62. Cast, All Change When the debut release from the Liverpool band Cast arrived in late 1995, the primary excitement derived from the presence of John Power, formerly of the band the La’s. That band’s self-titled 1990 album was already … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 62 and 61
In a rare occurrence, I didn’t have anything new go up at Spectrum Culture this week. But I am charged with figuring out which 2013 album release I think is worth inclusion on our list of the best of the year so far. By far the strongest album I’ve reviewed for the site–and still probably my choice for the year’s top release–is Yo La Tengo’s Fade. I’d like to see it included (and it had a low enough profile that I’m afraid it will be forgotten if I don’t tackle it), but I’m always reluctant to write on something that … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I’d love to report that I know about the Dublin band Les Enfants and their 1985 album, Touché, because I found it in some used record store, buying the artifact note unheard on the basis of something about the cover or the names of the songs. Certainly it’s easy, knowing what I know about the music, to think I may have correctly guessed a song called “Shed a Tear (There You Go),” hailing from the middle of the eighties, is some lost gem of post-New Wave pop. I was rarely that bold, however, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve never … Continue reading One for Friday: Les Enfants, “Shed a Tear (There You Go)”
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. For a small stretch of time–not when I was an actual … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Marvel Two-in-One #7 by Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema
And The Sopranos is on right now. Six years after the show went off the air, it remains a staple on the various HBO side channels, enduring in perpetual rotation in a way that other acclaimed series from the network haven’t quite. Not that there’s any shortage of treasures within the show, led by the inspiration of creator David Chase and a multitude of great performances. But watch any given episode and it’s clear that a major part of its greatness–the reason it truly lasts–is the incredible central performance by James Gandolfini. It’s absolutely one of the pinnacles in the … Continue reading James Gandolfini, 1961 – 2013
#29 — Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) What Cool Hand Luke is going for is made clear as can be right there on the movie poster: “The man…and the motion picture that simply do not conform.” Released at the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Twenty-Nine
“So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man–the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognize each other, and you drink a little too much and try and little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
64. Jane Jensen, Comic Book Whore I haven’t double-checked up and down the entire list, but I’m somewhat confident that Jane Jensen is the only performer on the chart who played a title role in a Troma Films release. In … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 64 and 63
It’s been a couple weeks since I provided an update on my doings at Spectrum Culture, which would usually mean a pile-up of links to share. For a variety of reasons, that’s not the case. Instead, I have only the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
When I started the “Top 40 Smash Taps” series of posts, it was largely to push myself to write about music that was unfamiliar to me. Without the prompts delivered by decades of Billboard data, I can’t imagine myself having cause to write about Donna Summer. And now here I am, writing about her a second time in the space of three days. Part of the pleasure of writing the “Smash Taps” posts comes in discovering odd little details about the modern history of music that were previously outside my ken. For example, I was pretty fervently devoted to all … Continue reading One for Friday: Donna Summer, “Protection”
Coffee for Two 