A Song of Rubber & Ice

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The Recorder’s Guide to the 2013 Stanley Cup, Round 1

I must say, I was having a smashing time in Portland, OR, last week. It was a lovely bit of relaxation after the awesome madness of C2E2 the week before. In a surpisingly beautiful weekend in the Pacific Northwest, I was catching sun and swimming in whiskey while I was guided around the Rose City.

Who needs to watch this so-called Gatsby film? Not I, for one.

Why, I even had the opportunity to catch some junior hockey – game 1 of the WHL championship series between the Edmonton Oil Kings and the Portland Winterhawks. I walked away from the game disappointed but enlightened by the following lessons:

  1. The Winterhawks’ jersey & logo look damn near indistinguishable from the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks. This made it rather easy in choosing for whom we would cheer.
  2. There were a lot of scouts erm, former players in the crowd. It’s almost as though the NHL just held a lottery for its draft, and the two teams were chock-full of draft-eligible players.
  3. Making all those centering passes won’t do shit if you don’t have someone in front of the goal to put said pass into the bloody net! Looking at you, Portland. That’s a damn good way to lose by a few goals, in fact.

Thankfully, the Winterhawks also seemed to learn this last lesson, as they’re now one game away from winning the WHL championship.

It was upon my return from this West Coast foray that my fellow Addisonian broke some troubling news to me: it was his distinct opinion that the Stanley Cup playoffs were getting lost amongst all the flim-flammery of other sports – even the off-season ones!

A quick perusal of the Worldwide ‘Leader’ in Sports lent credence to my associate’s troubling observation. Item after item flashed on the TV without the barest indication of the Stanley Cup excitement! We at the Addison Recorder wish to rectify this situation, which is why I shall be providing you with our pop-culture-infused look into the NHL playoffs, one round at a time. Grab some whiskey (or whisky, for our Canadian audience), and let’s get on the ice. [Read more…]

What You Are About To See Has Never Been Seen Before the Human Eye!: In Memory of Ray Harryhausen

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There’s quite a lot that has to happen for me to truly mourn the passing of a celebrity, an artist, or a noteworthy figure in popular culture. Quite often, the problem for me is that “celebrity” naturally inspires a distance between myself and the noted member of society. It’s sad for me to realize that I’ll never read another Roger Ebert review, never get to listen to a new track by Levon Helm, or that Stan “the Man” Musial has joined the ranks of the great All-Star team in the sky. It’s natural to feel some sense of loss, and to gain a true appreciation for what they’ve done. (Check out my colleague’s touching tribute to the late Mr. Ebert here, to whom all of us at the Recorder are deeply indebted to.) More often than not, however, it’s only a momentary blip in the never-ending stream that is life. It’s sad to know that Whitney Houston has passed away, but in the end, I’ll still dance like a fool to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” without thinking more on the subject than “hmm…she’s passed away…we’re all getting old.”

And then I came home from work today to discover that Ray Harryhausen has passed away.

Somebody like Harryhausen is not a well-recognized name in the general lexicon of popular culture. He didn’t discover a cure for a disease, he didn’t play quarterback for the Cowboys, and he never had a #1 Single on the Billboard Top 40. He did headline several movies of his own, but we’ll get to that in a second.

No, what he did was to provide hope, inspiration, and a wave of dreams for countless people the world over.

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“Some Cheap Tricks and a One-Liner”: Reviewing Iron Man 3

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Let me be quite clear about what I’m trying to do here. This is not just a review. This is not a cinematic critique, an admonishment or a chastisement of artistic mediums. Rather, it is a cry for help for a certain individual’s life choices that have spread over into said artistic mediums, becoming patently obvious through the infliction of personality defects upon an aesthetic, influencing it through temperament, chronological pacing, and the attention span that would cause a pigeon to fly into a rage of conniptions and  twitches before flinging itself suicidally into a lawnmower so as to bring an end to the overwhelming presence of the aesthetic of the aforementioned individual.

I write this because I’ve just seen Iron Man 3. And I’ve become utterly convinced that Shane Black is overwhelmingly addicted to c0caine.

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The Way of the Future: Jason Collins and Sexual Orientation in America

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I had a violently angry article primed and ready to go for this afternoon here at the Recorder, one that discusses the eroding values of our culture that have been showcased over the last few weeks by the tragedies in Boston, one that snarls and might be the angriest thing I’ve ever written.

Then I went to work and turned on ESPN and heard about Jason Collins’ announcement that he is “a 34 year old center,[…] black, [and] gay.” In light of the significance of this announcement, yelling about Twitter, ignorance, and racial stereotyping in modern America seemed…well…petty.

