Pop Culture Petri Dish

My wife let slip that she doesn't always groove on me writing about music, so I know of at least one reader who might want to sit this one out. You see, Adam Franklin's in Seattle tonight at the Crocodile Cafe (he also does a free in-store appearance at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard), and I'm as happy as a little girl with a shiny new Easy Bake Oven over this news. Unsung Rock History Lesson of the Day: In 1995 Creation Records , Britain's biggest buzz-band-harvester of a music label was busy wiping the bums of Brit brats Oasis with a wheelbarrow-full of advertising, promotion, and royalty dollars. As a result, Creation tapped out their coffers so badly that they treated a lot of other records they released around that time like the proverbial ugly stepkids in the basement. One of those albums was Ejector Seat Reservation , the third album by a scruffy quartet named Swervedriver . Swervedriver arose in the wake of that UK music genre known as the Shoegazer scene, which...

A friend of mine 'tagged' me with an Electronic Chain Letter Exhortation to relate eight things about myself, and then pass this mofo along to eight more Bloggers. Screw the eight bloggers part: the only Bloggers I know well enough to inflict this crap number fewer than eight. But I'm a good prole and will bend to the whims of peer pressure like any arrested adolescent worth his salt. Besides, I know that if I don't respond at all then The Chain Letter Curse is visited 'pon me. Plus there's a Scooby Doo reference here, which ties in (however tenuously) to the Pop Culture leanings of this Blog. So here goes. Apologies to my fellow Bloggers/Webmasters/Friends, but tag...You're IT!! (More Than) Eight Things about Me --For I, too am a contrarian, Kipling West... 1) I'm pretty disorganized, except for how I eat dinner. Side dish, vegetable, main course. Consumed in the most regimented pattern possible. Don't ask me how this started. 2) Been with the sam...

Think old black and white movies can't speak cold hard truths that still register today? Then take a look at The Heiress , director William Wyler's 1949 tragic costume drama (out recently on DVD). Beneath its genteel nineteenth-century surface beats the most bracingly caustic--and brutally honest--of hearts. The story proper follows the path of Catherine Sloper (Olivia DeHavilland), a plain and unexceptional young woman whose father Austin (Ralph Richardson) happens to be a wealthy physician. One night Catherine is pulled away from her routine of needlepoint and isolation to attend a lavish society party, and the drab heiress makes the acquaintance of dashing ne'er do well Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift). Soon Morris is courting her fervently, a pursuit that inspires suspicion in her father even as it brings Catherine out of her shell. If all of this sounds like the preamble to a typical period weeper, rest assured that it ain't. Wyler--one of the studio era's le...