#14 — Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) I have a strong awareness that retroactively visiting certain films creates an entirely different impact than, say, connecting with them chronologically, especially as they’re released. For example, I’d seen a lot of films … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fourteen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master has the look, feel and tone of a masterpiece. It has a distinct anti-narrative structure that allows even the moments that falter to feel organically right, refutations of the supposed need for everything in a … Continue reading I want your picture but not your words, you know they want it, but there’s no verse
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. Exile was a band that formed in Kentucky in the nineteen-sixties. They were a group of high schoolers that got together to play and, in true Wonders style, were picked up by the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour to barnstorm around their home state and then nationwide. Success didn’t immediately follow, however, and it was the endurance of the band, as much … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “You Thrill Me”
There was a time when there seemed to be no more enticing goal than to work eternally in college radio. Just continuing on in broadcasting had its appeal too, although it was hardly a field known for its stability and … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, An Introduction
This week at Spectrum Culture, the significant mound of assignments I’ve picked up lately started to catch up with me (though not at the level of the next crazy few days). It was one of those rare weeks when I had two new film reviews up. As it turns out, both were documentaries and both were at least somewhat disappointing. First, I offered an assessment of the new film from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. I selected it because I figured its subject matter–baseball knuckleballers–made me a little more qualified to review it than many of my cohorts at the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I have a pretty solid memory when it comes to chronology of the favorite music from my initial college radio days, but I’ll admit that I sometimes get it a little jumbled up. For example, I’m long assumed that Miracle Legion’s sophomore full length, Me and Mr. Ray, came out before I ever showed up at the station. I thought it was one of those hidden treasures that I somehow stumbled upon while scanning the music library during one of my late night shifts (or, more likely, was told about it by one of my station elders) and returned to … Continue reading One for Friday: Miracle Legion, “So Good”
#15 — Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) Terrence Malick has so solidly secured his place in cinema as the agonizingly meticulous crafter of exquisitely poetic, emotionally abstracted films–with perhaps the decisive argument in favor of that judgment offered by the utterly brilliant Tree of Life–that it obscures the earthy urgency of his earliest efforts. Yes, Malick has a preternatural ability to realize beautiful imagery, just as Steven Spielberg had an uncanny knack for the mechanics of narrative storytelling from the very beginning, but there was also a deep ferocity to his storytelling in his first couple of films, an ability to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fifteen
Forty-first in a series… (Source) Continue reading Life goes on, as the story goes
In some respects, I’m not entirely sure I should even include Donna Tartt on this list. Unlike those writers that have preceded her in this informal tally and most who will follow her (certainly all of them in the initial … Continue reading My Writers: Donna Tartt
By now, it should be wonderfully well-established that the merry mavens at Marvel Comics summoned superlative skills in self-promotion throughout the sixties and seventies. The practice persisted past that ecstatic era, even if the promos proved less vivid and verbose. … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Spider-Woman #25
Coffee for Two 