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. Though I first started buying superhero comic books at the very … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: The Amazing Spider-Man #25 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
#31 — The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968) There are few greatest pleasures in film than watching great actors–and I mean truly great actors–feast on wonderful words. In a way, that’s a counterintuitive statement, or at least one that bucks harshly against a more accepted conventional wisdom, one which venerates film as a visual medium, first and foremost. Happy as I am to celebrate the pristine, deeply considered imagery of the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, even those directors reached their greatest heights in films that were equally beholden to language (the latter’s Days of Heaven, for … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-One
68. Descendents, Everything Sucks Released in the fall of 1996, Everything Sucks was the first new studio album from punk rock semi-legends the Descendents in almost a decade. The group stopped recording under that name in the mid-nineteen-eighties, after lead … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 68 and 67
The Memorial Day holiday made for a truncated week at Spectrum Culture, but a convergence of minor issues meant that I had the rare instance of two different new movie reviews go up. First, I wrote on Hannah Arendt, about a writer and intellectual who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. Keeping with the heavy subject matter, I reviewed Shadow Dancer, centered on the The Troubles in Ireland, its own sort of period piece, taking place in the mid-nineties. Probably the most notable aspect of this film is the director, James Marsh. He won the Best Documentary … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I remember finding it bizarre when the first Robyn Hitchcock album on Warner Bros. Records arrived in 1996. He had been on a major label before, having released four albums on A&M through the late eighties and early nineties. Still, there was something about seeing that iconic WB logo–about as major as a label could get at the time–affixed to a record by college radio’s resident warped genius. It was hard to conceive of their promotions department having any idea whatsoever as to how to market this thing, and Hitchcock’s relatively brief stay with the label seemed to confirm that. … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “Sinister But She Was Happy”
I reserve a significant amount of my personal allotment of scorn for Rolling Stone magazine, mostly due to the misguided impressions it gave me about which portions of classic rock history merited veneration (they sure did like creaky British dudes … Continue reading My Writers: William Greider
#32 — In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967) The Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas were murdered in their farmhouse home in November, 1959. Author Truman Capote, with his childhood friend Harper Lee in tow, journey to the Midwestern state to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-Two
The 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise, directed by J.J. Abrams, was better than any such pillaging of pop culture’s past has a right to be. Ingeniously drawing on the exact time travel tropes that contributed to some of … Continue reading I was so nervous I shook my head, it was a struggle but there was pleasure at the end
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. My place of residence may have recently ceded the title of Beer City … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: ABA Hoppy Saison
70. Jonny Polonsky, Hi My Name is Jonny Besides looking like he was about fifteen years too early to snare a role in the supporting cast of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Jonny Polonsky was notable as a discovery of one Black … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 70 and 69
Coffee for Two 