Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: Pipettes, “Pull Shapes” (Live on NPR)

Dan Seeger

Sometimes you just fall in love with a band. I don’t mean a band comes along and are so great that they are immediately elevated to the level of favorite. I mean genuine, unexplainable head over heels affection that is roughly akin to that first swelling of puppy love when that cute guy or girl made eye contact across the crowded middle school classroom. It’s not love that’s meaningful or long-lasting, nor is grounded in a instinctual need for lifelong commitment. But it also helps define every similar swelling of the heart that follows. From the moment I first heard … Continue reading One for Friday: Pipettes, “Pull Shapes” (Live on NPR)

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Me (Without You)”

Dan Seeger

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. For a brief, noteworthy cultural moment in the nineteen-seventies, Andy Gibb was about as big a music artist could get. The youngest sibling of the furry Gibb clan, Andy was so committed to following in his brothers’ footsteps that one of his first bands was named after a Bee Gees song. He was eventually signed as a solo artist to RSO Records, the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Me (Without You)”

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Six

Dan Seeger

#36 — Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Surges, 1944) It was Sandy Sturges, the wife of Preston Sturges, who offered the ideal summation of the writer-director’s approach to tugging his own brand of creativity through the many graters of oversight required during his time in Hollywood. She offered, “What Preston said he did was: ‘Obey strictly the letter of the law…and totally ignore the spirit.’” Sturges had plenty of overseers whose strictures he chose to evade. Not only was he confined by the so-called Hays Code and the constantly voiced dismay of his studio bosses (after leaving Paramount Pictures, Sturges maintained, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Six

Film2 Comments

Golden living dreams of visions

Dan Seeger

Three years ago, tossed the keys to the most important vehicle for the successful but still relatively new Marvel Studios, the film that would offer the culmination of a lot of careful positioning through a practically unprecedented convergence of cinematic properties, writer-director Joss Whedon went ahead and bravely made a Joss Whedon movie, drawing on his ample skill set honed through a bevy of geek-friendly properties, many of them interconnected. He was fulfilling the Marvel corporate vision, but doing so with a film that popped with his own sensibilities. The rhythms, dynamics, and dialogue were thrillingly familiar to anyone who once spent … Continue reading Golden living dreams of visions

Everything Else11 Comments

Beers I Have Know: 21st Amendment Brewery Down to Earth

Dan Seeger

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. That monkey has the right idea. 21st Amendment is one of my favorite breweries (non-local division), and this beer — by the packaging, anyway — is a spiritual sequel to Bitter American, one of the first brews I wrote about in this series, so I should theoretically have plenty to write. Given my day, though, all I feel compelled to offer is a reiteration of that opening sentence: That monkey has the right … Continue reading Beers I Have Know: 21st Amendment Brewery Down to Earth

Music25 Comments

College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 48 and 47

Dan Seeger

48. Push, Shamefaced Like a lot of college radio stations, 90FM proclaimed a strong dedication to local music. In the case of our station, we expanded “local” to mean anything that originated, even initially, in the state of Wisconsin. By the time I arrived there in the late nineteen-eighties, no one was really thinking of Violent Femmes as a Milwaukee band, for example, but that’s where they started, so that was good enough for us. There was one band that showed up in the mid-nineties that was not only from our town of Stevens Point, they were populated by, on … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 48 and 47

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From the Archive: Predator 2

Dan Seeger

To help prove that I dutifully transcribe these old reviews regardless of the temptation to give the decades-old language a sprucing up, just look at the garbled syntax below. Some of these sentences gave me pangs of pain as I retyped them. Then again, those buzzes of internal agony could be attributed to memories of the many movies cited in the first paragraph slithering out from behind whatever suppression devices my brain has kindly deployed to this point. This is from the November 26, 1990 episode of The Reel Thing. We’d only be doing the show for about three months, and … Continue reading From the Archive: Predator 2

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One for Friday: The Shaking Family, “Tic Toc”

Dan Seeger

  A debate flared up from time to time at my radio station regarding the relative merits of digging into albums versus concentrating on the singles. It was more of a jabbering-over-beers debate than an almost-coming-to-blows one, but still it was there. Generally, I opted for the deep cuts argument, feeling it was what most differentiated us from just about everyone else on the dial. Especially in an era that found some of the most unlikely college rock bands and tracks crossing over (seriously, how on earth does “I Touch Myself” become a Top 5 song?) sticking to what the labels … Continue reading One for Friday: The Shaking Family, “Tic Toc”

Books8 Comments

My Writers: Art Spiegelman

Dan Seeger

It was in high school that I started defensively insisting on the artistic value of comic book storytelling. Although in deference to the subject of this point, I should say it was co-mix narratives I was stumping for. Spiegelman prefers that nomenclature, undoubtedly in part because it is has some of the hardscrabble spirit of the term “comix,” which was used for the underground, head shop publications that served as his developmental home. But Spiegelman was even more specific in his choice, adding the hyphen to emphasize the two different words parts, each suggesting an intermingling of elements, in this … Continue reading My Writers: Art Spiegelman

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Seven

Dan Seeger

#37 — Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) Lots of films have indelible images, those visual moments that don’t just endure in the memory but are so closely, solidly associated with a single work of art that any approximation that follows, no matter how tangential of glancing, automatically stirs comparison. There is no way, for example, for a horror film director to set a smart, evocative scene at an indoor swimming pool without calling to mind Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, at least for a certain breed of film fan. (Those who think the horror genre started with Friday the 13th likely escape this … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Seven