“Shame” feels inevitable. There was little doubt that Lauren Mayberry, the effortlessly charismatic lead singer of the Scottish band Chvrches, would someday venture out with solo material, and there was also no reason to expect that the sound of that … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Lauren Mayberry, “Shame”
Since great television comedy always begins with the script, this series of posts considers the individual episodes that have claimed the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series over the years. The wise wagerer would have bet … Continue reading Golden Words — Frasier, “The Good Son”
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. In 2011, DC Comics embarked on the most ambitious initiative in … Continue reading My Misspent Youth — O.M.A.C. by Keith Giffen and Dan Didio
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. I’ve written many, many times about the overwhelming appeal Marvel Comics had for me as a kid, … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — The Marvel Subscriber’s Club
Fall (Scott Mann, 2022). The premise of Fall is so perfectly suited for a feat of inventive B-movie storytelling that its relatively drab execution proves doubly disappointing. Working from a script he co-wrote (with Jonathan Frank), director Scott Mann brings … Continue reading Then Playing — Fall; Air; The Mighty Quinn
11. Love and Rockets, Earth, Sun, Moon (1987) “After the last tour, which was forty-five dates and a long tour by our standards, we made a decision to make a more acoustic-sounding album and get away from the rock ‘n’ … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #11
To amplify Trump? Or not to amplify? There’s actually a good answer. by Dan Froomkin The dilemma that the news media has been ineffectually wrestling with is how to address the increasingly incendiary, deceptive, and grotesquely cruel rhetoric spewed by … Continue reading Outside Reading — Desperate Despot edition
I could rap out a whole bunch of words about how the new Sleater-Kinney track is a hefty punch right to the solar plexus. After all, that’s more or less the assignment I gave myself for this weekly feature. Instead, … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Sleater-Kinney, “Hell”
These past few years, it’s seemed like Mitski could disappear at any time. Given that her breakthrough album, Puberty 2, established her creative voice as enthralling but elusive, almost otherworldly in its abstract intensity, the vague danger that she might … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
Independent People by Halldór Laxness (translated from the Icelandic by J.A. Thompson) Fiction, 1934 and 1935 There are few things that fill the soul of man with greater disappointment than to wake up when everyone else is asleep, especially if it … Continue reading Book Report — Independent People; Ten Steps to Nanette
