The New Releases Shelf: Holly Miranda
These Holly Miranda albums take time. After the 2004 debut release that she hawked at shows, the by-then former Jealous Girlfriend released a proper solo bow in 2010. That didn’t even have a quick turnaround time from studio to record store, with it sitting idly on the shelf until Miranda signed with XL Recordings in 2010. That pairing of artist and label wasn’t meant to last, though, and Miranda started working on her next album on her own, eventually connecting with Dangerbird Records. The result is technically her third album, and yet it bears her own name. Like all self-titled releases … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Holly Miranda
My Writers: Anthony Bourdain
I own a Global kitchen knife because of Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential, originally published in 2000, was one of those rare books that became a sensation, stirring up interest among a wide range of readers, most of them charged up by the sense they were receiving a glimpse of something wonderfully secretive about the restaurant industry. At the time, Bourdain was the head chef at New York’s Brasserie Les Halles, but he was also an accomplished enough writer that he had a couple food-themed crime novels under his belt. Kitchen Confidential was his coming out as a nonfiction writer, providing a … Continue reading My Writers: Anthony Bourdain
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Two
#32 — Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941) Alfred Hitchcock had an abundance of theses he kept circling around to during his career, a natural outcome of his prolific nature and usual ability to take his pick of projects. That’s a significant part of the reason cineastes tend to flip over Vertigo: it’s the one instance in which the master filmmaker took a swing at the piñata of his creative psyche and every laced candy came tumbling out. Part of the fun of examining the best films of Hitchcock’s career, then, is considering precisely where they fit into the puzzle of his … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Two
Top 40 Smash Taps: “Spinout” and “Until It’s Time For You To Go”
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. Elvis Aaron Presley had a few hits during his career. According to Joel Whitburn, who is as definitive of an expert as the field of counting chart hits gets, say he made the Top 10 thirty-eight times and claimed the coveted #1 position on eighteen occasions. For our purposes, what’s important is that two singles out of over one hundred peaked at #40. … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Spinout” and “Until It’s Time For You To Go”
College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 38-36
38. The Gufs, Collide Evidently, Milwaukee’s the Gufs took their name from a Demi Moore, and I don’t there are many bands that can claim that. The band formed in 1988, the same year as the Moore-starring horror thriller The Seventh Sign, which puts forward the term as the place babies’ souls are stored before they’re born. As source material goes, this is certainly not as cool as, say, nicking a band name from a Don Delillo novel. Still, the Gufs were one of the bigger Wisconsin bands at the time, earning the 1992 Album of the Year WAMI award (the Wisconsin Area … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 38-36
From the Archive: Backdraft
We had a few traditions on the movie review radio show The Reel Thing. The one that was in place from the very first episode involved spending our first episode in September discussing the biggest box office hits of the summer. Hence the inclusion of earnings analysis alongside the quick breakdown of the film’s quality. (And how adorable is it that the fifth biggest film of the summer has a total take that now looks like a respectable opening weekend for a hit.) My recollection is that we usually looked at the top ten highest-grossing films, but my memory might be faulty, … Continue reading From the Archive: Backdraft
One for Friday: John Wesley Harding, “Like a Prayer”
Let us momentarily sing the praises of indie performers targeting college radio with quasi-ironic covers of big hit pop song. Back in 1989, a copy of Madonna’s Like a Prayer, on vinyl, sat in the top drawer of the filing cabinet in the office I occupied as the Program Director of WWSP-FM. I’m not even sure why Warner Bros. even bothered to send it our way, except that the label was big enough that it probably wasn’t worth their time to discriminate about shipments of promotional copies to radio stations. Everything went everywhere. While my station was a little more … Continue reading One for Friday: John Wesley Harding, “Like a Prayer”
Greatish Performances #20
#20 — Linda Cardellini as Kelli in Return (Liza Johnson, 2011) In modern cinematic considerations of war, there is a broad agreement that the emotional aftermath when a soldier reached the homeland is just a brutal and devastating as anything that might have happened when they were deployed. Even a film as supposedly jingoistic and fully enamored with battlefield conquest as the ultimate in heroism as American Sniper needs to acknowledge that the military man whose prowess with a rifle is a such that he get deadly superlatives affixed to his name is going to win up staring blankly at a … Continue reading Greatish Performances #20
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Three
#33 — The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) Though The Big Sleep would never be considered experimental enough to suggest that it’s deliberating courting an antinarrative approach, it does oddly wind up making its own accidental argument about the invalidity of sanctifying cogent storytelling. Stories about the convoluted plot of the film flummoxing practically everyone involved are legendary. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, the film had three formidable writers credited on the screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman. Additionally, with Howard Hawks in the director’s chair, The Big Sleep boasted one of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Thirty-Three
My Misspent Youth: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. by Jim Steranko
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. By the time I started reading Marvel Comics offering in the early nineteen-eighties, there was a clear house style to the art. Looking at the issues from that era now, the figures, no matter who was drawing them or which artists they claimed as an influence, feel somewhere in the sweet spot between the clean clarity of John Romita, Sr. and the potent muscularity of John Buscema. The foundational works from … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. by Jim Steranko
Coffee for Two 