I would like to lead off that we here at the Addison Recorder are proud of Jason Collins, that we respect and support him, and that we are especially glad to see that his decision to come out has been WIDELY EMBRACED by a litany of public figures, both within the sporting world and outside of with.

(I will also readily admit that I am not a big enough aficionado of the NBA to be able to identify who Jason Collins was. My first response when I heard that an athlete came out this morning was “Wow, that’s awesome!…..who does he play for?” Immediately followed by “What position? Center? Halfback? Are the Wizards even a team anymore?” Needless to say, I’m not proud of myself.)

The best thing about Collins’ coming out is that it was immediately usurped in the news by Tim Tebow being cut by the New York Jets.

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Democracy In Action: Memories of Culture in Boston

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According to our records, this will be the 100th post on the Addison Recorder. Hard to believe we’ve done so much since that night in Julius Meinl when Travis concocted this idea.

Speaking of “we,” I’m almost positive that we, like so many of our friends and loved ones in our age group, spent the past week glued to televisions, web sites, and above all a startlingly dynamic Twitter to mourn, follow, and ultimately rejoice over the tumultuous week in Boston. A piece on just how much Twitter replaced media as our major source of information and our shaper of reactions may be due once we have a little more time and distance. But during the entire week, as I was doing all of the above actions with tears and laughter alike, the most significant rush of memories came about what that city means to me.

I went to Emerson College to study film, with a bit of writing and philosophy, and lived in Boston from 2003 to the very end of 2006. For the last two of those years, including the summer of ’06, Boylston Street was actually my home; I lived at the beaux-arts Little Building, the main Emerson dormitory, on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, right next to Boston Common, the Green Line stop, a CVS and a 7-11, a Dunkin’ Donuts (though that’s not surprising since there’s one on every corner), a little Chinese restaurant which had the best Crab Rangoon you could ask for, a magnificent dive of a New York style pizza establishment, and a Loew’s multiplex.

Even on Newbury Street, the fanciest in town…they use how many Dunkin’ Donuts are here to stump people on tour buses.

In short, everything a college student needed. Especially a slightly withdrawn college student trying to absorb everything he could in terms of art and culture, trying to learn from the masters of every art.

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How to Tell Another Person’s Story

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My excellent colleagues have all published equally excellent articles since our endorsement by the AV Club, and I have regrettably been the last to the party. I’m upset about this; the Recorder is one of the finest things I do in my life and the company I keep with it is wonderfully rewarding. That being said, I have an excuse: I spent the past month and a half hard at work on my second graphic novel.

(For those interested, and I don’t think the guys would mind me making a little plug, I’ll be signing copies of my first graphic novel, An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, at the Archaia Comics booth at C2E2 in two weeks. Come by and say hello!)

In the process of writing this work, I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading which led me to a particular observation.

My new comic is modeled on the (auto)biography, the life story, and as an aide and inspiration to the writing process I dove headlong into a variety of renowned books from the genre, some of which I’d read before, most of which I hadn’t. Those who remember my piece on Lytton Strachey know that part of the article involved chronicling Strachey’s variations on the traditional model of the biography: treating it as a closely-structured satire, heavily-detailed series of specific impressions, and stagelike grand romance. But further reading has shown me that there are variations within variations, and the traditional model itself, the straightforward life-to-death narrative, is not that straightforward.

Indeed, given its popularity on the bookstore shelves in subsets ranging from scholarly historical documents to more salacious memoirs, the biography at first glance seems an easier task than the novel: you have a ready-made structure and you get to work with known facts instead of making things up. But writing a biography is a messy task, especially when you don’t know the subject, especially when the subject is long dead, and even those who did know the subject may be hindered by agendas, excessive reverence or disdain, or just a plain inability to write. (James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson becomes more and more, in my eyes, the most miraculous book ever written every time I think about it: a writer very close to the subject who could write within the conventions of his time while still slipping harder truths between the lines, and writing with a magnificent, inviting, yet still complex style.)

Equally amazing that a man who had at least fifteen cases of gonorrhea in his life found the energy to write a masterpiece

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Re-Subscribing to Chaos Theory: Jurassic Park 20 Years Later (In 3D!)

