Because some days more than anything else you need a Japanese art rock band heavily influenced by Devo covering the Knack’s biggest hit. There’s just no getting around it. Though I wrote a rave review of one of their albums … Continue reading One for Friday: Polysics, “My Sharona”
#6 — Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) A few years back, when the American Film Institute followed their surprisingly successful AFI’S 100 Years 100 Movies special with annual companion lists of increasing insignificance (anybody really care … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Six
Fifty-fifth in series…. (Source.) Continue reading I pretended you were Jesus, you were just dying to save me
Into the Wild was published in 1996, the year I turned twenty-six. The doomed wanderer of the book, Christopher McCandless (also known as Alexander Supertramp), was twenty-four years old when he died alone in an abandoned bus on the Alaskan … Continue reading My Writers: Jon Krakauer
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. Undoubtedly best known for the 1965 hit single “King of the Road,” country singer-songwriter Roger Miller had a total of twelve songs cross over to the Billboard Top 40, all of them within a four year span from the mid- to late-nineteen-sixties that began with the #1 country hit “Dang Me.” Miller learned guitar from his cousin, “Purple People Eater” writer-performer Sheb Wooley, … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd”
8. Screaming Trees, Invisible Lantern When I was flipping through albums on the new releases shelf in my college radio station twenty-six years ago, the potential longevity of the artists before me was hardly at the forefront of my mind. … Continue reading College Countdown: Rockpool’s Top 20 College Radio Albums, November 1988, 8
In the early nineteen-nineties, John Hughes was still enough of an active brand that I could write this entire review of Dutch without mentioning that it was actually directed by someone completely different, all the more notable given that it was Peter Faiman’s official follow-up to Crocodile Dundee, a ridiculously huge hit five years earlier. Hughes’s fingerprints are so messily smeared across the movie that it was — and is — strange to attribute its creative energies to anyone else (Hughes did write the screenplay.) This was released in the summer of 1991. Later that year, Hughes delivered what would … Continue reading From the Archive: Dutch
This happens on occasion, though quite rarely, I’m pleased to type. I have run out of time to offer a song for sharing along with pithy (or perhaps pitiful) commentary. Back to business next week. In the meantime, I’ll offer up the current favorite of my partner in all things: Continue reading One for Friday: Cheating Off of Someone Else’s Paper
I think of The Man Upstairs as a tale of two covers. The umpteenth release from Robyn Hitchcock opens with his take on the Psychedelic Furs song “The Ghost in You.” The track’s mix of spectral beauty and piercing emotional … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: The Man Upstairs
#7 — North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) It’s probably impossible to pinpoint the first Alfred Hitchcock-designed image I was exposed to, but I know the single shot that stands as the first I really saw. It’s arguably his most … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Seven
Coffee for Two 