#11 — Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981) Warren Beatty has been credited as the sole director of exactly three films, two of which can be used to demonstrate how admirable ambition can turn into plain mediocrity. And yet, every time Beatty … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Eleven
When I was a student treating the college radio station as a second home, one of the music magazines that loomed the largest for me was Trouser Press. And yet, to the best of my recollection, I’d never seen an issue of the publication. After all, it had ceded publication five years before I ever crossed the threshold of the station. Trouser Press co-founder and co-editor Ira Robbins presided over a fat paperback slab of incredibly thorough artist biographies and album-by-album reviews of their respective discographies (it’s the fourth edition of the book that sits proudly on the bookshelf in … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top 10 Albums of 1981, An Introduction
After a long stretch in which it felt like my name was all over the site, I had a fairly light week at Spectrum Culture. The only thing I had go up was a review of a new western. This led to the sort of mini-treatise on the state of the modern western that’s almost inevitable, even if the same basic thesis on the current dynamics of the once-dominant film genre has been pertinent for about forty years now. I actually wish I’d had more room to stretch out (or, more accurately, more time to write it, which was my … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I’ve always liked the idea of a grand artistic community informally springing up in the heart of a robust city. The brand of nostalgia that Woody Allen traffics in (before dismissing it with trademark cynicism) with Midnight in Paris has a high, almost undeniable appeal. If you love some form of entertainment art–theater, literature, painting, film–how is it not a thrill to think of artists at the peak of the form sparking off of one another, intermingling their inspiration like some big, crazy TV sitcom crossover. Pet Sounds is most interesting when considered against Rubber Soul which begat it and … Continue reading One for Friday: Kevn Kinney, “MacDougal Blues”
This much is certain about the small battalion of scruffy creators that Judd Apatow has cultivated: they’re really good and following in the footsteps of their benevolent mentor and nurturing along cohorts themselves. Seth Rogen was one of the cast … Continue reading I figure the odds be fifty-fifty I just might have something to say
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 J. Geils Band had been around a long, long time before they had the kind of commercial breakthrough that’s the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll dreams. They formed in 1967 in Worcester, Massachusetts and undoubtedly logged a lot of hours in the nearby Boston clubs. Their first album came out on Atlantic Records in 1970 and they had significant success over the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Angel in Blue”
#12 — Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984) There are few movies that bring me as much immediate and consistent joy as Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, the brilliant concert film featuring Talking Heads. From the very beginning, with opening … Continue reading Top 50 Films of the 80s — Number Twelve
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. One of my favorite comic book artists when I was in … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Nexus by Mike Baron and Steve Rude
1. Bodeans, Home There are seven other artists with distinct Wisconsin connections in the whole of the 90FM Top 90 of 1989, including three that reside lower within the Top 20. As I’ve noted previously, even if we didn’t have some highly vaunted scene like the one of Minneapolis that was sadly reaching its end, the staff at our central Wisconsin radio station held a collective special affection for performers who shared our Dairyland roots. There was no free pass for these artists, but if one of their respective records somehow hit the station’s sweet spot, it was sure to … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 1
So I spent a good portion of this week feeling pretty ill. That’s ill in a lying in bed moaning all day way rather than a nineties fresh beats rap way. I don’t know that my condition compromised my writing at all this week, but let’s just say it’s a little more difficult to write a review of a deliberately languid, existentially fraught Russian mood piece under those circumstances. My other piece of film writing was for the latest entry in our Oeuvre series on Samuel Fuller. After writing on one of his touchstone war pictures, I got a chance … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 