We’re taking advantage of the weekend’s gloomy weather to stage a little in-house film festival. The DVR needs clearing, you understand. That got me to thinking about multiple feature nights over the years that have, deliberately, been a little more … Continue reading From the Archive: The Shadow and I Know Who Killed Me
As was projected in this space, I spent a portion of last weekend on the air at my alma mater, my first spin in the air chair in that particular studio in over fifteen years. It was delirious and delightful, a truly joyful experience that had the intense feel of coming home. With only two hours of airtime available to me, I barely got to dig into the history I carry with me from those days, much less the intervening decades of professional life and music fandom informed by my beloved time as a college radio kid. In particular, by … Continue reading One for Friday: Fetchin Bones, “Stray”
In making a film, it takes some industrial strength confidence to include an explicit promise of magic. I don’t mean constructing a story around a boy wizard or some other spinner of spells, fancifully warping reality with the behind the scenes … Continue reading Now Playing: Pete’s Dragon
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. Typically, I devote my reminiscing for this recurring feature to those superhero comic books I devoured through my tween and teen years (and, somewhat sad to type, beyond), with an occasional hat tip to a nineteen-seventies comic that, as the italicizes introduction concedes, I now feel I should have read. Truth is, during the seventies, which was very much my youth, I was collecting comic books with an unstoppable fervor. They … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Laff-A-Lympics by Mark Evanier and Owen Fitzgerald
The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980). I routinely think of this musical-action-comedy as the strongest film of the many that have been spun off from Saturday Night Live recurring characters, though we’re admittedly looking at a shallow, fetid pool. A recent fresh viewing suggests I might have been inflating in, undoubtedly on the basis of how freely I and my cohort of dopey high school friends quoted it, as if reciting a bar order of “three orange whips” at a purportedly clever moment would position us as comic geniuses. The movie is more slapdash than I remembered and spotted with … Continue reading Landis, McDonagh, Nichols, Parks, Trevorrow
This series of posts is dedicated to the many, many six packs, pony kegs and pints that have sauntered into my life at one point or another. The weekend just past was profoundly memorable for me, even the part that found me engaging in a pastime known clouding one’s recollection. I was one of thousands in attendance at the 30th annual Great Taste of the Midwest, a beer fest of colossal proportions. Were I more adept at describing the cascade of sensations that wash across the tongue when particularly vibrant and delectable potables are sampled, I could probably write a … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Toppling Goliath Mornin’ Delight
160. Patti Smith, “People Have the Power” When “People Have the Power” arrived, nearly a decade had passed without any new music from Patti Smith. She’d been effectively living in semi-retirement while starting a family with the man she married in 1980, Fred “Sonic” Smith, a punk icon in his own right thanks to his tenure in the foundational band the MC5. According to Patti, it was Fred who started her on the road to the song when he marched into the kitchen and said, “People have the power. Write it.” Armed with only that title, Patti embarked on a … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 160 – 158
In the interest of prolonging the weeklong indulgence of nostalgia for college radio days, I’ll use the weekly dip into the archives to focus on an artist that I suspect a few folks well-versed in the arcana of me were … Continue reading From the Archive: Flashback Friday – 1991
This coming weekend, I will take to the airwaves of WWSP-90FM, my college radio alma mater, as part of their annual reunion weekends. It will be my first time presiding over a radio program in nine years and my first time on 90FM in over fifteen years. I commemoration, I’m devoting this week to slightly displaced “One for Friday” posts, touching on each of my five years as a student broadcaster. To borrow a line from Robyn Hitchcock, “I didn’t write these songs; they wrote me.” I took my time getting through college. I didn’t want to leave. Sure, a certain fear of … Continue reading A Week of Fridays: Sugar, “A Good Idea”
This coming weekend, I will take to the airwaves of WWSP-90FM, my college radio alma mater, as part of their annual reunion weekends. It will be my first time presiding over a radio program in nine years and my first time on 90FM in over fifteen years. I commemoration, I’m devoting this week to slightly displaced “One for Friday” posts, touching on each of my five years as a student broadcaster. To borrow a line from Robyn Hitchcock, “I didn’t write these songs; they wrote me.” Other bands meant more to me personally and yet others were more dominant on the WWSP-90FM airwaves, … Continue reading A Week of Fridays: The Smithereens, “Top of the Pops”
Coffee for Two 