#8 — All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) All the President’s Men was released into theaters in the first week of April, 1976, less than two years after Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Office of the President of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eight
“Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa’s flat, which was spread out over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony château shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
Three films deep into Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, and the reboot of the character that started with 2006’s Casino Royale is totally complete. In Skyfall there are hints of the character as he was previously conceived–in the brief … Continue reading Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky
28. “Crazy” by Icehouse So let’s dial back to the way perceptions of bands were shaped circa 1987. For those, like me, who were stuck is relatively small suburban areas, well removed from the major culture centers, there weren’t many ways to find out about new music, especially given the ever-increasingly caution of local radio. This led to the disproportionate influence of MTV, which served as a de facto nationwide radio station back when they were more interested in music videos than reality shows. So the first time I heard of Icehouse was when the video for “Crazy” started getting … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 28 and 27
As I noted last week, I had several more pieces go up at Spectrum Culture in my second full week back, in part because of some backlogged music releases. That effectively describes the first thing I had go up this week, a review of the sophomore effort from the U.K. band the Vaccines. My unimpressed assessment proved to be the appropriate kick-off to a week of bad reviews. On the film side, I offered an evaluation of the new documentary about the late Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. Especially given the life being drawn upon, the film is shockingly … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I can’t say with any amount of certainty whether or not the same rule applies now, but in my distant day as a student in college radio a band could sell an awful lot of records by coming up with earnestly penned and crisply sung songs about being a sad little boy in love. When I started in student-run broadcasting in the late nineteen-eighties, it was very much the province of males, who were naturally accustomed to adhering to the norms of their gender, established from approximately the moment the very first electric guitar chord was struck, that entailed nursing … Continue reading One for Friday: The Northern Pikes, “Just Another Guy”
#9 — The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) There’s a beautiful desolation at the heart of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a echoing ache that’s given physical form by the scorched, dusty streets of the dying nineteen-fifties Texas town … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nine
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. Sonny Charles was the lead singer of the band Checkmates, Ltd., a group out of Fort Wayne, Indiana that had a sizable hit in the late nineteen-sixties with “Black Pearl,” a track that undoubtedly garnered at least some of its attention because of the wall it was draped in trademark Wall of Sound regalia by producer Phil Spector. That taste of success wasn’t … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Put It in a Magazine”
I have no way to string together words that won’t be compromised by extreme distraction today. A return to content tomorrow. Continue reading Lump sat alone in a boggy marsh
It has been twelve long years since Robert Zemeckis directed a film that had real live actors in it. He would undoubtedly take umbrage with that characterization, noting that the stop-motion animation efforts he’s toiled on during those dozen years … Continue reading Turn this crazy bird around, I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight
