Arts – Page 31 – the Addison Recorder

Recorded Conversations: Drink of Choice

August 24, 2012 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. For today’s conversation, J. Michael Bestul looks forward to a few drinks over the Labor Day weekend, and wonders aloud what might be drinking.

Prompt: You’re at a bar, restaurant, or pub that you’ve never been to before. The place has a pretty good drinks list, and on it, you notice ____________. And because this is one thing you always have to try when you’re at a new place, you order it.

Question: What is ____________, and why is it the libation you order?

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To explain my contribution to the conversation, I must pay due respect to three people who shaped my philosophy on ordering drinks in public places.

When I was developing my palate for alcohol, my parents allowed me to try anything and everything they were drinking. My mother has a taste which runs towards mimosas, Bellinis, cosmopolitans, etc., and I also attended many college parties where fruity and sweet mixers were in fashion. For a long time, I preferred incredibly sweet cocktails. But a couple months before I earned my master’s degree, I went out to dinner with my parents at one of the best restaurants in Chicago, ordered such a drink, and received a frown from my father.

(My father’s answer to this question, by the way, would be a martini, with Hendrick’s Gin if available, almost no vermouth, and a twist of cucumber.)

If you’ve never had Hendrick’s, by the way, it is the NECTAR OF THE GODS. The finest nationally-available alcohol there is. What are you waiting for?

“Andrew,” he said to me, “you’re getting older, and drinks like this…they aren’t you.”
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Recorded Conversations: Drink of Choice

August 24, 2012 by -J. 1 Comment

Question: What is ____________, and why is it the libation you order?

—

This question sprang up last month, when I went to a relatively new bar with a good whisky list. On this list was a particular single malt, Caol Ila 18-year. And I ordered it, as I always do, with the full expectation that I would not get it. Someone would (and did) come along to tell me that, sorry, but they were planning to get the 18-year, but were unable to do so.

I expect this answer because you can’t find a bottle of the 18-year for sale in the U.S., but its distributor seems to give the impression to restaurants that they can. I’ve yet to order a Caol Ila 18-year and actually receive it. But I keep asking for it, since it was the first single malt I’d ever tasted.

If only…

I thought it would be fun to put the question to my fellow Addison Recorder colleagues, as it is broad enough to include responses ranging from “anything with grapefruit” to “locally-brewed porter” to a specific single malt Scotch.

Forgetting the Caol Ila, there is one drink I will always try if it’s on a bar’s menu: the Blood & Sand cocktail, or any variation on it.

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Best of TV 2011-12: Number 2

August 21, 2012 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

Hey, remember this? I have no explanation as to why it has taken me a month and a half to finish off my list of TV’s best, but here we are. Having previously listed my Honorable Mentions, Standout Performances, Episodes, and Moments, as well as spots #10-#3 on my list, it’s time to finish the whole thing off and reveal my top two shows from the 2011-12 TV season, each of which will get an entry. Today:

2. Mad Men
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THE GRUDGE REPORT: Searching for the Pinball Wizard

August 18, 2012 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

Salutations,

In an effort to predispose myself towards a somewhat more consistent writing schedule, you may now look forward to my bi-monthly feature, a new column that will be taking a quick, dirty look at a landmark album or movie from the past on a rotating basis. This will be a somewhat more curtailed look than the in-depth analysis that myself and my colleagues at the Recorder have become known for over the past two months, but it will hopefully provide a quick listener’s (or viewer’s) guide to approaching the works of past masters. Owing to a lack of creativity and an overwhelming need to be a smart-ass on my part, this column will be henceforth entitled “The Grudge Report”.

For the record, this is not indicative of any sort of professional criticism on my part. The deep analysis you might expect, having already found it in many other articles within our magazine, will not be here. Nor, however, will this be a simple diatribe or a love totem on my part on the behalf of past masters. It’s best to think of this as simply a Buyer’s Guide to Classic Media, a Purchase or Pass if you will. Those looking for deeper analysis on my part may simply post below and let your feelings be heard.

Living With the Dead, or, My Favorite Kind of Necrophilia

August 9, 2012 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

The diehard fans now call them “The Days Between,” after a song written during the group’s final years of existence and never recorded in the studio. It was only played live, the only way most people ever wanted to hear their music.

Jerry Garcia would have been 70 this year; he was born August 1, 1942. And he in all likelihood would have been stepping onto a new stage, his feet planted on a Persian carpet, guitar at the ready. But he died seventeen years ago today, August 9, 1995, itself exactly one month after the Grateful Dead encored with their elegiac songs “Black Muddy River” and “Box of Rain” at what was destined to be their final concert, right here in Chicago at Soldier Field.

