The Addison Recorder doesn’t talk about the NBA much…until it gets to the really interesting time of the year. In this four-part series, Alex and Travis will talk about what’s getting them excited for the NBA Playoffs.
As Mad Men comes to an end, there are thousands of articles being written about “The End of an Era.” I’ve always been drawn to the costuming work that Janie Bryant has done on the series, because it goes above and beyond anything that other television shows are doing. I could write for days on each and every costume created for the show, but I’d like to focus on the journey that each of our main characters made from the first episode to the last one. While the characters grow and change, we can still see bits and pieces of who they once were ten years ago. [Read more…]
A fitting end.
Mad Men is over. This is still a difficult idea to process. When Becky and I did our binging re-watch a few months ago I kept trying to remember where and when I was as each big episode queued up on Netflix. I originally watched the premiere on a friend’s couch, because that’s where 20-year-old Bean lived in the summer between his Sophomore and Junior years of college. I caught up on seasons two and three in my apartment in Hyde Park in between sessions of frenzied Master’s Thesis writing. Season 4 was in a crappy starter apartment. Season 5 was in a high rise I always sort of felt like a tourist in. I moved in the middle of both the 6th season and the first half of the 7th. On Sunday night, I watched the series finale from the living room of the grand condo that Becky and I bought six months ago. [Read more…]
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Best Coast puts me in a good place, even though they play almost exclusively sad music. Reigning Queen of Upbeat Beach Songs with Downer Lyrics Bethany Cosentino teamed up again with musician Bobb Bruno for California Nights. The album came out May 5 and follows up 2012’s The Only Place and 2013’s Fade Away with more energetic songs about medicating depression.
Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, but he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.
His mother spoke over fifty dialects of Italian and helped neighborhood girls with abortions. His father was a barkeep who boxed under the last name O’Brien because people thought only the Irish could fight. His voice teacher was a drunk ex-opera singer who lived over a restaurant in New York. He was friends with lawbreakers and Presidents. He was a teen idol who became an institution.
Charlton Heston said at a testimonial dinner that every one of his songs sounded like a four-minute movie. Frank Sinatra, who celebrates his centennial this year (and died seventeen years ago today), had a past that fueled a lifetime of stories.
Last month Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s second novel, The Moor’s Account, was announced as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In their citation the Pulitzer committee said that the novel was “a creative narrative of the ill-fated 16th Century Spanish expedition to Florida, compassionately imagined out of the gaps and silences of history.” That second clause ran through my mind as I raced through the novel a few weeks after its citation. The Moor’s Account is Lalami’s imagining of the famously doomed Narváez expedition to Florida that began with 600 Spanish conquistadors and settlers landing near Tampa Bay and ended 8 years later when the only four known survivors stumbled across some Spanish soldiers in what is now northern Mexico. Cabaeza de Veca would become the most famous of those survivors when his La Relación became the official royal account. Lalami, as you might have guessed, moves the narration from de Vaca to Estevanico, a Moorish slave owned by one of the other surviving Spainards and the first known African (and African slave) to land in what is now the United States. [Read more…]
While we were all watching playoff hockey, another spectator added chum to the shark tank of off-season coaching vacancies.
Mike Babcock, whose Detroit Red Wings spent another postseason extending a record yet coming up way short of the Cup, has been given permission to shop his coaching talents to other teams.
Babcock’s glare is so withering, it actually put out that terrifying AHL Flames mascot.
But for the moment, the courtship of Babcock takes a back seat to the four teams who’ve survived to the Conference Finals, including the new ‘comeback kids’ of the playoffs, the New York Rangers. Before we get to them, let’s look at the West:
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How Does This Hold Up? is a series where Alex and a guest check out a movie they haven’t seen in ages or that they’ve always been meaning to watch. They’ll compare the experience of watching these movies now to when they first saw or heard of them and explore the differences there-in. [Read more…]
Unless you were living on the moon this past fall, you heard about Serial, the podcast tour de force that everyone from your mom to the guy who rotates your tires could not stop talking about. Serial fans by and large became very invested in the case against Adnan Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee, and were left at the podcast’s conclusion with more questions than answers. Always more of an attempt to tell an engaging story than it was to give a detailed play-by-play, Serial made for riveting podcasting, but it was often frustratingly short on details. In its wake, a new podcast has emerged promising all the details you can handle (and probably a fair bit more). Undisclosed: The State v. Adnan Syed, hosted by attorney Rabia Chaudry, seeks to tell us all much more about the case, but with one very important caveat: she fully believes Syed is innocent.
