Maciej Kasperowicz is one of the most interesting people I know. He makes his money in the coffee game. He’s a DJ. He was single-handedly keeping several movie theater chains afloat pre-pandemic. He’s a passionate sports fan. He is also awaiting trial on The People Versus Pearl Jam, where he’ll argue the popular grunge outfit sucks in front of a jury of his peers. If you missed it, here’s Maciej’s guest column on the movies of 2019. And be sure to give him a follow on Twitter, if that’s your thing.
DBB: You are in the rare group of people whose movie opinions I respect and cherish. So I ask you this. Who is the Alfred Hitchcock in Bears history? (I am providing no further explanation for that question. It’s on you now.)
Maciej: Look, there’s an easy answer to this. An undeniable, legendary talent through multiple phases of a long career, but a fucking asshole in real life? It’s Ditka. But I wanted a more interesting, if less direct answer, so I started thinking of Mike Brown staring into the backfield from the secondary like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Singletary bearing down on a ball carrier like the airplane in North by Northwest, the 2018 Bears swarming Jared Goff and his receivers like the birds in The Birds, and Hitchcock’s real time experiment in Rope as a metaphor for that half season of Kordell Stewart (that’s admittedly unfair to both Rope, which I like better than Hitchcock did, and Slash, who at least was an incredibly fun video game quarterback, in different ways).
And then Jay Cutler, fresh off his divorce to a woman whose character on The Hills wasn’t that far from a Hitchcock blonde, started making a crime film on his Instagram stories. Granted, with a line like “Thelma there, while she looks nice and sweet, is a savage with loose morals,” Jay seems to be aiming more for early John Huston than Hitchcock. But who knows where his new art may take him.
DBB: First, what do we laymen coffee drinkers not know about the coffee industry that we should? Second, compare the experiences of a perfect cup of coffee to a exhilarating Bears win.
Maciej: The global spread of coffee from Ethiopia throughout the rest of the world was built on a colonial system the remnants of which, combined with the fact that coffee is a wildly hard crop to produce, and that its supply chain is longer and more twisty than that of most crops make it really damn hard to make any money growing coffee. And, obviously, that’s what global capitalism does in many industries. But as climate change reduces the available land on which you can grow coffee well and young people in the global south refuse to take over coffee farms because they won’t make enough money to live on, there’s a good chance we just won’t have all that much coffee, or at least all that much tasty coffee. So, the main thing I want more people to know is that if you plan on enjoying coffee much longer, or if you care about things like farmers being able to feed their families or baristas having health care and financial stability, paying more for a cup of coffee is eventually going to have to be part of the solution.
99.9% of the time, drinking an excellent cup of coffee is nothing like a Bears game. But there are cups of coffee or shots of espresso that I’ve had that were not only super delicious but also opened my eyes to what a certain origin or processing method or brew method can do in a way I hadn’t imagined before. And those taste like the games that make you realize that your team is way better than you imagined and this might be a special year.
DBB: I’ve sat next to you for a hundred Bears games and I always wonder if the Bears could actually ruin your week the way they have mine. Can the Bears or your other fandoms impact the rest of your life in a significant way?
Maciej: I feel like you should hold onto this one for when you get a therapist in this feature, but, no, a Bears game has never ruined my week. My day sure, but not my week. I’d think at least part of that is because I don’t go by @DaBearsBlog on Twitter and people therefore don’t expect me to constantly be thinking and answering questions about the team that broke my heart that week, but I don’t know. Did they ruin your week before you were professionally tied to them? Maybe I’m just better at compartmentalizing. I think the only fandom that’s ever ruined my week is my Prince fandom when Prince died.
