the Fifth Line: Jets Are the First Casualty

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I am a Blackhawks fan, and therefore I am a very tired person.

The Blackhawks / Predators series is four games in, and their double-overtime game last week was eclipsed by a triple-overtime gem this week. The playoffs have also been a strain on my attention span because I’m constantly flipping between games. There have been few blowouts, which means trying not to miss a big event when flipping to the other game.

Before we get to the playoff recaps, though, let’s talk about the oil-covered elephant in the draft room.

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Balls.

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J&STAC: Onwards to C2E2!

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-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature  and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”

This weekend marks the annual event of Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, commonly known as…

C2E2!c2e2

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The Mask You Live In: Failing Boys Fails Us All

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The Mask You LIve In

The Mask You Live In, the new documentary from director Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the guiding force behind 2011’s Miss Representation, takes us from negative media portrayals of women to the other side of the gender spectrum to answer the question: “As a society, how are we failing our boys?” American boys, the film posits, are born into a culture that saddles them with a construct of masculinity that is both impossible to attain and destructive to pursue.

Through interviews with sociologists, activists, psychologists, neuroscientists and other experts, as well as personal stories from everyday boys and men, the filmmakers present a compelling argument that we are robbing boys and young men of the freedom to express their feelings, experience intimacy or participate in certain activities deemed not “manly” enough. The cost of this deprivation is high. The film explains how the demand for hyper-masculinity contributes to all manner of social ills including sexism, rape culture, transphobia, homophobia and violence. [Read more…]

Addison Recorded 113: Kimmy Makes Waffles

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Logo by Owen Williams.

Logo by Owen Williams.

Welcome to the Addison Recorded, the official podcast of the Addison Recorder. For season one of the podcast, Gina and I have been re-capping episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the latest original series from Netflix. This is our final broadcast from the PodFort™ (aka, Gina’s dining room blanket fort) for season one. We hosted a slew of Addison Recorder writers to join us for a round table discussion of the show’s season one finale.

That means our season finale, and 13th episode, is now available on iTunes! We’re excited to share it with you. Find the Addison Recorded on iTunes and be sure to subscribe, rate and review! We’ll be back for season two, at a later date with a new topic to cover.

A Harp Playing at the Crossroads: “Ireland 1690-1840” at the Art Institute of Chicago

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Many of the recent major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago have been retrospectives of individuals: Matisse, Lichtenstein, Picasso, Magritte. However, the current show takes a look at an epoch of an entire country. Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design examines the aesthetic output of the Emerald Isle from 1690 to 1840. At first glance, this seems a strange choice, for Ireland is not historically important to art history as France, Italy, and Japan are, but a tour through the galleries reveals many unimagined delights and powerful statements.

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A Pasture of Desire: The Promise of Ryley Walker’s “Primrose Green”

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Primrose

Ryley Walker is a 25 year-old from the Chicago suburbs by his birth certificate and a time-traveling folk-rock spirit by his career. One look at the cover of his sophomore album, Primrose Green, is enough to make anyone think they’ve stumbled across a lost classic from the late 1960s, what with the ethereal photography and Walker himself in long hair and vivid-colored blazer. The music within reinforces such an impression, as it draws so heavily on the styles of some of the era’s most acclaimed records. Walker is definitely not in that league yet, but Primrose Green suggests a fruitful career is in store.

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the Fifth Line: Bracket Time!

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Woo-hoo! The NHL playoffs have begun! Someone find my blood pressure medicine and hide my tequila!

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Scott Darling made how many saves in relief of Corey Crawford?!

I kid. My blood pressure issues are completely untreated, and even if you hid my tequila, I have plenty of whiskey. Whatever your drink of choice, you probably needed it last night if you were a fan of any of the Western teams that played.

Before we dive into the playoff brackets, though, a few words on a recently-fired tank commander. [Read more…]

Thoughts from the Dugout: A Day at Wrigley Field

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The baseball season is long and arduous. It’s often compared to a marathon, which credits the enormous physical toll that 162 games can exert upon the human body. The comparison, however, serves a slight discredit to the immediacy of the individual games themselves. Careers are made and broken on a nightly basis, and a lost or blown game here or there can have a monumental impact upon the postseason race in September. Think of it as something similar to the Butterfly Effect (not the movie), where a butterfly flapping its wings in April can blow the course of a season off pace when a monsoon takes out a pitcher’s elbow, or causes a game winning home run to die on the warning track. In a game of inches, that damn butterfly can wreak untold, and often unknown, havoc.

It’s also pretty damn fun.

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