From the Archive: The Dark Knight
For those heading out to theater this weekend to “just get this over with,” helping elevate the latest Zack Snyder joint to ludicrously triumphant box office numbers, I dig into the archive to offer the gentle reminder that it didn’t have to … Continue reading From the Archive: The Dark Knight
One for Friday: Michael Penn, “No Myth (Acoustic)”
Though it clearly charted at my college radio station, I have no clear recollection of playing any music from Michael Penn’s debut LP, March, when it was in the new music rotation. I probably did, but it didn’t stick with me, even once its lead single, “No Myth,” started edging its way up the charts (eventually becoming Penn’s sole Top 40 hit). Very much in the know-it-all phase of my late adolescence, I was probably given to a needlessly reactionary indifference to Penn’s music, so certain that he had a record deal only because his brother was a movie star, … Continue reading One for Friday: Michael Penn, “No Myth (Acoustic)”
Garry Shandling, 1949 – 2016
When I suggest that boxing, like comedy, is about rhythm, he nods. “My trainer, Dave Paul, he said, ‘G’—he calls me G—he said, ‘G, you have an unusual rhythm of your own that’s sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you, because they can’t figure you out.’ So sometimes when I’m in the ring, it’s like you can’t tell whether I’m about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can’t read me. They come in close—just like when an audience leans … Continue reading Garry Shandling, 1949 – 2016
Greatish Performances #23
#23 — Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Johnson in Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015) I don’t begrudge Sylvester Stallone the victory lap he got to take for his seventh performance as the hangdog Philadelphia boxer Rocky Balboa. While he’s perpetrated a great many heinous acts on moviegoers (he didn’t just star in Rhinestone, Cobra, Over the Top, and Cliffhanger; he also helped write them!), there’s something appealing, even charming, about his unlikely perseverance in the business. There might have been a little more sourness had the Academy Award nomination he received actually turned into a win, but, as was the case … Continue reading Greatish Performances #23
My Writers: Malcolm Gladwell
Back in the rough and tumble days before the vast digital landscape was scored with roadways to full archives of certain publications, I used to devote thought and energy to tearing pages out of magazine. Our filing cabinet had a folder stuffed full of articles either I or my partner-in-all-things found interesting enough that we wanted the option of revisiting them somewhere down the line. A sizable number of these came from The New Yorker. These weren’t yanked indiscriminately, but nor we we making a concerted effort to assemble the work of certain writers. I wasn’t even looking at the byline … Continue reading My Writers: Malcolm Gladwell
Beers I Have Known: Schlafly Coffee Stout
This series of posts is dedicated to the many, many six packs, pony kegs and pints that have sauntered into my life at one point or another. I like beer. That should be clear by now. If there’s a beverage that I prefer, it’s coffee. It stands to reason, then, that beers that incorporate coffee into their flavor profile would make me giddy as a barfly with an unlimited tab that never requires payment. An approach to beer once put forward as a sitcom gimmick is now common enough that an article ranking a couple dozen of the best is far from … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Schlafly Coffee Stout
College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 223 – 221
223. Lou Reed, “No Money Down” By the mid-nineteen-eighties, there were two surefire ways to stir up extra interest in a single: make a attention-getting video that MTV couldn’t resist playing, or make an attention-getting video that MTV rejected from their cable-waves for one squeamishness-based reason or another. When Lou Reed released his 1986 album, Mistrial, he was in a strange, unsettled place professionally. Thanks to his creative leadership in the Velvet Underground and a edgy nineteen-seventies solo career that could be used as a shorthand introduction to that decade’s drug-addled grittiness, Reed was approaching the status of legend, albeit one … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 223 – 221
From the Archive: Doubt
This review originally appeared at my former online home. To the best of my determination, this was the last full-length piece on a new film that only appeared there without also transferring over to this little corner of the digital … Continue reading From the Archive: Doubt
One for Friday: Big Audio Dynamite, “James Brown”
When I arrived at my college radio station, in the fall of 1988, we still played records. There was a CD player there, shiny and new and forbidding. It was a relatively new technology (commercial stations that had moved their … Continue reading One for Friday: Big Audio Dynamite, “James Brown”
The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive
Operating with the mixed blessing of a highly distinctive voice — in every sense of that word — Thao Nguyen could presumably get along all right taking an easier, less deliberatively disruptive course. She could probably make a string of records laden with relatively straightforward, folk-tinged rock songs and keep herself and her band, the Get Down Stay Down, in regular music biz work for some time. Instead, she ties composition into tricky knots, constantly seeking the challenging dynamic, as if enough effort in that direction will finally create the song that can surprise her in midstream. As a listener, it’s … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive
Coffee for Two 