Cultural Consumption: 6/6/21 Some highlights of my pop culture diet during the week of 5/30-6/5/21. Music: I spent some time this week with a couple of new releases I’d been looking forward to — first, Del Amitri’s Fatal Mistakes, which marks the Amitri mantle’s return to active
Cultural Consumption: 5/23/21 Some highlights of my pop culture diet during the week of 5/16-5/22/21. Music: This was kind of an unfocused listening week for the most part — I spent the early part of it digging into old soul and R&B records recommended by three of my
Cultural Consumption: 5/16/21 Some highlights of my pop culture diet for the week of 5/9-5/15/21. Music: I’ve been picking my way through the list of artists profiled in the recent New York Times piece about the diversification of solo guitar players, and Yasmin Williams’ Urban Driftwood album is
Music Old Interview: Danny Seraphine, October 21, 1994 I tracked Danny down at a company called Street Sense, Inc. …didn’t know his relationship to or with the company, just knew that he could be reached there…figured maybe it was a management company, so I called and said “I’m calling to talk to someone about Danny
Cultural Consumption: 5/9/21 Scribbling down some highlights of my pop culture diet for the week of 5/2-5/8/21. Music: I spent a couple of days prepping for Friday’s FM to MTV podcast recording by listening to the Wham! catalog for the first time. I’d lived through the hits,
reviews Cobra Pumps I had my first broadband line installed in 1999, just in time to surf the wild mp3 frontier in the heady months before the law stepped in and started cutting filesharing services off at their grubby knees. Napster — and later, to a greater extent for me personally, Audiogalaxy — opened the
reviews Old Is New In the 1996 film Big Night, Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub play brothers who own a slowly failing Italian restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. It’s a premise ripe with comedy, and Tucci — who co-wrote and co-directed — takes frequent advantage of those possibilities, playing up the dynamic between
Strings, cont'd Like a lot of sad, melodramatic kids, I spent large portions of my youth clinging to music as a lifeline. And almost as quickly as the stuff burrowed its way into my being, I wanted to beam it back out: As far back as third or fourth grade, I can
Max Headroom Reboot Nostalgia gets kind of a bad rap these days — and understandably so, given that it seems to be in the process of swallowing our pop culture and political discourse. But I’m of the opinion that you don’t get to the other side of 40 without coming to appreciate
