This weekend I’ll sit down to write about one of my truly formative films, a cinematic effort that helped define my notions of adulthood and especially friendship that endures past the easy cohesion of school years and across the years. All I’ll elude to in the piece, when I first saw the film I was young enough that the portrait of a bond freighted with history was as foreign to me as, say, an archeology professor engaged in feats of borderline implausible derring-do. And yet it struck a chord with me, as if I knew I’d have touchstones that roughly … Continue reading One for Friday: Luka Bloom, “An Irishman in Chinatown”

Now that it is completely, definitively, decisively established that the surest route to mainstream chart success these days is repetitive, dance-tinged songs about feeling empowered while dancing all night long in the club, I can’t help but wonder if there are any tracks on those slicked-up albums that take a look at the melancholy downside. It’s not that I think there’s some responsibility of pop culture to provide that balance. Instead, I’m just struck by the way that the college radio playlists of my younger days often seemed to have songs that portrayed drinking cultures in all their permutations, from … Continue reading One for Friday: Mark Eitzel, “Some Bartenders Have the Gift of a Pardon”

The announcement this week that the few remaining Blockbuster video stores would be closing inspired a lot of surprisingly wistful reminiscences for the chain with the garish blue and yellow color scheme that was once best known (and reviled in all the right corners) for a selective prudishness that deemed Henry & June unacceptable but Playboy exercise videos a-okay. (To be fair, I’m in absolutely no hurry to sit through the former again, so they may have had a point purely on aesthetic merits in my example.) Of course, this didn’t truly reflect a swelling of nostalgia for one particular … Continue reading One for Friday: Darren Hanlon, “Video Store”