Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the producer extraordinaire behind such classics as Remain In Light, The Joshua Tree, and Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, but the avant garde,…
Over a decade before the Coen Brothers released their neo-noir, blood-soaked vision of Americana, Blood Simple, Terrence Malick’s Badlands etched into the public consciousness a particularly languid flavor of Midwestern cruelty. Loosely based on the true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate’s…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
Waylon Jennings may not have invented outlaw country, but with Honky Tonk Heroes he gave the movement its clearest distillation of purpose; its manifesto, its aesthetic framework, even its narrative vocabulary. Naturally, for a movement so rooted in myth-making, there’s an important backstory. Jennings, along with his pal…
Our monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of ‘country’ to incorporate all the permutations that the genre has opened itself up to, especially in recent years. We…
Jean Luc-Godard’s career came to an end in 1967, with Weekend — only for it to rise again out of the ashes, and for the filmmaker to summarily dismiss everything he’d made before. The violent and vehement events of May 1968 marked a return to…
Fairly or not, Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records has long been saddled with a reputation for producing airy and cavernous Euro-jazz, best exemplified by Keith Jarrett’s mid-70s solo piano excursions and the Scandinavian folk / Gregorian chant mashups of tenor/soprano saxist Jan Garbarek. Certainly one…
#8: Kentucky Crapwagon: The Horror Cinema of William Girdler Download episode here. Episode Description: This month, Steve & I, the Click and Clack of DIY movie podcasts, get festive with a Halloween-themed episode dedicated to the horror films of William Girdler. Girdler is the director of such…
#6: O Captain, Not My Captain: Cinema’s Anti-American Captain Americas Download episode here. Episode Description: What’s on tap for this month? Anti-Americanism! Or at least a version therein, as Simon & Steve discover that an iconic superhero on the page has invariably seemed a lot less iconic when…
