Author: Dan Seeger

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“He assigns the topic. Each writes whatever sentences his or her temperament permits. ‘Write what you know,’ Harmon apes, as if it were possible to do anything else.” –Richard Powers, Generosity, 2009 “OF ALL THE COUNTLESS WORLDS I’VE KNOWN…OF THE MYRIADS OF PLANETS UPON WHICH I’VE TROD…NEVER HAVE I KNOWN A RACE SO FILLED WITH FEAR…WITH DARK DISTRUST…WITH THE SEEDS OF SMOLDERING VIOLENCE…AS THIS…WHICH CALLS ITSELF…HUMANITY!” –Stan Lee, SILVER SURFER, Vol. 1, No. 2, “When Lands the Saucer!” 1968 Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “People in Love”

Dan Seeger

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. The band 10cc started in 1972. At least that’s when the group of British musicians who’d been writing and recording together for a while decided to formally become a band under that name. Before that, they’d operated in several different iterations, including a stint as a band called Hotlegs, as which they had a minor hit in 1970 with the song “Neanderthal Man.” … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “People in Love”

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College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 6 and 5

Dan Seeger

6. “Need You Tonight” by INXS The Australian band INXS could reasonable claim that they’d already broken through on the U.S. charts when they released Kick, their sixth studio album, in October of 1987. Their prior effort, 1985’s Listen Like Thieves, just missed the Top 10 of the Billboard album charts and yielded a Top 5 hit in the lead single, “What You Need,” which MTV seemed to play about as much as their top of the hour astronaut bumper. That taste of success was a grain of salt compared to the deluge of flavor that came with Kick, an … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 6 and 5

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

There were plenty of my upstart opinions flung around digitally this week at Spectrum Culture. Among the film reviews, there was my take on a new indie thriller, the sort of neo-noir that had a momentary spell of prominence in the mid-nineties. That’s not to imply that this new effort was outdated. Instead, it’s major sin was its unrelenting dullness. I’ve been sitting on a fair number of albums from late 2012 while still picking up new releases to review, and that stockpiling led to a pair of pieces this past week. I reviewed the second full-length from the Joy … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Peter Case, “Put Down the Gun”

Dan Seeger

The first time I knowingly heard of Chekhov’s gun, it was in a song. The monumentally important Russian playwright used the gun as a mean to articulate the importance of efficiency in dramatic storytelling, writing, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” The way Peter Case put it in his 1989 song “Put Down the Gun” was as follows: “I don’t want to swear it/ But it’s something that I’ve heard/ A gun in the first act/ Always goes off in the third.” So I came to my knowledge … Continue reading One for Friday: Peter Case, “Put Down the Gun”

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Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Eight

Dan Seeger

I hedged a bit when I first wrote about Magic Mike, noting that the final act had problems. I stand by that, but as time has passed, I find I care less and less about where the movie sags and more about its thrilling thrust. Inspired in part by star Channing Tatum’s own experience as a male stripper, the film makes this hedonistic world appear both unbearably sleazy and wickedly intoxicating, often in the same gasped breath. In that way, it races along the same track as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, but Anderson’s vivid sprawl is replaced by director … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Eight

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Carax, Davies, Godard, Huston, Lord and Miller

Dan Seeger

21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012). This adaptation of the ludicrous nineteen-eighties television series about cops undercover in high school (one of the first hits for the Fox network) was met with surprising appreciation by the critical community when it was released last spring. I can certainly understand why its metafictional comedy may have been a welcome surprise, but it’s still more ragged and predictable than it is shrewd and effective. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have nice interplay as the requisite mismatched cops working together, and there’s something refreshing about the inversion of stereotypes, with the … Continue reading Carax, Davies, Godard, Huston, Lord and Miller