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…
Before Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, and Ryan Reynolds, there was Ryan O’Neal. Like the first four actors mentioned in the previous sentence, O’Neal was aided in his early…
During my sophomore year of high school in 1989-’90, the district implemented a new policy they dubbed Sustained Silent Reading, or SSR for short. The idea was that kids weren’t…
When people talk about action movies, they tend to focus on the form the genre hardened into after the mid-to-late ’80s — pictures about big, steely-eyed heroes whose generally ruthless…
My mind wanders. There’s nothing original about this, I know. Everyone daydreams. For years, my livelihood has depended on people seeking distractions, from the benign to the edifying. On the…
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…
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,…
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…
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.…
Context is a crucial — and, as far as I’m concerned, underappreciated — component of the way we experience art. There’s a long list of books, records, and films I…
During one evening of my willfully misspent youth, my parents sat me down for a screening of Cool Hand Luke, hoping to show me what happens to smart-assed malcontents who…
Thanks to No Depression‘s year-end roundup, I spent the day acquainting myself with Aaron Lee Tasjan’s Silver Tears — a fine set of songs I’m just now hearing even though…