688. The Clash, Black Market Clash (1980) For U.S. audiences, new material from the Clash arrived at a dizzying rate across the final months of 1979 and through 1980. The band’s 1977 self-titled debut, originally deemed too rough for the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #688 to #685
BEDTIME SONGS by Kiese Laymon Published in Oxford American, this essay by Kiese Laymon is lovely and moving in its purity. She writes evocatively about the experience of driving at night — with no particular geographic destination, just circling through … Continue reading Outside Reading — Right Track, Wrong Track edition
Merging orchestral music with modern pop stylings often results in a sonic mess, tilting toward either the pure cheese of the disco classical that burbled up in the nineteen-seventies and -righties or the unbearable pretension of rock acts trying to expand their … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Anna Meredith, “Paramour”
I greatly admire Hereditary, Ari Aster’s feature directorial debut, but I completely understand how some moviegoers might have developed an aversion to it by the end. There’s no charity from me to those who rankled at the visual resplendent and insidious … Continue reading Now Playing — Midsommar
The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Fede Álvarez, 2018). I have no firsthand familiarity with the Lisbeth Salander novels penned by Stieg Larsson, but I’m beginning to suspect, whatever their merits, they might repel earnest efforts to turn them into Hollywood … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up —The Girl in the Spider’s Web; Old Boyfriends; Hotel Artemis
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Whatever its virtues and flaws, Ari Aster’s Midsommar is one of my favorite film releases of the … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Bear in a Cage
It has been a mere three years since Tom Holland took his first swings as Spider-Man, bringing the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper in Captain America: Civil War. It seems as though the young English thespian has been … Continue reading Now Playing — Spider-Man: Far From Home
692. Go-Betweens, Tallulah (1987) Tallulah might not have delivered the Go-Betweens their first experience with professional disappointment, nor even their most pronounced. And yet the recording experience and subsequent related duties were peppered with enough frustrations that the album stands … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #692 to #689
Meet the people fighting for health care access for disabled kids detained at the border by s.e. smith The grotesque immorality and abject cruelty currently being perpetrated against human beings attempting to immigrate into the U.S. — most of them … Continue reading Outside Reading — Life, Liberty, Etc. edition
Long Beard is the performing moniker employed by singer-songwriter Leslie Bear, whose 2015 debut album, Sleepwalker, stirred up admiring interest from music fans inclined towards the wistful. Recently relocated from Canada to her native New Jersey, bear acknowledges her songwriting … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Long Beard, “Sweetheart”
Coffee for Two 