Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

Indeed, Alex, that is a wide-open question. Thus, I feel it deserves a broad-ranging answer. Not broad-ranging like Mr. Cook’s answer, but an answer so utterly gargantuan & sanity-sapping that it has mutated beyond its origins as a cultural object and into an unnamable sub-culture.

I speak, of course, of H.P. Lovecraft and this delightful Mythos.

I came to the Mythos from a few different angles, much like a Hound of Tindalos. By my teens, I was already a devotee of Poe and Bierce, as well as a tabletop gamer. In addition, my local library had a section dedicated to Wisconsin writings, including the stories of August Derleth. When my mind pieced together these seemingly dissociated bits of knowledge, it lead me inexorably to HPL.

That selfsame library also contained many blasphemous tomes published by Arkham House, the Wisconsin publishing house founded by Derleth and Donald Wandrei. These included the original anthologies of Lovecraft’s work, which I confess to borrowing often and for the full allowance of time.

It was the summer after my first year of high school when I cracked open an HPL story for the first time. Under the searing light of a relentless midday sun, I read the short story “Dagon.” It was… okay. I mean, I liked it, but it didn’t grab me.

Dagon did, however, grab the front of this ship.

After a bit of research, I learned that the chronological approach was not the best way to read HPL. So I jumped next to “The Nameless City.” The mood and ambience of that story struck me. Maybe there was something to this Lovecraft fellow, I thought. On it went, my enjoyment of HPL’s work slowly overtaking me, much like madness does to his protagonists.

And then I read “The Colour Out of Space.” I was hooked. This was the story that sealed my fate as a Lovecraft geek: the slow terror of a creeping blight, the sheer horror of powerlessness in front of an unworldly presence, and yet… a seemingly random event.

After that, all I could do was tumble down into this Styigan abyss. I was devouring weird and supernatural fiction that were tangential (or influential to) HPL’s Mythos. It introduced me to Robert W. Chambers and his Yellow Sign, which prepared me for the plays of Luigi Pirandello. It—

Have you seen the Yellow Sign?

I’ve got to pull back, here. There isn’t enough room in this response to list all the creative vistas that HPL opened to me: games like Delta Green, Arkham Horror, and Call of Cthulhu; other authors of the weird such as Arthur Machen, Ramsey Campbell, and Neil Gaiman; songs by the likes of Metallica, the Mountain Goats, and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets; podcasts, films, people, my Master’s thesis…. And on, and on, ad infinitum.

I keep returning to Lovecraft and his Mythos for more than the original stories. The man himself was terribly flawed, and his stories could’ve used better editors. But the ideas that flowed from Lovecraft’s pen, and the community of writers he encouraged and collaborated with, those are what keep me coming back to his eldritch Mythos.

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Andrew, and Travis.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

I don’t really have a solid answer for this with a lot of detail, mostly because I’m drawn to about twenty different books or movies or albums or games at a time. My mood tends to be flighty, like the wind, and different pieces speak to me at different times because of that. It’s hard to nail anything completely down because the things that I identified with years ago mean different things to me now.

Jurassic Park was the first movie where I realized that I could be something with my life, whether it be a dinosaur or a paleontologist or a filmmaker or a writer. Sometimes I wish I could harness the passion that I felt about dinosaurs when I was five. To quote Paul Rudd in Knocked Up: “I wish I could feel as strongly about anything as kids feel about bubbles.” Insert (in place of bubbles) ‘dinosaurs’ and (in place of kids) ‘me as a five year old’ and you’ve got the general statement/problem of my entire life.

Five-year-old Travis is all OVER the latest study on whether dinosaurs were cold- or warm-blooded

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has been a central feature of my life since middle school — not because it was an escape from the hell that is growing up in a small Midwestern town, but because it was something that I could so strongly share with my mother. There is a trivia game that I was gifted by a friend concerning Lord of the Rings knowledge. While playing the game, we quickly discovered that my mom and I created an entirely unfair advantage when we were on the same team. The game would literally end on the first round because no one else would get one right and we would sweep on through everything. The stories of good and evil are something that I continually return to, and it reminds me deeply of the relationship with my mother that I have now lost.

