Culture Club #2
Ever wondered what inspires a brewer? We can’t speak for all, but here’s a little roundup of things that we've been enjoying recently.
Here is a selection of cultural highlights that different members of the team have been enjoying so far in this nascent year. We would love to know what you’ve been enjoying recently, let us know in the comments section below.
If you enjoy reading these posts, please consider heading to our shop and ordering some beer or merch from us. As an independent brewery, direct customer support is vital to what we do and massively appreciated. The AYE is particularly fresh at the moment, a beer we’ll be talking about in more depth here very soon…
Before we kick off, we want to quickly acknowledge the recent passing of David Lynch, all of whose work we will revisit soon. One of the best obituaries we heard was from Kermode and Mayo who, amongst other things, reminded us of Mel Brook’s pithy description of him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” which we like very much.
Book
Olga Tokarczuk’s latest book “The Empusium” arrived to much fanfare last year and I finally sat down with one of those lovely blue Fitzcarraldo books and duly enjoyed getting it out on public transport. Pitched as a horror story, it’s definitely on the creepier end of that description as it follows its protagonist (suffering from tuberculosis) to a health resort in the rarefied air of the Silesian mountains. It’s peculiar, and has a similar feeling to The Wickerman, but with some Hitchcockian tensity thrown in. (WB)
Film
Two films I loved this year are Anatomy of a Fall and Perfect Days.
Anatomy of a Fall takes us through a moral maze that questions our sense of truth in the face of public scrutiny. A writer and her husband live alone with their dog and young son in a cabin in the Alps, when the husband dies after falling from the cabin and there are no witnesses, what follows is an unnerving unravelling of our perception of reality, exposing the cruel lens with which we're looked at in the public eye. Beautifully crafted, brilliantly acted, it's mesmerising
Perfect Days is another film exploring what it is to be human. It follows a public toilet cleaner, in Tokyo, as he goes about daily life. The film ticks metronomically over day by day and with it we discover more and more about his character, the people in his world and, perhaps, the world left behind. An elegy on existence, this film captures something that takes us out of the superficial, for a moment at least. (JR)
TV
Severance is a beautifully odd TV show that has proved itself to be philosophically and psychologically more than meets the eye. In a nutshell, a workforce at an opaque multinational company are “severed” every day at work, thanks to a chip in their brain their workplace body has no memory of their outside life (and vice versa). They work on tasks all day for which they have no understanding of the end goal, and in the local community - and presumably globally - there is a deep mistrust and dislike for these severed people. I haven’t done it justice, but it’s such a strong concept that they could be forgiven for going full Christopher Nolan with it. Thankfully they seem more interested in exploring the psychological impact of it without twisting all over the place. So far. (WB)
Music
I have come to Laura Marling very late and to my fault I have been a bit dismissive of her in the past. However, with some encouragement, I have listened to her latest album “Patterns in Repeat” and I think it is really beautiful. It's a record I keep going back to. The way she is writing about that time in her life is something I can very much relate to, which I think makes it quite personal. I am now looking forward to going back and listening to some of her earlier work. (JLM)
Last week we were lucky enough to see our old pal, Hayden Thorpe, kick off the UK leg of his tour for his new album, “Ness”. We headed down to The Brewery Arts Centre in our hometown of Kendal to catch Hayden’s sold-out show, supported by the amazing Helen Ganya.
Seeing Hayden play live music has punctuated most of our adult lives, and it was great to see him on stage again. This is a show with a difference, though. The album “Ness” is like no other music he’s made before. Based on the book by Robert MacFarlane, this is an album about a decommissioned nuclear site that now belongs to the National Trust.
Hayden’s command of the room was nothing short of incredible: the whole audience appeared completely transfixed by him.
It may seem somewhat predictable that we give a glowing review to such a great pal, but this is a show you should get to if you can and you’ll see exactly why! If it’s a trip down memory lane Wild Beasts music you’re after, then you won’t be disappointed in that department either. (LC)
We’ve still got a few cans of our collab brew with Hayden on the web-shop which you can grab here. His remaining tour dates can be seen here as well.