#17 — The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) When I first watched The Last Detail, some fifteen years ago, it was the first time that the reverential opinion usually afforded nineteen-seventies American cinema really began to fully make sense to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Seventeen
Though I loved reading throughout my school years, and therefore happily gravitated to English courses and even majored in English in college (along with Communication, because I decided to double-down on degrees bereft of vocational utility), I generally had a … Continue reading My Writers: John Steinbeck
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. When I started reading superhero comics, I immediately decided that the Fantastic Four was my favorite group of characters. Even though it took several issues of their before their chief adversary appeared, I immersed myself in the Fantastic Four’s fictional history with enough fervor that I flatly knew that the imposing monarch of Latveria, Victor von Doom, was such an integral part of the sprawling ongoing story that he was practically the … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Iron Man #150 by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Layton
#18 — Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) First, a consideration of the pleasure and reward of a perfectly chosen line of dialogue. One of the most famed elements of Steven Spielberg’s sophomore feature film, Jaws, is the way that the technical … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eighteen
6. Stereolab, Sound-Dust Stereolab was just starting to rattle college radio’s proverbial cage at about the time I secured my undergraduate degree, a task undertook in concerted foot-dragging fashion, I assure you. The album Mars Audiac Quintet was released about a year after I graduated, its lead single, “Ping Pong,” nicely mapping out the new path noncommercial radio stations might take now that their profit-driven counterparts further up the dial had fully and completely appropriated grunge rock. The music was poppy and light but also archly different, introducing oddity through the casualness of its mildly disenchanted deconstruction of traditional songcraft. … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 6 and 5
I was back to a fairly typical week for Spectrum Culture, beginning with a movie review. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much a movie. On the surface of it, the film is one of those desperately quirky efforts that is among the most painful material a modern fan of independent cinema is routinely saddled with. It’s even more of a mess than that. I also had a music review go up this week. The record I reviewed is a prime example of one that doesn’t necessary spring to mind when considering the best, most vital or most challenging music of the year, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
To begin with an enormous understatement, it should be obvious by now that I harbor deep nostalgia for those songs that provided the soundtrack to my years in college radio, especially those that accompanied my time as an undergraduate student in central Wisconsin. There’s an added subset to consider: I reserve a special affection for the music that carried me through the bittersweet stretch of time in 1990 that I lovingly refer to a My Summer in Exile. It was the one summer during my years of higher education that I went back home to live instead of staying in … Continue reading One for Friday: Steve Wynn, “Carolyn”
“If you’d driven past our house on Wednesday night, noticed our lights burning, seen through the windows my mother in the kitchen cooking dinner, seen the neighbors’ lights on, my father fresh out of the shower, sitting on the front porch steps lacing on his shoes in the cool, humming twilight, the moon high and clear, cars moving beyond the park, his hair wet, smelling of Old Spice and talcum, rehearsing to Berner and me stories of what he’d seen on his ‘business trip’–the prairie like a great inland sea (‘like the Gulf of Mexico’), the northern lights, no mountains, … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
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. Diana Ross is very well acquainted with the Billboard Top 40. With the Supremes, both before and after her name officially preceded that of the group, she amassed 26 Top 40 singles, twelve of which topped the chart (the group made seven more appearances in the Top 40 after her formal departure from the group in January 1970, including with one song that … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “So Close”
For about two decades, David Koepp has been a screenwriter sought after for his apparent ability to polish blockbuster material into workable shape, a reputation that probably began in earnest after he assisted mightily in the process of adapting Michael … Continue reading I can’t go on so I give in, gotta get myself right outta here
Coffee for Two 