To a similar extent, I am drawn not to culture/media, but to nature. A walk in the woods is as close as I have ever come to spiritual absolution, and I find myself craving wide open spaces free from the polluted, noisy cities that I have grown up near and around. Call it the spoiled life of a country boy, but I feel that there is something wrong with a  world where you look up into the sky but cannot see the stars due to light pollution. That’s why someday I figure to retire to a cabin in the middle of Wyoming or South Dakota or Arizona or the Upper Peninsula to just write and forget about society. (Chris McCandless is my homeboy)

Music has always been an important feature to me in my life. I grew up listening to a steady diet of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, learning to play instruments. I taught myself to play guitar by listening to Led Zeppelin’s albums over and over again, playing alongside and learning what it meant to be a musician. Even now, I strum away at my guitar when I’m feeling particularly irked or stressed or just in need of belting out Neil Young or Counting Crows after a long day of menial pay and no tangible results to witness. Any/all music seems to do the trick, but if I had to boil it down, my top five artists of all time are The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Counting Crows, Beck, and Nirvana.

With that in mind, how does one choose one object to return to over and over again?

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Andrew, and -J.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

It began with, of all things, cassette tapes: a disorganized collection of cassette tapes, current whereabouts unknown. The tapes were my dad’s, and the first one was, in fact, a mix tape, an assemblage of he and my mom’s favorite Billy Joel songs, made about the time they saw him in concert eight months before I was born.

One day at the age of four, for reasons unknown (maybe I grew tired of nursery rhymes), I popped the tape into Dad’s Ford Escort, and from the propulsive first bars of “Movin’ Out,” I was hooked, lined, sinkered, and fried like a Lake Erie perch on the music. For five years, I listened to that Billy Joel tape until it finally wore out, and by that time I knew the words to every song on it, for Dad and I had sung them together through so many cruises through the freeways of Mahoning County. Not only did I learn vocabulary and a bit about how to craft poetry, but as I let the songs’ meanings sink in more and more, “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” “Goodnight Saigon,” and others clued me in to a range of emotions and ideas more complex than those found in my picture books. It was an early, formative step into growing up.

But this was not the only tape in Dad’s collection. Hungry to hear what else he had stored in his seat pockets and glove compartment, my fortuitous next step was a cassette with Rubber Soul on one side and Revolver on the other. Those songs were committed to memory within two months, and the Beatles became and remain one of my great obsessions… in wanting to learn all about them, I discovered how much care went into every note and every lyric that had seemed so fun and effortless upon first listen. Twenty years later, among many things which come to mind when I think of the Beatles, I always think of the work which must be expended to create art, or excel at a job, or raise a child, or make a relationship last…my family did all of those things, and the Beatles are inextricably linked to my family.

Gotta love a band with a name like Supertramp

There were more tapes beyond those. More Beatles with the White Album. Tommy, which Dad owned on vinyl too, and the lyric book’s illustrations scared me as much as the crazy sounds of “Revolution #9.” Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues. Mix tapes of Supertramp and the Association. The Best of the Doors. A tape with two Rock and Roll Hall of Famers making sounds I’d never dreamed of on each side, Pink Floyd’s monumental Dark Side of the Moon giving way to Traffic’s folk-jazz hybrid John Barleycorn Must Die. And there were the songs Dad sang to me in the bathtub, songs from all those cassettes, plus  Donovan and Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Cat Stevens and Carole King and Bob Dylan and Harry Chapin.

Dad and I didn’t care much for “Cat’s in the Cradle;” our songs were “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” and “Mail Order Annie.”

Today, I listen to anything and everything, having grown to love classical, country, jazz, and even rap by now, but the starting point was that original set of songs my Dad had on cassettes. From there, I built the foundation for a lifetime of exploration, and not just in music.

When Dad exposed me to so many great and varied sounds before I’d even started kindergarten, he and Mom (she was responsible for the Carole King) were telling me without words that there was so much out there, and not just in art, to experience, and I should not hold myself back for any reason; they certainly weren’t holding me back. With that simple expression of love and trust in me, I did more than go out to find new music, eventually music my parents had never even heard of; I read every book which interested me, saw every movie that caught my eye, tried as many foods and occupations and college courses as I could, and all those experiences and memories have bled into my writing. In a way, that music led to my becoming a writer. It was the first step in a journey which guaranteed I would always have inspiration, always have things to draw on in my own life to write about.

