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. Much as I would have loved to be one of those … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Micronauts by Bill Mantlo and Butch Guice
20. “All I Wanted” by In Tua Nua I have only the vaguest recollections of this song being played at my college radio station in the fall of 1988, and believe me when I maintain that an awful lot of my recreational time that fall was spent with a fellow who would have been especially partial to a band led by a pretty Irish singer. The song is certainly lodged deep in my brain, though, so it was probably getting some spins from us back then. Even at the time, In Tua Nua was probably best known for their tangential … Continue reading College Countdown: First Billboard Top 20 Modern Rock Tracks, Fall 1988, 20 and 19
After a customary end-of-the-year rest, the Spectrum Culture site returned with a spiffy new redesign this week. It was fairly low-content for the first week back, so my contributions were limited to pitching in on a couple of lists. First, I wrote on the latest Black Keys albums for our collection of the “honorable mentions” when it came to the best albums of last year. Besides that, the site has an annual tradition–in keeping with the features built around assessing older albums and films with fresh eyes–of kicking off the new year by looking back to the best pop culture … Continue reading Spectrum Check
College rock in the nineteen-eighties was full of bands that provided a sonic echo of the jangly R.E.M. sound and the nineties was dominated by groups emulating the sludgy assault that was forged by Mudhoney, perfected by Nirvana and turned into a slicked up commodity by Pearl Jam. Those styles were so dominant that it’s easy to forget that there were other bands that were inspiring adherents, including a few fairly unlikely ones. Legend has it that a tour through the Midwest undertaken by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the mid-eighties is what led to the formation of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Royal Crescent Mob, “5 More Minutes”
#50 — The In-Laws (Arthur Hiller, 1979) In half-watching a recent horror film the other night, I got into a discussion about the ways the story in question ticked off a multitude of basic, commonly shared fears. That’s what good … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fifty
And thus our recurring exercise in nostalgic evaluation takes a turn into especially tricky territory. In tracking through my picks for the best films of the the first ten years of the 2000s, then the nineteen-nineties and the nineteen-eighties, I was always considering time frames with which I had at least some level of personal connection concurrent with their actual occurrence. Sure, I was awfully young when the eighties began, but those were hugely formative years as I matured with the movies, for good or ill, as one of my primary influences. If I’d conceived of a top fifty in … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — An Introduction
It’s always a unique disappointment to see an excellent performance shellacked into the misery of a bad movie. In the new film My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams is consistently sensational as Marilyn Monroe. She’s charged with not only playing … Continue reading So far from the ordinary things I once knew while I wait for the chance to tell you what is true
One of the many household goals during the holiday season involved clearly material off of our heavily burdened DVR, a task with which, I must admit, we only had limited success (we seriously have about twenty hours of Boardwalk Empire … Continue reading Bad Movie Night — Predators/Season of the Witch
By the fall of 1988, the influence of college radio was at an early peak, which meant that the music that had stirred its rebellious, off-the-beaten-track spirit was in the process of being finally and fully co-opted. MTV’s Sunday night excursion into left of the dial fare, 120 Minutes, was popular enough to produce a nightly spin-off called PostModern MTV and major labels were scouring playlists of humble, student-run broadcasters in the hopes of discovering the next U2 or R.E.M., a band that had breakout potential. In September, the ultimate marker of the accepted institutionalization of the sound was printed … Continue reading College Countdown: First Billboard Top 20 Modern Rock Tracks, Fall 1988, An Introduction
While my predilection for movie-related lists is all over this corner of the Interweb, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve tried to craft a ranking of the best albums of any given year. Part of the reason is that I think those sorts of music preferences are a little more slippery, with opinions subject to change as albums age. Songs that sounded fresh and amazing become tired, even hackneyed and annoying as repeated plays mercilessly erode their charm. The reverse is equally true, as there have been plenty of albums that I initially dismissed, only to have them … Continue reading Top Ten Albums of 2011
