Month: December 2012

“Jesus, it’s amazing how it grows!” The Addison Recorder’s Adventures with “Les Miserables,” Part I

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In his remarkably informative and entertaining book Pictures at a Revolution, the story of the 1967 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Mark Harris devotes several pages to one of the most disastrous gambles Hollywood ever made. After watching West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and the bonanza-grossing The Sound of Music take home the most coveted of Academy Awards, executives at every major studio decided that the public wanted giant, extravagant musicals, films which ran for three hours or so and filled up the Cinemascope screen. The final years of the sixties were littered with big-budget song-and-dance marvels which lost millions upon millions: Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Hello, Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon, Camelot, stretching into the supreme debacle of Lost Horizon.

Would you rather watch these guys in a musical…

Or Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch?

Since then, Hollywood and Broadway, which once went hand in hand, have been very wary of each other.

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The War and Peace Post

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Right now, we live in a tumultuous nation, filled with internal strife emanating from Washington and, though ostensibly at peace, always kept on a footing for war thanks to both all of the international actions undertaken by our awe-inspiring military and the national security mindset of a post-9/11 world. To say that it can be difficult sometimes determining how to live our lives in this climate is an understatement.

But as 2012 comes to a close, again, it is good to think about another country similarly torn by crises on a grand scale. 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grande Armee invaded Russia with a goal of conquering the superpower and got as far as laying waste to Moscow…only Napoleon had suffered his most staggering military action yet before reaching Moscow, at Borodino, and unprepared to face Russia’s winter and vastness, he was forced into a retreat which slashed his forces and laid the groundwork for his two great defeats and total loss of power.

Remember, you never get involved in a land war in Asia, and Russia stretches all the way through…

Fifty-seven years later, a veteran of another Russian war—the Crimean—who had fought in the endless and draining siege of Sevastopol wrote a book about the before, during, and after of Napoleon’s assault on Russia. That veteran’s name was Leo Tolstoy, and his book was War and Peace. [Read more…]

Breaking Down the Baseball Hall of Fame 2013 Ballot Part 3: Once and Future Kings

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The wonderful, and terrible, about the Baseball Hall of Fame is that it inspires instant debate and conjecture about the relative worthiness of present-day players for consideration. All it takes is ten seasons of play to be eligible for the ballot, though you do have to be nominated by two members of the committee in order to receive such a distinction. As we’ve seen with the current edition of the ballot, this is more often than not the hardest honor to receive (Rondell White, you guys!). I would like to make a note that it is, in fact, a great honor just to be on the ballot, and means that you must have done something of note during your ten years in the leagues.

The problem with projecting players into Hall of Fame consideration is that a great deal of it is based upon forecasting statistics, which necessarily requires throwing several tangible and intangible factors out of the window. A player might get horribly injured, losing his fastball; a player might prematurely age, losing his ability to catch up to a fastball; Albert Pujols might get traded to the Rockies, leading to a gabillionty more home runs than he would have otherwise hit.*

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Christmas Is All Around: Highlights and Oddities from the UK Holiday Chart

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Here’s one of my cardinal rules, one which comes into great effect during my favorite month of the year, December—it is impossible to watch the movie Love Actually and not feel better about life by the end of the running time. I watch this film every Christmas and am always left in a mix of hysterics and eyes welling up all over, and so many of my friends and family feel the same. Not a bad reaction in America for a movie as thoroughly British in its own way as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classics. It’s that characteristic which I’m using as the jumping-off point for my Christmas contribution to the Addison Recorder, one which fulfills our mission of bringing cultural singularity to your attention, for something not many people may realize is that one of the multiple plots in Love Actually involves a long-standing British holiday tradition.