Nobody listens to cassettes anymore. But I still listen to those artists and albums all the time, and always smile with love and gratitude…and the occasional chuckle when I picture my five year-old self hear Lou Reed sing about “giving head” and having no idea what that meant.

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Travis, and -J.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

This is a pretty wide-open question, but I like that for our inaugural run of this feature. It means that there’s lots of room for all of us to play around and explore what makes us tick. Personally, I thought I knew what direction I was going to go with this question, but as I sit here my mind is changing. Initially, I had thought to make my answer something like John Ford’s seminal The Searchers. If I had to pick a favorite movie that would be it for a whole variety of reasons.

But, the question posed is not about favorites per se, but about what we can’t seem to get enough of. The object that I return to time and again is not The Searchers, or Deadwood, or any of my myriad other favorites. No, I always find myself inexorably drawn to sit down and enjoy that grand staple of American television: the sitcom.

I’m not sure exactly when my love for the sitcom started. I can remember watching a lot of NBC’s mid-90’s greats like Seinfeld and Newsradio when I was younger. Tim Allen’s old series Home Improvement was definitely appointment viewing in our household. That’s unsurprising considering that my dad loved doing his grunty-hoot thing like it was going out of style (which it was). In high school I had the TV schedule memorized so that I could jump between comedy reruns, eliding around the heavy-handed nighttime soaps or dry procedurals. By college, my obsession was in full bloom. I can recall skipping student organization meetings in order to stay in my dorm and watch The Office.  When you’re a freshman who knows no one else on campus the funny people on TV can be a more welcome sight than the myriad strangers all around.

These days, much of my down time is filled by one sitcom or another. Be it a new episode of Happy Endings on Wednesdays, or queuing up an episode of Better Off Ted for the umpteenth time on Netflix while I play a video game, TV comedies are a constant presence in my life.

When you combine those two activities, you get Skyrim’s top-rated sitcom, “Shouting at Draugr”

There is an eternal tension in sitcoms that makes them endlessly consumable for me. Their most obvious function is to deliver jokes, which must rely on an element of surprise in content or delivery. But underlying even the most anarchic joke machine shows (such as Seth McFarlane’s many, many cartoons) is a finely-tuned narrative structure. The series has an established setting and cast of characters, which each episode disrupts in some fashion. These disruptions, such as Liz’s perpetual romantic troubles on 30 Rock,  are the motor behind the jokes. However, each episode must resolve its disruption within that same episode or else risk alienating the audience.

So, no matter how many times I watch The Venture Brothers, there is always that tension between the comic disruption caused by the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s half-brained attacks on the Ventures and the knowledge that the problem will be resolved within twenty minutes. It’s engaging without taking up my whole brain; hilarious without being challenging at the end of a long day.

Go Team Venture!

So, that’s me, what about all of you?

Read the responses from the other editors: Andrew, Travis, and -J.

All the King’s Men: Modern Loathing in the NBA

Leave a Comment

The NBA finals, recently concluded, pitted the Miami Heat against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Rife with storylines, these included the quest for Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden to aid the Thunder’s rise from worst in the NBA to the ultimate heights. It was also about Lebron James’ continued quest for his first title in his pursuit of becoming one of the best basketball players of all time. As we now know, the latter proved to be the dominant storyline, granting this incarnation of the Heat their first title and fully forging James’ status as the best basketball player currently playing the game.

Really, it boils down to two people. The other eight roles on the Finals were played by an assortment of flaming hedgehogs. #nerd

What strikes me now, reflecting upon the match-up, is how this particular finals pitted two villains against each other. In this case, it is Lebron James vs. the Zombie Sonics, a bitter feud of egos, tormented fan bases, and entire states of disgruntled ex-fans, and what it means to passionately care about overpaid gazillionare athletic freaks throwing a rubber ball through a 10-foot metal hoop.

