This weekly plucking from the box of chocolates that is my digitized music collection has been recurring long enough that I now have the chance to commemorate a momentous anniversary five years after the last time I felt compelled to … Continue reading One for Friday: The Cast of Meatball Radio, “Bovines from Hell”
#16 — The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) Steven Spielberg once attributed the initiating spark of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to none other than François Truffaut, noting that the French filmmaker told him on the set of Close Encounters of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Sixteen
Brill Bruisers, the sixth outing by all-star pop collective the New Pornographers, veritably explodes to life with the album-opening title track. The instruments burst forward with the sort of harmonized nonsense syllables that have been the hallmark of rock ‘n’ … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Brill Bruisers
Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014). This piece of fairy tale revisionism might be more affecting if it didn’t arrive on the heels of the same studio’s Frozen, which pulled off basically the same switcheroo (including the subversion of the “true love’s kiss” trope) with more spirit. Judging from what’s onscreen, not much thought went into this project after the dream casting of Angelina Jolie was secured. The certainty that her presence as one of the most iconic villains in the annals of Disney Animated Classics would be enough to make the film compelling comes tantalizing close to becoming a proven truth. … Continue reading Allen, Assonitis, Korda, Stromberg, Tetzlaff
#17 — The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Westerns, long a staple of Hollywood filmaking, were absolutely huge in the post-War years. According to Glenn Frankel’s book on the making of The Searchers, by the time John Ford’s iconic film was … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Seventeen
17. The Primitives, Lovely Certain as I am that the following statement can be refuted many times over by countless music fans with their own predilections, I’m still going to put it out there: No debut album begins in better … Continue reading College Countdown: Rockpool’s Top 20 College Radio Albums, November 1988, 17
When we were producing The Reel Thing on WWSP-90FM, we were able to get on the list with a couple of studios and promotional houses, receiving electronic press kits for their releases, especially the biggest ones. There were few bigger … Continue reading From the Archive: The Addams Family
I can no longer dependably relate how I first heard about the band Sarge. I could have sworn I was told about the Illinois indie band by one of my friends after they’d seen them as an opening act at a Madison, Wisconsin concert. Over the years, though, I’ve specifically attributed it to the individuals who were the most likely candidates and over and over again I’ve been told, “No, I’ve never heard of them.” Their single “Dear Josie, Love Robyn” was briefly a small sensation among the cool kid set, although I think it was a song I longed … Continue reading One for Friday: Sarge, “The First Morning”
Throughout middle school, I swear I always had a copy of a Douglas Adams book with me. That’s almost certainly not true, since he was only two books into his five-volume trilogy launched in 1979 with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to … Continue reading My Writers: Douglas Adams
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. As I believe I’ve noted before, I know exactly which Marvel … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Marvel Two-in-One Annual #5 by Alan Kupperberg and Pablo Marcos
Coffee for Two 