On liking bad things

When I was a kid, I collected comic books. This was back in the 80s, before the Tim Burton Batman movie turned "comics" into something else, into movies, I suppose.

I was obsessed with comics, and my best friend at the time was my best friend in large part because he was the other kid who was really into comic books (there were other common interests but for the sake of anonymity I'll leave those out).  

I stopped collecting comics in the early 90s for a very straightforward reason- I got a girlfriend. It was that simple.  I went from spending all my money on comics to never buying one for years.  I was done with them and I never really looked back.  

Well, that's not really true, or else I wouldn't be writing about them now.  More like, every few years I would go to a comic book store, sometimes one I'd frequented in the past, where the owner would remember me with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and I'd pick up an issue of what had been my favourite comic book, the Fantastic Four.  I'd read the issue I bought, mostly confused because I'd lost all the plot threads.  And was never so taken by whatever I read I sought out older issues to better understand what was going on.  This was probably a sign.

I still have my comic books, or, my parents do. They sit in a pile of white boxes in a storage room in their basement, and we talk a lot about them sending these eight boxes to me, the final repatriation of stuff that has been sitting at my parents' house in the quarter century since I left Calgary.

After the birth of my first son, I started to indulge again in some of my youthful interests more than I did in that liminal space between childhood and parenthood. As an example, over the years, I've bought some of the omnibus editions of the Fantastic Four, big thick volumes that collect 30 issues in a hardbound dust jacketed "prestige" edition.  I've usually bought them on sale at BMV, a local second hand bookstore here in Toronto, while also somewhat inebriated, alcohol being the royal road to nostalgia.

I've had them for years, but it was only a few weeks ago that I started to read the first one, which collects the first 30 issues of the Fantastic Four, "The World's Greatest Comic Book Magazine".  I'm reading them mainly because I'm sleep deprived as a result of the birth of my second son, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read, say, Wieland's Des Esels Schatten at night, or anything else that's a) in a language other than English or b) more involved or complicated than a magazine article.

As I've been making my way through the omnibus, an issue or two per night, a thought kept creeping in, one that was there the last time I read some of these treasured stories about a decade ago - they aren't very good.  The stories, the art, they aren't very good.

Maybe it was pride, or nostalgia (it was nostalgia) that kept the thought at bay, but yesterday I happened to read an essay by Sam Kriss about the death of nerds.  As someone who used to try to talk about hipsters on this very blog, to try to figure them out, I'd never really thought about the fact that nerds really did take over. 

And the idea, which I'm taking from Kriss' essay, that hipsters were just snobs except in the wrong direction, seems correct, in part because I talked about this myself 14 years ago!  So I think he's right about how the hipster and the nerd have functioned in our culture, and how we do seem to be moving past them.

For my own part, I never considered myself a nerd (I'm sure everyone else did!) but in my defense, I'd always been a pretty bad nerd - for one, although I was obsessed with comic books, and collected them with a verve bordering on what we'd probably call OCD now, I really did enjoy them.  I really liked the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and all the other superheroes - I liked their adventures, and had a lot of fun reading them and talking about the latest issues with my friends.  

But then I grew up.

To be sure, when I was in junior high, my friends and I would discuss the literary merits of comic books, their aesthetic value of course on a par with the great works of Shakespeare and Beckett, but given none of us had read any literature at that stage, it seems like in hindsight, what we were doing was learning to perform the Anglo-American-Canadian culture two step, where we affirm that whatever mass media product we're slurping down at the time is just as good as anything that has a higher aesthetic value - snobs are really just nerds with ascots!  

But back to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped reading comic books around the same time I got into classical music - the girlfriend was definitely the last straw, but the signs were there.  The last year I bought comics as a teenager, it was more out of a sense of duty- I wasn't reading them, I was collecting them, but the love wasn't really there anymore.

What did I love instead?  Bach.  And Monteverdi.  And so on.  

***

All this being said, I don't want to pretend I spend all my time listening to Xenakis on a $10,000 soundsystem while reclining in a late 60s Finnish recliner. For one, I like Star Wars, and I dutifully watch all the shows and movies, and I've even bought some of the novels and  comic books.  Most of them aren't very good, and it feels a lot like Kriss' description of nerdery, where I'm really consuming it because it's not great, but Star Wars has always held a particular place in my head, and even though I sometimes resent it, it doesn't really matter. 

It's more like a sickness, in the way that Goethe and Heine described Romanticism as a sickness. It's something I have, and deal with, but it's not going away, and you have to treat it.  But pretending like it isn't a sickness is as good an explanation as any as to why so much mass culture sucks so badly, where you have so many smart, creative people turning out bland slop to audiences who don't even know if they care about this stuff anymore.

Have I just spent a morning writing a blog post on how I'm not really a nerd?  Yes, I think so.  But I'd also like to start talking about taste again, maybe in a slightly more philosophical way, and this seemed like a good place to start.  

Soon I'll start talking about Heinrich Heine's thoughts on taste, but not today.  

But soon.

Post Beer

According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013.  

For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out.  The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!

***

Way back in 2010, I went to Germany for the first time in a long time.  It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.

It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer.  That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.

I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son.  I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.

As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!

As I recently pointed out implicitly on this very blog, Canadians can be uh, parochial.  Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well.  People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.

Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales.  Which is why this article by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time! 

I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.

Even at the time, articles like Hoppy Beer is Awful were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of Bellwoods Brewery in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital.  

Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful.  I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning.  

Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones.  But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles.  Did they really enjoy these beers?  Or were they just chasing trends?

Why did I care about this so much?  Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind!  Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore.  What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.

That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!

Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is a sour, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me!  But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day!