Minnesota, Beer, Chicago, Beer, Wisconsin, Beer

I managed to sneak away into the comforts of the Midwest United States for a few weeks recently and - with my interests shaping my route - many sites related to beer came through the truck window.

Unfortunately, i could not get into Surly for a tour. As always, they have about a 3 month waiting list but I think I can weasel in for my next trip as promised by a sympathetic ear in the head office. So my beer exploits in Minnesota remained fixed at my fathers homebrewery, the vastly expansive free market liquor stores, and as always the usual haunts that have great happy hours. A beer I have to draw attention to that I picked up on my way south from Moorehead Minnesota is called Rooster. It is brewed by a not-for-profit brewery in Hendricks, Minnesota. When you buy a 24 they donate 3x the cost to fund conservation and land management initiatives for critical habits in Minnesota. God I love that state. The majority of my time was spent bulking up my beeradvocate cred and waiting out the rain.

(Misato refusing to recognize my existence, dad in the brewery gettin his bottling on, and obvs.)
My trip down to Chicago was fantastic. Drove through snow covered rolling hills, deep into the Mississippi River Valley where the cliffs rise as abruptly as the mighty miss herself. Stayed with my sisters and hit up as many breweries/brewpubs as we could. Starting with Metropolitan Brewery which was just a few buses away from their place. Metropolitan is pretty freakin cool, particularly in the small shop of 3 employees who basically do it all (they wanted volunteers, and I wanted to be). Also each one of their fermenters had names of obscure star trek characters! Tages and I were talking next to their 4 pronged bottling machine, just top right of that was this cool keg sculpture of a long horned bull. My only qualms was with the beer itself, all German Lagers, no IPA, Ever!
Just had to add in the photo of the Chicago Fire game we took in, where they actually sold Lagunitas at the stands! Craft Brewery at a soccer game! fantastic. And yet the whole city seemed to be smattered with these trite adverts for Miller lite. The traveling fan from Houston clearly chose too much taste and vomited all over the away section, after the fight, and just before his own friends were taking photos 'around the drunk guy' for facebook.

Next was the Haymarket Brewpub. By far the best selection of micro-brews I have had, period. Haymarket famously named after the Haymarket bombing of 1886. The scene there was a bit bourgeois for a bit of proper anarchist history, but ill try and remind myself that the brewers are the ones who make the beer, the managers sell the space. This first picture below is of all their samplers we went through. Their menu of their own beers was a full page, they had 3x that of other craft beers on the back. Even had a section on their menu called "Shit Beer" with your budmillcoors. Number one for me was the Mother Jones Belgian Dubbel, Followed by the Mathias IPA and Speakerswagon Pilsner. Of course we made our way earlier in the day to the Haymarket Memorial, and came upon mutha f**kin Emma Goldman!

After a great time steeping in Chicago culture, I made my way back slowly through Wisconsin (which holds a piece of my heart) so I could hit a few of their growing craft breweries. Sadly the cooperage at left hasn't been active for over 100 years, but it was a nice stroll through an old farm with many of the original trades buildings in tact. Don't ask me where I was, i just followed the sign. New Glarus Brewing (in New Glarus Wisconsin) has an obvious path of success laid before them. Their new brewery is massive, landscaped, and full of shiny everything on the inside. I kinda liked this one more than most tours I have been on because I got to just walk around by myself with a beer in hand while workers were brewing/yeast testing/bottling etc. Very cool. Also got to buy just about every seasonal they have made in the last 2 years. The last photo is their old building, size matters there i guess.

Heading further North towards Madison I made it into Capital Brewery. Unfortunately no such luck on a tour, but I got the guy to show me around a few of their storage spaces and their kettles. I also bought several of their beers. Not a fan personally of most of what i drank, but they too almost exclusively brew the German Lagers. But it was on the map, so I had to do it. They had an awesome beer garden though in back of the place but it was raining, and i hadn't eaten and just sitting in there drinking a beer seemed not quite right. They don't need my business I have a feeling after having been brewing for almost 20 years.

On the whole, an excellent trip for personal experience and diversifying what will continue to be my beer stratum. I highly recommend a trip like this which is relatively close, and several major cities with a handful of hours between each other makes it reasonable. Go slow, take your time, and belt the radio tunes out of the window on cruise!

Batman and Anarchism

I know what your thinking... that Batman is not only the Original Gangsta, the Man with the Milkshake, and the Jefe Maximo, but also the Libertarian Socialist we all know him to be.

First let me go out on a limb and lay out my assumptions that readers may takeforgranted/nevercaredabout:

1-Batman is not Bruce Wayne, Batman is Batman. From Grant Morrison's abstract novel Arkham Asylum: a Serious House on Serious Earth, Batman's psychoanalysis rap sheet reads as follows, "Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. I must be a creature. I must be a creature of the night. Mommy's Dead. Daddy's Dead. Brucie's Dead. I shall become a bat." This reads as Kafka's Metamorphosis - with radical implications. Here batman attempts to escape a class critique, he has a base in the elite but it is not Bruce Wayne's economic wealth that has defined him, it is his personal loss created by economic disparity of which he himself has no hand in other than being born to it. Granted Batman's "First Night Out" depicted by Frank Miller and Mazzuchelli implies that he works from the base of inexhaustible wealth to build from.

2-If Batman is not Bruce Wayne, Bruce Wayne aspires to be Batman. Batman is a symbol beyond a man, a socially defined representation of what (wo)man could become if unrestricted by defined normatives, i.e. law, the state, economic restriction. As Lewis Call depicts in his work Postmodern Anarchism, the Nietzschean Ubermench is intended to 'kill your inner fascist.' The Ubermench, mis-appropriated most famously by a fascist - Adolf Hitler, "the overman or over (wo)man is she who no longer needs the State, or any other institution for that matter. She is her own creator of values and as such the first true an(archist)." The immediate question to this lies in the miseducation of the term anarchist - what of the black-hole of structureless living? Call states that fascism is the converse of anarchism, an ideology that operates at a cellular level rather than the individual level "the horror of fascism grows not out of the fact that it can seize power at the macropolitical level; any state can do that. Particularly horrific is the way it penetrates - rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school and office." It attempts to co-opt the indivual's personal becoming of self-governance. Batman is the Ubermench.

3- As can be extracted from any individualist story, the sole-character is the modern incarnation of Jesus and Mohammad, Buddha and Xenu. For me, Batman is neither. The individualism of Anarchism is about finding god in man. It is not about looking to Batman as the god of men, nor looking to a god generally or specifically. Batman is in a constant state of self-loathing for psychotraumatic reasons, but what he is confident of is his ability of becoming. No question, different writers depict Batman in different ways, from the fascist vigilante who turns the desperate over to the baton of the state (police), to the overly human sleuth who is shot and killed. But the possibilities of what Batman is, are particularly knowable through an anarchist reading.

Finally, this interpretation of a Batman that is above the law in the way described in point #2 is about becoming. Rather than the individual above social law who corrupts their agency by seeking self-promotion at the expense of society, Batman exists in a structured world that he seeks to subvert. Much like the notions of subverting normative behaviour as purported by Foucault, the overly normative pretend actions of elite Bruce Wayne fit perfectly for the true-self of Batman, a persona that is more aligned to subverting the system.

That's Right, you heard me.