much). I also planned to repeat three beers—2° Below and Voodoo Ranger, which I just had on Christmas Eve, and Accumulation, which I haven't had since fucking January 3rd (so that kind of acted like a full circle-type beer to drink).

I will also have some champagne, from a bottle whose label I will definitely note while I'm drinking it and include that in the master list eventually. Finally, I plan on having wine from a bottle that has been sitting in a box for the past year, along with the New Year's resolutions that Pam and I wrote down and stored away. We plan on drinking that wine and reflecting on the year that passed us by more quickly than we could've ever imagined. I will also include that wine on the master list.

In the next couple of days, I will fill in the following brackets with my opinion of Chimay Grande Réserve: [nice round taste, very rich like a Belgian should be, nothing straying too far from the Strong Dark Belgian Ale formula but then why would you?] If you'll recall, Pam mentioned it in her closing interview last week, so I'm hoping it can be a beer we'll both enjoy as we ring in 2021.

Finally, I want to make it clear how much I'm going to miss doing all this. Yes, it was a relentlessly annoying pain in the fucking ass to keep up with the daily blogging about a subject that, let's face it, has a finite shelf life as far as blogging goes... and yet, looking back, I am so proud of what this body of work ultimately amounted to. If you're still here after 366 days, then I want to thank you for taking this bizarre journey with me. I hope you learned a little, and I hope you drank a lot, and I hope you had as much fun as I did. Cheers.

Love,

Joey

WPPR, Episode 7: A 2020 Retrospective

The only way I know how to ring in the new year with my readers is to make a playlist and then mumble into a microphone for a few minutes. Enjoy your final episode of WPPR this year, and marvel at the fact that I never figured out how to play background music during the talky parts, even after all this time.

CLICK HERE TO STREAM OR DOWNLOAD

Tracklist:

1. “Stationary” by Teenage Halloween

2. “The Authority Song” by Jimmy Eat World
3. “Lilacs” by Waxahatchee
4. “Making Flippy Floppy” by Talking Heads
5. “Young Man’s Game” by Fleet Foxes
6. “Dear Sirs” by El-P
7. “Gimme What I Want” by Miley Cyrus
8. “Used Up” by Kill Lincoln
9. “Valley Winter Song” by Fountains of Wayne
10. “Julia Take Your Man Home” by Wolf Parade
11. “Leaving Las Vegas” by Sheryl Crow

12. “Alien with a Sleep Mask On” by Ratboys
13. “Levitating” by Dua Lipa
14. “All Around You” by Sturgill Simpson
15. “Lay My Love” by Brian Eno and John Cale
16. “The Crowd” by Wells Fargo
17. “Martha Divine” by Ashley McBride
18. “Regan” by Killer Mike
19. “Then Because She Goes” by the 1975
20. “Better” by Caracara
21. “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band
22. “Your Deep Rest” by the Hotelier

23. "Hit and Run" by King Tuff

Whatever It Takes: We're Having a Party—I'll Bring the Degrassi Review, You Bring the Watermelon

Degrassi: The Next Generation

"Jagged Little Pill"

Season 1, Episode 15

Originally aired: March 3, 2002

A few weeks ago, when discussing Bridget Jones's Diary for Never Seen It, I made an observation that it must be tiring for the reader to witness me constantly documenting my explorations of experiences for which I am an amateur. I wondered whether my work on this blog and other internet authors around the web who do similar projects (e.g. "Why are people obsessed with such and such? I went to find out.") are doing the public a disservice. I wondered too why there isn't more content written by experts, explaining why the art or entertainment or passion they appreciate already should be appreciated more broadly by the general public.

After lamenting my inability to do that, I kind of realized that I already write something like that, at least to an extent. My Degrassi reviews. I'm not the world's foremost Degrassi expert, but I'm at least in the top 1% of the world's population. I also (whether you'd agree or not, I dunno) am pretty good at understanding people. My career involves investigating families, after all. I'd like to think that I am intuitive when it comes to someone's motivations behind their actions. And we spend a lot of time in these Degrassi reviews trying to understand why the characters behave the way that they do. That's the basic premise—the kids are like you. If I know Degrassi and I know people, then I am able to accurately assess the success of any given Degrassi episode from an expert's position.

In other words, unlike music reviews or movie assessments or craft beer analyses, this isn't shit I'm unfamiliar with. I am comfortable casting judgment on this TV show, because I know it intimately, and I know how and why it operates. I guess it's ironic, then, that these reviews are by far the least viewed feature on Puke on Your Birthday. It's possible that I was wrong in my assumption that people want to read something from someone who knows his subject well, and instead would rather read the straws I regularly grasp at when confronted with something I don't quite understand fully.

Or another possibility is that you, the reader, just aren't interested in the subject matter itself. It doesn't matter how passionate I am about Degrassi or how methodically I can break down each episode and each character if the reader doesn't give a fuck about Degrassi. Maybe the author's abilities don't ultimately matter. Maybe it's more about connecting to the reader with something that they are familiar with. It doesn't matter how I write or what I write about if the audience is bringing a passion with them from the start. And clearly, not many people are bringing a passion for an erstwhile Canadian teen soap opera.

But that's always been the joke, and I've always known that. My love for Degrassi is sincere, but it's also true that my love for Degrassi can—and should—be viewed in the absurd. I'm a fully grown adult male, and I have a deep knowledge of a fucking soap opera that played on The N in the '00s. That's weird. I'm self-aware enough to acknowledge that absurdity, and to be able to laugh with you about it. I might even play it up a little bit to keep the joke going. Maybe I wouldn't be writing tens of thousands of words about the show on a blog if I wasn't in on the joke.

I also wouldn't be writing so much about it if I wasn't comfortable in my understanding of it. This shit is not a struggle. I can watch an episode and give you a thousand words without really breaking a sweat. Degrassi makes sense to me.

