Alfred Soto's blog about arts and politics.
If readers in 1990 lived in a small town or in a small town like Miami posing as a city, the B. Daltons and Waldenbooks at the local mail saved your life. Dadeland and International malls carried three books of rock criticism: Christgau’s Record Guide: The 1980s; The Trouser Press Record Guide, edited by Ira […]
Every time I post a rundown of hits from the sixties I have to say, Goddamn it and restrain my nostalgia, but, really, any chart with Mother Popcorn and I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) and Is That All There Is will draw attention. Immune to Simon and Garfunkel, I placed Scarborough Fair [ ]
Had my screening of The End of Oak Street taken place at night instead of 9 a.m., I hope the audience would ve applauded loudly when Ewan McGregor turns into an amuse bouche for an Allosaurus. The latest film by David Robert Mitchell, director of the excellent It Follows and the unseen by me Under the [ ]
Because aging potbellied men ran the music biz and constituted part of the audience during the High LBJ Era, The Men in My Little Girl s Life exists. It so happens that I was watching The Apartment with dinner a few minutes ago and Mike Douglas attitude towards women was Fred MacMurray and his four dwarves. [ ]
By necessity incomplete, this list of old, new, and new-ish favorites treat adolescence as a hinterland whose borders recklessly separate childhood and adulthood when, really, to some degree we should ve held on to medieval notions about children as young or little adults. Maybe I knew I was queer by adoring Judy Blume and especially Louise [ ]
Jill Mapes, formerly of Pitchfork and whom I know from Pop Conference, wrote an elegy for Brooklyn Vegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine that doubles as an elegy to an ideal: the full-time music journalist. The way I read it her essay comes across as a mea culpa for failing to consider the utility of [ ]
The preferred method of long distance travel for Americans and the cheapest until deregulation lowered airplane fares in the 1980s, trains dominated pop songs well into the 1990s when for example Soul Asylum earned an unexpected top five with Runaway Train. Elvis scored the first and best hit: a missive from a country within a [ ]
Listening to what is to my ears Public Enemy s most powerful album, I thought about good songs in which states figure. Ray Charles sets the standard: Georgia as state of mind, like Wallace Stevens jar in Tennessee. Many of these tunes are classic in themselves. Which states dominate the imagination? California, whose temperate climes serve [ ]
Interesting! Democrat Elijah Manley, a gay, Black and Jewish Gen Zer, faces two veteran U.S. representatives in a high-profile Democratic primary. Shevrin Jones, Florida’s first out gay state senator, and Kendrick Meek Jr., an out politician whose father and grandmother both represented South Florida in Congress, face each other in a heated Democratic primary. Self-described [ ]
Pop music would not exist without capitalism: the business of recording and distribution, the means of production, the media in which the art gets to the people. When non-critics complain about the Death of the Album, I remind them that the sainted album relied on products (ahem vinyl) and things like radio and stores to [ ]
Although I haven t seen a flood of appraisals, I ve read or heard enough praise for the late writer-director Nora Ephron s comedies from younger film writers and film podcasters for me to reexamine my prejudices. A spring watch of When Harry Met Sally occasioned by the death of Rob Reiner delighted me: a fizzy and still [ ]