Author: Dan Seeger

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Clones (We’re All)”

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. In the late nineteen-sixties, a high school student named Vincent Damon Furnier, a recent transplant from Detroit to Phoenix, started a band with a few friends. They called themselves the Spiders, a name they eventually jettisoned in favor of Nazz. That was problematic because there was already a group calling themselves Nazz, with a talented guy named Todd Rundgren in the lineup. By … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Clones (We’re All)”

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Five

Dan Seeger

#45 — My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) I have an abiding fascination with and appreciation for those directors who have an uncommon mastery of the language of film narrative. Much as I might ply my modest critical acumen against certain films, willingly and unapologetically lamenting muddy storytelling or other shortcomings in the vital business of presenting a coherent, compelling beginning, middle, and end, I recognize that the task of adhering to established grammar of traditional Hollywood cinematic narrative is extremely challenging. Even coming close can be reasonably termed a feat of craftsmanship. Given that, I am even more agog … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Five

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“I took a deep breath and told Arthur I wasn’t just somebody to fuck. ‘What did you think we were?’ he said. ‘A little family?’ He was getting into a lot of harder drugs — they made him say things he didn’t agree with a few minutes later. But they were still the things he said. That was the last time I felt betrayed by a man, I think. Afterward I expected it.” — Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet, 2010 “THE POWER KNOWS NO DISTANCE! IT PROJECTS FOR MILES — TO THE CITY! TO A BUILDING — TO A WINDOW! AND … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

Music33 Comments

College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 69 – 67

Dan Seeger

69. The Caulfields, Whirligig Much as I’ve groused about the bland uniformity of alternative rock radio circa 1995, dominated as it was by pallid echoes of the Seattle sound that crashed playlists a couple years earlier, largely thanks to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, there were a couple other dismal genre subsets that had secure footholds on the airwaves. The Caulfields nearly represent one of those. Hailing from Newark, the band was part of the long death rattle of A&M Records, the once prestigious imprint of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss that had a self-destructive proclivity through the late-eighties and early-nineties … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 69 – 67

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From the Archive: Indecent Proposal

Dan Seeger

This was one of the last reviews I wrote for my college newspaper. Indecent Proposal was released in the spring of 1993, when I was weeks from graduation. For some reason, my partner-in-all-things had a scanned copy of this nestled deep into the hard drive of one of her computers and passed it along to me this week. I’ve seen probably no more than a minute of this film since watching it for the review. I’ll bet all the material that I describe as “provocative” seems tame as can be now.  The new movie “Indecent Proposal” has a terrific beginning. Woody Harrelson … Continue reading From the Archive: Indecent Proposal

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One for Friday: The Darling Buds, “Burst”

Dan Seeger

I’ve featured the Darling Buds in this space once before, writing about the way my affection for the band was compounded by their recording life cycle synching up exactly with my tenure as an undergraduate student who basically set up camp in the college radio station. At that time, I included a track from the band’s swan song. Today, it’s time to consider their debut. I don’t recall with certainty when I first encountered Pop Said… but online sources suggest it was released very early in 1989. That would certainly help explain why it locked in so solidly with me. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Darling Buds, “Burst”

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The New Releases Shelf: I Love You, Honeybear

Dan Seeger

Though I suppose it doesn’t matter so much on record, Father John Misty definitely looks the part. The identity adopted by Josh Tillman, at least as far back as the exemplary 2012 album Fear Fun, calls to mind some odd and mildly lackadaisical man of the cloth, which is roughly what the singer-songwriter presents with his lanky frame, propensity for bargain suits, and a beard so thick and bodacious it looks like the merest provocation could send it scuttling off to begin a new life as an especially posh footstool. He looks like he’s comes in from a gnarly forest after … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: I Love You, Honeybear

Television7 Comments

That Championship Season: Seinfeld, Season Four

Dan Seeger

Aside from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” perhaps no other sitcom has such a clear single-episode high-water mark as Seinfeld. Airing right in the middle of the show’s fourth season, “The Contest” find the four main characters engaged in a wager inspired by one of them, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), recently suffering the humiliation of being caught by his mother while he was masturbating with a copy of Glamour magazine. Each of the quartet puts up a hundred dollars that says they can go the longest without engaging in that particular activity. Actually, Elaine … Continue reading That Championship Season: Seinfeld, Season Four

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

Dan Seeger

#46 — Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) Jean Cocteau’s presentation of the classic French fairy tale La Belle et la Bête begins with a plea. In a written introduction, Cocteau invokes the intertwined sense of ready belief and excited wonderment with which children meet stories. He then calls upon all viewers, regardless of age, to engage his film with a similar openness to enchantment: “I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy.” Cocteau then introduces the story in only manner suitable: “let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s ‘Open Sesame’: Once upon a time….” This entry into the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Six

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Burton, Limon, Melfi, Segal, Tyldum

Dan Seeger

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014). One of the great frustrations of the Oscar season was watching Selma and, to a lesser degree, American Sniper battered by criticism over supposedly terrible transgressions in their depiction of historical record while The Imitation Game, the “true life” story receiving the phoniest treatment among the Oscar contenders, sailed along unperturbed. The story of Alan Turing’s secret, indispensable contributions to the Allied effort in World War II is fully deserving of big-screen veneration, just as his own government’s cruel retribution against him a decade later because his “lifestyle” was considered illegal is the stuff of … Continue reading Burton, Limon, Melfi, Segal, Tyldum