Author: Dan Seeger

Film, Music5 Comments

One for Friday: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, “If I Wanted”

Dan Seeger

Yesterday, I wrote about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s acting in The Hudsucker Proxy as part of the ongoing Greatish Performances series. As I noted when I first cooked up (okay, stole) that recurring feature, the inclusion of a specific performance doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m declaring it the very best work of the thespian in question. In fact, in the case of Leigh, there’s a very different turn that I instinctively invoke in those rare occasions when I might be asked to name her best screen performance. I don’t think Leigh was ever better than she was in the 1995 film … Continue reading One for Friday: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, “If I Wanted”

FilmLeave a comment

Take a left, a sharp left, and another left, meet me on the corner and we’ll start again

Dan Seeger

There’s a wholly earned stereotype surrounding British films, best encapsulated by Eddie Izzard, who referred to the standard as Room with a View and a Staircase and a Pond type movies. These are the sort of efforts that reach their … Continue reading Take a left, a sharp left, and another left, meet me on the corner and we’ll start again

Music16 Comments

College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top 10 Albums of 1981, An Introduction

Dan Seeger

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

FilmLeave a comment

Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

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

MusicLeave a comment

One for Friday: Kevn Kinney, “MacDougal Blues”

Dan Seeger

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”

Music68 Comments

Top 40 Smash Taps: “Angel in Blue”

Dan Seeger

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”