Arts

Hendrix is Alive: ‘Blak and Blu’ by Gary Clark Jr. Pt. 2

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Editor’s Note: This is what happens when your text sprawls over 20 pages of copy (in 10 point font!). It gets broken up, B. It gets broken into two parts. You want a complete piece? Write a friggen’ book. As for you readers who have stuck with us, I do believe that he gets around to making his point in the next two sections. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go nurse a coffee and try to remember how to feel. TJC

For those who missed Part 1, you can retrace our steps here.

 

4. Outside Little Rock…A Discussion…The True Meaning of Origins.

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Hendrix is Alive: ‘Blak and Blu’ by Gary Clark Jr. Pt. 1

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Editor’s Note: The following text arrived on my doorstep early Tuesday morning, sealed in an envelope, written in miniscule 10 point font, along with a flash drive containing music samples, an e-version of the text, and several unflattering photos that have since been excised from the document. Buried on a small post-it note somewhere around page 10 was a small note directed to me: “T. Piece is finished. More or less vacant from all mental faculties. Publish as soon as legally accountable. OK here. A.C.B.” At the risk of running afoul of his vengeful wrath, I have published the following piece under the heading of “Blak and Blu: A Music Review” though it should be noted that the actual byline of the piece was enclosed on a successive string of Post-It notes (all colored blue, for some odd reason that seemed important at the time) and directed to headline the page itself; including a rambling editor’s note was optional, yet something that I felt was essential to the integrity of the text, as well as the general strangeness of the weekend itself. It is important to note that, regardless of who or what is involved, the words below are my associate’s own, pure and unfiltered. Take them as you will.

 

Hendrix is Alive and Well and He Lives in Austin, Texas: Gary Clark Jr. and the Renaissance of the Texas Blues; A Complicatedly Simple Study of the Condensing of American Music Tropes into a Wholly Original and Wholly Impressive New Sound That Will Soon Shake Your Windows and Rattle Your Walls; a Further Study of the Road and Its Dangers Whilst in Pursuit of the Glory of the New as the Times are Changing

A Review by A.C. Bromfield

1. The Inciting Incident…Trouble in Paradise…The Needle is Broken.

https://www.youtube.com/user/garyclarkjr?feature=watch

Chicago is built for the inclement weather that strikes at any and all opportunities, a condition in which the city residents worship the angry gods of the Northwest that regularly send down the cold fronts of Arctic ice that pulverize their bodies and shake them to their bones. It is not unusual to emerge from one’s apartment into a frigid, icy wasteland, something that would be highly irregular on a May day in, say, Cincinnati, Ohio. However, these are things that the good denizens of the Windy City have grown to accept, paying homage with clasped hands at the El stations dotting the urban landscape.

I hate this weather.

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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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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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A Plethora of Choices: A (Semi) Knee-Jerk Reaction to the 2012 Academy Awards

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“Argo fuck yourselves” indeed.

 

“Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here’s the first step to happiness: Don’t get pissed off that people who aren’t you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don’t get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn record and play “Maps” all goddamn day (if that’s what you want). Don’t get pissed off because people didn’t vote the way you voted; you knew this was a democracy when you agreed to participate, so you knew this was how things might work out. Basically, don’t get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn’t some kind of universal consensus. Because if you do, you will end up feeling betrayed. And it will be your own fault. You will feel bad, and you will deserve it.” – “Cultural Betrayal”, Esquire 2005, Chuck Klosterman

Well, the Academy Awards happened on Sunday night (the 24th of February in the Year of Something or Other 2013), ostensibly celebrating the year in movies that was 2012. It was not a clean sweep, something that has become a little rarer in recent years, much like Bengal tigers and Bengals playoff visits. The last time I can think of where one movie solidly dominated the goings-on in Los Angeles was Return of the King in 2003. (Well, 2004, but it was a group of movies that were mostly released widespread in 2003. At least, in theaters in NY and LA near you.) Returning to last Sunday’s evening, we were treated to Daniel Day-Lewis turning into a stand-up comedian, tasteful musical numbers, tasteless musical numbers, show-stopping numbers and numbers that almost literally dragged the bloated carcass that is any awards behemoth into the ground. (Thank you, Les Mis, but it’s impossible for a bunch of mostly talented white people who seem otherwise charming to truly follow the awesomeness that erupted from Jennifer Hudson’s mouth. It’s almost institutionally unfair.)

