I look forward to reading the rest of Steve Hyden’s six-part(!) series about his experience being a life-long R.E.M. fan over at the av club for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of the first installment’s uncanny ruminations about the experience of being “a fan” in the way that only a certain type of […]

I truly was intending to keep making these record reviews a regular thing, though I can’t seem to manage it lately – it’s not that I’m not listening to music, it’s that I’ve not been bothering to write down my thoughts on a lot of the CDs I’m listening to. As I said, I’d keep […]

Just trying to wake up about now. Maybe this music will help. “Texas Lady” – Les Paul & Mary Ford “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (live) – The Hooters “A Million Miles Away” – The Plimsouls “European Swallow” – The Refreshments “The Human Hosepipe” – Harry and the Potters “Three Little Pigs” – Green […]

Because I’m here, and on the computer anyway, I’m doing a random ten, because it’s been four months. I guess I should call it the “quarterly random ten”. Not a bad mix; a couple of nostalgic old favorites, and one new favorite (which is a cover of an old favorite). See if you can guess […]

As I’m an early middle-age white male hipster contrarian type, I mostly ignored Whitney Houston past the initial wave of pop stardom (though “How Will I Know” and all that were pretty popular tunes when I was a ten year old). I saw “The Bodyguard” of course, and spent most of my time cringing at […]

It’s been a while since I touched this particular feature. I don’t know why. Maybe I just needed a break. Or, it could be that I took my big box of discs out of the car a month or so ago, and haven’t gotten around to putting it back. There are, however, still discs in […]

For no particular reason, I provide here a link to the American Top 40 pop charts from the week I was born. All told, there’s not a lot of quality there, especially #1, which straddles the line between hokey and oddly creepy pretty well (though I suspect there were at least a few jokes cracked […]

Apologies up front for the almost-certain crap quality of this post; I woke up this morning feeling, shall we say, pretty awful, and that will probably color just about everything I produce throughout the day, at least. So, sorry. Still, stuff and adventures and things happened this weekend, so I feel I ought to chronicle […]

Presented forthwith are several short notices of a personal nature. Feel free to enjoy: – Thanks to the kind reminders from my amazing convention friends via the various social networking services, my head’s kind of been in con space all week. As it stands, there are only 36 hours or so until I arrive at […]

Here’s another thing that exists, the new single from Van Halen (featuring David Lee Roth), “Tattoo”: My reaction? Meh. Yeah, Dave’s back, and that’s kinda cool, though I was always kind of agnostic regarding the one true front man – all three brought something interesting to the table, even Gary Cherone, who I’ve always felt […]