It made total sense when Degrassi caps off their first school year with a house party with all the main characters crammed into one home. Degrassi shows that not only does it understand teenagers and their behavior, but it also understands what I love about television in general. I was a teenager who fucking loved gathering all his friends together for an occasion, and I am an adult who fucking loves when TV shows let all their characters gather together and bounce of each other in interesting (and plot-forward) ways. Degrassi, as it often does, spoke to me this week on multiple emotional levels.

Let's break it down for those who made it past that introduction and are still hanging on. A few storylines come to a head during the party. Primarily, Ashley is starting to question her behavior this year—not that she's done anything wrong for the most part, just more that the general role of "good girl" is starting to feel more and more claustrophobic for her. Toby is still pining after Emma, long past the point of it being cute and more now into creepy territory. Sean and Emma are still on the outs after the fight last week. Meanwhile, Ashley and Toby's parents are going away for the night, and they trust their 7th grade son and 8th grade daughter to hold down the fort while they're gone.

At first, Ashley and Toby are committed to playing by the rules and only inviting one friend over each (Terri and J.T., respectively), but shit quickly spirals out of control. Paige once again sows the drama by inviting herself and Hazel over. J.T. thinks that inviting Sean over will be helpful for Toby (Tobes can learn "how to be a bad boy"), but then disastrously uses the lie that "Emma will be there" to convince Sean that it's worth his time; Emma is then actually invited, along with Manny and Liberty. Ashley sees the 7th graders and ups the ante, inviting Jimmy, Spinner, and the unnamed boys (and Spinner's watermelon).

Point being that everyone is there, and you know what they say about Degrassi students—put enough of 'em in a room together, and shit goes off. The MacGuffin today is a tablet of ecstasy that J.T. had procured from his cousin. Sean, knowing that this can't possibly go well, switches it with Aspirin, but the actual ecstasy ends up with Ashley, who takes it in an attempt to shed her goodie-two-shoes image. This doesn't sit well with Jimmy, who's there, but hates that he showed up to a house where his girlfriend is doing drugs. Meanwhile, Sean and Emma are there together, finally, but Emma basically tells him to fuck off and runs out of the room. So Ashley's high on E and she finds Sean crying in a bedroom. They make out.

Ashley and Sean's hook-up, however brief, is a plot explosion, blowing up at least five characters in the process. Ashley, obviously, is grief-stricken that she'd do something so stupid. Sean immediately realizes this is dumb, and then further realizes that he can't help but self-sabotage his and Emma's relationship no matter what he does. Jimmy is pissed, not only because his girlfriend is high and making out with some guy, but also that it had to be the same fucking guy that he just fist-fought literally the week before. Emma, rightly, has it confirmed in her mind that Sean is scum. And Toby happens to be there to pick up the pieces with Emma, a long stare at Sean indicating that Toby now realizes that being the "bad boy" is not a viable choice for him. All this not even mentioning the fact that the hook-up is so far-reaching and dangerous that it immediately ends one of the only legitimate parties that the Degrassi students will ever throw before graduation (Drake Lempkey is coming for you, J.T.).

First of all, I just love the fact that the two main romantic relationships featured in Degrassi Season 1—Ashley/Jimmy and Emma/Sean—were able to intersect in such an intense way. Everything about it makes sense, and everything has been built up to this point, whether we noticed it at the time or not. 

 

Of course Ashley is going to take drugs to dispel the notion that she's too well behaved, and of course she's going to try to hurt Jimmy in the worst way possible, since he is a symbol of the stability that she is so sick of. Of course Sean is going to make out with a girl who wants to kiss him, because he's so tired of feeling like a failure, and here is this stranger (pretty much), telling him that he is worthy of affection. Of course Jimmy is going to be hurt, because he was told over and over by Ashley that she wants to be her boyfriend, and now he's finding out that that was a lie, and it's told to him in the worst and most insulting manner possible. Of course Emma is going to be devastated, because she thought she saw something good in Sean, a person who everyone else had written off, she thought that she had the ability to see the goodness in those who are downtrodden, and then Sean goes ahead and rubs that in her fucking face, yet again.

And secondly, this is all pretty true to life (besides the fact that anyone, even the dumbest, most Spinner-like among us, would ever deign to bring a fucking watermelon to a party). I've had hook-ups that have made girls cry. I've gotten a little too wasted and completely imploded a chance at happiness. I've gotten excited about gathering friends at an illicit house party only to see it end in disaster. All the shit that happened in "Jagged Little Pill" happens to teenagers every single fucking weekend, and I know because I've been there. All the characters in this episode are incredibly flawed, and that's what makes them real. The main characters in this episode are more real than they've been at any other point this season.

The realest, I think, is Toby. At long last, Emma falls into his arms. It's what he's wanted this whole fucking season, ever since he rescued Emma from a sex predator. It finally happens. And... you can just tell by the look on his face that he didn't want it to happen like this. Toby doesn't sweep Emma off her feet, but rather finds himself picking up her broken pieces. The look on Toby's face indicates that he knows that getting what he finally wanted is nothing but a curse.

Perhaps this is the realest emotion in this episode because it is the emotion I can most relate to, at least in the context of writing Degrassi reviews. I have finally found exactly what I was looking for, after 997 blog posts in 2020. I now realize that I have found a calling and a great use of my particular skills and passions in writing these reviews. And now I'm looking like Toby, like I got what I wanted but I'm not particularly happy now that I have it, and maybe I'm regretting my wish.

See you in Season 2.

GRADE: 5 pukes out of 5

This Is My Blood: Carnevale

Tomorrow's column entry will most likely be reserved for mushy conclusions and goodbyes, so that leaves today as the final day we drink a beer and break it down, just like Randy Mosher taught us. Let's go through the whole thing, one more time.

I tasted Carnevale on 12/30/20 at approximately 8 PM. It came in a 750ml bottle, and was corked. The only thing resembling any date printed on the label was a print that read "VINTAGE 2020," so I guess this could be 364 days old at most.

