Over ten years has passed since the release of Consolers of the Lonely, the album from the the Raconteurs that is the direct predecessor of their latest, Help Us Stranger. Any reasonable music fan might have wondered if the band … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Help Us Stranger
Keeper of the Flame (George Cukor, 1943). Only the second film to boast the famed pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Keeper of the Flame is a stern, stout-hearted drama that too often has the life knocked out of … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Keeper of the Flame; A Star is Born; The Front Runner
By now, it should be be no surprise that a new Quentin Tarantino film finds the filmmakers shuffling together all his good and bad instincts like the thick, blood-speckled cards of a tarot deck. Then they’re flipped up with a … Continue reading Now Playing — Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
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 Sunday New York … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Garfunkel and Oates, “What’s Gonna Happen to Chris”
680. Robert Plant, The Principle of Moments (1983) The Principle of Moments, the second solo album by Robert Plant, finds the frontman of the revered, departed Led Zeppelin asserting a new creative identity with greater assurance. His first outing on … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #680 to #677
The Language I Learned From Cassettes by Ben Ratliff This remembrance of the golden days when cassette tapes were invaluable strikes strikes right at a nostalgic vein that I find irresistible. Ben Ratliff deploys well-chosen details to capture the bygone … Continue reading Outside Reading — The Revolution Will Be Recorded edition
A glimmering Ring Pop of a single, “I’ll Be Back Someday” could redeem high school poetry. If that task is realistically beyond the scope of any bouncy pop song (or, you know, the abilities of mere mortals), it at least … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Tegan and Sara, “I’ll Be Back Someday”
It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953). From the boom years of modestly budgeted, big studio science fiction, this tale of space creatures who alight on Earth is based on a story cooked by no less a luminary in … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — It Came from Outer Space; The Fastest Guitar Alive; At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal
It starts with the guitar, a jackhammer line joined by a propulsive rhythm section beat. And then lead singer Marisa Dabice starts singing, her voice fierce and fragile at the same time as she delivers lyrics about a toxic relationship: “Who … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Patience
I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read. When I started reading superhero comics, the publications of Marvel were … Continue reading My Misspent Youth — What If? #29 by Steven Grant, Alan Kupperberg, and Al Gordon
Coffee for Two 