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  • Deep Cuts: Top Ten Songs from Nic Cage Movies

     Nicolas Cage’s career is a beautiful car wreck.  It started off fast and wild, careening from weird to weirder.  No matter how bad some of those early movies were he was always so brilliant that it didn’t matter.  Part of the fun was waiting for him to drive into the ditch. In a lot of…

  • On My Turntable: A Different Kind Of Truth

     I picked up Van Halen’s latest album, their reunion with front man David Lee Roth, for the same reasons that I Facebook friended the hot girl from my high school.  I hoped that she was still pretty, but on some level I welcomed a horrible train wreck.  Twenty-seven years is plenty of time to get…

  • 64. I Started Drifting To A Different Place

    Valley Girl opened the same weekend as The Hunger.  I didn’t have any interest in seeing it.  As far as I was concerned the film makers were morally destitute thieves who ripped off Frank Zappa, which was an even worse crime than Zappa making a hit record with his daughter.

  • Help Stripmall Architecture, Score Some Cool Stuff

    Stripmall Architecture is working on a new album, Lowbrow in the Evening, and they’re opening up the vaults and cupboards to make you a part of it. This is a truly great band: atmospheric, moody, melodic, and Rebecca Coseboom has an amazing voice that’s both powerful and fragile as glass.  It’s really a wonder.  They’re…

  • From the Stacks: Mr. T’s Commandment

    Don’t be a fool.  You can trust me. I have a mohawk and twenty pounds of gold chains.  My tube socks don’t match.  Stay in school, don’t do drugs.  Now get in my van and help me find my puppy, sucka.

  • 63. The Alton Ellis Incident

    Misfits come in all shapes and sizes, at least Alton Ellis did.  He was 6’4″ easy, though his clothes were 5’8″.  He had a huge pimply nose in the middle of a huge pimply face with thick nightcrawler lips and tiny little eyes.  Framing this lovely portrait was a bail of unruly weathered hay, yellow,…

  • Don Cornelius: 1936-2012

    Don Cornelius, creator and host of Soul Train, appears to have killed himself at age 75.  Gunshot to the head, ugly way to go.  I’ll be interested to learn over the next few weeks whether he was terminally ill or what the deal was there.  I hope it wasn’t depression. I wonder if he knew…

  • From the Stacks: The Leaning Tower Of Bowie

    …or an obsession viewed in the sunlight.

  • 62. Turn and Face the Strange

    David Bowie ended the 1970s in April 1983 — drove a stake through their Angel Flight hearts like some sort of dance friendly Van Helsing.  Let’s Dance wasn’t Bowie’s first album in the decade —  that honor belongs to 1980’s brilliant Scary Monsters — but it was his first album of the decade.  Suntanned, perfect…

  • Deep Cuts: Queen’s Dragon Attack

    The intergooglewebtubes tell me that this is the Chinese Year of the Dragon.  I have no idea what that means, but it sounds a lot more fun than Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve Featuring Ryan Seacrest. White people holidays are so boring. I’m going to have to send you elsewhere for Year of the…