I was a bad English major. Truth is, I wanted to be a creative writing major, but my college didn’t offer that at the time. I opted for English, basically declaring it as soon as I got there. My was … Continue reading My Writers: Thomas Hardy
88. Pearl Jam, No Code Pearl Jam was probably poised to be the biggest rock band in the U.S. in the mid-nineteen-nineties. After their 1991 debut, Ten, built into a sales juggernaut over the course of a couple years of … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 88 and 87
I only had one new piece go up at Spectrum Culture, but it was a fairly distinctive one. Capitol Records recent reissued four old country albums on vinyl and apparently actively solicited reviews from various outlets. The editor-in-chief sent out an email asking if anyone was interested in reviewing the respective titles, and my many, many hours as a kid (and I’m talking single digits here) sitting in front of my grandparents’ big console stereo listening to Kenny Rogers records made it clear that I needed to participate. I went ahead and claimed The Gambler. Listening to it again, for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Inadvertently, this is the second time in the last three weeks that I’m featuring a band that Atlantic Records simply didn’t know how to handle. Map of the World was a band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, signed by the major label in the late nineteen-eighties, a time when A&R men roamed college towns with fevered urgency, so sure that the next R.E.M. was lurking out there somewhere. The group–headed up by the sibling team of Khalid and Sophia Hanifim–had exactly one release for the label, a 1989 EP entitled An Inch Equals a Thousand Miles. When it wasn’t embraced automatically … Continue reading One for Friday: Map of the World, “I Fight for My Life”
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. As I’ve mentioned before, I know exactly which comic book got … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Fantastic Four by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz
#43 — Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) Films centering on revenge are easy, perhaps too easy. The motivation for the central character or characters are built right in–only the simplest backstory is needed in order to convince the audience of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Three
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. David Ball had a first pass at a music career in the late nineteen-eighties when the country music singer-songwriter secured a recording contract with RCA Records. A trio of singles in 1988 and 1989 failed to generate anything but the most meager of interest from country radio and the album he recorded was shelved. Jump forward a few years, and Ball gets his … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Thinkin’ Problem”
In recent interview with New York magazine’s online outlet, director Sam Raimi was surprisingly frank about earlier films of his that didn’t work, specifically citing Spider-Man 3 and The Quick and the Dead. I concur on the former and would … Continue reading And movie stars you thought were long dead now are framed beside your bed
90. Marilyn Manson, Antichrist Superstar You know, when I counted down Trouser Press‘s picks for the ten best albums of 1981, I made a point of listening to every one of them before I wrote on them. Not with this … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 90 and 89
I usually lay these links out in roughly chronological order, but I’m instead going to start with my favorite piece of the week for Spectrum Culture. Part of the household agreement made when I took on this fairly time-consuming side gig dictated that I would routinely, though not indiscriminately, request horror films to review. This led to the acquisition of The ABCs of Death, a gimmicky anthology film that never escapes its gimmick. I decided to adopt a modified version of the film’s conceit for my review starting each sentence with each successive letter of the alphabet, from A to … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 