Alex is one of the founders of the Addison Recorder. A Chicagoan who grew up in Metro Detroit and went to college at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, he’s pretty thoroughly Midwestern and has the outsize love of football and Inland Vowel Shift-ed accent to prove it. He majored in Film Studies and Popular Culture at BGSU and got his Master of the Arts, with an emphasis on Cinema Studies, from The University of Chicago. For both his undergrad and Master’s thesis he wrote about the cultural meanings of Hollywood Westerns, but tries to keep that obsession under wraps for us.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his writing for The Recorder tends to cover cinema and TV more than anything else. He’s weirdly obsessed with awards shows for those fields. Especially the Oscars; don’t get him started about the Oscars. He’ll also dabble in thoughts about books, history, video games, and sports (Go Blue!) every now and then, too.
He spends half of his working life teaching intro-level Cinema, Pop Culture, and Mass Media courses for the Humanities Department at Harold Washington College in Chicago’s Loop. The other half of his work is spent at Groupon, where his job title is “Associate Redemption Specialist.” If you can read that job title and figure out what his work actually consists of, then he will give you a Coke.
Augustus McCrae from Lonesome Dove is his role model.
A hero to Epicureans everywhere.
Alex Bean
A life-long Midwesterner, currently living and working in Chicago. Primarily writes here about television and film (which is what he accrued crushing debt to study in school), but will write about books, sports, video games, or whatever else strikes his fancy. He's the one who thinks baseball is really boring.
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