Uncorked, I immediately got a whiff of metallic. That's never a good sign. It wasn't overpowering like some other beers I've been disappointed with this year—I could still get a whiff of the fruity Belgian esters underneath it—but still, yeah, metal. Fuck.

Carnevale poured a deep golden color. The foam was out of control. The label said "pour gently"—whoops—but also sometimes this is a sign that the beer has gone bad. The foam plus the aroma did not bode particularly well. This beer has definitely been oxidized.

Sucks because I did everything I could to treat this beer with the respect it deserves. I even made sure the temperature was correct—it calls for 40-45 degree F—and yet the beer shows me no respect in return by clearly having gone slightly bad.

It did not taste terrible, despite that. The body was pretty thin for a Belgian, but I still enjoyed the spiciness of the Belgian yeast. I probably always will. Maybe my affinity for Belgian beers is what pulled this Carnevale back from the brink. If it wasn't for that unique fruity/spicy combo, then I would've had a lot worse to say about the thin/metallic combo that also clearly existed.

Carnevale was also bitter, but in the wrong way. Bitter not like hops, but like battery acid. At least that's what I got in the aftertaste. Again, it was subtle, but definitely not satisfying.

I'm wondering if I would've had these opinions if I hadn't opened Pandora's box this year when it comes to beer. Maybe I've had 1000 oxidized light lagers in my life, and I haven't said shit, just drank 'em like a good little boy, but now I have "taste" and "expectations" and all that nonsense, and all of a sudden I'm picky about what fancy Belgian beers taste like? Bummer, bummer, bummer. This knowledge is a double-edged sword—I can appreciate good beers, but now I am picky about bad beers. Would've been nice to not know shit about beer tonight and just drank a fucking beer, but we can never go back, ever.

Still, having said all that, I'm still gonna miss doing shit like this. Even if a beer isn't great, I still get to consider an inanimate object on a deeper level than I would have otherwise. I feel a connection to this beer, even if I didn't particularly like it. If you want to read that as self-loathing, then go for it; I tend to see it as simply an appreciation for the perfect and the imperfect alike.

NOTES

BEER: Carnevale

STYLE: Belgian Saison

ABV: 8.2%

BREWED BY: The Lost Abbey

LOCATION: San Marcos, CA

PURCHASED AT: IGA, when I was looking for a nice (but reasonably priced) bottle to drink toward the end of the year

PAIRED WITH: nothing, we were just chilling, enjoying the beer and each other's company

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 544.5

Never Seen It, #27 of 200: Brokeback Mountain

I made a list of 200 movies I've never seen but felt like I should have, put that list in alphabetical order, and started watching from top to bottom. Here's the next movie. It would be cool if I could do two of these per week in 2021, but no promises.

Brokeback Mountain

2005

I usually start with Google, after the credits roll. Not to see if there are any retrospectives or analyses available—there are, usually, but I wait until after I let the movie sink in a little bit before reading what it means to others—but rather just to see if the movie has been talked about recently for whatever reason. You'd be surprised what can show up in the news (remember how we watched The Godfather Part II and Roger Stone's prosecutors had just used the movie in court that week as "evidence"?). Still, it's not like it happens that often, so I was surprised to see multiple stories online dated "1 day ago" regarding the author of the Brokeback Mountain short story speaking out.

Most of the articles had a clickbait title, something like "Annie Proulx Wishes She Had Never Written Brokeback Mountain." What she really meant was that, over the past 23 years, Proulx has had interactions with fans of the story and of the movie who, in her opinion, completely miss the point. The point isn't Jack's love or Ennis's sadness or whatever, the point is the homophobia that keeps them apart.

I don't think that I necessarily needed that pointed out (especially after just seeing Brief Encounter, but we'll get to that). I am interested, though, in the idea that audiences could misinterpret a movie so badly, both in innocuous and in harmful ways. I'll use a personal example for the latter—I had obviously never seen this movie before, and I doubt many of peers did either, but that didn't stop the term "Brokeback Mountain" from becoming a homophobic punchline in high school. Forget misinterpreting—this is perversely weaponizing an anti-homophobia film for the purposes of creating more homophobia. I can't imagine LSCHS was the only all-boys school making such jokes, and it sucks in so many ways, the least of which is that it's such a good fucking movie.

 

So I feel like I need to take particular care in explaining this film—what it's about, what makes it a great film—as some form of repentance for whatever ignorance I've showed toward it in the past, in service of some bad joke or another. I would say something like "you know how teens are," but even ignorant teenagers are part of the fabric of society that takes on these uninformed and hateful views of non-majority groups. If I ever played into that—I can't remember any specific Brokeback-inspired jokes I've made, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen—then I'm truly sorry. Again, I'm especially sorry because the film makes its points beautifully and poignantly.

 

In that vein, let's talk about what Brokeback Mountain really is about. As you may have surmised, this is the story of two cowboys who fall in love. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet when they are nineteen, when they are both hired as sheepherders for the summer. A friendship develops and blossoms into a complicated romance. But when the job ends, so too do their interactions, at least for a few years. They both get married, have kids, live quote unquote "normal" lives. But eventually, they reconnect, and fall into a pattern of getting together every few months for a weekend on Brokeback Mountain, living how they want to live and never could back in society.

Or could they? That's the question that Jack poses multiple times to Ennis. Why not just buy a ranch together somewhere, live together for the rest of their days, be actually goddamn happy for once? But they both know the answer, even though Ennis is the only one who wants to say it out loud. The answer is that society (their society being America in the '60s through the '80s, roughly) would never allow it, and would often violently rebuke it. Ennis tells a tale of how, when he was nine years old, his father brought him to see the dead body of the local gay rancher, a guy who lived with his male partner, and for his supposed crime, paid by being violently murdered by locals. Ennis knows the score. He is unhappy, sometimes insurmountably so, but he chooses to be unhappy rather than to be dead. 

