Back in my college radio days, when I moved with a music-nerd crew that devoted our collective brain power to sussing every mystery of the artists we loved when there was no superhighway continually exiting information to us, one of … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — To Love is To Live
For my eleventh birthday, all I wanted was a Carl Reiner movie. A little more than a year after the release of The Jerk, Reiner’s sixth film as a director and his first of four straight starring Steve Martin, the … Continue reading Carl Reiner, 1922-2020
When I fell for Hope Downs, the debut full-length from Australian band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, it was because I heard the college radio of my own personal era in the earnest, tuneful stylings. It wasn’t true retro, reliant on … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf —Sideways to New Italy
491. The Suburbs, Love is the Law (1984) Serving as the trailblazers in a Minneapolis rock scene that went a long way towards defining alternative music in the pre-grunge era, the Suburbs were prepared to make a proper stab at … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #491 to #489
Rethinking the Film Canon by Rich Juzwiak Earlier this year, I was listening to the Little Gold Men podcast as they discussed the newly announced Academy Award nominations. As they mostly expressed relief about the small signs of voters looking beyond … Continue reading Outside Reading — Canon Fodder edition
I barely follow it, and even I know it’s been a helluva week for country music. I’m sure there are still plenty of practitioners of the form still relying on pickup truck cliches and jingoistic garbage to propel their creativity, … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Eric Church, “Stick That in Your Country Song”
#28 — Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, 2013) Most of the films of director Bong Joon Ho have been wholly original works, suffused with inspiration drawn from serious study of film, perhaps, but springing start to finish from his whirring brain. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Eight
Ashes and Embers (Haile Gerima, 1982). Made around forty years ago, Haile Gerima’s experimental drama opens with Black men driving in a city who get pulled over police officers that immediately escalate the situation, presuming guilt as a default for … Continue reading Then Playing — Ashes and Embers; Brewster McCloud; A Star is Born
#29 — American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013) Rife with absurdity and energized by misguided bravado and crass capitalistic scheming, David O. Russell’s darkly comic rendering of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation would feel off if it didn’t have “American” … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Nine
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. The official announcement of … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Meet The CONAN Staff: Conor Oberst – Production Assistant
Coffee for Two 