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. A few years ago I was working with a group of … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Daredevil by Frank Miller
“‘To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction–every kind of evidence in the logician’s list–have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation. ” –Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, revised final version in 1912 “YOU’RE GREAT, HONEY! YOU’RE WASTED HERE! YOU DESERVE SOMETHING BETTER THAN A TYPEWRITER AND THIS SNEAKY CRUMB! GET YOURSELF A BIKINI AND START A CHAIN OF HEART ATTACKS AT … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
88. The Wonder Stuff, Hup Popping out albums at the same rapid tempo as much of the music that fills those releases, the U.K. band The Wonder Stuff unleashed their second effort on American audiences in the fall of 1989. … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 88 and 87
#14 — The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) I tend to be hard on films that present narratives with fractured chronologies, but that’s only because I’ve seen the technique done perfectly, exactly right. Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is based … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fourteen
I’ve known a couple great people named Jane, but I never got around to making the mix that provided a song by song tribute to their name. I’ve long felt like there were an abundance of songs about women named Jane (not to mention a few fine offerings by women named Jane), but maybe its just that there are enough absolutely great songs about Janes that it skews my perception. Even though I never actually sat down to assemble the mix, I was always certain that “Understanding Jane” by The Icicle Works would have a spotlight position. It bold and … Continue reading One for Friday: The Icicle Works, “Understanding Jane”
Swimming to Cambodia (Jonathan Demme, 1987). Jonathan Demme may not have been the best filmmaker of the nineteen-eighties, but I think there’s an argument to be made that he was the most interesting. This film is a good illustration of that point. It’s a film version of one of Spalding Gray’s monologues, a meandering but always focused act of storytelling that springs from his involvement in the film The Killing Fields. Gray’s approach was simplicity itself, sitting behind a small wooden table with his spiral notebook before him and little more than a couple of maps to help fill out … Continue reading Demme, Frears, Hooper, Lee, Wang
I spent the summer of 1990 working at a video store in Stoughton, Wisconsin. That may be a type of business now rapidly approaching typewriter repair on the obsolescence scale, but it was a fairly brisk shop to work in … Continue reading I can walk right in to a lion’s den and make ’em all stand up and grin
Once again we bring a scholarly scrutiny to the bygone breathless boasts used to promote Marvel Comics titles backed in the age when the House of Ideas truly reigned supreme. The tantalizing teasers typeset and tucked into the monthly Mighty Marvel Checklist always guaranteed staggering surprises and jaw-dropping jolts, but how often did the individual issues live up to the hype? This time out, the monumental mythmaking moving under the microscope comes from Thor #186, which was touted as follows: “Even the title, ‘Worlds at War,’ can’t begin to describe the excitement and wonder of this one. What happens to … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Thor #186
#15 — The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997) I should probably start by acknowledging that any film which uses an old issue of the Marvel Comics series The Fantastic Four to illustrate how dysfunction can envelop and cripple a family is playing directly to my soft spot. The idea is introduced via voiceover narration by the character Paul Carver as he sits on a stalled train bound for New Canaan, Connecticut. He goes to school in Manhattan, but it’s Thanksgiving weekend and he’s headed home, a place that’s held by a chill as deep as the one produced by the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Fifteen
90. Big Audio Dynamite, Megatop Phoenix Mick Jones almost died. Some time after the release of his band Big Audio Dynamite’s third album, Tighten Up, Vol. 88 (its title a play on the old Trojan Records series), Jones picked up … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 90 and 89
Coffee for Two 