Ramsayings

Philly Beer Week really works for a select constituency, mainly the guys who are covering the local beer scene. The rest of us can partake in the bajillion events happening all over the place if we like, but if articles like this one are any indication, Philly Beer Week has more in common with the local music scene in October than anyone would like to admit. Guys, all these events do is just cannibalize each other! (Hat tip to Lew Bryson for sharing that link on Facebook. I would’ve totally missed that piece in all the hoopla.)

I noticed an insightful tidbit from Mithras, a great Philly blogger I’d not read in a little while. He wrote:

I understand that bars have to pay a fee to PBW to participate. One bar owner told me it was $500. With 1,000 venues, that’s a lot of revenue. Of course it’s in PBW’s interest to have more and more events – but it’s not in bar owners’ or in beer drinkers’ interests.

So there’s the follow the money angle, if PBW organizers have no skin in the game for week to be a successful one from a standpoint of curating a great citywide beer experience.

Of course, I’m with the folks who just think that having Philly Beer Week during the first week of June is just silly. I managed to get over to Memphis Taproom — which is literally around the corner from my house, as I’ve written repeatedly — exactly twice. Helen and I squeezed in a quick dinner and drinks before the Erykah Badu concert and I made it back over one evening for a hasty Happy Hour with Charlie in my lap. I probably drank three beers total at Memphis Taproom that week, which is actually fewer than most weeks.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of making a fuss over Philly Beer Week. When I talk to beer-loving friends who live elsewhere they never forget to remind me just how lucky I am to be a Pennsylvanian, PLCB notwithstanding. We need to celebrate what makes this state so special to the microbrew culture that’s maturing into a sustainable business and not just luxury brews for beer snobs. But aren’t we celebrating that very thing nightly in this town? Do we really need bigger, better, faster, more? Philly Beer Week is verging on SXSW Music in terms of sheer scope and insanity.

Jack Curtin seems to feel the same way. Sure, March can be tricky, too, what with the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing, to say nothing of the impending 96 team field for March Madness, which may add an additional weekend to the proceedings. Factor in the lousy weather we had this winter and maybe Philly Beer Week dodged a bullet by moving to June. With any luck, the organizers will work some of the kinks out for next year and it’ll be the dream event everyone wants it to be.

(In case you’re wondering, I drank a delightful imperial stout from BrewDog called Tokyo. I thought it’d do me in. Need I mention what an amazing job Leigh, Brendan and the crew do over at Memphis Taproom during Philly Beer Week? No Repeat Beer Week for me is the epitome of what makes Philly such a great beer town. My neighborhood bar can create the entire experience in a microcosm! As they say where I grew up, ‘Nix besser!’)

Is it still cool to like Black Mountain? I strayed on their last album, but I’m willing to come back to the fold if it sounds like this, although I’m not hearing the OMG Black Sabbath freakout people have suggested elsewhere. I think I like the Two Lane Blacktop vibe of their new video, though. Maybe the ’70s revival isn’t dead yet?

(I honestly don’t know anything about the new album as I fell off the Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian/Dead Oceans promo list somewhere along the line and never remedied that oversight.)

It’s way too late on a school night for me to really dig into everything I thought about while watching David Simon’s latest opus, “Treme,” on HBO. What I have been collecting, however, are other peoples’ feelings about the show and I am positively fascinated by the response.

I’ll start with the obvious. Lots of people hated the show! For all sorts of reasons! Some of them deserved, some not so much! I’m sympathetic; I enjoyed ‘The Wire’ plenty, but only after my wife convinced me of its brilliance and even then I harbored some angst about the cult of David Simon. He’s arrogant! Read this great post-mortem with the essential Alan Sepinwall and you’ll see what I mean.

There are more glib, entertaining responses to the show. I loved the Awl’s shouting match. It embodies my internal dialogue — yes, dialogue — on the show almost too perfectly to admit.

I adored David Raposa’s plea to reconsider troubled academic Creighton Burnette, even if I never especially cared for his character, particularly because, as a recovering academic who labored in the language arts, I can understand his passion for others to share his view, to see the city as he does, to experience it in the rich body of work that has been produced in and about New Orleans.

The only conclusion I can safely draw from all of this is that I need to watch the entire series again, as soon as possible, probably between episodes of “Mad Men” and “Deadliest Catch” or whatever you watch in the summer months that isn’t Step Brothers on on demand.

(It goes without saying that I’m one of those people who LUUURRVEES THE MUSICCCCCC. I listen to it often via the Songs from Treme Tumblr, which I run through trntbl here.)

Charlie’s First Birthday, originally uploaded by J T. Ramsay.

What an amazing day! We celebrated Charlie’s big day with 60 of his closest friends and family. Charlie’s birthday had a music theme and rest assured that he’s spending his time turning all the lovely instruments he received into percussion as best he can.

I may be letting the cat out of the bag, but picnic area #2 on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park is a gem; it was like 90 degrees, but the area was nicely shaded from the morning until well into the afternoon. It was great for staying cool while being outdoors, which makes life easier on adults and babies alike.

Special thanks to friends and family who lent a hand in making Charlie’s birthday extra special. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Cleanr’s been great to me. Taught me the value of a clean interface, with dead simple navigation. The problem? It’s not simple enough. Not a year goes by that I don’t realize how important it is to present information completely free from noise whenever possible. What does that mean? An end to two-column theme, at least for me.

Thus, I throw myself at the mercy of the Internet to help me find the following: an elegant one-column theme with dead simple navigation and a beautifully integrated “follow” suite where I can plug in links to my Twitter, Flickr, and other accounts. To be perfectly honest, if Flavors.me offered something akin to Tumblr, I’d jump in a heartbeat.

Why not Tumblr, you ask? Too insidery for my tastes. Sure, I don’t try to generate batty pageviews here at Kensington Blues, but I’m not trying to impress an armada of followers either. Influence peddling is not something I want to get too wrapped up in outside of work, if you catch my drift. More importantly, I have yet to find a Tumblr theme that doesn’t make actual words seem like unwelcome guests on the page. I think Tumblr’s great for meme generation and is home to a lot of fun stuff on the web, but I just don’t think I can commit to Tumblr as my sole outlet online. (Don’t even get me started about maintaining separate channels in my personal life.)

Having said all that, I do appreciate Tumblr’s elegance. Be gone, useless blogroll! No one clicks on you anyway! Goodbye, archives! The people will use search instead! You get the picture.

Ideally, I’d love to strip the extraneous elements out of this theme and adapt it for my purposes. If you’re the sort of person who reads this and thinks that is possible, let me know!