That's... well, it should be clear to anyone that it's not fucking fair to anyone in that position, to know full well what it is that would make you happy, and for then to be told you can never have that thing. It's fucked up. Annie Proulx, I get it! I get the point! And it hurts to think about it!

I couldn't help but compare Brokeback Mountain to Brief Encounter, not only because I watched them in back-to-back weeks, but also because they deal with (at least on the surface) pretty similar themes of love unrequited. Whereas Brief Encounter was content to show that love and to violently yank it away, Brokeback Mountain instead acknowledges that that love is always going to be yanked away, regardless of what you do, because of society's terrible constraints. Brokeback Mountain sadly chronicles the toll that can take on a human life, the harrowing truth that happiness could be within reach if there was any justice in the world. At least Brief Encounter's Laura was able to find her way back to her husband. For Jack and Ennis, there is nowhere to turn.

I spoke a lot last week about that feeling of brokenness within oneself when you think you should be happy, and yet you occasionally find yourself very unhappy, for some unexplained reason. While there are a lot of comparisons to be made between the two movies, I don't think they are comparable in this specific way. It's not like Ennis is sitting around wondering if he is broken, and what he can do to fix it. He knows exactly why he is so unhappy. He knows that he only ever found happiness with Jack out there on Brokeback Mountain. He knows that he could find true happiness if he ever allowed himself to be with Jack outside of the context of their thrice-yearly getaways. And yet he also knows that he can never do that, ever.

Jack didn't quite get that, or maybe he got it but was more outward in his disdain for the unfair truth of the matter. Jack is outwardly frustrated, whereas Ennis slowly collapses inward. It is never confirmed in the movie whether Jack paid the price that Ennis so feared (murdered by those with no tolerance for his lifestyle), or if that was Ennis imagining the worst in his mind. Does it matter, really? Whether Jack was murdered or if he really did die from an exploding tire pump, the truth of the matter is that he, like Ennis, was denied those basic rights that are supposedly guaranteed in the Constitution—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

So as much as Annie Proulx hates it, I can't really blame for the audience wishing for a better outcome for Jack and Ennis. We try to imagine that there has to be a better way when it comes to love, no matter how that love is forged. There were enough people imagining a brighter future that gay marriage is legal in America, and that the majority of Americans are now accepting of LGBTQ+ lifestyles. Thankfully, plenty of human beings are able to find love akin to Jack and Ennis's, and they are now able to confirm that love in public without fear of being murdered for it. But we're not quite there, not when the Catholic Church looks unfavorably on it, or the trump administration pushes through homophobic laws, or, I dunno, high schoolers make cruel jokes using Brokeback Mountain as the premise.

I feel like I'm getting a little preachy, but that's just because Brokeback Mountain really got to me. It told an affecting story about how society was really fucked up in its homophobic views. The prejudice really got under my skin. In that way, it is a successful movie.

It's kind of funny that it lost to Crash at the Oscars, isn't it? Crash has been mentioned in countless Your Favorite Movie interviews, held up as the premiere example of undeserving accolades in cinema. It's been years since I've seen Crash, but I recall that it was an anti-racism movie, right? Which is as deserving a subject as anti-homophobia, but... I just can't imagine that Crash came anywhere close to making its case so intimately and effortlessly. Maybe the Oscar voters misunderstood the point of Brokeback Mountain, just like Annie Proulx feared? I'll never fool myself into believing that I understand anything about Oscar voters.

But I do understand Brokeback Mountain—unfortunately. I wish I could live in a world where the only thing keeping apart two men who are clearly meant to be together is their own personal flaws. I do not live in such a world. Instead, I know that I live in a world where two people can find happiness together, and despite that, they will still be kept apart for ugly and prejudiced reasons. Good movies sometimes proclaim terrible truths, but it is for those same movies that we have a responsibility not to look away.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Speaking of terrible truths, Bill Murray is coming back to our screens next week in Broken Flowers, so we'll see what our old foe has in store for us this time.

Top Five Tuesday: Leftover Music from 2020

My idea was to make a Top Five list of all the new music that I discovered in December of 2020, during the weeks after I wrote my Top Albums of 2020 list. It would be an opportunity to clear the deck, so to speak, before we move onto a brand new calendar year and a brand new "Listened To" memo on my phone.

Two issues. One, I already wrote about a bunch of music from 2020 that I listened to in December—Taylor Swift, Rico Nasty, Kurt Vile, Gorillaz—and so I'd be inclined to exclude those from this list (i.e. it's too soon to write more about any of them). Two, more than any other year since I started actually consuming new music, I spent the vast majority of my December listening to older music. I'll exclude those as well, since next December, they will be eligible for the "Best Non-2021 Albums I Listened To This Year" list.

With those exclusions in mind, we are left with... exactly five albums. So let's go ahead and rank them and give them their proper due before I inevitably forget about them come January. #1 is probably the only album that would've had a fighting chance at making the year's best list, but that doesn't mean all five of these LPs aren't worth your time.

Top Five 2020 Albums I Listened To in December

5. Cuttin Grass — Vol. 2 (The Cowboy Arms Sessions) by Sturgill Simpson

Sturgill might've been the first rock star to get sick from COVID, which apparently fucked him up good but which also gave him time to relax and reflect. After he got healthy, he used his new lease in life to explore bluegrass, and releasing a couple albums that take his old songs and repurpose them for this new/old genre. It's relaxing as fuck.

4. I Don't Hate You by Ogbert the Nerd

The lo-fi halfway point between, I dunno, Saves the Day and Iron Chic? No idea, give me a break, it's been a long year.

3. Hypoluxo by Hypoluxo

I have no idea what secret sauce is required for post-punk to be palatable for me, but whatever it is, Hypoluxo have it. Stereogum argued that it's "the ability to have fun," but I don't know if I buy it. I've enjoyed dead-serious post-punkers before. Can't argue that Hypoluxo ain't fun, though.

2. Triceratops / Stegosaurus by ME REX

Have we finally reached that point when Los Campesinos! is serving as direct inspiration for indie rock projects? If so, consider me very excited. That torch needed to be passed long ago.

