#35 — Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967) The year before Wait Until Dark was released as a film, it made its stage debut, playing Broadway under the direction of Arthur Penn. Whether by intent or as a result of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-Five
Forty-fifth in a series… Continue reading Some people say Jesus, that’s the ace in the hole
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. Patrick “Sleepy” Brown is the son of Jimmy Brown, who served as the lead vocalist and saxophonist for the nineteen-seventies funk band Brick, best known for the mid-decade hit “Dazz”. With seventies soul music wrapped into his DNA, Sleepy Brown brought that bygone sound into more modern music as one of the co-founders and primary creative forces behind the Atlanta production outfit Organized … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I Can’t Wait”
This is a piece I wrote for a friend’s self-published magazine about a year-and-a-half ago. With Room 237 in theaters now, it seems a fine time to share it here. With only a few modifications–including some helpful hyperlinks–here’s my take … Continue reading You’ve Always Been the Caretaker: The Many Lives of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
76. Bob Mould, Bob Mould I was working in commercial radio in 1996, at a station billed, in the parlance of the time, as a “new rock alternative.” While I often disparage the format’s reliance on watered-down grunge, at about … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 76 and 75
This week has been a blur for me, thanks to a stupefying number of hours at work. If questioned without any external references, I’d have no idea what I wrote for Spectrum Culture. Luckily, I can scroll through the site and find out. Of course, I may have already forgotten about The Numbers Station by now under just about any circumstances. I presume this may be the film that sets John Cusack to considering nabbing himself a short-season cable series. On the music side, I reviewed the new album from the Black Angels. It’s fine, but I found very little … Continue reading Spectrum Check
When I got started in college radio in the late nineteen-eighties, there was still a lingering myth about broadcasting being a good route to do something truly daring, even subversive. It was, after all, a radio station that had played George Carlin’s routine about the seven words that can’t be said on television, leading to a landmark Supreme Court case that got the great comedian’s brilliant skewed linguistic analysis forever entered into the federal record. And the notion of the darkly philosophizing deejay still cropped up every now and again, as if everyone who got behind the microphone could hold … Continue reading One for Friday: Diesel Park West, “All the Myths on Sunday”
#36 — The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) Widescreen aspect ratio has been used since the earliest days of film being run through projectors, but it really took hold as the default beginning in the nineteen-fifties, when the movie industry … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty-Six
It’s been quite some time since I’ve used one of these posts as a space-filler, but I think tonight is the night to briefly bring back the tactic. (Via) Actual words tomorrow. Theoretically. Continue reading And Circus Boy dances like a monkey on a barbed wire
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 even a casual perusal of this digital space probably suggests, … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: “Allien and How to Watch It” by John Severin
