Author: Dan Seeger

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Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Twenty

Dan Seeger

#20 — Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1996) Smoke is about the power and pleasure of stories. The film is enamored with the very act of spinning a tale, whether it be complete concoctions, embellishments on personal histories, or even the fictions people create about themselves as buffers against the sadness of the world. The mere craft of it is admirable enough, and there’s perhaps no better indicator of its value than the smile that irresistibly rises to the visage of a teller who has completed their task particularly well. The film is centered around a Brooklyn cigar shop, the perfect setting … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Twenty

Music2 Comments

One for Friday: XTC, “My Bird Performs”

Dan Seeger

One of the little intellectual games that naturally came up around the college radio station involved speculating about other eras of music and what it would’ve been like to be taking our turn on the left end of the dial in those times. What must it have been like to be there in the late seventies, for example, when the burst of punk and new wave brought amazing albums from the likes of the Ramones, Blondie, and Elvis Costello into the rotation on a regular basis? Or to be Music Director when the package from I.R.S. Records arrived with Murmur, … Continue reading One for Friday: XTC, “My Bird Performs”

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“‘This time I’m not going to tell you a story. I’ll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.’ “‘We’ve all felt that.’ “‘And all of us, one way or another, are insane.’” –Paulo Coelho (as translated by Margaret Jull Costa), Veronika Decides to Die, 1998 “ONLY A MADMAN WOULD HAVE BUILT THE HOUSE HERE, … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

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Bertolucci, Boden and Fleck, Bozzo, Coffin and Renaud, Levinson

Dan Seeger

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). Bertolucci’s masterwork probably won its Best Picture Oscar due to its effortless embrace of the epic, but its the acute realization of the most intimate portions of its story that makes it a great film. It follows the life of the last emperor of China from his coronation while still a toddler to his later years toiling as an anonymous gardener after his royal role had disappeared. The sweep of history is what the film moves through, but Bertolucci and his co-screenwriter Mark Peploe rightly realize that the intricacies of the different personality entanglements … Continue reading Bertolucci, Boden and Fleck, Bozzo, Coffin and Renaud, Levinson

Music4 Comments

College Countdown: Winter 1991, 15-11

Dan Seeger

And now…on with the countdown… 15. They Might Be Giants, “Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought We Had a Deal” This is the band that we would sometimes refer to as “the Two Johns,” since it was entirely populated by John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They were perhaps the oddest band that I had a working knowledge of before arriving at the radio station, built largely because MTV couldn’t resist the intoxicatingly goofy video for their first single. They were then a major part of my college radio experience. Their second album, the outstanding Lincoln, was plopped into Heavy Rotation at … Continue reading College Countdown: Winter 1991, 15-11

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One for Friday: The Trilobites, “I Can’t Wait For Summer to End”

Dan Seeger

Including my years as an undergraduate student, I’ve moved to the rhythms of a traditional academic year most of my adult life. This means I get to recapture a little of that childhood feeling about summer, that it’s a break, or at least a change. Often my summers were actually busier when I was in school at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It was a much smaller group of students who stuck around in the summer months, dedicated to keeping the college radio station going. During some stretches, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be on the air every day, … Continue reading One for Friday: The Trilobites, “I Can’t Wait For Summer to End”

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Strong and warm and wild and free

Dan Seeger

I recently watched the 1979 film Real Life, the first feature directed by Albert Brooks. There’s plenty to say about it as a film and a comedy, especially in light of its retroactive relevance as a satire of reality-based filmmaking in a programming era in which no city’s pampered, appalling self-absorbed housewives are safe from the profitable scrutiny of Bravo’s fleet of cameras. Separate from the facets that are the usual fodder for cinematic analysis, I found something particularly striking. At two completely different points, Brooks uses the word “abortion” in punchlines. Indeed, in the second instance, the word is … Continue reading Strong and warm and wild and free