Spoilers for a half-dozen Coen brothers films. A couple newsletters ago, when I was discussing movie titles, I mentioned Fargo, and I'll take any free-associative excuse to think more about Fargo. I had somehow not realized until now that in their first seven movies (their 80s
When I was a kid, my grandmother had a vacation home in Bear Valley, in Northern California. I would have thought Bear Valley was a town, but I'm now reading it is a "census-designated place." If Bear Valley is known at all, it's
A review and some thoughts on dinosaurs and the Saw series as sports movies
Chipwrecked At The End Of All Things
A few months ago, at the great Partners and Son here in Philly, I saw a solicitation flyer for a comic called Laser Quest, by an artist named Harry Nordlinger. I don’t have a copy of that flyer, but it was, if I remember correctly, a small black and
I remember the first time I tried soda, which feels like a memory you'd only have access to if you were alive when soda was invented or you were raised in a cult that disavowed syrup, like that memory would also have to find you at 18-years-
Last week, my partner and I watched the first half of Black Hawk Down. Not a good movie. I think you could save Black Hawk Down as a film, though, if at the end, when all the post-script text is telling you how these soldiers ended up, they told
In 2009, you had to work to hear Andrew W.K. He'd started underground, in the world of Michigan noise, blown up in 2001 as a New York-based rock intensity machine and then, following the 2003 release of his second full-length LP, he scattered. Andrew'
My parents got my son a kids' tablet last Christmas. Jasper was 3-years-old when he opened it up, meaning he can currently remember a time before he had the tablet, but one day soon it'll feel like something that was always in his life. We
I'm going to go in a lot of directions here. I'm not saying that like "Buckle up, buttercup, here comes a thought tidal wave," I'm saying it to apologize for intending to write one cohesive essay and winding up with four rougher
I watched The Drifters play a show in my high school gym. Wait, that sounds too impressive. I watched a splinter of a splinter of The Drifters perform one-and-a-half songs in my high school gym and then all the students left to go eat lunch. I went
I've been reading two Batman books side-by-side, thinking about their respective dystopias. The series are vaguely connected even beyond their lead character because one of them is Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight, a comic most other Batmans and many