Pop Culture Petri Dish

Perfect records do not grow on trees, friends. Contrary to the carping of a lot of wags, you can still find the sugar rush of a perfect three-minute pop song with some frequency (if you know where to look), but a 100% perfect full-length album stands as a true rarity in this age of instant and empty musical calories. I'm not just talking about a disc that's chock-a-block with great songs. There are other significant X factors involved: it takes a clarity of purpose, a vibe of consistency to convert that collection of songs into a cohesive work of art. A lot of new music crossed these ears last year--good, bad, and indifferent--but I only heard one completely and utterly perfect release in all of 2005. That record was Coles Corner (out on Mute Records), the most recent release by Englishman Richard Hawley . Like a lot of perfect records, Coles Corner seems an unlikely candidate for such lofty praise, if only because it's so traditional on the surface. Sinatra-style balladr...

Mother Mary in bib overalls, it's been a long time since I've weighed in. I've been far from idle, but the most writeable thing to occur in the last four (yikes!) weeks will take me more time to relate than I have right now. So, what to blather about... The Final Chapter on the Hollywood Trip? Soon, I promise, but not tonight. How 'bout the Oscar results? Well, the missus smoked me in a five-person mini-Oscar pool--She came in first, and I came in third (I was, however, the only bloke in the mini-pool to accurately predict the 7-10 split on Director and Actor trophies). No, I still haven't seen any of the Best Picture nominees. Hey! Why don't we kibbitz about a crappy Italian horror movie? BINGO! To extend the 'selling the sizzle not the steak' metaphor, Media Blasters/Shock Show's two disc DVD of Joe D'Amato's infamous 1980 shocker Anthropophagus immerses a pretty unremarkable piece of gristle-laden meat in an incredibly nifty, flavorful, e...

If you haven't read the last entry already, you might wanna do so, just to get caught up. Done? Good. Some of the best stories came from some of the most unexpected sources. Bug-eyed character fixture Don Calfa contributed engaging bits in everything from Scorsese's New York, New York to the eighties comedy, Weekend at Bernie's . But he enthused most amusingly about the role that's insured him eternal horror movie cultdom, Ernie the Mortician in Dan O' Bannon's zombie spoof, Return of the Living Dead . A real salt-of-the-earth New York guy, Calfa genially chatted about what a tyrant O'Bannon was (though Calfa himself enjoyed a good working relationship with the volatile writer/director), and the folicular decline of good friend and fellow character actor Frank Sivero. Boyish-looking Kenny Miller enjoyed a career that spanned fifty years, and shoulder-rubbing with some real giants. In typical six-degrees-of-horror-movie-separation fashion, I only knew Mil...

This last weekend (January 27 and 28, to be exact) marked my fifth trip to the LA/Hollywood area in the last three years. Dismiss the area all you want, seen-it-alls; call it an aesthetically unexceptional 'burg planted squatly into a smoggy, dry, sun-crisped semi-desert. Call it nothing more than a dirty, ugly little industrial town. All of the above could effectively be argued, but I could give a spit less. Hollywood's still utter magic to these unjaded movie-geek eyes. The big draw for Rita and I was yet another Hollywood Collectors' Show . Since I covered my February 2005 Collectors' Show adventures in an earlier Blog , I'll spare you the exposition and leap straight into the highlights, which are as strange as they are abundant. Tinseltown is one gloriously weird place; it socks away surrealism like a squirrel socks away nuts. For one thing, Barry White greeted us as we boarded the Avis shuttle to get to our rental vehicle. OK, maybe it wasn't really Barry ...

I'm a traitor to my gender. Or at least a traitor to my hometown, maybe. The beleaguered Seattle Seahawks have finally fought their way to the Super Bowl after nearly four decades of mediocre showings, and all of a sudden, even locals who don't know pigskin from pomegranates are dancing in the streets like Pee Wee Herman on crystal meth. Me, I don't really care. Mind you, I hold no ill will whatsoever for the legions of fans who'll be crowding living rooms and sports bars to watch the big game. Nor do I wish anything less than the best for this buncha Northwest gridiron underdogs as they slug it out with the Pittsburg Steelers on Sunday. And my dear old Dad--a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool sports freak if ever there was one--will have even more of an excuse to meld gleefully with the easy chair Howard-Hughes-style while radio and TV Bowl coverage bombards him, which makes me happy for him. But truth be told, I'm just not a football fan. As a spectator sport it lacks s...

Halfway through the first listen of the first track, you'll be hooked. I was. The stuttering rhythm guitar and walloping drums that start the song don't promise anything particularly earthshaking, but then come the opening guitar chords, clean and direct, with just the right amount of swagger. In about twelve seconds, singer Julian Casablancas starts crooning and declaiming in an arch yet affecting style, punctuating the verses with 'oh, oh's' like a goofily-happy Lou Reed. Then the guitar gets loud and boisterous, and the joyous infectiousness of the song has utterly seeped in. It's three minutes and nine seconds of pop perfection. The song is "You Only Live Once," the opening track on First Impressions of Earth , the third CD by New York post-punk darlings, The Strokes. The tune's marriage of indie-rock idiosyncracy and arena-ready boldness couldn't be more perfect, and the instant the track finishes, you'll want to listen to it again. It...

Rats rule. And don't let anyone on earth or in heaven tell you otherwise. Separately and together, Rita and I have had pet rats for eighteen years, and they're all-around great pets. When it comes to small animals, parents of smart kids would do well to adopt a pet rat. Too many parents try to fob off a gerbil or hamster onto a child, not comprehending the extremely aggressive and stupid temperament of both. Rats, on the other hand, display smarts, resourcefulness, affection, and sweet-naturedness that put most people to shame. Much of the time, when you see a mouse doing intelligent, resourceful things in a fiction film, you're actually watching a baby rat do it. They're sharp as tacks, those little guys. I speak from a great many years of experience. Western culture has always feared and maligned the rat, mainly because of the rodent PR nightmare that was the Bubonic Plague. But the Chinese viewed these misunderstood creatures with high regard (the rat occupies the fi...