Thirty years ago, in 1988, Transvision Vamp released the album Pop Art. The British band’s debut album, Pop Art was positioned alongside the Primitives’ stellar Lovely as part of a mini-movement of brashly confident retro pop delivered by acts fronted … Continue reading One for Friday — Transvision Vamp, “Tell That Girl to Shut Up”
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Let’s be very plain and direct about this. It’s entirely possible that this, created to promote (sort … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — “Real Life” trailer
It was considered a major coup when the Fox television network signed up Joss Whedon to create a new ongoing science fiction series. Whedon sat in an exalted place among genre fandom, thanks to his efforts with Buffy the Vampire … Continue reading That Championship Season — Firefly, Season One
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. One of the things … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Amber Ruffin Remakes Art Created by Problematic Men”
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953). Drawn from stories in the eighteenth century collection Ugetsu Monogatari, by Ueda Akinari, Kenji Mizoguchi’s film proceeds like a hazy dream that’s periodically jarred into wakefulness by jolts of pointed pragmatism. Set in the time when earning … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Ugetsu; Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
876. Screaming Trees, Invisible Lantern (1988) “When we did Invisible Lantern, we were probably ready to call it quits,” Van Conner, bassist of Screaming Trees, once acknowledged. “We all had crap jobs, and had no future. You weren’t making any … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #876 to #873
There are times in the process of seeing, writing about, and, yes, ranking films, when the best feature of the year is immediately evident upon first viewing of it. For me, that was the case with Children of Men. That’s … Continue reading From the Archive — Children of Men
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1988, the Dream Syndicate released the album Ghost Stories. Although the band was one of the defining acts of the Paisley Underground movement that spun out of Los Angeles in the nineteen-eighties — … Continue reading One for Friday — The Dream Syndicate, “My Old Haunts”
From now on, I don’t want you listenin’ to Guns N’ Roses an’ The Soup Dragons. I want a strict diet of James Brown for the growls, Otis Redding for the moans, Smokey Robinson for the whines, and Aretha for … Continue reading Aretha Franklin, 1942 – 2018
Across thirty-plus years of commercially released feature films, director Spike Lee has rarely lacked for ambition. Near-perfect or fatally flawed, his efforts are routinely packed with ideas, manifesting as narrative deconstruction, wildly inventive manipulations of cinematic technique, or heated social … Continue reading Now Playing — BlacKkKlansman
Coffee for Two 