CSotD: A loaf of bread, a pint of beer, and a cartoonist beside me, singing in the Upper Valley
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"Pints and Panels" is an interesting use of the medium that I think works very well for what Emily Sauter is up to.
Blogging your life through cartooning has become popular, though today's Cul de Sac points out a slight flaw in the concept:
Putting something boring, dull and uneventful into cartoon format does not transform it into something interesting. Sarah Laing is able to pull off the trick of turning her daily life into a comic because she selects moments of insight and shares those insights, which means that her life is not boring, dull and uneventful even when the things that happen would seem ordinary in other hands.
I mean, you could make a joke about country life being so boring that the big excitement is going out to the field to watch the wheat grow. But if you send Vincent Van Gogh out there, he's apt to bring back something pretty interesting.
You don't have to be Van Gogh, but, dammit, you have to make an effort. There is a school of comic blog diary thingie in which the point is apparently a sort of affectless dadaism in which minimalist art is used to illustrate the randomness of life. Or its lack of meaning. Or something.
To create one example of this might be interesting art, like Warhol's "Sleep," but to pound out the same relentless drumbeat time after time, panel after panel, day after day, begins to suggest that the cartoonist is purposely refusing to gain insight from life.
You don't have to work that hard to find people who are boring, lack insight or both. In fact, it's worth putting in a bit of effort to avoid them.
According to the guy who turned me on to "Pints and Panels," Emily Sauter, a recent graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies, works at a local beer store. I don't know that the job gives her life meaning, but it does give her easy access to good beer, presumably at a discount.
Which is close enough.
There have been other uses of the cartoon format in reviewing things, most notably Ward Sutton's book reviews in the Village Voice. But, clever as the idea is, and talented as Sutton certainly is, there's a contradiction in it: People who want to read books are not only willing to read text but probably want more depth of criticism than a few word balloons. A comic-style book review might get me interested, but, before I drop thirty bucks, I'd like to know a little more about what I'm buying.
But a beer? What's to say? It's a good beer, it's a lousy beer. It's good for this reason, it's not so good for this reason.
A beer columnist could natter on for 300 words about it, with a bunch of pretentious, meaningless jargon comparing it to chocolate and berries and smoke and mirrors, but all I really want to know is, if I drop five bucks on a pint of this beer, am I gonna be sorry?
Emily tells me, and she doesn't waste my time or insult my intelligence.
Going back into her archives, it appears that Emily is about to leave for the West Coast. This means a whole new set of local beers for her to review. If you can't find the brews she's talking about now, stay tuned.
UPDATE: I went by the beer store and it turns out Emily is no longer there. However, they still have beer. I bought some.
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