1. Can't Complain by Kill Lincoln

I had no idea that Streetlight Manifesto left an itch until Kill Lincoln scratched it. It's not a direct comparison (not as close as Los Camps to ME REX above, anyway), because whereas Streetlight was impossibly lame (though that's why I love them), Kill Lincoln are impossibly cool. "Cool" is not an adjective that's ever been used for ska, I don't think, but here we are.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES: The only reason I haven't listened to McCartney III yet is that I want to listen to McCartney and McCartney II first; Slaughter Beach, Dog just released a new one, and I know in my heart of hearts it would find itself here if I had the time to get around to it before writing this.

This Is My Blood: La Libertad

This Is My Blood Superlatives

 

FAVORITE BEER STYLE I WAS ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH: Hefeweizen — God, I wasted so much time at Frankford Hall drinking PBRs.

 

FAVORITE BEER STYLE I WAS NOT FAMILIAR WITH: Weizenbock — Combine the fresh wheat of the hefeweizen and the rich malty/caramel history of the bock, and you got a winning concoction. 

BEER STYLE I HAD THE MOST OF: IPAs, probably — I'm not gonna sit here and count it up, but it feels like I had more IPAs than I should've this year. That's what happens when the country you're drinking in is obsessed with a trendy, easily-brewed beer.

 

BEST BEER PAIRING: our dinner on June 12th — It's crazy, because of the three pairing dinners I put together, this was the most haphazard, in that I already had planned the courses, and just grabbed whatever beers I had in my fridge that I thought would work best. It worked really, really well.

 

WORST BEER PAIRING: Fool's Gold — You'd think that a peanut butter beer would go well with chocolate cake, but that's assuming too that the peanut butter beer is actually a good beer (when the peanut butter flavor is on top of a fucking hefeweizen, then you assumed wrong). 

BEER I HAD THE MOST OF: Milwaukee's Best — I finished a 30-bird of Beast over one weekend. I can't have drank all 30—I'm sure some were used for beer pong and other drinking games—but even at 20+, it would still win this award.

 

BREWERY I HAD THE MOST BEER FROM: Attic Brewing Co. — Not only were they my favorite brewery, but more importantly for this superlative, they have a high turnover rate for brewing different beers, and they have a free delivery service through which you can purchase a single beer of each variety.

BEER I REPEATED THE MOST TIMES: Miller Lite — According to my notes, there were at least nine different days on which I drank a Miller Lite. What can I say, it's a nice easy light cheap beer to supplement heavy expensive craft beers with.

 

BEST BEER ON DECEMBER 29TH: La Libertad — A nice, fresh lager, similar to Tecate but made with more care. You can taste the corn adjuncts, which means it would go really well with Mexican food. That's the point, though, isn't it? So full marks I guess, even though I'm not 100% on board with the taste of that particular adjunct.

 

MOST VIEWED BLOG POST: Reilly's Red Ale —that's only because it was constantly linked back to during 50-60 subsequent blog posts, all about the different styles of beer, which were listed on this Reilly's post. Otherwise, the most viewed is a virtual tie between Eraserhood and Imperial Sunshine, since the subject of each respective post asked me to take it down, and clearly kept clicking on the post to see if I had done so yet.

 

MOST REGRETFUL BLOG POST: Corona Light — Not only did I employ an incredible weak conceit swiped from Community, but I also stated that "wearing face masks" was a "pointless response." I wonder how many lives would've been saved if I and the rest of the country had adopted the wearing of face masks on March 7th.

MOST NEEDLESSLY SAPPY BLOG POST: Murphy's Irish Stout — Only Joe K*** could get all weepily nostalgic about the goddamn subway.

MOST FUN WHILE DRINKING A BEER (PRE-PANDEMIC EDITION): Daisy Cutter — February 29th was really the only night that came close to replicating the wild abandon of a crazy Philadelphia Saturday night all year.

MOST FUN WHILE DRINKING A BEER (PANDEMIC EDITION, ALSO NON-POCONOS EDITION): Summer Love — Those halcyon days when the numbers were low enough that you didn't feel like a complete fucking asshole eating dinner outside at an Italian restaurant after a rain storm for your anniversary.

 

LEAST FUN WHILE DRINKING A BEER: Hazy Jane — I've been up in the middle of the night to deal with Martha at least 340 nights this year. It's not fun. It's exhausting. Why in the world did I think drinking a beer would change that? 

WEIRDEST PLACE TO ENJOY A BEER: Abington Hospital — But I could think of no other way to properly greet my niece into the world than with a four-pack of her father's namesake beer.

BEST SOLO LUNCHTIME BEER: Damnation — The beer was good (but expensive), but the best part was actually doing something after two months of isolation, even if that something was sitting in a park and drinking a beer by myself.

COOLEST BARTENDER: The Lunar Inn — I was drunk enough to bring my own beer to the bar; I was all prepared to show my receipt that I had paid for the beer at the attached bottle shop earlier in the day; bartender could not give less of a fuck.

 

MOST SURPRISINGLY GREAT BEER: Kriek Cherry Lambic — I had low expectations because sour beers aren't normally my thing; Pam had low expectations because she abhors cherry-flavored-anything. We were both blown away.

MOST SURPRISINGLY BAD BEER: Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc — Nothing worse than buying a beer thinking it's going to be a fancy rare French beer, only to discover that it's a shitty orange Kool-Aid knockoff.

