These posts are about the songs that just barely failed to cross the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41. The Kinks always felt like the underdogs … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Near Misses — “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” and “Do It Again”
449. The Allman Brothers Band, Enlightened Rogues (1979) Enlightened Rogues is one of the clearest examples in nineteen-seventies rock of a band rising from the ashes of their own self-destruction. The infighting after the Allman Brothers Band’s 1975 album Win, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #449 to #447
Wisconsin Is on the Brink of a Major Outbreak by Robinson Meyer This article is a week old as I post this, and it’s been weighing on me ever since. This is the state I was born in, this is … Continue reading Outside Reading — America’s COVIDland
I think it’s the probing, slightly spooky synth line opening the song that takes me back to the college wonderments of decades past. And yet “Sad Cowboy,” the new single from Goat Girl, doesn’t sound like a throwback to me. … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Goat Girl, “Sad Cowboy”
#12 — Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) The basic plot description of Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze, implies that the film is a despairing broadside against modern technology. In an indeterminate near future, Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) is a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twelve
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. About the only good … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Veeps
#13 — Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) Looking back, it’s remarkable that Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was the first foreign language film to claim the Academy Award for Best Picture. There’s first the oddity that no film reliant on subtitles to reach … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Thirteen
Michael Lewis is good at explaining things. From my perspective, he’s especially good at explaining things that otherwise don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s maybe that mastery of the otherwise elusive that explain why I’ve never … Continue reading My Writers — Michael Lewis
452. Berlin, Pleasure Victim (1982) No one was really taking the group Berlin seriously at the time they released the album Pleasure Victim, least of all the individuals on the band’s roster. From the time the band formed in 1978, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #452 to #450
The dismal truth of our nation’s sad moment in time is that there was no time to properly mourn the death of a significant public figure, a U.S. icon who started her career underestimated by a chauvinistic legal profession and … Continue reading Outside Reading — The State May Not Bolt the Door to Equal Justice edition
Coffee for Two 