Top 40 Smash Taps: “I (Who Have Nothing)”
These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. “I (Who Have Nothing)” reached the Billboard Top 40 on three different occasions. The first, and arguably now best known, version was by Ben E. King and released in 1963. Seven years later, Tom Jones carried the song close to the Top 10. By the end of the nineteen-seventies, every last page of the pop music songbook was up for grabs again, as long as … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I (Who Have Nothing)”
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Two
#2 — Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Casablanca is the quintessential Hollywood film of its era, so completely shaped by the strictures of the time and grounded in the established mechanics of narrative cinematic storytelling that it very nearly transcends itself to become a movie about what movies can achieve. It intermingles hope and cynicism, romance and sorrow, stirring patriotism and nomadic isolation. Filmed and released after the United States was wrenched into the tumult of World War II, it serves as an effective avatar of the somewhat ambivalent view towards international engagement that still defined the national sentiment. The theme of the weary, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Two
Beers I Have Known: Ale Asylum Velveteen Habit
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. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve got a whole new world of beers to become acquainted with now that I’ve moved back to my native land of Madison, Wisconsin. The state may have been one of the renowned homes to breweries for ages, but we’re talking about historical offerings on the Blatz and Schlitz tier. In the time I’ve been away, America’s Dairyland has experience the same boom of craft brewing as just about everyplace … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Ale Asylum Velveteen Habit
My Writers: Eric Schlosser
As soon as I was finished with Fast Food Nation I wanted to pass along the book to everyone I knew. And give them a chance to pass it along to everyone they knew. For a time, I even had a plan in place to do just that. The household paperback copy was handed out with the instruction to lendees to print their names on the inside front cover once they’d completed it and then to pass it along to another person they thought would benefit from the information within its pages. I had visions of highly weathered copy of the … Continue reading My Writers: Eric Schlosser
College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 9 – 6
9. Ramones, Mondo Bizarro Much as I find the long reach of alternative music of my generation remarkable (stuff I once played on the radio as brand new music, such as Nirvana, seems completely viable to current college kids in a way that doesn’t quiet match up with how my generation viewed material of a similarly aged vintage), we had our more old school bands that could still capture out attention and enthusiasm. Approaching twenty years past their stellar debut, no one was delusional enough to suggest the lather-clad compatriots who all adopted the last name Ramone were still making … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, 9 – 6
From the Archive: Cars
Such a long day today, leaving me nothing pithy to add about the review plucked from my former online home, I’m afraid. Watching a new Pixar movie in the theater is a little like the same experience with a Disney … Continue reading From the Archive: Cars
One for Friday: Wire Train, “Skills of Summer”
Back when I had some control over the music that was played at my college radio station, this was about the point that I’d finally relent and drag the meager collection of Christmas music out of deep storage. Yes, plenty of our on-air personnel were likely irritated that I waited so long (even back then, timeline creep with Christmas revelry was happening), but as someone who was generally listening to the station all day long, I could only take so much holiday cheer. While it certainly didn’t help that there was a relative dearth of seasonally appropriate college rock back … Continue reading One for Friday: Wire Train, “Skills of Summer”
My Misspent Youth: Uncanny X-Men #153 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum
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. To be a youthful fan of superhero comics during the nineteen-eighties, one needed — absolutely needed — to adore the X-Men. Writer Chris Claremont took the granules of Stan Lee’s original conceit for the team, with the maligned mutants standing in for every beset group of people in American culture, and spun it into a fair representation of the sensation of being perpetually outcast that comes with adolescences, especially for those … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Uncanny X-Men #153 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Three
#3 — Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) Double Indemnity is the film that convinced me of Billy Wilder’s ability to full off just about anything within the borders of a movie screen. Admittedly, this represented, in part, my own personal shortsightedness, a unlearned tendency to always categorize directors in terms of the genre in which they were most prolific, of at least crafted their best known triumphs. If Alfred Hitchcock struggled somewhat artistically the further he strayed from the splendid spectacles of suspense that made his fame, surely it was worth marveling at Wilder’s ability to make a film far darker and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Three
Great Moments in Literature
“Outside it was one of those depressing blue-crystal-golden-drops-of-sunlight afternoons. The weather is always perfect at Four BEE, but now and then the Jang manage to sabotage something, and we get a groshing, howling sandstorm come sweeping in past the barrier beams to cheer us all up. I’ll never forget the time Danor and I, both female then, I might add, disabled the robot controller at Lookout 9A and let in a downpour of volcanic ash from one of the big black mountains outside, floods of it for units and units — everything went zaradann. They had to deliver food by … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
Coffee for Two 