Laughing Matters: Portlandia, “The Dream of the Nineties”
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. I can’t claim that I stuck through Portlandia through it’s entire run — including the pending final season — but I have tremendous affection for the comedy series co-stewarded by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. Although I didn’t have intimate knowledge of the scruffy metropolitan area it satirized when the program launched, I recognized a generational identity within the comedy. My swath of the … Continue reading Laughing Matters: Portlandia, “The Dream of the Nineties”
My Misspent Youth: Stumptown by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth
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. As I must on occasion, let me preface what follows by conceding that I am about to abuse the word “youth” in the title of this feature. Stumptown, written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Matthew Southworth, debuted in 2009, well past the point that I could claim any dewy upon mine eyes. My mild justification for highlighting it under this regular banner is that the series — while hardly a … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Stumptown by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth
Laughing Matters: George Carlin, Class Clown
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. It’s not accurate to call the nineteen-seventies the heyday of comedy records, not when the prior decade saw the smash-hit album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, elevating a guy who’d recently been a Chicago advertising drone to both Best New Artist and Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. That doesn’t even get into the likes of Vaughn Meader and Allan Sherman tying … Continue reading Laughing Matters: George Carlin, Class Clown
Now Playing: It Comes at Night
I feel compelled to write about the audience I was in midst of when I saw the film It Comes at Night. The second feature from writer-director Trey Edward Shults, It Comes at Night is being positioned as a horror film for promotional purposes. That’s entirely fair. All the elements are in place, including a constantly mounting sense of dread, allusions to a devastating and unexplained phenomenon that has ravaged the populace, and a wary appraisal of the intrinsic darkness of desperate people. And yet the film is primarily notable for its colossal restraint more than its vivid shocks. In … Continue reading Now Playing: It Comes at Night
College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 34 – 32
34. Sinéad O’Connor, “Mandinka” It didn’t start with a picture of the Pope on live television. Sinéad O’Connor was at war from the beginning. “I had no illusions that there were such things as record deals — I just happened to be lucky enough to get one,” O’Connor noted shortly after the release of her 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. “I didn’t realize there were such bastards in this business.” Her famously shaved head — a look especially out of step with late-eighties fashion trends — was O’Connor’s rebuttal to label attempts to impose a more MTV-friendly style … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 34 – 32
From the Archive: Grizzly Man
This originally appeared in my former online home. I was still getting back in the swing of writing movie reviews when this posted. The new film from sorta nuts German director Werner Herzog is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who spent years in the Alaskan wilderness observing, bonding with, obsessing over and serving as self-proclaimed “protector” of a large group of grizzly bears. An inveterate ham, Treadwell documented his experience with a video camera, shooting hours of footage which Herzog merged with new interviews to give us a potent picture of a damaged individual who sought some … Continue reading From the Archive: Grizzly Man
One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “One Way Street”
After I graduated from college and was underway with the slow, sad process of detaching from the student-run radio station, I did the best I could to compensate for no daily exposure to the waterfall of new music that came through the doors. After initially insisting my break would be clean, I eventually signed up for a weekly on-air shift as a community volunteer, and I scoured music magazines with the intensity of a conspiracy theorist looking for the clue that would bring down the menacing shadow government. When I found a song that I believed had similar stuff to … Continue reading One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “One Way Street”
The New Releases Shelf: Goths
I have a lot of affection for the Mountain Goats, but I was disappointed with their last album. Released in 2015, Beat the Champ was a concept album, awash in songwriter John Darnielle’s abiding affection for professional wrestling, and not the kind that takes up hours of national programming hours with intricate stories and flashy production values. Darnielle was writing for the hardscrabble, downscale grapplers who shed blood and sweat (but no tears in this manliest of sports) in half-filled municipal coliseums and on static dappled UHF stations in his younger years. Much as I appreciate Darnielle’s conviction that absolutely … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Goths
The Art of the Sell: “Fargo” movie poster
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. By the middle of the nineteen-nineties, I was becoming dismayed with the state of movie posters. I have no empirical evidence to offer to prove my theory, but it truly seemed as if attempts at creativity and artfulness were dwindling. There was little evident willingness on the part of studios to bring memorable images to their promotional efforts. Instead, they wanted great big pictures of the movie stars with as little other information as possible. If they … Continue reading The Art of the Sell: “Fargo” movie poster
Now Playing: Wonder Woman
AT LAST, IN A WORLD TORN BY THE HATREDS AND WARS OF MEN, APPEARS A WOMAN TO WHOM THE PROBLEMS AND FEATS OF MEN ARE MERE CHILD’S PLAY — A WOMAN WHOSE IDENTITY IS KNOWN TO NONE, BUT WHOSE SENSATIONAL FEATS ARE OUTSTANDING IN A FAST-MOVING WORLD! WITH A HUNDRED TIMES THE AGILITY AND STRENGTH OF OUR BEST MALE ATHLETES AND STRONGEST WRESTLERS, SHE APPEARS AS THOUGH FROM NOWHERE TO AVENGE AND INJUSTICE OR RIGHT A WRONG! AS LOVELY AS APHRODITE — AS WISE AS ATHENA — WITH THE SPEED OF MERCURY AND THE STRENGTH OF HERCULES — SHE IS … Continue reading Now Playing: Wonder Woman
Coffee for Two 