It's good to have a hobby. They keep our minds sharp and give us something to talk about at parties. Some people are so good at their hobbies that they are able to monetize them and make their hobby a profession. But, just as often, people let their passions get the best of them. They go from talking about their hobbies with other like-minded individuals to spouting unsolicited facts at anyone in shouting range. There is a fine line between being geeky and being a snob, and you may not know you have crossed it until it is too late.
One of the most snob-filled areas of expertise has got to be wine. Now, I am not opposed to discussing proper decanting methods or calculating degrees Brix with someone who knows what they are talking about, but few other hobbies can so quickly lead to snobbery than trying to become a wine expert. It is far too easy to turn your wine knowledge into a weapon. And a large part of the cult of wine snobs is fear. This is true of any cult, I suppose. Fear is a tool that is used to keep people in line. In the wine world, the fear comes from not wanting to seem uneducated. Wine is the drink of the elite, after all, and some people fear that they may be too pedestrian to drink it. Maybe their palate isn't refined enough, and if they say the wrong thing everyone around them will know the truth. And wine snobs feed on this uncertainty. It's this culture of fear that has allowed these bullshitters to thrive for so long.
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Microfest 2016 is just over a month away. If you are going to be in the St. Louis area on May 6th and 7th and you love craft beer, this is a no-brainer. You need to go to Microfest. Held in beautiful Forest Park, the festival features live music, good food, a silent auction, live brewer and chef demonstrations, not to mention beer from 70 breweries! As if that's not enough reason to go, there is also a killer homebrewing competition sponsored and conducted by the St. Louis Brews and sanctioned by the AHA and the BJCP. Profits from the event go toward funding Lift for Life Gym, which offers at-risk St. Louis city children a safe, enriching environment where they can "strengthen their bodies, enrich their minds, develop healthy social relationships, and learn to make positive life choices". And you know what that means: You can help kids in need by drinking lots of beer. That's a beautiful thing. Brings a tear to your eye. So we hope to see you there. If you swing by the Randalls Wines & Spirits booth, we will be handing out free swag and doing raffles (not to mention pouring some tasty beers of our own). -Dustin After a brief back-and-forth with the Cicerone Certification Program (that we remain big proponents of), we are going to have to change our name. We always knew it would be an issue, but had hoped that earning the rank of Certified Cicerone would allow us to keep the name of Cinema Cicerone. We have since learned that is not the case, and the only use of the word cicerone that is acceptable is the full title, so Certified Cicerone, Advanced Cicerone, or Master Cicerone, depending on one's rank. So we are combining our two-word name into a portmanteau. We will, from now until forever, go by the name CINEMARONE. Nothing else will change, and we shall never speak of this again. Cinema Cicerone is dead, long live Cinemarone!
-Dustin We at Cinemarone love David Bowie. He was a thrilling artist, a chameleon, and a jumping-off point for many frank discussions about gender, sexuality, heteronormativity, mental illness, drug abuse, etc. His style was inimitable, though many tried, and his passing has left a hole in our culture that will never be filled. He was The Man Who Sold the World, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Pierrot, The Goblin King, The Outsider, The Elder Statesman, Meta-Bowie. To honor this strange, brilliant creature, we will be doing a retrospective next week featuring five Bowie movies. Check back every weekday for a new pairing with a new iteration of the late, great David Bowie.
-Dustin While writing the recent pairing for Return to Oz, I did a lot of thinking about the movies from my childhood that were ostensibly designed for children. They were a far cry from the movies being churned out for kids today. Movies today are toothless. There is no danger, and therefore no deeper connection. When Kevin performs a heroic sacrifice at the end of Minions, there is never any doubt that he will survive. Illumination Entertainment would never kill one of its main protagonists, even if it is just one out of a horde of identical sentient yellow blobs. That might upset someone, and you don't hit a billion dollar worldwide box office gross by upsetting people. And why even bother making entertainment for children if you aren't going to make insane amounts of money by doing so?
I hate spoilers. I don't understand people who say they aren't bothered by them. I won't even spoil movies for people when they want me to. Especially if they say they're never going to watch the movie, so it doesn't matter if I spoil it. If you want to know what happens, watch the fucking movie yourself. I'm not your own personal CliffsNotes for movies.
Having said that, I have learned to regulate my disdain for spoilers. They are simply a fact of life in this day and age (fuck, that phrase makes me sound like an old man). But some spoilers are unavoidable. And, largely, they don't really matter. But other times spoilers do exactly what their name implies: they spoil otherwise fine entertainment. So, quickly, I want to lay the groundwork for this new feature on Cinemarone. In this blog, we will be talking about things peripherally related to movies and craft beer. Sometimes we will post reviews, either of a movie we recently saw that we feel very passionately about (positively or negatively), or some new craft beer we feel deserved a special mention. But we are also going to take some time to just talk about the things that make movies so special to us. Or things that make craft beer such a joy.
So there's not going to be much in the way of structure as far as this blog is concerned. Posts will pop up whenever one of us has something they want to say. Their tones will range from serious dissections of art to pointless tangents about you name it. We will try not to devolve into blatant fanboyism (though we will occasionally fail in this noble endeavor). We will also try to keep the ratio of positive posts to negative ones squarely on the side of the positive. Again, we'll try. So please check back often to see what new beer is hitting our palates just right, or what movie is rewiring the pathways in our brains and making us better people. No matter the topic, we promise to relay our thoughts on it in a passionate and enlightened manner. Except when we don't. -Dustin |
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