One for Friday: Flesh for Lulu, “Time and Space”
Every band deserves one perfect song, a pop gem so glistening and lovable that all other transgressions against creative good taste can be forever forgiven. Flesh for Lulu had exactly that with “Postcards from Paradise,” a single off of their 1987 album, Long Live the New Flesh. The song is so good that any greatest hits album that includes that track and a random assemblage of eleven other of the band’s efforts is guaranteed to be a pretty damn good record. Of course, there’s a downside to that, too. Every other song, almost without exception, is going to sound fairly … Continue reading One for Friday: Flesh for Lulu, “Time and Space”
Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Nine
#29 — Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) Roman Holiday comfortably coheres to many of the patterns that have dictated Hollywood-crafted romantic comedies for about as long as the moving pictures started to talk. There’s the upstanding man’s man, who may … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Nine
Top 40 Smash Taps: “Like a Sunday in Salem”
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. Gene Cotton was a singer-songwriter who worked primarily in the nineteen-seventies, racking up a few moderately successful singles, four of which landed in the Billboard Top 40. Among that quartet was a 1978 duet with Kim Carnes on the song “You’re a Part of Me,” a track that stood as her first trip to the Billboard charts, two years before she made it … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Like a Sunday in Salem”
Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine
At some point, the meta magic of filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is going to wear so thin it can’t hold up a flimsy excuse for a movie concept, but the inevitable erosion hasn’t happened yet. Mere months after their astonishing and daring subversion of the corporate synergy movie model turned The Lego Movie into the most unlikely critical hit in ages (the film’s commercial success, while more impressive than expected, wasn’t exactly in doubt) they’ve returned with a sequel to 2012’s television show adaptation 21 Jump Street, itself a headlong dive into the rabbit hole of mocking self-awareness. … Continue reading Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine
Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty
#30 — Shane (George Stevens, 1953) No other film genre inspire hyperbolic statements about deconstructionist subversion like the western. That’s in part because the hefty log pile of westerns from the earliest decades of Hollywood are largely so staid and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty
College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 8
I got a call earlier today from my friend Sarah. Long-time listener, not a first time caller. She’s one of the few people I know who still makes radio broadcasting her profession, and she was nearing the end of her … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 8
From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk
This might be a good place to acknowledge that I was dead wrong in my presumptive assessment of The Babe as one of the more interesting movies of the spring of 1992. The Player is great (that’s the film I was really pining for). Unfortunately, it took long enough to get to our town that it arrived on the same weekend as Batman Returns, which played to full houses while Robert Altman’s masterful film sold a couple tickets per showing. I don’t have much to add about the two films reviewed. Even in the capsules here, it’s clear I didn’t … Continue reading From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk
One for Friday: The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”
I’ve long been under the impression that I’m not supposed to like The Sound of Music, the last album credited to the dB’s during their original run. (Reunions happen.) In the canon of cool, the first dB’s album justly holds an honored place with every subsequent effort a dissipating echo. Certainly declaring allegiance to one of the albums recorded after band co-founder and stellar pop songwriter Chris Stamey is highly suspect. And yet the record that has the strongest nostalgic pull for me is not the masterful Stands for Decibels. It is indeed that final album. It is The Sound … Continue reading One for Friday: The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”
The New Releases Shelf: Beauty & Ruin
This is one of those rare instances where the album cover says it all. There’s the kid. Bushy hair. Eyes cast down. Cigarette in place and drawn heavily upon. He looks like he’s moving forward, pressing against the world but … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Beauty & Ruin
Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One
#31 — The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) The Night of the Hunter is famously the only film directed by esteemed character actor Charles Laughton. I’ve also seen it cited more than once as the finest film ever directed by someone whose main gig was on the other side of the camera. It’s absolutely one of the most striking and distinctive such efforts, especially for its time. In adapting the bestselling novel by Davis Grubb, first published in 1953, Laughton and his collaborators made a grim, expressionistic work, one that veered away from the growing trend towards tenderized … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One
Coffee for Two 