Allow me to break this down.

[Read more…]

Our Own Special Place: Thoughts on Moonrise Kingdom

Leave a Comment

I am incapable of neutral feelings when it comes to Wes Anderson.

Since the Recorder is a magazine devoted to opinions, that’s not going to get me in any trouble, but I wanted to throw it out there anyway. I lack objectivity in this piece because it’s about my thoughts on the new Wes Anderson film, Moonrise Kingdom. To make a long story short, I loved it to death, but where’s the fun in making a long story short?

I first encountered his films when I saw The Royal Tenenbaums with my aunt and uncle sometime during Christmas break my freshman year of high school. Tenenbaums is a big, grand movie, messy and alive with laughter, compassion, and deeply felt sadness. I was delighted and intrigued. My aunt and uncle hated it as much as I liked it. The next time I went to Hollywood Video (remember that place?) I checked out another film, Rushmore, by the same director-writer.

Over the course of the three-day rental, I watched Rushmore four times. First by myself in the basement on Friday night, again the next day with my 11-year-old sister who mostly found it baffling, and twice more on Sunday with and without the commentary from Anderson, his co-writer Owen Wilson, and the star Jason Schwartzman. By the time my dad drove the DVD back to the store on Sunday night I was hooked. Something in that little 90-minute tale about a lonely, weird high school boy’s unexpected connection with two equally lonely souls lit me on fire. Too wry and idiosyncratic to be mainstream, but funny in such unexpected ways and expressionistic that spoke to me in ways that art, literature, and religion never had. Rushmore was a tiny, beautiful world unto itself. It was made whole by Anderson’s devotion to detail and made worthwhile by its acknowledgement that life could be hard and dispiriting, but you should certainly come out the wiser.

 I scoured the internet for something, anything I could find about Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Anderson, or any other person or thing related to those films. This continued unabated for at least a year and a half, and had the inadvertent effect of throwing me headlong into the world of cinema. Since I was a devotee of Anderson’s work I tracked down the films that inspired him. I convinced my parents to let me rent The Graduate and Jules et Jim. When I saw those I turned around and found more movies related to them. I found that film was a vast, undiscovered country filled to the brim with the emotion and thoughtfulness that seemed in short order in my high school life. Cinema, and the cinema of Wes Anderson in particular, became a safe haven, where I found people who felt as broken and adrift as I sometimes did. Fast forward 10 years to today and, that still rings true. My obsession with cinema did not wane in the months or years after I first saw Rushmore. It grew exponentially into a full blown career path, and, well, here we are.

[Read more…]

Another Christmas Trailer: Les Miserables

Leave a Comment

This article was suggested by a sentence in a previous essay by Mr. Alex Bean.

I’m the type of film lover who pays more attention to directors and writers than movie stars, and in the years since my return to the Midwest, one director who has gotten a prominent place on my watching list is Tom Hooper. Hooper has a unique set of artistic strengths, and more importantly, he makes terrific work. John Adams is one of the greatest television productions I’ve ever seen, and The King’s Speech is a type of film I love discovering: smart, witty, and full of emotion without ever feeling manipulative.

But though his work is in the first rank of quality, Hooper himself is a more dubious figure on my critical scale. It still rankles that he won the Best Director Oscar for 2010 over David Fincher and the Coen Brothers. Hooper’s filmmaking style is unimaginative, stagey, and technically dull. However, Hooper’s main goal in his films, I am convinced, is to let the actors take over. In his films and shows, every line of dialogue, every gesture, even every spot within the scene where a player stands, feels upon analysis to be as thought out and practiced as possible. I say “upon analysis” because in the immediate experience of watching, the actors are so confident and so dedicated as to mesmerize. Watch Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney in John Adams, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech, and you basically get an acting-for-the-screen clinic.

And to think they’d made “The Nanny Diaries” just a year before.

Which is why Hooper may have been the best choice to direct the long-gestating film version of Les Miserables, a film primed and ready for the Oscar season along with Mr. Bean’s choices Django Unchained and The Great Gatsby.

[Read more…]

Observing the Observers Verbal Portraits from the Comics: Philosophy & Practice Conference, University of Chicago, May 2012

Leave a Comment

The writer needs to think as visually as the artist.

