Author: Dan Seeger

MusicLeave a comment

You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball

Dan Seeger

…where you used to play pinball 2005 This tape was made as a part of the flurry of mix activity that preceded a road trip to Athens, Georgia. Selections from this batch of cassettes have made prior appearances as part of this process of purging. This particular tape was purely an exercise in nostalgia. I thought back to my days as an impressionable student at 90FM and tried to come up with some of the artists and songs, in roughly chronological order, that I connected with most dramatically at that time. Basically, I’d been concentrating so much on discovering new … Continue reading You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball

Everything Else1 Comment

I’d lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E but the railroad don’t run no more

Dan Seeger

It has been a banner week for the U.S. House of Representatives. In the midst of continued economic hardship at home and events on the world stage with the potential to create a startling shift in the geopolitical landscape, they passed an ever-so-timely apology for slavery. To be fair, they weren’t entirely oblivious to the the cataclysmic events dominating the news (and by “news” I don’t mean to imply that the events dominated cable news networks where footage of wild traffic arrests or breathless, hand-wringing reports about missing children still took priority). They did, after all, overwhelmingly pass a resolution … Continue reading I’d lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E but the railroad don’t run no more

Music1 Comment

One for Friday: American Music Club, “How Many Six Packs Does It Take To Screw In A Light”

Dan Seeger

As I’ve noted before, my time as a student in college radio was a prolonged musical education. Many people walk through the doors of a station like that convinced that they have unique reservoirs of knowledge that they are duty-bound to share with the world. I was certainly opinionated and had my flashes of ego when it came to matters of musical taste (especially when contrasting my interest in, say, Husker Du against the adherents of godawful hair metal prevalent among the population of the wing I lived in during my freshman year), but I was also always keenly aware … Continue reading One for Friday: American Music Club, “How Many Six Packs Does It Take To Screw In A Light”

FilmLeave a comment

Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on

Dan Seeger

Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, 2008). It would be easy to make a documentary about the devastation Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans and the equally disastrous governmental response that is grounded in apoplectic anger, especially since indignation seems to be the default starting point for many current non-fiction filmmakers. Deal and Lessin create something more delicate, more nuanced, more complicated, and, because of these qualities, far more fascinating. The hook of the film’s first half is on-the-scene camcorder footage taken by Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts as her neighborhood and then her home floods during … Continue reading Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on

Books, Comics4 Comments

Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“The boy nodded. He sat looking at the map. The man watched him. He thought he knew what that was about. He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. Come on, he said. We should go.” –Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006 “THERE! I SEE IT BENEATH ME–PULSATING–GLOWING! SO THIS IS WHAT MEN HAVE DIED FOR. I CAN SEE WHY! IT’S SO STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL–THROBBING AT MY TOUCH AS IF–BY THE … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature