Robin Williams passed away earlier today at his Tiburon, CA home at the age of 63. The Marin County authorities have ruled his death an apparent suicide by asphyxiation. We’re as saddened by this news as everyone else here at The Addison Recorder, so a tribute to the man and his work is in order. A few of us will share our thoughts and memories. Feel free to leave your own in the comments.
Last week, Zack Snyder released the first picture of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. The online response has ranged from praise by fans to snarky declarations of the death of sexism to outright rejection. Do we like what we see? [Read more…]
Somehow both phallic and vaginal. (Image via)
Football is on TV right now. Live football. It doesn’t count (Hall of Fame preseason game). It’s not even the right level of competition for my tastes (NFL). But football is on. So it’s time to start. I’m going to cover football in more depth for The Recorder this fall because I care more than I should. Specifically, I’m going to do my best to bring you a weekly picks column for the biggest college football games of the coming week and a NFL game or two, as well. Each week a different guest predictor will join me, usually someone from The Recorder staff, but sometimes not. We shall see. [Read more…]
I was working out at the gym today, thinking about Billy Beane’s “brass balls of steel” (exact origin of quote unknown, but it was somewhere on the Internet) and the Jon Lester/Yoenis Cespedes trade, when all of a sudden the White Sox-Tigers game I was watching took an abrupt turn for the surreal. The camera jumped several times between two men: Austin Jackson, the Tigers’ leadoff hitter/center fielder, standing out in the field looking relatively surly; and Dave Dombrowski, the Tigers’ GM, lurking in the back of the dugout like Tywin Lannister behind the Iron Throne. After a few moments and several horrific Hawk Harrelson quips that need not be repeated here, Jackson jogged in, awkwardly hugging every Tiger in his path before being shepherded up the clubhouse ramp by Dombrowski Lannister.
Jackson now plays for the Seattle Mariners. Enter David Price, former Tampa Bay Ray and newly-minted staff ace of the Detroit Tigers.
We’re a little freaked out that it’s almost 2015. The decade is half over! To try and make sense of time passing the Recorder staff is going to write about their favorite stuff from the past 5 years in a few installments between now and the end of the year. We’re starting things off with music! [Read more…]
“Wish I Was Here” came out July 25. (image via)
Zach Braff came under fire last year when he successfully launched a $2 million Kickstarter to bring his latest project to life. This might not have been controversial except that Zach Braff is, ostensibly, a famous person with money, and this film was “a follow-up to ‘Garden State’” at best and a vanity project at worst.
Over the past year it’s been increasingly common to see Comedy Central’s programming pointed to as among the best on cable. Key & Peele, Inside Amy Schumer, Kroll Show, Review, @Midnight, Nathan for You, and Broad City are all relatively young shows that push at the boundaries of what TV comedies can do, while still being gut-bustlingly hilarious. Throw in those venerable stalwarts The Daily Show and the soon-to-be-departed Colbert Report, and it’s not hard to look at Comedy Central’s lineup and say it’s the equal of HBO, Showtime, or FX.
Drunk History is not as ground-breaking as some of its sibling shows, but it might be the most purely enjoyable show in Comedy Central’s lineup. It’s a sketch show where host Derek Waters gets comedians blitheringly drunk and has them tell stories from American history. Waters and a wonderful cadre of guest actors then act out the stories in full costume using the drunken soundtrack recording as both dialogue and narration. It’s a goofy concept, and doesn’t always hit, but when it does the show just soars. The slurred speech and wild excitement of the speakers (especially Drunk History all-star Paget Brewster) lend the action a pleasantly loony atmosphere. The real fun, though is seeing actors like Jordan Peele, Retta, Weird Al (as Hitler!) and Charlie Day perform the loopy action described by the narrators. Nothing on TV right now is funnier than the moments where a skilled actor mouths along to a drunken digression that utterly shatters the fourth wall.
Cox, LaRussa, Glavine, Thomas, Maddux, and Torre. AKA A Summary of Baseball in the 1990’s.
It’s a relatively safe assumption that nobody else on our tiny staff cares about the Baseball Hall of Fame as much as I do. It’s a much broader leap, but still a reasonable hypothesis, that I care about it more than most of our (hopefully somewhat more than) tiny readership. Therefore, when news governing the actual Hall of Fame rears its head, I stand at attention, ready to pounce upon their latest justice/injustice rendered upon innocent/guilty players.
This time around, it’s a little more complicated than that.
News broke over the weekend that the Baseball Hall of Fame, that venerable and most hallowed of institutions, would be changing a few things in time for this year’s election cycle. One change will be that baseball writers will be prohibited from selling their vote and must sign a waiver of sorts agreeing to a “code of conduct”, a reaction to some of the fuss that sprang up during voting last year. While one might argue over precisely how impactful this measure will be, there’s certainly no harm in it; the Hall simply wants to make sure that there are no further embarrassments to its “hallowed process”.
I am not a fan of surrealism or excessive flights of fancy in art: when confronted with Salvador Dali or Hieronymous Bosch’s mind-warping visions of the unimaginable, my flesh feels like it is creeping off my skin and my eyes avert themselves. The one exception to my distaste for surrealism is Rene Magritte, whose paintings, photographs, handwritten essays, and the productions of his ad agency in Brussels, is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in their special exhibition Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926-1938, which runs through October 13.
Jenny Lewis, “The Voyager” (image via)
Full disclosure: I love Jenny Lewis. She is my musical alter ego, and an indie rock goddess. Her lyrics are poetry and they say everything I could ever want to say but can’t.
Lewis writes about insecurity and falling in and out of love and the impermanence of everything, including and especially ourselves. At this time, I’d like to thank my junior year college roommate for constantly playing the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack because it contained “Portions For Foxes”; thus began my journey into the depths of Rilo Kiley, the now-defunct band Lewis co-fronted.
