Shallow Thoughts: Bourbon, Michael Cera and Horns
August 22nd, 2014
Shallow Thoughts: Vapid headline grabbing, meandering nothings and a false sense of importance
Bourbon
It’s not really news that bourbon’s popularity is growing with every passing day. According to the Courier-Journal there were “5,294,988 bourbon barrels aging in Kentucky warehouses at the end of last year,” which is the “most since 1977.” While bourbon is now a mainstream drink, there is still a lot that people don’t know about it. One thing that comes to mind is the difference between the corporate owner, the brand name represented on the bottle and the distillery. There are a small number of large distillers that distill the bourbon that is aged and blended by corporate holders, only to be branded under a name that makes no reference to the actual distillate’s source. For example, Willett makes some of my favorite bourbons and ryes, but they didn’t distill any of it themselves until very recently. When you drink Willet Rye or Michter’s, you’re drinking alcohol distilled by the large Indiana based company MGP. Some people find this troubling, but to me it’s more interesting than anything. This bourbon family tree illustration highlighted in GQ makes sense of this industry in a clear visual way.
Owl John
Owl John is the solo project of Scottish musician Scott Hutchinson. The combination of his accent and his muddied guitar playing somehow work together perfectly for me. I learned about this song from KEXP and haven’t been able to stop replaying it all day. He seems to be flying under the radar a bit so far in terms of popularity as a solo act, but I’m thinking this might change.
Horns
The premise is pretty straight-forward. Ig Perrish (played by Daniel Radcliffe) is accused of killing his girlfriend. Ig proclaims his innocence, but the media is relentless in their accusations. He wakes up to find that he has started growing horns, and throughout the course of the film they grow larger and larger. The premise seems simple and comedic. I think it will be a good role for Radcliffe, who has certainly developed his acting chops quite a bit since his Harry Potter days.
Michael Cera
Michael Cera is having an interesting year it seems. He just put out an album titled “True That” on Bandcamp that you can buy for $7. It’s very lo-fi, but what I’ve heard from it so far is interesting.
Cera is also currently starring in a Broadway play titled “This Is Our Youth.” According to broadway.com “the play chronicles 48 hours in the lives of spoiled, drugged-out, rich kids living in Manhattan in the 1980s. Cera plays Warren, a depressed 19-year-old who has stolen $15,000 from his tycoon Dad.” It also happens to be playing at the Cort Theatre, whose last three engagements have seen Daniel Radcliffe in “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and the combination of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the plays “No Man’s Land” and “Waiting For Godot.”
