1. The Who, Who Are You Let’s start with the bloke seated in the chair there, the one turned around backwards with the instructional message “NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY” stenciled on it. Keith John Moon celebrated his thirty-second birthday … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 1
When I decided I was going to share these old reviews, I committed to doing so with only the tiniest of alterations. No matter how strong the temptation to edit, I mentally pledged to refrain. Some Saturdays are harder than … Continue reading From the Archive: The Adventures of Huck Finn
When I was in college, North Carolina seemed as distant as a foreign land. Hell, we were in central Wisconsin so at least one foreign land was significantly closer. But there was something else about the state that made it seem even further away somehow. Maybe it was simply that it was one of those areas that I’d never had much cause to think about before. When waves of records showed up from Georgia or Seattle, it didn’t strike me an exotic (and all the albums from nearby Minneapolis were like letters from home). A sudden influx of material from … Continue reading One for Friday: Satellite Boyfriend, “Bam Bam Bah”
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. Ernest Evans was overweight, but just a little. Just enough, in fact, that he was nicknamed “Chubby” by one the bosses at a low-level job he worked. As the story goes, Evans had just done a Fats Domino impression during an audition when he was asked his name. When he responded to a question about his name, he replied with the nickname related … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Lazy Elsie Molly” and “Let’s Do the Freddie”
#23 — The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) There was a time when Hollywood was all klieg lights and high glamor, at least in its calculated depictions of self. It was lucrative to preserve the myth of happy creative miracles, dreams captured on celluloid for all to enjoy. By the nineteen-fifties, some cynicism was starting to creep in, and filmmakers allowed that their chosen business had a corrosion at its heart. Some of this was surely attributable to the general social shell shock felt in the post-war years, but I think there’s also the slide of Hollywood itself to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Three
In a cinematic irony that its subject would surely appreciate, the documentary Life Itself is dominated by the specter of death. Sure, the film does its duty in tracing the life of film critic Roger Ebert, who is arguably the … Continue reading The hills ringing hear the words in time, listen to the holler
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. A generous friend gave me a bottle of this. Released to help celebrate … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Central Waters Brewing Company Sixteen
2. Van Morrison, Wavelength I saw Van Morrison play live once, as the capper to a day-long festival of mostly Irish artists sponsored, of course, by Guinness. This was towards the end of the nineties, so Morrison was well past … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 2
As I’ve noted before, 2005 was the year that I took advantage of the bountiful blank page afforded me by the interweb and started writing movie reviews again. I tend to to think of it as a relatively slow development process, from noodling around to full-length reviews. But it seems I got to the destination a little more quickly than I remember, as this take on the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, written just a few months after I’d recommitted to writing about movies, has a hearty word count. There are two moments in the new Johnny Cash biopic … Continue reading From the Archive: Walk the Line
“Cinematic” by the A-Sides is the first song listed in my iTunes. When I start it up at the beginning or the day or slip over to the “Music” list on my iPod, that’s the first song I see. It is the only song I have from the band, a group of indie rockers from Philadelphia. It’s off of Silver Storms, their sophomore effort and sole release for Vagrant. One year later, they announced the dissolution of the band (on their MySpace page, to put the moment in music business history in proper perspective). I like the song, but I’m … Continue reading One for Friday: The A-Sides, “Cinematic”
Coffee for Two 