The most purely fun section of the film, in my humble opinion, is near-forgotten, legend-in-his-own-mind rock star Billy Mack’s (the transcendent Bill Nighy) attempt to get back to the top of the pop charts with his cloying “Christmas Is All Around” single. Throughout the storyline, much is made of how Mack is dueling the real-life boy band Blue to have the number-one single in Britain on Christmas Day itself—which is a point lost on most Americans. We don’t particularly care what song is #1 in Billboard on Christmas week; it’s the same as every other week. But in the United Kingdom, having the #1 song on Christmas is akin to winning a Grammy award for Record of the Year or selling ten million singles and downloads of a song. Whatever song is #1 on Christmas is usually the biggest-selling single in the country that year, and small fortunes are won and lost as people actually wager on what song will take the top spot; not the usual subject for Las Vegas bookmaking.

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Breaking Down the Baseball Hall of Fame 2013 Ballot Part 2: The New Blood

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A good portion of my reasoning for breaking down the Hall of Fame ballot this year (beyond providing reasonable analysis for all twenty of our devoted Recorder readers) is strongly driven by nostalgia. Ballots from the past years have slowly started featuring the players that I identified with growing up (Barry Larkin! Barry Larkin! Barry Larkin!), and when I look over the names appearing on this ballot for the first time, the realization strikes me that I was up in arms about every single one of the players for one reason or another. Whether it was making cracks about Julio Franco’s age while he was still producing at a reasonable clip for the Braves or wondering exactly how many Flintstone’s Vitamins I would have needed to take to look like Sammy Sosa (Answer: All of them, only replace chewable vitamins with testosterone pills shaped like Dino the Dinosaur.), these are the players of my youth, and a sign that we are all sure as shootin’ getting older. Call it the Boys of Summer Effect.

Which is why the fact that these are the ballots the Steroid Era is mildly upsetting to me.

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Breaking Down the Baseball Hall of Fame 2013 Ballot Part 1: The Old-Blood

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The NFL Hall of Fame is in Canton. The museum is rather fun, and the hall enshrining the individual busts of players past and present is appropriately filled with dim lighting. It’s like an old gallery of ancient Rome, if all Romans were hulked-out on ‘roids, overweight, or just downright psychotic. (Maybe not too big a stretch to think about.) The Naismith Basketball Memorial Hall of Fame is somewhere in Massachusetts, and should receive a great deal of credit for enshrining, well, everybody. That being said, the Hall itself leaves much to be desired. I hear that the NHL has a Hall of Fame, where they can someday lay the carcass of the NHL when the sport’s owners have finished pilfering the body for vital organs and valuables. And let’s not get started on golf.

In all of American sports, there is only one Hall of Fame that truly weighs heavily over the entire sport that it is devoted to, a grand building situated in an idyllic town in upstate New York that can only be reached by driving through rolling hills and leafy forests. It is one hour from any major airport and features one massive hotel; there are more than enough accommodations in small cabins and bed and breakfasts surrounding the beautiful lake, as well as wide array of museums and small town charm. (I once took part in a peaceful protest against the Iraq War out front of the local post office!)

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Conference Realignment, or, How I Learned to Stop Caring and Hate the Future

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As I write this, players wearing maize and blue and scarlet and grey are stretching and warming up inside Ohio Stadium. Unsurprisingly, this means I am quite nervous and keyed up since The Game is only fifty minutes from kickoff. The annual contest between Michigan and Ohio State goes back over a century and has filled the intervening decades with jaw-dropping plays, gut-check defensive stands, and thrilling wins (or embittering defeats) for both sides. Bound up in this end of the year game is a wealth of feelings: regional animus, cultural identity, and the simple matter of bragging rights that mean something. It’s everything that is right and good about college football.

I am not here to write about everything that is right and good about college football, though. Instead, what I want to talk about is the business of college football. Earlier this week the Big Ten Conference announced two new additions to its membership starting in 2014: the University of Maryland will leave the ACC and Rutgers University will leave the Big East to become the 13th and 14th members of the alliance still known as the Big Ten (I’m not even going to touch that particular bit of…math). These moves are only the latest in a 3-year long cycle of schools moving from conference to conference in a dizzying cycle of realignment.
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