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. One of the things I most regret about my youthful comic … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Metal Men #20 by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru
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. Over the course of his thirty-plus years as a recording artist, George Strait has recorded a total of forty-four #1 songs on the Billboard country chart, more than any other artist. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that he also had some amount of success on the pop charts, especially since the first of those country chart-toppers arrived in 1982, a time … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Go On”
#3 — Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) I expend a lot syllables in these pieces considering how individual films fit in with the shifting trends of the cinematic era. Maybe they connect to the French New Wave, as a representative example of it or a film that bears its mighty influence. Or maybe a film forecasts the dark, intense revolution of American moviemaking on the horizon. And then there are those efforts that stand wholly apart from any such contextualization, that are astonishing entirely on their own terms, set against any era, any place, certainly any trend. That’s where the work … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Three
PLAYBOY: Are you afraid of dying? O’TOOLE: Petrified. PLAYBOY: Why? O’TOOLE: Because there’s no future in it. PLAYBOY: When did you last think you were about to die? O’TOOLE: About four o’clock this morning. A few weeks ago I watched a commercial on television. It was selling insurance, and I had realized how graphic and Grand Guignol they’d got. There’s a fellow on the beach with his wife and ten children romping around in the sand, and suddenly they all dissolve. And he thinks: “Must insure with Prudential” or whatever. But if I was going to die, I’m afraid I … Continue reading Peter O’Toole, 1932 – 2013
12. Possum Dixon, Star Maps This is one of the albums that drove home for me that commercial alternative radio was going to follow a different path than my old, preferred home of college radio. Possum Dixon’s second full-length, Star … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 12 and 11
The mad rush to the end of the year continues at Spectrum Culture. Everyone’s been doing their best to pull together various “best of” features while still making sure we still continue to crank out the regular new material. It’s fun (especially for a dork like me who enjoys wedging his media interests into list form, which the tags over there on the right certainly indicate), but a little exhausting, too. And it’s made even more busy when a feature we’ve been working on for ages comes to fruition at the exact same time. It took over a year for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I’ve usually had fairly conventional picks for the best album of the year, to my dismay (I have a niggling desire to be more iconoclastic than I really am). There have been exceptions, though. One of those occurred in 1995, probably because I was enduring the overly conventional to a tedious degree thanks the playlists I was handed at the commercial radio station where I worked. While most of the cool kids’ lists were topped by the likes of Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins and Björk, I was ready to tell everyone who’d listen that the actual greatest achievement in recorded … Continue reading One for Friday: Mike Watt, “Heartbeat”
The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968). This is definitely an odd one. It’s not hard to see why this has become something of a cult classic, its relative obscurity combining with the floridly executed proto-seventies moody grit creating a fairly singular viewing experience. Based on a John Cheever story, the film casts Burt Lancaster as a middle-aged stalwart of the self-anointed suburban upper class who decides on a whim on day that he can cross the vast distance from one house to his own home entirely by following a path that takes him through all of his many neighbors’ backyard swimming … Continue reading Fleischer, McQueen, Perry, Sturges, Tourneur
Someday soon, I will get better at having some actual writing, with words and punctuation and junk, presented anew in this space every day. I’m afraid that tonight I have to once again concede defeat, this time because I spent so much time with this lovely young lady: Look for the results at Spectrum Culture on Friday. (Image above pilfered from elsewhere.) Continue reading The night they invented champagne, it’s plain as it can be they thought of you and me
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. Though she had a Top 10 hit with “Don’t Mess with My Man” in 2002 (which seems to be part of the “Don’t Mess with” series), I’m betting that Nivea is better known for her personal life than her music career. That comes with the territory when there’s a marriage to and divorce from Terius “The-Dream” Nash and two separate engagements to Lil … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Okay”
