Thursday’s ad is for the manufacturer Continental Can Company, from 1959, extolling the virtue of their can for beer. Showing an illustration of four seating men standing around an open refrigerator with a can of generic Light Beer in it, the company promises that “Continental has the right beer package for you!”
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Tuesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1954. This one is also football-themed, with a man at the game, being poured two beers from cans to wash down the hot dogs, already in his hands, as his significant other waits with the blanket and a pennant in the background.
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Today is one of my favorite author’s birthdays, John Updike. He grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town that I did — Shillington — and we both escaped to a life of writing. Though I think you’ll agree he did rather better than I did with the writing thing, not that I’m complaining. I once wrote to him about a harebrained idea I had about writing updated Olinger stories from the perspective of the next generation (his Olinger Stories were a series of short tales set in Olinger, which was essentially his fictional name for Shillington). He wrote me back a nice note of encouragement on a hand-typed postcard that he signed, which today hangs in my office as a reminder and for inspiration. Anyway, this little gem he wrote for the The New Yorker in 1964 is a favorite of mine and I now post it each year in his honor. Enjoy.
This seems to be an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements. Consider the beer can. It was beautiful — as beautiful as the clothespin, as inevitable as the wine bottle, as dignified and reassuring as the fire hydrant. A tranquil cylinder of delightfully resonant metal, it could be opened in an instant, requiring only the application of a handy gadget freely dispensed by every grocer. Who can forget the small, symmetrical thrill of those two triangular punctures, the dainty pfff, the little crest of suds that foamed eagerly in the exultation of release? Now we are given, instead, a top beetling with an ugly, shmoo-shaped tab, which, after fiercely resisting the tugging, bleeding fingers of the thirsty man, threatens his lips with a dangerous and hideous hole. However, we have discovered a way to thwart Progress, usually so unthwartable. Turn the beer can upside down and open the bottom. The bottom is still the way the top used to be. True, this operation gives the beer an unsettling jolt, and the sight of a consistently inverted beer can might make people edgy, not to say queasy. But the latter difficulty could be eliminated if manufacturers would design cans that looked the same whichever end was up, like playing cards. What we need is Progress with an escape hatch.
Now that’s writing. I especially like his allusion to the beauty of the clothespin as I am an unabashed lover of clothespins.
In case you’re not as old and curmudgeonly as me — and who is? — he’s talking about the transition to the pull-tab beer can (introduced between 1962-64) to replace the flat punch-top can that required you to punch two triangular holes in the top of the can in order to drink the beer and pour it in a glass.
The pull-tab (at left) replaced the punch top (right).
Originally known as the Zip Top, Rusty Cans has an informative and entertaining history of them. Now you know why a lot of bottle openers still have that triangle-shaped punch on one end.
So essentially, he’s lamenting the death of the old style beer can which most people considered a pain to open and downright impossible should you be without the necessary church key opener. He is correct, however, that the newfangled suckers were sharp and did cut fingers and lips on occasion, even snapping off without opening from time to time. But you still have to laugh at the unwillingness to embrace change (and possibly progress) even though he was only 32 at the time; hardly a normally curmudgeonly age.
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Tuesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from the 1960s, when they debuted the “Aluminum soft top” can, which according to the ad was much easier to open than the “old hard way.” They billed it as the “world’s easiest opening beer can!” I’m not sure about their prophecy that “Some day all beer cans will open this easy!” Time seems to have passed by that innovation.
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Today’s work of art is a thoroughly original, unique work of contemporary art. The medium is not paint, but “stitched commercial wool felt combined with needle and traditional wet felting.” The Portland, Oregon artist, LeBrie Rich, originally created it as a window display for the local knitting shop Knit-Purl. Hard as it is to believe, everything except the aluminum tv dinner tray and the plastic fork is made of felt.
Appropriate for today, the work also includes a football game on the felt television.
And, of course, there’s a beer. In this case, the TV dinner is paired with a can of Hamm’s.
And finally, here’s the TV dinner itself. Hungry? Probably a lot of fiber.
To learn more about LeBrie Rich, check out the biography and resume on her own website. And there’s a short profile on Craft Corps. She also has some of her other items for sale on Etsy, and his online store Penfelt.
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In honor of today being “Beer Can Day,” the anniversary of the first beer can’s introduction by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey on January 24, 1935, here’s an amazing use of a beer can. Now this is recycling, or perhaps more correctly repurposing.
For many years, people having been making what are called “pinhole cameras” out of a variety of materials, really anything that keeps out light can be used. Essentially, they’re a very simple, homemade camera. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. “A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.” But they’ve become very popular again in the last ten or so years, a kind of backlash as a result of the rise of digital photography. There’s as simple and low-tech as possible, yet still create interesting images.
At least two photographers have been in the news lately, making time-lapse photographs with pinhole cameras made from beer cans. The first, a student at the University of Hertfordshire — Regina Valkenborgh — put her beer can camera “next to the university’s radio telescope at its Bayfordbury Observatory.” According to the Daily Mail, the pinhole camera recorded the sun’s movements over a six-month period of time, “[f]rom solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view.” How cool is that?
The second, photographer Justin Quinnell, was featured on the Discovery Channel’s website. He’s captured a variety of time-lapse pinhole images using “emptied beer cans and about 50 cents worth of other supplies, such as duct tape and regular photography paper. While the cameras only took about five minutes to build, they had to withstand six months of ‘wind, rain, hail, and being thrown in the trash.’”
When asked which beer cans he preferred, Quinnell responded. “My choice would be lager or Guinness although often, when I teach larger groups, I have to rely on what is left in my neighbors recycling boxes.”
This photo is of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, England, from December, 19 2007 to June 21, 2008.
This one is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, also in Bristol, from December 17, 2007 through June 21, 2008.
And this last one was taken by the gravestones of Blance, Grace and Dorcus, over three months in the spring 2008 in the Eastville Cemetery, Bristol, England.
You can many more of Justin Quinnell’s work at his website, pinholephotography.org, including a galley of more from the Slow Light Collection, which is where the above photos came from.
Now that’s a pretty cool use of beer cans. Happy Beer Can Day!
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For more of my past columns, see Brooks On Beer
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