It was a full house, and that is something which might surprise people of our generation: for the final decade of their existence, the Grateful Dead was one of the only bands in history to be a guaranteed sell-out at any arena and stadium. They couldn’t play smaller concerts; the demand was far too great. In 1991, for instance, they played NINE shows at Madison Square Garden and turned people away. For those who only know the Dead from the skull and roses, the multi-colored Teddy bears, and the classic video for their only top ten single, “Touch of Grey” (which I ate up as a kid every time it was on VH1), their appeal might be hard to understand. Even harder because the Dead are a very foreboding band to get into. It took me a long while.
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Alex and Andrew Debate the Sight & Sound List: Part Two

August 8, 2012 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

Picking up where we left off two days ago, Alex and Andrew continue to debate Sight & Sound’s list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” Be sure to check out Part One if you missed it.

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Alex, I grant you every single point about Citizen Kane…I find the story as compelling as you do, and the idea that it takes an entire cast of characters to make an individual life is a profound one which may never have been as fully realized as Welles and Mankiewicz realized it. This being said, your description of Kane could just as easily be applied to Jay Gatsby, Julian English, even Michael Corleone in his way…and I have felt much more emotionally overwhelmed by The Great Gatsby, Appointment in Samarra, and even the two Godfathers (even though I’m not a giant fan of part one) than by Kane. Maybe my problem is I always come at film more from the writing/story perspective than the pictorial/mise-en-scene perspective. I hold both as the two equal standards of judgment, but the story takes precedence only because of my turn of mind. (And I’m not saying you discount story…I know you and your love of movies too well to make such a horrid and untrue claim…but you and I see movies from slightly different angles, just slightly, but still.)

Anyway, my point: with Gatsby, English, Corleone, Scottie, I see them as Shakespearean tragic heroes, good men brought to death, be it actual or spiritual, by a flaw. Kane is never presented that way, which makes empathy for him harder to obtain…and on the one hand, this may part of the brilliance of Citizen Kane, that the protagonist is so down-to-earth and recognizable and presented without either endearing or purely villainous qualities…Kane is neutral, is Everyman despite being the MAN among men, is recognizable. But at the same time, Welles’s refusal to give the adult Kane, his Kane, any character trait I can relate to beyond his very human ambition, anything which makes me feel involved with him, means that I only appreciate the film for that intricate and dense plotting. Don’t get me wrong, I love a film, a novel, anything with a whirling story like Kane which is so well-told. And I will never deny Kane’s greatness for an instant. You will see it appear on my own top ten list at the end of this reply because I know how much we all owe Welles. I am simply trying to understand why people are now disinclined to rank it as number one, and I think it is because it lacks the pull on the heart, even though it may be the darkest corners of our heart, which is found in Vertigo.
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Alex and Andrew Debate the Sight & Sound List: Part One

August 6, 2012 by Alex Bean 1 Comment

The list is out. For a certain brand of cinephile, yours truly very much included, that can only mean one thing. Once a decade the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine polls the world’s leading film critics and directors, and compiles their list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” This tradition started back in 1952, and has continued apace since then. Sight & Sound takes the measure of the cinematic canon every ten years so as to avoid momentary effusions and measure long-term trends. Other groups, most notably the American Film Institute, have crafted rival lists that hope to match the original for prestige and influence. The explosion of the internet has also created a surge of lists, from the venerable like They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They, to the ridiculous, such as the IMDb Top 250. But the Sight & Sound list rises above them all, and today it unleashed something of a sea-change.

For the first time since the inaugural list in 1952 (which crowned Bicycle Thieves), Orson Welles’ landmark debut feature Citizen Kane has not been voted into the top spot. Instead, Alfred Hitchcock’s lurid and mysterious Vertigo has ascended to the pinnacle, rising from a second place finish a decade ago. I’ll get to the importance of all this in just a moment, along with the myriad other interesting tidbits raised by the new Top Ten, but first the list. (Please note, I will be referring to the Critics’ List unless I note otherwise. I like and respect the Directors’ lists, but I tend to think of it as being akin to the Coaches’ Poll in college football: interesting but perhaps not as well informed.)

