Author: Dan Seeger

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And it’s paid for and I’m so grateful to be nowhere

Dan Seeger

Chapter One: The Huckster’s Reintroduction To be fair, Quentin Tarantino has never been anything other than transparent about his convictions. He is an unabashed recycler, a self-aggrandizing showman, a virulent jabber jaw. He is a cinematic con artist of the highest order, taking all the influences that swirl in his head, buffeted by the blizzard winds of his grindhouse-soiled psyche, and spilling them out onto the screen with only the barest hint of deeper introspection. Much as he loves the gamesmanship of movie narrative, from the pleasure of imposing subversion onto the inane to the flawed puzzle box of displaced … Continue reading And it’s paid for and I’m so grateful to be nowhere

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College Countdown: The Effort Thus Far

Dan Seeger

(Photo found elsewhere) It’s been five and a half years since I decided to take an old CMJ chart that I found and offer a sort of a digital duplication of a radio program hosted by my old movie reviewing colleague. As I noted when tracking through that tally of forty tracks, it was a Sunday night ritual during my first semester of college to listen to the show that aired on the student-run station where I was securing my own FCC Operator License. At the time, it was The College Count-Up, inverting the usual numeric progression, because playfully tweaking convention … Continue reading College Countdown: The Effort Thus Far

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From the Archive: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Dan Seeger

Any movie review program circa 1990 practically required a home video segment. Rentals of blocky VHS tapes was that significant a piece of the entertainment market. It was also the great equalizer, giving smaller markets that would never see, say, a big screen showing of a playwright’s feature directorial debut, an adaptation of a stage work that provides a clever reimagining of Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters, access to such comparatively esoteric efforts. Largely stuck with the more dismal wide releases for our main reviews, we tended towards recommendations of art house fare when we were guiding … Continue reading From the Archive: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

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One for Friday: The Builders and the Butchers, “No Roses”

Dan Seeger

Well, there’s no real reason to start the new year with something chipper and upbeat, is there? The Builders and the Butchers are a beautifully artful and occasionally morose folk-rock band out of Portland, Oregon. Led by singer-guitarist-songwriter Ryan Sollee, the band deliver music that is at once strangely timeless and sharply current. At first listen, it can seem like they’re engaged largely in a act of preservation, but there are layers that which make it clear that they are simultaneously committed to moving forward, exploring the dark corners of songs in a protracted attempt to make their music singe with the … Continue reading One for Friday: The Builders and the Butchers, “No Roses”

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Five Songs from 2015

Dan Seeger

And so we come to another tradition in my stream of year-end rituals. The day after sharing my top ten albums of the year, I turn to the individual songs that thrilled me the most. In this instance, I don’t intend or purport to name this quintet as the absolute best of 2015, although they can certain all jockey for that title. Instead, this is simply a way for me to celebrate a few more exceptional musical creations. That means I’m largely eschewing music from any of the ten albums cited yesterday. As with most rules, there is an exception. … Continue reading Five Songs from 2015

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Top Ten Albums of 2015

Dan Seeger

It’s been a few years since I recommitted to the task of offering up a yearly list of my personal favorite albums from the preceding twelve months of music, doing so because I was writing for Spectrum Culture. It was part of our year-end obligation as music critics. Because my top three albums that year prominently featured women performers, the editor-in-chief decided I was some sort of swooning sucker for female musicians. Never mind that my pick for best of the year matched the whole site’s collective selection for the same honor and that male-dominated acts comprised exactly half my … Continue reading Top Ten Albums of 2015

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And I still remember all those days we spent alone

Dan Seeger

Carol, the latest film from Todd Haynes, is unyieldingly admirable in almost every way that matters in the construction of great cinema. The screenplay, adapted by Phyllis Nagy from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, is meticulous and thoughtful, spelling out the conflicts of the main characters in a determined, empathetic fashion. The performances evidence an equal amount of care. Maybe more than anything, Haynes’s directing job, heavily abetted by the cinematography of Edward Lachman, is the sort that can be studied for decades, held up as the embodiment of the way that images can be framed and finessed to tell … Continue reading And I still remember all those days we spent alone

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Inside this stillness is a wave, a force from which we won’t be saved

Dan Seeger

It’s not that the entire career of Adam McKay makes it appear that he’s have no interest in, much less facility for, an adaptation of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s fury-stirring 2010 book about the fiscal malfeasance that precipitated the real estate collapse of 2007. Time as a head writer of Saturday Night Live is inked into his resume, meaning there’s got to be at least some amount of political awareness in his skill set, and the Funny or Die website, which he co-founded, has demonstrated a regular willingness to use broad, hooky gags as a delivery vessel for pointed, … Continue reading Inside this stillness is a wave, a force from which we won’t be saved

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College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 2 and 1

Dan Seeger

2. Suzanne Vega, 99.9F° At the end of 1992, I engaged in a list-making activity that I don’t recall doing previously. I crafted my personal tally of the ten best albums of the year. I’m not sure of everything I had on there, but there is one certainty I hold: Suzanne Vega’s 99.9F° was my pick for the very top. I will admit — as I probably would have at the time — that a major criterion that inspired me to elevate Vega’s recording above all the others I’d heard that year was its distinct transformation from what the artist had released … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 2 and 1

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From the Archive: Quigley Down Under

Dan Seeger

Much as there has been an unexpected endurance for many of the films that populated theaters during the first part of the nineteen-nineties, when I was holding down one half of a movie review program at my college radio station, there are a whole slew of releases that are, I suspect, barely though of at all any more. Maybe Quigley Down Under is in regular rotation in the wilds of some cable channel I barely know is there, but I doubt it. These days, probably the most notable thing about it is that it was basically Alan Rickman’s first attempt … Continue reading From the Archive: Quigley Down Under