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While Jurassic Park is not the first movie I ever had the pleasure of viewing in theatres (more on that in a later article), it holds the distinction of being not only the first live action movie I was taken to see, but the movie that utterly transformed me into a full-fledged nerd. When I was but five years old, my mother told me that there would be a movie coming out in the summer that was about a theme park consisting of live dinosaurs. My little brain took off running, and I instantly took out every book I could find regarding dinosaur history, etymology, and paleontological studies, going so far as to give a lecture on dinosaurs both in my kindergarten class and at the Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting (church camp for Quakers). Needless to say, while I remain convinced to this day that I was a natural born lecturer from the age of six (my birthday happened before the movie was released), my classmates were less interested in the distinction between saurischian and ornithischian hip structures and more interested in Power Rangers, TMNT, and Battle Trolls. (That ought to date my coming of age properly.)

(Sidenote #1: This ability has never left me. One of my lab sciences, designed to fill out a liberal arts education centered around the double whammy of majors in Theatre: Acting/Directing and Film Studies, was the Geologic History of the Dinosaurs. A Wednesday tradition that semester was to hold court at the local Panera Bread, where I would orate about the differences between hadrosaur skull structures while my friends and colleagues devoured French onion soup. My main realization of those afternoon seminars is that not much has changed since I was in kindergarten, especially as I realized the most effective way of teaching the differences between dinos was to pretend to be one of the creatures we were studying and attack my friends until they could tell me five facts about what dinosaur I was supposed to be. But I digress.)

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In Memory of Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert was a tremendous film critic and is pretty easily the most well-known and beloved writer about film in American history. His death today after a long, very public, battle with cancer is a tremendous loss to the entire film community and we here at The Addison Recorder extend our deepest condolences to his family and friends. There have been a lot of tributes to him pouring in since the news of his passing broke this afternoon, and I wanted to whip something together that expressed how important Ebert was in my life. The thing is, I cannot begin to express the impact he had on me.
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No Madness, Only Hockey (pt 2: the East)

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…and, we’re back.

I think I’ve got everything re-arranged for those of you out East. Now to get back into character–

What? No, I didn’t see the Madness today. That’s kind of the point of this, isn’t it? My news feed told me that there were almost a couple of Cinderella stories, but I was distracted by the Women’s World Curling Championships. No, seriously. The U.S. team defeated Russia Thursday to force tie-breaker games Friday, and U.S. skip Erika Brown had a sick shot to seal the game in extra ends.

But we’re getting off-topic. This is about evangelizing for hockey, spreading the Good Word from the puck. We’re over in the East tonight, testifying about Crosby and the Pens, bringing light to the darkness in New York and Philly, illuminating the success up in Canada. The East is in an exciting race, with teams like the banged-up Ottawa Senators fighting mightily for points in the standings with every game. [Read more…]

No Madness, Only Hockey (pt 1: the West)

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It’s a liminal time of year. A young man wakes up on March 18th, bleary-eyed and barely remembering his last two days. He fumbles for his phone, checking texts and e-mail and—

Wow, that’s a lot of messages. Each one seems to implore him to complete something known as the Almighty Bracket. The only messages that don’t require his thoughts on the Bracket are messages telling him what to think about the Bracket. BRACKET. This rite of passage has signaled that spring is merely days away. It’s time for Bracketology. It’s time for the Final Four.

It’s time for March Madness.

Or not.

Watch out, corporate sponsors! March Madness is destroying the floor, with gravity and lens flare! RUN! SAVE YOURSELVES, CORPORATE SPONSORS!

Thankfully, the message I bring you today has nothing to do with the hype machine that is the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship. I’ve never been keen on following college athletics – and don’t get me started on the bullshittery of NCAA’s “amateurism” – so I’ve got nothing to offer on the Madness.

Maybe you’re of a similar mindset. Or maybe you’re really tired of seeing FINAL FOUR plastered over the same bar banners that, only days ago, excoriated us to make other poor life choices – choices that somehow celebrated an Irish saint. Or maybe you’re a sports fan, but aren’t buying the Madness (or that other basketball thing… y’know, that NBA thing). Meanwhile, Major League Baseball is still a few weeks away, and America forgot about the World Baseball Classic (SPOILER ALERT: Dominican Republic won), so… what can one do other than succumb to the Madness?

Well, I’m here to tell you what – you don’t mind if I grab a seat, do you? I’m here to introduce you to a world of ice and vulcanized rubber. If you have not been baptized in the church of the NHL, I would like to offer you a glimpse into what you’ve missed. There’s been sport a-plenty happening on the ice since October erm, since the start of this year. Why succumb to Madness, when you can follow the wisdom of our Lourd and saviour, the Almighty Hockey Puck? [Read more…]