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Alex’s Thought on the Cinema of 2012 Part One: Or, Argo is a Mediocre Thriller in the Guise of an “Important” Film and its Oscar Victory was Vapid Bullshit

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Ugh.

I’ve been putting off summing up my experience of the year 2012 in cinema for a while now.  It just seems that I never see enough to really pass judgment on a year until 1/6th of the next one has passed. Part of that is just the general lethargy of me not seeing half of what I want to on time. But there’s also a big part of me that doesn’t want to write an article like this until I can bitch about the opinions of others, namely the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So I will get to my overall thoughts on the cinema of 2012 in a second article, first I have to get rid of my venom in this one.

In specific I want to tell you, dear readers, that the Academy gave its highest honor, the Oscar for Best Picture of the year to a film that is wholly undeserving of such praise. Now this is not an unusual occurrence. In the past ten years I have agreed with the Academy’s choice all of once, when the Coen Brothers won top honors for their 2007 Western/Noir/Existential Philosophy Think-piece No Country for Old Men. That’s not to say that I hate every Best Picture winner. I have absolutely no complaint with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Departed, The Hurt Locker, or even The Artist winning it all. There were movies I preferred to all those films, but they are all good to great films that deserve to be seen and stood out against the films they competed against at the Oscars. That’s not something that I can say for Argo, the film that was named Best Picture of 2012. I know my esteemed editors here on The Addison Recorder have sung the praises of Ben Affleck’s Iran Hostage thriller in their own 2012 pieces, but my opinion runs rather dramatically counter to theirs.
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The Academy Awards Live Blog…by Andrew and Company

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TWENTY-FIFTH

Sorry. that was just way too surprising.

The way Jack Nicholson says “Amour” is beautiful.

Argo wins Best Picture. Travis takes ten hard-earned dollars from me. And…I have no problem with this. There were three/four better movies this year, but this film is going to be studied better and more in years to come…and why is Kristen Stewart sitting behind Spielberg?…and Affleck, who does not get played off…I’m sorry, he is so humble, and he is an outstanding director who ranks with Bigelow…who wore the dress everyone should have worn tonight…

The final number: MacFarlane and Chenoweth sing about the losers. It’s very astounding that they never cut to the audience (who might be leaving) and I still think that Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty should have WAY MORE OSCARS than they did. But that’s for posterity.

Good night, everybody!
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Andrew and Alex Talk Oscar Nominations, Part Two

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ANDREW

So with ten days to the Oscars and voting for the actual awards almost over, I am absolutely confident in saying…Daniel Day-Lewis will win Best Actor.

And that’s it.

Here’s why I’m completely unprepared to go any further, Alex. It has to do with my top five movies of the year, as I had gone on record stating that Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty were two masterpieces, almost flawless. But a few weeks after that pronouncement, this is how my Best of 2012 list finished, and this does not include Amour, Holy Motors, or Life of Pi, none of which I’ve gotten to see yet…

1. Lincoln

2. Silver Linings Playbook

3. Argo/Zero Dark Thirty

4. The Master

In short, Hollywood unveiled four of the greatest movies I’ve seen in my lifetime (plus one of the most complex and intelligent artistic mind**ks ever in one season), and they’re all up for Best Picture.

Now I breathe with excitement about the 24th…good…then continue.

The brilliance of Silver Linings Playbook and Argo has to do with their meeting one of my favorite cinematic maxims, as pronounced by Robert McKee: “Give the audience what they want, but do it in a way they don’t expect.” Zero Dark Thirty was a film that brilliantly met every expectation of mine. Lincoln met them, then surpassed them. David O. Russell, Ben Affleck, and Chris Terrio flipped my expectations on their heads with the intelligence and emotion they poured into their films, especially the former quality. These are two very, very smart motion pictures, which adhere to conventions of style and genre while traveling to places not many movies go.

Saying more inappropriate things than appropriate things.

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