 

TOP FIVE WORST BEERS

5. Tradewinds — Skittles, basically

4. Oude Gueuze Tilquin à L'Ancienne — Ancient sour beer recipe can go fuck off

3. Stoop Fireflies —y u gotta fuk wit hefeweizen

2. Bilsner — I hope Bilsner, if he truly does exist, gets what's coming to him

1. Plain Chicken Nuggets — I don't think it was supposed to taste like chicken nuggets...

 

TOP FIVE BEST BEERS

5. Rye Eagles Rye — E! A! G! L! S! Rye beers!

4. Arrogant Bastard Ale — Don't let the beer bros fool you, if they like this beer then they are right

3. The Shape of Hops to Come — Imperial IPAs aren't great in general, this is a fluke in the best way

2. St. John Street — I didn't even know what I was drinking, but I loved it, and now I'm regretting not getting more before Goose Island Philly boarded up

1. Aventinus — Let the ranking speak for itself (because I'm all out of words for beer at this point)

NOTES

BEER: La Libertad

STYLE: Mexican Lager (i.e. American Lager)

ABV: 5.3%

BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.

LOCATION: right down the road from wherever you are in Philly

PURCHASED AT: this is the last beer in the delivery that I ordered a few weeks ago

PAIRED WITH: Fried chicken sandwiches from Omaha Steaks

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 544

Whatever It Takes: Trying to Purposefully Get the Flu So I Don't Have to Write a Degrassi Review

Degrassi: The Next Generation
"Under Pressure"
Season 1, Episode 14
Originally aired: February 24, 2002


 
A cynic might describe the characters of Degrassi as "morons," but it's week fourteen, and by this point you gotta understand that this is just how teenagers behave. We were all dumb teenagers at one point, and as you get older, you start to forget that undeniable truth. It would be so easy to just dismiss the whole thing as "unrealistically dumb," as if characters like Sean and Spinner are dumber than anyone else was at that age. They aren't. They're just regular teenagers. This is how they are! If you are a 30-something watching this teenage soap opera, then it's probably time you accept this!

Plus, who wouldn't act out during such a stressful time of year? It's already time for final exams at Degrassi, and some of the students are feeling the pressure. I'm sure all of the students at this school are acting out in some dumb teenage manner (remember when Toby was the one struggling in Media Immersion?), but Degrassi chooses to focus on the aforementioned Sean and Spinner this week. I think it's important that these two characters anchor the A/B-plots, respectively, because these are the two characters who, for better or worse, don't have much faith in themselves and their own academic abilities. And though they both eventually reach the same conclusion (no need to self-sabotage; gotta believe in yourself), they both get there in different ways.

Let's start with Spinner, whose journey is a little more lighthearted this week. This, even though it involves the return of Ms. Kwan, who was last seen bawling her eyes out in the parking lot because Spinner was torturing her. Kwan is back and in good spirits (her husband's chemo is going well), and she's all ready to administer the final English exam to grade 8s. Spinner has been told again and again this year how dumb he is, and so he's starting to believe it. It's to the point that, even though he's actually read all the books and probably knows most of the material, he still thinks failure is inevitable. And so, he starts pulling some of the usual Spinner bullshit, this time concocting a plan to purposefully get sick to get out of the exam.

I think I'm just on edge because of our 2020 concerns with COVID, but I think that trying to get the flu on purpose might be the low point of all dumb fucking Spinner plans (and yes, this includes the time when he tricked the school pariah into shooting Jimmy with a gun... ah, shit, spoilers, sorry). But it's times like this when I step back and meditate and remember what I said at the beginning—teenagers are by and large dumb fucking morons. 

 

So thank god for Ms. Kwan, right? Her ability to call Gavin out on his bullshit is so, so welcome this week. I love how Kwan is able to instill confidence in Spinner even though she is probably also 99% sure that Spinner egged her car last month. She's got some serious teacher skills. In that regard, it's disappointing that Spinner doesn't connect the two. Sure, he's happy that he passed, and thankful for Ms. Kwan's telling him to believe in himself, but he isn't able to put that in the context of the fact that it wasn't that long ago that he was legit torturing Ms. Kwan. The kid shows no remorse. Maybe it's coming later and I just forget, I dunno. More likely, this is Degrassi dropping the ball.

I wouldn't say that Degrassi "dropped the ball" when it comes to Sean. It's more that they laid the foundation for Sean's anger issues and self-esteem concerns, and kind of let it simmer a little too far in the background. That's not to say that Daniel Clark hasn't always done a good job playing Sean as if he has some dark emotions bubbling just below the surface. It's just that it's kind of all of a sudden when Sean flies off the handle in this episode particularly. Final exams are really getting to him, huh?

We start with Emma at Sean's place. Sean doesn't want her to see their house, so she waits outside. Then Tracker shows up. You remember Tracker—Canada's premiere badass older brother. Tracker is such a dick to Emma, but also manages to sneak a genuine compliment through his cracked angry veneer. Tracker is right—Emma has been a good influence on Sean this year. Sean, when he was first introduced, made it plain to his peers and to the audience that he was ready to throw down at any moment, but the fact that he hasn't really fulfilled that promise means that Emma is working. Sean may have hit a kid at his old school so hard that it made the kid deaf (who does he think he is, Marky Mark?), but at Degrassi, he's stayed out of trouble.

So it doesn't irk me that Sean is clearly holding back some intense anger and the show hasn't acknowledged it in all this time. I'm more so irked that this is the time that Sean decides to let the anger boil above the surface. Emma, having been tipped off by Tracker that Sean has anger issues, confronts Sean about it. Sean fesses up, but says that he's doing better (and that's true). Any reasonable person would take that as a sign that they need to double down on their efforts, and try to stay out of trouble to save the best relationship you have going right now. Instead, not 24 hours after telling Emma that he has anger issues, Sean allows those anger issues to get him so riled up that he takes a swing at Drake, and then pushes Emma to the ground in frustration. Bad move, bro, and worse timing.

Same with Spinner, though... I know, I know, these are teenagers. Bad timing is kind of their thing, ain't it? And bad decisions. Terrible decisions. Like Spinner, Sean does eventually have a teacher come to his aid and give him a pep talk about not being as dumb as you perceive yourself to be—Mr. Simpson tells Sean that he aced the test that made him so worked up, and that he should believe in himself some more. Unlike Spinner, however, the damage is already too great for a good test grade to overcome it. Sean pushed Emma to the ground. He can't take that back. Not yet, anyway.

