Author: Dan Seeger

FilmLeave a comment

Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné

Dan Seeger

Flow: For Love of Water (Irena Salina, 2008). Because there are few things we enjoy in our house than watching documentaries that offer an assessment, in painful detail, of how humanity is engaged in self-inflicted extinction through carelessly destructive exploitation of one of the most necessary substances for human existence. It make for a fun night of movie-watching. Real popcorn fare. Irene Salina’s film is compelling and suitably frightening, although it occasionally tangles itself up because there’s simply so much ground to cover. As admirably as it presents the scope of the problem, there are definitely times when it seems … Continue reading Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné

Film, MusicLeave a comment

Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

I had a busy week at Spectrum Culture, in large part because it was my turn to contribute to the Revisit series on the music side. While my previous efforts were focused on different releases that did require me to give them fresh spins to reacquaint myself with their pleasures (and think about them in a context that now included significantly more hindsight), this time I decided to write about an album that I know extremely well. I’m also quite happy that my observations about the overly self-assured dismissive attitudes about differing opinions among the fans of the band in … Continue reading Spectrum Check

MusicLeave a comment

One for Friday: The Amazing Pickles, “I Like Ice Cream”

Dan Seeger

Thanks to the wonders of the world wide web, I have a more eclectic music collection than I ever could have imagined, and diversity among my music was always a goal. I still have my clear particular favorite sounds and certain genres have only slight representation, but I have stuff in my iTunes that still sort of boggles my mind whenever it shuffles up. For example, thanks to a generous soul who used to employ fair use of his possessions to share some music on a regular basis, I have a copy of a 1969 single by a band called … Continue reading One for Friday: The Amazing Pickles, “I Like Ice Cream”

Comics24 Comments

My Misspent Youth: Iron Man #150 by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Layton

Dan Seeger

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

Music2 Comments

College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 6 and 5

Dan Seeger

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