Back when the mighty mavens of Marvel certified their sovereignty over the spinner rack, they had a sparkling specialty for making every one of their monthly mags sound like unmissable masterpieces. The primary platform for this tantalizing touting was the … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: The Amazing Spider-Man #53
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. Evelyn King got the nickname “Champagne” because she had a bubbly personality, which couldn’t have hurt when she was recording music designed for the discotheque. King’s first album, Smooth Talk, was released in 1977 and it was meant for the dance floor as surely as Tony Manero’s white suit. Supposedly, King was working as a cleaning lady at a record label when a … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I’m in Love”
8. Hoodoo Gurus, Magnum Cum Louder Hoodoo Gurus was one of my favorite band names to say on the air. It sounded silly and yet it didn’t. Those O sounds just begged to be elongated, the words stretching out and … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 8
There are a few things I will always, always, always be ready to do. One of them is expounding on my admiration for the films, artistry and general cinematic passion of Martin Scorsese. I was given the opportunity to do just that for the current Best Living Directors series. I did the best I could, but it always feels like there’s more to say, more to write about the way he both honors and reshapes classic Hollywood narrative storytelling. Someday I’ll get it right. I also wrote a new film review about a film that’s about as grimly nutty as … Continue reading Spectrum Check
When I’d transitioned from the exploratory freedom of college radio to the stifling monotony of commercial radio in the mid-nineteen-nineties, I worked very hard to keep myself reasonably well-versed in music that was distinctly different from the jackhammer awfulness I was charged with lobbing out onto the airwaves. I used every resource at my limited disposal, leaning especially heavy on the monthly magazine that had recently been launched as a companion to CMJ, the trade journal of college radio. I’m fairly certain it was within the pages of one of those issues that I first read about Ben Lee. More … Continue reading One for Friday: Ben Lee, “How Can That Be?”
Youth in Revolt (Miguel Arteta, 2009). This was Arteta’s first film in almost a decade after some quick, buzzy success to kick off his career. All the time between features didn’t eliminate his slightly arid style, which has a tendency to deaden the drama after a while. More problematically, the film exhibits a offbeat pushiness as it heaps in quirky details and disaffected anguish. It simply tries to hard. Michael Cera plays a sweet, timidly pining young man who conjures up an imaginary tough-talking alter ego who drives him to get the girl while also slipping deeper into a quicksand … Continue reading Arteta, Feig, Hayward, Malick, Ritchie
#20 — Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983) Most comedies posing as documentaries cheat. Much as I love many of them, I’m aware that the nonfiction form they’re employing is just a means towards easing the storytelling and the character development, or … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Twenty
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 Cure were hardly new faces in the mid-nineteen-eighties when they first started to garner some significant commercial attention in the United States. The band first got together in 1976 and released their first single, the controversial and occasionally disowned “Killing an Arab”, two years later. They quickly developed into a perennial presence on the charts in their English homeland, but had to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Just Like Heaven”
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. I was a Marvel devotee from the very beginning of my … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Avengers by David Michelinie and George Perez
9. The Weeds, Windchill I think it’s safe to say that, of all the bands on this countdown, the Weeds are the only ones who spent one night in 1989 playing a live show at The Encore in the University … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 9
