This week at Spectrum Culture, I didn’t have a single new piece go up. While I’ve got a whole pile of stuff waiting to be reviewed (four movie screeners and, I think, the same number of new music releases), the site had a low-content week, which honestly couldn’t have come at a better time for me since my work week has been, to put it mildly, exhausting.

In place of a weekly recap, it seems like a fine time to offer up a sort of “greatest hits.” Not only because I’ve got a spare week, but because we’re fast approaching the date that will mark two years since my first review appeared on the site. I didn’t put an awful lot of thought into this tally of previous efforts that stir up a little bit of uncommon pride in me, but these are the pieces that, for one reason or another, leap to mind when I consider my best writing for Spectrum, presented in now particular order:

–There’s my first and, to date, only concert review, covering a show at Asheville’s Orange Peel last fall.

–My primary position remains in the film section and I’m pleased to report that there are quite a few reviews that I’m pleased with. A particular favorite is one I wrote in response to a fairly obscure documentary, largely because responding to the film’s deliberately obscure poetic form led me to open up my writing a bit, while still offering a clear assessment of the work’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s one of the instance when I sat down to start the writing process very worried about whether or not I’d be able to capture the strange rhythms of the film and wound up immediately satisfied with the result (a true rarity).

–One of the music reviews that I worked hardest on was from just this past spring when I took on the latest album from Springsteen. I have a long, deep history with the artist that has involved a fairly conflicted response in recent years. I think I addressed that history while staying focused on the record at hand.

–Finally, unlikely as it may seem, there’s probably no single piece of my writing that’s gone up at Spectrum Culture that inspired more kudos from my colleagues there than a retrospective consideration of the pivotal Wolverine limited series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller that was originally released in the early nineteen-eighties. It perhaps reveals more about my geeky past than I’m comfortable with that it’s probably the most effortless chunk of writing I’ve had digitally published.

That’s it for looking back. I’ve got all those screeners and all that music to get to.