Yesterday, I wrote some unkind things about the central Florida city that was my home for six years. In the interest of equal time, I should allow that there were plenty of places down there that we did like, that, in fact, I’ve missed since we’ve moved on. There are some good bars, BBQ shacks, and at least one constantly evolving coffee shop. There’s also a very nice movie theater that was our first real exposure to the sort of full-service evening out that is becoming more common in the land of moviegoing. The Enzian was probably the first place … Continue reading One for Friday: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Wig in a Box”

Before I made it to the college radio station, I was devoted to the celebration of the album. I was convinced that full-length records were the proper measure of an artist. Anyone could zip out a three minute song, but it took true talent and dedication to construct the heady novel that was a great album. This was, in part, residual Rolling Stone influence–the publication’s review section at the time had no reviews of singles, and, given the nature of music sales at the time, little cause to change that. It was also because the artists who held the greatest … Continue reading One for Friday: The Beautiful South, “Song for Whoever”

There were a lot of things I appreciated about being at my particular college radio station back in the day. These things primarily revolved around the camaraderie and togetherness of the students at the station. In general, we viewed ourselves as apart from the rest of the campus population, in part because the responsibility of keeping this fully licensed FM station is proper working order, beholden to a tangle of a federal regulations that explicitly bound us to the community that existed beyond the borders of our campus. What’s more, when our classmates were plotting out spring break excursions to … Continue reading One for Friday: Kitchens of Distinction, “Hypnogogic”

I have, despite my best efforts, a completist’s mentality. This undoubtedly stems from my extended time in thrall to comic books, a field of fandom in which thorough, dedicated acquisition of product is the fully exploited norm. I’ve still got longboxes that testify to my dedication to owning, say, the entire run of John Byrne’s Fantastic Four. That same inclination seeped into my other media consumption. I follow movie directors to places I wouldn’t otherwise go and routinely stick with television series well after their creativity has faded because, hey, I watched every other episode so I should see it … Continue reading One for Friday: Suzanne Vega, “Stockings”

Lost music was harder to come by when I was in college than it is now. There was no eBay, no Hype Machine, no Amazon (well, there was an Amazon). There weren’t even great used record shops in the humble city where I went to school. So there were a few holy grails of college rock, widely revered albums that had slipped out of print and probably illicitly slipped out the door of the radio station library shortly thereafter. We could read about these records, but couldn’t play them, and often couldn’t even hear a bit of them. The album … Continue reading One for Friday: The Feelies, “Sooner or Later”

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”