How Many Comebacks Can You Have? – Elton John’s “The Diving Board”

During the Emmy Awards, a show which was not merely a train wreck but a train-crashing-through-the-walls-of-the-station disaster, one of the most glaringly WTF moments came when Michael Douglas and Matt Damon strained credulity by insisting that Elton John’s new single “Home Again” fit in so thematically well with their film about Liberace. Not that “Home Again” is a bad song.  Far from it. It’s actually a gorgeous ballad with elegant music, strongly impressionistic lyrics, and a haunting arrangement which allows touches of horns and choir to sneak in like the memories of the past Sir Elton sings about. And the performance was superb, as one could expect from one of the world’s premier showmen. It just had nothing to do with anything being honored on stage that night. WHY it was there seems to stem, in my opinion, from a tsunami of positive reactions, mostly from middle-aged critics at all of the major media sources, regarding his new album The Diving Board, released this past week.

I was intrigued by The Diving Board mostly because of the tone of these reviews; over and over again from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal the aforementioned critics declared it “a comeback…his best album since the seventies” and variations thereof over and over again.

This worried me.

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One and Done: MLB Postseason 2013 (Ongoing Coverage)

billy hamilton

Tonight marks the start of the MLB Postseason, featuring the first of two fights for the right to play in the Divisional Round between eternal enemies Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, followed by a second duel to the death elimination tomorrow between Cleveland and Tampa Bay. (There might be some fairly grandiose moments throughout this column because I just watched the new trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and might be mildly freaking out at the moment. I mean, new Hobbit footage AND a Reds postseason game in one day? Your intrepid writer’s mind melts like butter on hot asphalt.)

What I’ll try to do with the Postseason is to do all of my Round Previews in one article, before each new set of Series begins. This will culminate with a team-by-team preview of the two pennant winners, followed by World Series recaps. All part of our mission at the Addison Recorder to provide you with the best continual analysis of the major shakings and dealings of popular culture.

(Oh, by the way, apparently there’s hockey tonight, though I cannot verify such things as truthful.)

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Game 163 and Beyond: MLB Postseason Coverage 2013

David-Price

Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?

One of the biggest criticisms (slightly warranted) of Major League Baseball is that the seasons tend to drag on forever. While it is your intrepid columnist’s opinion that the people who believe this are nihilistic, soulless goons more obsessed with watching grown men reduce each others brain matter to Silly-Putty, there is something to be said for the idea that the Baseball season is one long march towards an inevitable goal, the postseason. The corresponding argument is that because there is such a preponderance of games on the schedule, it is impossible to attach meaning to any individual contest, save for the latter weeks of the season.

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The Hunt for Red October: This Weekend in Baseball

Detroit Tigers v New York Yankees - Game 5

Welcome back, everybody.

Having essentially taken a summer sabbatical from the Recorder (you know, the pop culture column I helped found over a year ago), I feel that it’s time to get back to work. It’s been a great summer, full of theatre, farm work, and…..okay, maybe it’s hard to stay connected to popular culture when you’re living in the boonies of southwest Ohio. Nigh impossible, I might say. It’s almost unbelievable how quickly I fell back into the media stream upon my return on August 26th. (Case in point: while hanging out with friends and colleagues of the Recorder, the first question I was asked relating to anything popular was “Did you hear what Miley Cyrus did at the VMA’s?” In Ohio, I would have heard about that slowly, over a cold glass of Bell’s Oberon, on a patio, most likely three or four days after the fact. As it was, I immediately watched a clip of her performance with Robin “I’ve Really Been Doing This for Twenty Years, What the Hell is Wrong with You People That You Love Blurred Lines?” Thicke. My reaction: meh.)

With that being said, it’s the best time of the year to be a sports fan. Professional football has returned, with both the NFL and the BCS (See what I did there?…It’s been a long summer, you must understand. My humor will need a little bit of time to come back. Apparently, just like the Longhorns’ run defense.) going strong, things happening in NASCAR, Floyd Mayweather fighting the Ginger Sensation (Real name: Canelo Alvarez, which is a convoluted anagram of Satan’s Spawn.), and above all, baseball.

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Football is Back (For All of Us)

That’s what I call a community.

Forgive me if this sounds redundant, but football is great and it means an awful lot to me. I’ve said it before on here and you can expect it from me again.

That being said, it is also frustrating, boring, misguided, dangerous, and generally overplayed in our society. It can be terminally dull when a single play lasts only a few seconds, but downtime between plays is generally more than half a minute. Games can last 3 hours and never have a truly exciting thing happen . It can be among the least exciting entertainment this side of televised poker.

I have to admit, the only fall that I ever played organized football I just hated it. I hate the hitting, hated the running, hated most of my teammates, and hated how little interest the coaches gave to me because I had never really been coached before. I wanted to quit for most of the season and only stayed on the team because my parents and the athletic director convinced me that I had made a commitment and should see it through. I’m still not convinced that was worth another seven weeks of misery, but I’ll let that lie.

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A Visit to the Circus

Travis isn’t the only one with associates.

I’m the one member of the staff here without a degree from Bowling Green. I fell in with these other motley characters when Alex and I met at grad school at the University of Chicago. And I still remember the first day our precept groups convened–there was a tall, thin, earnest man in my group who discoursed at length but so wisely, never with a trace of boredom, about all of our discussion topics that in a single moment I realized I had to step up my intellectual game more than ever, if he represented the standard for our program.

Later, he told me he just talked a lot when he got nervous.

That was after Adam Osborn and I had become friends. He actually lived in the Addison vicinity after we all finished school, only moving for the greener, brighter pastures of Auburn for doctoral work, but we have never lost touch and I’ve followed his work with much pleasure.

Recently, I read a book partly on his recommendation which captivated me in ways I didn’t expect. For certain reasons you’re about to hear, it is a book designed to be a very personal experience…and for that reason I wanted to discuss it with one who had also gotten enraptured by its magic. So on what happened to be my parents’ 34th anniversary, we hopped on GChat and had a three-hour conversation on Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

What follows is a transcription, slightly edited…particularly our tangential expression of frustrations over George R. R. Martin.

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