1. Vertigo (1958, USA, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock)

2. Citizen Kane (1941, USA, Dir: Orson Welles)

3. Tokyo Story (1953, Japan, Dir: Ozu Yasujiro)

4. La Règle du jeu (1939, France, Dir: Jean Renoir)

5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, USA, Dir: F.W. Murnau)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, USA/UK, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)

7. The Searchers (1956, USA, Dir: John Ford)

8. Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR, Dir: Dziga Vetov)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, France, Dir: Carl Theodore Dreyer)

10. 8 1/2 (1963, Italy, Dir: Federico Fellini)

So, Andrew, what are your thoughts on Kane being dethroned by Vertigo? Or is that not even where your thoughts landed when you saw the list?

– Alex
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Lost in a Fantasy: Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, and the Appeal of Virtual Worlds

August 1, 2012 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

I have been disappearing a lot lately, slipping off by myself for hours. My wife has definitely noticed, and I know that some of my friends have taken note. It’s hard to reach me when I disappear, and ever harder to drag me back to the rest of my life and my roles and responsibilities. The place I’ve been disappearing to? It’s the northern-most province of the continent of Tamriel, a land a mountains ,mist, snow, and stone. Its rivers run clear and fast; its weather is frightful and harsh, surpassed only by its ever-present predatory fauna. It’s a place called Skyrim, and it is entirely fake. Like many others in the past several months, I have flung away untold hours—hundreds and hundreds of hours—to Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. A single-player role-playing game (RPG) set in the above-described land during a period of political strife and apocalyptic tidings, Skyrim is in many ways an archetypical American fantasy RPG.

I’ve always enjoyed video games, and in my first few years in high school, I was an enormous fan of high fantasy of this sort, but things change. I left behind fantasy at some point, enjoying The Lord of the Rings when it came on TV, but devoting more of my interest to the generic pleasures of art cinema and Westerns in recent years. Video games have remained a constant, but in the past few years my gaming time had been more or less exclusively devoted to three product types: NCAA Football from EA Sports, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Rockstar Games’ open-world action games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.Why I wanted to try out Skyrim I cannot precisely say. The TV ads were well made, but so are those of many other video games, and this material did not intrinsically speak to me. There I was on a random evening in December though, walking a few blocks to rent Skyrim from a Redbox stand. I have been missing real life on and off ever since that night.

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Games on Addison: 7 Wonders

July 26, 2012 by -J. Leave a Comment

I’ve been wracking my brains for a few weeks on how to present this.

‘This’ being a discussion or analysis of tabletop games, a topic that, once upon a time, didn’t require the adjective in front of ‘games.’ But with the advent of video games, and the blurring of lines between sports and gaming (whether referring to betting, fantasy sports, or poker & darts on ESPN), I’ve felt that the grand tradition of tabletop games has become the long-lost brother of Western pop culture and entertainment.

And this led me to an idea: if we can break down & analyze movies, books, and music, why not do the same with games? Sure, I can go to Boardgamegeek.com and find such writing, but why can’t we also bring it to a more general audience? Hence the experiment that is my new series for the Recorder, “Games on Addison.”

The goal of this series is to explore and analyze tabletop games in the same manner as other forms of popular entertainment — film, music, video games, books, and the like. It is not meant to be a ‘review’ of these games, but a means of bringing attention to and discussion of games in a popular culture forum (that is, the Recorder).

This idea has been percolating in my brain for years, though the advent of the Geek & Sundry web channel (and its gaming series, Tabletop) brought it back to the forefront. Thus, for the first entry in this series, I’ll hearken back to a game I briefly mentioned when I wrote about Tabletop and digital media: 7 Wonders.

Check out all that Wonder.

7 Wonders is a recent and award-winning game from Repos Productions, wherein each player is takes the role of one the civilizations that built the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (hence the name). It’s a game that rewards resource management and adaptability, and once the players get the hang of the mechanics, it plays exceedingly quick.

Let’s get to know 7 Wonders. [Read more…]

A Dark Night’s Sorrow: An Addison Recorder Editorial

July 20, 2012 by Travis J. Cook 4 Comments

To begin, let me just say that, on behalf of all of us at the Addison Recorder, I would like to offer our condolences to all of the victims of the shooting that happened early this morning at the movie theatre in Aurora, CO. These murders are horrifying, a senseless act of violence that might seem like a vast impossibility, and because of the nature of this particular act, many of us around the nation, and the world, are in a deep state of mourning today.

There are many things to be said about this attack. I want to try and keep from politicizing the nature of the event, casting blame about, and making this into something more than it is. Lord knows that I want to rant about several things, and I’ve struggled with this in my mind as I sit down to write out my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, I apologize if this gets wordy, windy, or overly dramatic. If you wish to avoid such thoughts (though I’m trying to avoid getting preachy), close out now and you won’t have to suffer through my thoughts.

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