52. The Tragically Hip, Up to Here Maybe it’s the fact that the character Mike Nesmith played on the Monkees always wore a tuque that drew the Canadian band The Tragically Hip to him. More specifically, the group with a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 52 and 51
It was another fairly busy week for me over at Spectrum Culture. I contribute my first offering to the Film Dunce feature, which invites writers to watch and consider seminal movies that had previously eluded them. I confessed to having neglected the debut feature from Mike Nichols, the film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Then I proceeded to rave about it to such a degree that it made it doubly embarrassing that I’d avoided it for so long. Then there are new movies, which led me to When We Leave, which was Germany’s official entry for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
There are always going to bands and performers that are inextricably linked with their eras. For me, The Cure represents one side of the nineteen-eighties and R.E.M. is the flip side. Nirvana’s Nevermind dirges are so embedded in the early nineties that it’s almost a shame that the album wasn’t actually called The Waning Days of Bush I or some such thing. Much of this music is still great, and even has some qualities that could be called timeless, but they also speak so clearly for their musical moment that playing them causes calendar pages to flip back like a … Continue reading One for Friday: The Smithereens, “Kiss Your Tears Away”
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. By the time I found my way to superhero comics, I … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Fantastic Four #200 by Marv Wolfman and Keith Pollard
#47 — Swimming to Cambodia (Jonathan Demme, 1987) The very nature of Swimming to Cambodia is fantastically, deliriously uncinematic. There’s no sweep or scope to the movie, nothing particularly dynamic to train the camera on. The action gets no more … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Forty-Seven
1-19-2. Something about that first number…just…doesn’t….look…right…. As I’ve reported in this space, I’ve been engaged in an ongoing bout for over twenty years, putting my best guess at the Oscar nominations in the six major categories up against those of my old movie review radio show colleague. Nineteen times, I’ve conceded defeat to him. Twice, I was able to call him up and note that we had tied, though those didn’t feel like accomplishments; they felt more like leaning across the ring with my face bloodied, asserting, “You didn’t get me down, Ray!” Then, this morning, for the first time … Continue reading Sell yourself short, but you’re walking so tall
It’s odd to be able to accurately use the phrase “decades of futility” about a personal endeavor. But the simple fact is that it was over twenty years ago the first time I challenged my friend and movie review show colleague to a duel, each of us taking a stab at predicting the Oscar nominees for the top six awards: Best Picture, Best Directing and all four acting categories. We’ve revived the skirmish nearly every year since. We’ve tied twice, he’s won nineteen times, and I’ve never won. Ever. In my tepid defense, we’re both quite good at this. It’s … Continue reading Predicting the Oscar Nominations, or The Definition of Insanity
54. Dash Rip Rock, Ace of Clubs For a blazing, guitar-driven outfit from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dash Rip Rock seems a pretty fitting name. A quick listen to any of the scorchers on their sophomore album Ace of Clubs makes it seem like the band’s name might derive from the set of instructions they give themselves before manning their instruments. That may be part of the point, but the group is more specifically named after the hunky actor who spent some quality time with curvy Elly May Clampett in an episode of TV’s The Beverly Hillbillies. The real secret to … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 54 and 53
Comics were added to the mix recently over at Spectrum Culture, which speaks directly to my woefully geeky heart. My first offering on that front is a retroactive examination of the Wolverine miniseries created by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller in the early nineteen-eighties. I well remember reading the limited series when it was first published, reveling in the aching coolness of it. He was in a tight race with bashful Benjamin J. Grimm in my own personal Favorite Character category at the time. By the end of that decade, it’d be hard to think of a character I was … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I suspect there’s a tendency to always see the time when you’re following music most closely–probably those years around high school and college–as a time of particular tumult and transformation. It’s a natural side effect of close scrutiny combined with a passionate connection with the artists. Every shift in a lineup or full-on dissolution of a band is major news, like the borders of a country being redrawn after a war. The whole landscape changes, or at least that’s what it feels like. At around the time I started at the college radio station, both Husker Du and The Smiths … Continue reading One for Friday: Antenna, “23”