Okay, so let's zoom out and reflect, as we always try to do, on what Degrassi is trying to tell us by presenting these two stories in parallel. Spinner and Sean acting like complete buffoons teaches us what? That we should believe in ourselves? I dunno... that seems a little trite, but it might be the best we can do today. Had Spinner believed in himself, then he wouldn't have had to get anus-shamed by the school nurse or miss the big sporting event with his dad this weekend from the flu that he got on purpose. Had Sean believed in himself, then maybe he could've concentrated on being a good, calm boyfriend instead of, um, assaulting his girlfriend.

Also, we could also learn a thing or two from the fact that both of these jabronis got so worked up in the first place about a dumb fucking grade school test, ones that will mean nothing in the long scope of their lives. We could learn from them to have some perspective, and not get so worked up about the little things. Then again, they are teenagers, and when can we ever expect them to be mature enough to obtain perspective on any goddamn thing in their lives?

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

Stray Observations (because I actually have a few today):

• I wonder how long Jimmy has been walking past Sean's locker and making snide comments to Sean about his repeating seventh grade. We saw the ball-busting when Sean first showed up, and we see it twice in today's episode. Maybe it's been happening every day all year. Maybe Jimmy had it coming.
• One interesting conflict that wasn't remarked up too heavily in this episode is that Jimmy's fight with Sean does not sit well with Ashley, who makes it clear to Jimmy that she is PISSED that he'd stoop to fighting in the side alley after school. I know there is a big blow-up between Ashley and Jimmy on the horizon. Could this be the beginning? Only time will tell (because I truly forget).
• Very interesting that Terri had some strong words about boyfriends who push their girlfriends to the ground, considering what we know about her future.
• I love that the school nurse is allowed to show genuine pleasure in scaring Spinner with the rectal thermometer. Sometimes kids like Spinner deserve what comes to them, and the school nurse understands that. The laugh was genuine, and delightful enough that I wish this school nurse made more appearances in the future. Alas.
  
• Season 1 has been pretty inconsistent with their episode titles, but starting with this episode, every episode will be named after a song title. I've long been ambivalent about "Under Pressure," but The Number Ones recently convinced me that it is a good song.
• I know that these characters have so many stories left to tell, but I'm really looking forward to getting to Season 2, meeting Craig and Marco and Ellie, and really getting to some of the more classic plotlines. Season 1 is starting to feel a little claustrophobic, and also kind of primitive, like Degrassi is still trying to figure out what it wants to be. Let's get to the really good stuff!
  

PoYB's One and Only Retraction of 2020

We've written a lot this year. By the time the clock strikes midnight on Thursday night, Puke will have published 1000 blog posts in 2020 (hopefully). I (Joe) can't speak for everyone, but I know that regarding everything that I've written this year, there are very few posts that I regret. Most of my regrets involve me just writing shitty blog posts due to lack of time or effort or both (Family Matters references, vegetables, that kind of thing). But there is only one blog post, as far as I know now, that I was just straight-up wrong in my assessment. I am here now to quickly make amends before the year is over and I go back to writing an average of 2.5 times a week.

 

Alright, here it is: On 10/31/20, I ranked all the Billboard #1 songs of the year so far, and I had a lot of compliments for "Say So," a disco-infused summer-y jam by Doja Cat. I thought so highly of it that I called it the second-best #1 song of the year. Some new information has since come to light, information that makes me regret the nice things I had to say. I promise that this is the last time I let a large-breasted, small-bikini'd, french-fry-eating music video distract me from what really matters.

First, all the evidence that I could stand reading (about half of it, maybe) seems to indicate that Doja Cat is... not a good person. Not that every artist has to be a saint, but her particular brand of shittiness is what makes me want to dismiss her. Vulture has an extensive look at all the controversies, and it's a lot, but it can probably be summed up as such: Doja Cat moderated an alt-right video chat room, in which she stripped for incels, and expressed some volatile racist views herself. Kinda hard to justify any of this, and I'm not sure Doja Cat was ever able to. Whether should be "cancelled" or not seems like a stupid argument based on premise alone. All I can say is that her history of unsavory views and how she expresses those views makes me sorry I ever liked her song.

Second—and I didn't know this either, at the time—"Say So" and four other songs from the most recent Doja Cat LP were produced by Dr. Luke, a.k.a. Lukasz Gottwald, a.k.a. "Tyson Trax" (his pseudonym for his Doja Cat credits), a.k.a. the dude who sexually assaulted Kesha. I had no idea (because I'm ignorant about these kinds of things) until Fiona Apple brought it up the other day. She makes a good point—absolutely wild that the Grammys could make a big show of supporting Kesha a few years ago, saying they "believe" her, and then go ahead and nominate her abuser. It makes me angry enough that I don't even want to watch the Grammys this year, to be honest (I guess I should retract making a big deal out of it too, then). And that's not even spotlighting the fact that Doja Cat thought she could sweep this under the rug by letting Dr. Luke use a pseudonym? Creepy, disgusting, and irredeemable.

Third—and this is the least important point, but probably the closest to my own sensibilities—"Say So" has been credibly accused of ripping off a song that already exists. That song is "Fiona Coyne" by an artist named Skyler Spence (who used to go by the name "Saint Pepsi"). I mean, you tell me. Do they sound enough alike for Spence to have a day in court over the issue? It's possible (not probable). It's just as possible that the creators of both "Fiona Coyne" and "Say So" were influenced by the same general disco sound, and that both of those songs also sound like countless other hits and semi-hits from the 1970s. But after listening to it a few times, I like "Fiona Coyne" a lot too, and it's particularly galling that that song never even charted, but Doja Cat can finagle her way to #1, since only the former is about a Degrassi character. 

