Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: Half Miler, “Here Comes A Regular”

Dan Seeger

There was a time when I marked every summer with a baseball-centric trip with my friend Colin. In our fearless, energized youth, we would load up a vehicle with modest provisions and embark on cross-country journeys built around stops in cities that could boast a major league baseball team: Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, Toronto, and, to help properly date the era of these trips, Montreal. Through all this dedicated journeying, we only made a point of getting to one city that had no home team to root, root, root … Continue reading One for Friday: Half Miler, “Here Comes A Regular”

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Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

Dan Seeger

Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007). This Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature catalogs and condemns the harsh treatment of prisoners in the Bush administration’s zealous “war on terror.” Gibney lays out the evidence of vicious abuse and clear-cut torture perpetrated by the American military at prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just as importantly–arguably even more importantly–he examines the ways in which the highest leaders created, encourages and perpetuated the environment for these horrendous practices and then casually, heartlessly blamed the enlisted men when the worst of it came to light. Like Charles Ferguson’s No … Continue reading Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“It was all I could think of to say. I turned away from this woman and went to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands, which is something I like to do in the colder months, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Then I touched my face with my warmed hands. It calms me down, it’s just this very normal thing that I do.” –Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances, 2008 “ON THE SURFACE, THIS MAY SEEM TO BE A SUPER-HERO ACTION THRILLER! BUT, IF YOU PROBE DOWN DEEP, IF YOU ANALYZE EACH SUBTLE NUANCE, IF … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

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Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Nine

Dan Seeger

#49 — The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001). For all the precision that Wes Anderson brings to his filmmaking–the carefully constructed shots, the pristine cinematography, the merging of imagery with the rock’n’roll soundtrack so complete that it feels like the movie itself is breathing in time with each song’s backbeat–it is the ungainly sprawl of The Royal Tenenbaums that impresses most. Anderson has been upfront about drawing upon the works of J.D. Salinger, particularly those involving the Glass family, for this film, and it indeed comes across as a wildly inventive, overstuffed novel. Set in a arch, Bohemian, colorful New York … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Nine

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Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above, I would miss all the places and people I love

Dan Seeger

I definitely appreciate that Duncan Jones is trying to create a science fiction film that’s as much about ideas as it is about C.G.I. logistics with his feature directorial debut, Moon. Set in an indeterminate future era in which our … Continue reading Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above, I would miss all the places and people I love

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One for Friday: Mike Watt, “Drove Up From Pedro”

Dan Seeger

When I was work in commercial radio in the mid-nineties, I was desperate for new, different music. This shouldn’t have been the case. I was, after all, primarily working for a “new rock alternative” station. The implication is that the sort of music I was craving would be there in abundance. That wasn’t the case. The most interesting new music stayed behind locked doors while the DJ booth shelves were loaded down with sound-alike bands built on the theory that Nirvana’s music was cool but could use a coat or two of high gloss. In 1995, we didn’t have Sleater-Kinney, … Continue reading One for Friday: Mike Watt, “Drove Up From Pedro”

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Top Fifty Films of the 00s — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

Nearly ten years ago I was given a proposal from my old partner on the movie review program we did on college radio from 1990 to 1993. He suggested we each concoct our respective lists of the top fifty films of the nineties, adapting the traditional yearly top ten to a larger scale. While it had been years since we’d done the radio show together, we’d each remained avid moviegoers. In fact, we’d each taken little spins with movie reviewing and Academy Award analysis on other radio stations during the intervening years, he much more notably and productively than I. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — An Introduction