This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: The Oklahoma Kamikaze
This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: Hot Buttered Soul
This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
80. Skinny Puppy, The Process I didn’t know that Skinny Puppy was still making music together as late as 1996. Maybe that’s because they barely were. The arduous process of recording The Process started in 1993, with the band intending … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 80 and 79
My efforts for Spectrum Culture this week began with an incredibly difficult movie to write about: Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. The movie is so densely inscrutable that any attempt to summarize it (or even more daunting, to speculate on its meaning) is practically doomed to failure. I feel I did all right, but I’m actively looking forward to writing on what appears to be a fairly simple documentary for this coming week. On the music side, I wrote about the new album from Caitlin Rose, which is very solid. Though I didn’t make this comparison in the review, it reminded … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Though I like to think my musical tastes have diversified somewhat in recent years, two decades ago there was no surer pathway into my preferences than big, proud electric guitars. The Chicago band Urge Overkill was already on my radar for that very reason by the time they released their major label debut, Saturation, in 1993. Their prior effort, The Supersonic Storybook on Touch and Go, was championed by CMJ, the college radio trade publication, and I returned to it fairly regularly across my last few semesters as a student at the station. But Saturation, officially released just a couple … Continue reading One for Friday: Urge Overkill, “Sister Havana”
#38 — The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962) Much as I can exult in films that are edgy and daring, bending the very parameters of cinematic narrative–and these were in no short supply in the nineteen-sixties, thanks largely to the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-Eight
As with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was a latecomer to Veronica Mars. Frustratingly enough, it was my overt appreciation of Buffy that got in the way of me trying out Veronica Mars when it arrived to largely positive reviews. … Continue reading That Championship Season: Veronica Mars, Season One
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. Going to college in a town with a beloved small town brewery inspired … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Rhinelander Bock
#39 — Long Day’s Journey into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962) Much as I admire and even love those films that are told with precise expertise, that lock firmly into place as they deliver their ideas, themes and passions, I maintain … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-Nine
Coffee for Two 