 

If I continue my Degrassi reviews, then it'll be another seven years or so before we meet Fiona, but still, I think it's great that such a fun song can be about—and also directly quote—the best teen soap opera of all time. So I hate the fact that Doja Cat and her producers took a pretty cool sound, stripped away the best part about it (Degrassi), and added some pretty distasteful elements (Nicki Minaj). Like I said, who the fuck even knows if it's a direct rip-off or a coincidence, but even if it's the latter, it still breaks my heart that Doja Cat gets the fame and Skyler Spence is left with the scraps. So it goes with us Degrassi fans, huh?

Thus completes my one retraction of 2020. I regret everything nice I've ever said about "Say So" and about Doja Cat. I hereby take it all back, and insist that "Say So" is now officially PoYB's second-worst #1 song of 2020 (not the worst, since even after all this, it's still pretty hard to top the noxious pair of Minaj and fucking Tekashi 6ix9ine). I have no one to blame but myself. If I'm going to write a long blog post about pop music, then I have to stop pretending that I even know one fucking thing about pop music to begin with.

This Is My Blood: Love City Lager

One thing perhaps lost in the hubbub of this long, arduous beer journey is a sense of history of the beer. Sure, you learned a lot about my personal history with beer (sometimes distressingly so), but the idea of "beer" and "drinking" go back many millennia before I was born.

As early as 15,000 B.C., humans were brewing beer (if "beer" can be a term used relatively, of course). Those early denizens of the Middle East, China, Egypt, and elsewhere, figured out how to mash barley and turn it into alcohol. By 3000 B.C., the process of making beer was firmly established (for instance, they knew that yeast was the ingredient that made the alcohol, even if they didn't know how yeast worked quite yet).

The important thing to remember (so supposes Randy Mosher in Tasting Beer) is that beer is a stationary art—it's pretty tough to brew beer when you're in a nomadic tribe. So beer really only came into its own when people started to gather together in large groups, i.e. beer is the lube that helps build civilizations. Mosher insightfully questions whether humans are really meant to live in such dense cities, and if not, whether beer is necessary for humans to remain comfortable in a packed living arrangement like we do in cities like Philadelphia. If we couldn't have beer, one might assume that the city would burn to the ground before long.

I held up a half-glass of Love City Lager tonight and tried to see the history of beer in it, tried to appreciate the long path beer has taken to make this beer tonight possible for me and Pam. I tried to acknowledge all those who came before me, those forward-thinkers in ancient times, those who did the heavy-lifting to not only create the beer, but also convince their fellow man that this elixir could truly make life better, and it was worth keeping it around. 

 

From the Kurdistanians who chewed grass to make malt, to the Sumerians who wrote down recipes, to the dwellers on the outskirts of Bavaria who first thought to add hops, to the English who placed their brews in barrels, to the immigrants in America who wanted to recreate the beer of their homelands, to the bootleggers who kept beer flowing during Prohibition, to the big thinkers with deep pockets who started breweries in the beer wasteland of the 1970s and its No Name Beers, to the dudes in Philly who liked to brew beer and decided to open up a brewery off of Spring Garden St., there is a lineage, and I am at the end of that lineage. I am drinking but one beer today, but I am a part of something bigger than me or the beer that I drink. I am part of history.

Like any art, it's important to remember where it came from. I'm going to try to remember the importance of beer, even after this year is over.

NOTES

BEER: Love City Lager

STYLE: American Lager

ABV: 4.0%

BREWED BY: Love City Brewing Company

LOCATION: "Eraserhood" if you wanna call it that

PURCHASED AT: probably at the brewery, but this was a gift from Bridget—yo Bridge, check your texts, you were probably sleeping after night shift when you got one from me!

PAIRED WITH: bratwurst sandwiches

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 543.5

Album of the Week: Broken Dreams Club

I recently read an article on Pitchfork from earlier this year about how the brain deals with the idea of new music. Basically, music we are familiar with releases the perfect amount of dopamine in our brain and makes us feel comfortable; music we are unfamiliar with cause too much dopamine to be released, and we get agitated. It takes a little bit to 1) become familiar with that new music so that 2) we can regulate the dopamine hits and find that perfect emotional balance. It's a process.

But it's a process I'm proud to say that we willingly participate in every week here at Record Club. It would be really easy to just sit back and relax with the same five albums you've listened to since you were a teenager, but you guys don't do that. You willingly put yourself through emotional turmoil to earn an understanding of a new album every single week. It's a beautiful thing.

As of today, Record Club has asked you to fuck up your brain neurons 100 weeks in a row. It's been a long journey, and I hope you have found it as rewarding as I have.

And so, for the 100th time: welcome. Glad to have you. There's a new album for you to explore, if you're down to tackle it. If not, we have the archives and the playlist. We also have the option of not participating, and just heading back to the same playlist you've been listening to since 2014. I cannot blame you. But I will tell you, from personal experience, that discovering a new album to enjoy is a challenge worth meeting. Trust me.

WEEK 100 — December 27, 2020-January 2, 2021

What we're listening to this week (Joe's pick):

ALBUM: Broken Dreams Club EP

ARTIST: Girls

RELEASED: November 22, 2010

WHAT GENRE IS THIS: Mainly indie rock, some elements of jangle pop, surf rock, psychedelic rock, and so on

WHY JOE PICKED IT: Something about the juxtaposition felt appropriate, reviewing an album called Broken Dreams Club, and the fact that writing about music for 100 weeks in a row feels like a dream come true.

TRACKLIST:

1. The Oh So Protective One
2. Heartbreaker
3. Broken Dreams Club
4. Alright
5. Substance
6. Carolina

LENGTH: 30:12

 

HOW TO LISTEN FOR FREE: YouTube

 

READING SOME SHIT: Go back and read all the reviews you've written already for Record Club! They're all great! I'm proud of you, and I'm looking forward to more of your words in the future.

 

DATE OF RECORD CLUB WEEK 500: August 27, 2028

 

DATE OF RECORD CLUB WEEK 1000: March 28, 2038

WILL RECORD CLUB END DURING WEEK 1000: Probably

Happy listening, fam! Have a great week!!