Spectrum Check
I had a busy week at Spectrum Culture, in large part because it was my turn to contribute to the Revisit series on the music side. While my previous efforts were focused on different releases that did require me to give them fresh spins to reacquaint myself with their pleasures (and think about them in a context that now included significantly more hindsight), this time I decided to write about an album that I know extremely well. I’m also quite happy that my observations about the overly self-assured dismissive attitudes about differing opinions among the fans of the band in … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One for Friday: The Amazing Pickles, “I Like Ice Cream”
Thanks to the wonders of the world wide web, I have a more eclectic music collection than I ever could have imagined, and diversity among my music was always a goal. I still have my clear particular favorite sounds and certain genres have only slight representation, but I have stuff in my iTunes that still sort of boggles my mind whenever it shuffles up. For example, thanks to a generous soul who used to employ fair use of his possessions to share some music on a regular basis, I have a copy of a 1969 single by a band called … Continue reading One for Friday: The Amazing Pickles, “I Like Ice Cream”
Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Seventeen
#17 — The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) When I first watched The Last Detail, some fifteen years ago, it was the first time that the reverential opinion usually afforded nineteen-seventies American cinema really began to fully make sense to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Seventeen
My Writers: John Steinbeck
Though I loved reading throughout my school years, and therefore happily gravitated to English courses and even majored in English in college (along with Communication, because I decided to double-down on degrees bereft of vocational utility), I generally had a … Continue reading My Writers: John Steinbeck
My Misspent Youth: Iron Man #150 by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Layton
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. When I started reading superhero comics, I immediately decided that the Fantastic Four was my favorite group of characters. Even though it took several issues of their before their chief adversary appeared, I immersed myself in the Fantastic Four’s fictional history with enough fervor that I flatly knew that the imposing monarch of Latveria, Victor von Doom, was such an integral part of the sprawling ongoing story that he was practically the … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Iron Man #150 by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Layton
Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eighteen
#18 — Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) First, a consideration of the pleasure and reward of a perfectly chosen line of dialogue. One of the most famed elements of Steven Spielberg’s sophomore feature film, Jaws, is the way that the technical … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eighteen
College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 6 and 5
6. Stereolab, Sound-Dust Stereolab was just starting to rattle college radio’s proverbial cage at about the time I secured my undergraduate degree, a task undertook in concerted foot-dragging fashion, I assure you. The album Mars Audiac Quintet was released about a year after I graduated, its lead single, “Ping Pong,” nicely mapping out the new path noncommercial radio stations might take now that their profit-driven counterparts further up the dial had fully and completely appropriated grunge rock. The music was poppy and light but also archly different, introducing oddity through the casualness of its mildly disenchanted deconstruction of traditional songcraft. … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 6 and 5
Spectrum Check
I was back to a fairly typical week for Spectrum Culture, beginning with a movie review. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much a movie. On the surface of it, the film is one of those desperately quirky efforts that is among the most painful material a modern fan of independent cinema is routinely saddled with. It’s even more of a mess than that. I also had a music review go up this week. The record I reviewed is a prime example of one that doesn’t necessary spring to mind when considering the best, most vital or most challenging music of the year, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One for Friday: Steve Wynn, “Carolyn”
To begin with an enormous understatement, it should be obvious by now that I harbor deep nostalgia for those songs that provided the soundtrack to my years in college radio, especially those that accompanied my time as an undergraduate student in central Wisconsin. There’s an added subset to consider: I reserve a special affection for the music that carried me through the bittersweet stretch of time in 1990 that I lovingly refer to a My Summer in Exile. It was the one summer during my years of higher education that I went back home to live instead of staying in … Continue reading One for Friday: Steve Wynn, “Carolyn”
Great Moments in Literature
“If you’d driven past our house on Wednesday night, noticed our lights burning, seen through the windows my mother in the kitchen cooking dinner, seen the neighbors’ lights on, my father fresh out of the shower, sitting on the front porch steps lacing on his shoes in the cool, humming twilight, the moon high and clear, cars moving beyond the park, his hair wet, smelling of Old Spice and talcum, rehearsing to Berner and me stories of what he’d seen on his ‘business trip’–the prairie like a great inland sea (‘like the Gulf of Mexico’), the northern lights, no mountains, … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