This is especially true in my chosen medium, but even without the presence of graphic narrative’s pictures, any serious writer needs to have characters visible in the mind’s eye. The close watching of human behaviors, physical qualities, and similar traits is a source of detail to borrow and inspiration to run with; the mere imagining of a single physical attribute may lead to a character’s entire backstory being formed.

It took me many years to learn how to pay attention to people, and it is a skill I am still honing, but I will always remember the moment when it became apparent to me how clearly the lesson had been learned. I was interviewing a friend of mine about her life to get some psychological insight for a project I had conceived… which is now, in part thanks to her, taking on new proportions. While taking notes, various aspects of her presence became more and more apparent with time: when her eyes would shift at some memories and glow at others. When she would pick at a small scab on her pristine white skin. And when how, deep in thought, she would finger her necklace. Suddenly, much richer and more textured creations came into my mind than had been imagined before.

The writer needs to be as visual as the artist.

Although for artists the significance level ratchets up. Observation of life and people is the foundation of their entire existence. In particular, the artists whose work has so greatly influenced me, my colleagues in the world of graphic narrative, whose portraiture skills, ranging from the ultra-realistic to the fancifully grotesque, have reinvented the comics world from the DC and Marvel tradition of heroes and action to gripping, emotional stories which break the rules of genre.

There is a lot to be written about the Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference held at the Logan Arts Center of the University of Chicago last month. The archives will preserve all what was said, but when I decided this was something I had to document from my point of view, the idea of truly looking at these luminaries, scrutinizing them a little as they scrutinize others, latched on to me hard.

What follows are my notes from the field.

[Read more…]

Tincture, Bitters, Citrate, Shrub

Leave a Comment

Anyone who spends even a few minutes on Twitter knows that’s it’s rather cluttered. Its main export is white noise, and you can lose a lot of time sifting through the static. But amidst the abbreviations and attempts to cram as much meaning into 140 characters as possible, I occasionally come across a tweet that hits me with a +3 Hammer of Concise Truthiness. For example:

Very seriously.

I realize it’s not earth-shattering – a man who has a business making fine bitters in the UK, tweeting about the product he makes. But to approach it in such a way is too dismissive. There is a cocktail renaissance of late, and bitters are an integral part of that event; were this not the case, he wouldn’t have much of a business making bitters, would he?

[Read more…]

the Longship cocktail

Leave a Comment

Despite the idiom that is meant to admonish, I find there is value in ‘reinventing the wheel’ when it comes to cocktails. A classic recipe can provide a great framework to inspire new ideas and experimentations.

Take the Longship, for example. The basic concept is that of a Sidecar, but with aquavit. It also bears close resemblance to the Sailor Mercury, another aquavit-based cocktail with similarities to a Sidecar. Rather than the floral flavors of the Parfait Amour, however, this drink utilizes the intense and unique aromatics of kaffir limes. (If you can find the kaffir limes, making the tincture is quite simple; see below.)

This recipe is tailored to my palate, and I tend to favor cocktails that are spirit-forward (i.e., boozy) and not too sweet. Since we’re using a classic recipe as framework, it’s pretty easy to adjust for your own tastes. Want a cocktail that focuses less on the base spirit, and is a bit sweeter? Take the the aquavit down to 1.75 or 1.5 oz, and add a spoonful or three of simple syrup — tweaking proportions like this can help you tailor cocktail recipes to the liking of you and your friends.

the Longship

2 oz – aquavit
.5 oz – triple sec
.25 oz – fresh lime juice
kaffir lime tincture

Combine first three ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake, then strain into a coupe glass. Top with a few drops of kaffir lime tincture, and garnish with an orange boat & brandied cherry.

Kaffir lime tincture – take the leaves and/or zest of 2 kaffir limes, and place into a small jar. Cover with a high-proof, neutral spirit — Everclear, Spiritus, or 100-proof vodka — and seal the jar, storing out of the light for 1-2 weeks. Shake daily, and start checking the tincture after the first week. Once ready, strain out the solids — voila, you have a tincture.