9. Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! For any up-and-coming band, it’s useful to have some advocates who have already established themselves in the cutthroat music biz. Circa 1978, a band couldn’t do much better than … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 9
Much as I’ve admired Kathryn Bigelow’s recent and somewhat sudden escalation to the upper ranks of “important” modern filmmakers–the two films responsible for the shift are both formidable works–I still struggle with the cognitive dissonance of the director of Point Break as an exalted Oscar-winner. That’s how much I disliked that film, an ire that’s only grown over the years as plenty of people have cited it as a willfully dumb pleasure. Despite what it might seem like, I can get behind grandly, deliberately dopey summer popcorn fare, old or new, but I’ve never understood the affection for this particular … Continue reading From the Archive: Point Break
It’s now been twenty-five years since my first summer at the college radio station. That whole first year had a major impact on me, but there was something different–something deeply transformational–about the first summer. For one thing, I was now on the people in charge. I’d been on the executive staff the spring before, though in a fairly low-level position. Now I was the Program Director, effectively second-in-command on the staff, carrying responsibilities that encompassed everything that crossed the airwaves. For another thing, we were able to devote ourselves fully and completely to the operations of the radio station, without … Continue reading One for Friday: Concrete Blonde, “Little Conversations”
Somewhere out there in the vast reaches of the unknown, there is a multiplex of the multiverse, playing all the great and near-great movies that never came to be within our humble reality. (I, for one, am prepared to buy … Continue reading He has the power to foresee or to look into the past, he is the ruler of the stars
#32 — Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950) When we screened Harvey in a “Writers and Their Movies” class I took in college, the professor introduced it by writing a quote on the blackboard. It was from one of her distant colleagues, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Two
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. Before he started performing under the name Blowfly, Clarence Reid was a crack songwriter and a fine soul singer. While most of the material he released was fairly benign, there were some early indications that there was a raunchy sensibility lurking there. The Blowfly persona started as a gag at parties, with the singer trying out dirty songs and parodies on his pals … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Nobody But You Babe”
The Immigrant, the new film from director James Gray begins in 1921, as a woman and her sister are waiting in the anxiously hopeful misery of the line at Ellis Island. The supposed promised land is at the other end … Continue reading For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing
10. Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food I don’t mean to denigrate the very fine–underrated, even!–album Talking Heads: 77 when I note that More Songs About Buildings and Food seems like the real debut of the most important … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 10
This review was written for the drops we created to slip into regular programming after the weekly radio show ended in 1993. I can tell from the script that it was written on the already-antiquated computer that resided on the desk of the closet-sized manager’s office in the movie theater where I worked. It’s one big block of all-capitalized text, making it brutally difficult to read during the recording process. I see I was pushing back against the critical instinct to overpraise the supposed deeper meanings of Eastwood’s directorial efforts even then. And I’m somewhat surprised that “Lazy charm” was … Continue reading From the Archive: A Perfect World
A vacation is hard work. No matter how enjoyable my ventures into the greater world may be, they are rarely relaxing, even when pure relaxation is the goal. And when the destination doesn’t involves time in a hammock rocking in synch with cool oceanic breezes, but is instead dominated by energetically traversing an urban landscape for miles of foot travel, well, it can leave even the heartiest souls a little ragged. And I am hardly the heartiest soul. So as I return to the personal digital screens for the first time in many days (the items that took up successive … Continue reading One for Friday: The Textones, “Vacation”
Coffee for Two 