Such a long day today, leaving me nothing pithy to add about the review plucked from my former online home, I’m afraid. Watching a new Pixar movie in the theater is a little like the same experience with a Disney … Continue reading From the Archive: Cars
Back when I had some control over the music that was played at my college radio station, this was about the point that I’d finally relent and drag the meager collection of Christmas music out of deep storage. Yes, plenty of our on-air personnel were likely irritated that I waited so long (even back then, timeline creep with Christmas revelry was happening), but as someone who was generally listening to the station all day long, I could only take so much holiday cheer. While it certainly didn’t help that there was a relative dearth of seasonally appropriate college rock back … Continue reading One for Friday: Wire Train, “Skills of Summer”
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. To be a youthful fan of superhero comics during the nineteen-eighties, one needed — absolutely needed — to adore the X-Men. Writer Chris Claremont took the granules of Stan Lee’s original conceit for the team, with the maligned mutants standing in for every beset group of people in American culture, and spun it into a fair representation of the sensation of being perpetually outcast that comes with adolescences, especially for those … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Uncanny X-Men #153 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum
#3 — Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) Double Indemnity is the film that convinced me of Billy Wilder’s ability to full off just about anything within the borders of a movie screen. Admittedly, this represented, in part, my own personal shortsightedness, a unlearned tendency to always categorize directors in terms of the genre in which they were most prolific, of at least crafted their best known triumphs. If Alfred Hitchcock struggled somewhat artistically the further he strayed from the splendid spectacles of suspense that made his fame, surely it was worth marveling at Wilder’s ability to make a film far darker and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Three
“Outside it was one of those depressing blue-crystal-golden-drops-of-sunlight afternoons. The weather is always perfect at Four BEE, but now and then the Jang manage to sabotage something, and we get a groshing, howling sandstorm come sweeping in past the barrier beams to cheer us all up. I’ll never forget the time Danor and I, both female then, I might add, disabled the robot controller at Lookout 9A and let in a downpour of volcanic ash from one of the big black mountains outside, floods of it for units and units — everything went zaradann. They had to deliver food by … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. While standing beside Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon claimed three chart-topping singles. Garfunkel’s mellifluous tenor was undoubtedly a central part of the appeal of at least two of those major hits, but there was little doubt that the chief songwriter of the pair was going to do just fine for himself when he went out on his own. And so it was, was Simon … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Still Crazy After All These Years” and “One-Trick Pony”
13. The House of Love, Babe Rainbow As I noted in the introduction (see below!), this chart comes from a point in time during which I was keenly attuned to the music moving through our college radio station, knowing full well that this would be my last dance with the wide-ranging genre I loved most deeply. Even though I liked the U.K. band the House of Love a great deal (they were responsible for a single that I’m tempted to claim is one of the ten best released during my tenure at the station), I have no recollection of the album Babe … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 13 – 10
It’s about time for a new Greatish Performances post, and I’ve been mulling over which acting feat to select. One that I’ve batted around as a possibility ever since I launched (or, being honest, stole) the series, is Rachel Weisz’s Oscar-winning turn in The Constant Gardener, if only because it seems to be largely forgotten (she’s not the only supporting acting winner from the decade that is rarely invoked as such). By the time of the awards ceremony, I probably felt as strongly about Weisz deserving the win in her category as any other performer (and this was the year of Philip Seymour … Continue reading From the Archive: The Constant Gardener
(Disclaimer: Dogs Die in Hot Cars is a terrible, terrible name for a band, and sharing this song is by no means an endorsement for the group’s supposed cleverness in selecting that moniker. Usually it’s fairly easy to avoid holding a suspect band name against a batch of musicians, especially since so many over the years have acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a smart, original, pithy was to be billed on posters. And the number of band names that actually sound fairly ridiculous but become plain and comfortable over the years is legion. I mean, the Beatles is a … Continue reading One for Friday: Dogs Die in Hot Cars, “Paul Newman’s Eyes”
As is regularly proven anew to me by my weekly rummaging through old papers to find old reviews that are theoretically worth sharing, I have carved out a privileged place for a person who still feels a compulsion to write … Continue reading And he carries the reminders of ev’ry glove that laid him down
Coffee for Two 