Screenings #39

Here’s October’s haul, with links.

Gimme all your jazz: Ranking Psychedelic Furs albums

Until “Heartbreak Beat” skirted the edges of the American top thirty, Psychedelic Furs thrived in the limbo state between just beyond college radio cult status and the wider mainstream embrace of The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode, etc. “I never understood why Psychedelic Furs didn’t sell more records,” AllMusic quotes Paul Weller saying once. The heaps

The state with the prettiest name: October update

“We’ve lost our self-respect,” said the woman to the Publix cashier on Sunday in Cuban Spanish. “Sooner rather than later we’re going to deal with socialism.” Who “we” was is unclear: Floridians? Cubans? Americans? All of them, like as not. The robust paranoia of the Cuban exile mind specializes in the collapsing of referents. 

More unfavorite things

1. American cheese 2. Bon Jovi 3. Halloween 4. Outrage over political hypocrisy 5. Coke Zero 6. Four-door pickup trucks 7. Fifteen items in an express lane 8. Both Sides Do It 9. “Adult drinks” 10. Trailers and previews

Ranking the five best New Pornographers albums

I wonder if A.C. Newman does any ghost writing for acts in need: a middle eight here, a place for a harmony there. Certainly he’d make an ace producer for hire. The band for which he writes most of its songs has recorded more than their share of good albums, but I won’t listen to

…and more favorite things…

For the next eight days I’ll need these, preferably as transfusions. 1. Get Up With It 2. Key lime pie 3. Passion tea 4. Mistolin All Purpose Cleaner 5. Twang guitar 6. Every Penelope Fitzgerald novel except The Blue Flower 7. Thick Spanish wines 8. Karaoke 9. William Powell 10. Cashews

Brazil — what happened?

Four days ago Caetano Veloso, who knows about imprisonment and repressive regimes, nailed what he sensed might happen in Brazil tonight: Many artists, musicians, filmmakers and thinkers saw themselves in an environment where reactionary ideologues, who — through books, websites and news articles — have been denigrating any attempt to overcome inequality by linking socially

Ranking Eurythmics albums

The most popular of the eighties synth pop duos — a global operation at their 1985-1986 peak — Eurythmics get condescending press in England, which hasn’t forgiven them for the Tourists and David A. Stewart’s gauche American crossover moves. Yet it’s impossible to weave a narrative about that decade without accounting for the degree to

Singles 10/26

At last. Those of us who feared Jessie Ware had embraced the blandishments of adult contemporary have “Overtime” to comfort us. An estimable singer of mid tempo material, Ware is on fire when she gets dance material. One of this quarter’s best songs. In other news: yes, you read that Thug-Elton credit right. Click on

‘I should burn in hell and I was a deformity’

Decapitated Barbie dolls, dirty laundry, and a van whose interior smelled like thirteen rotting possums. And Sayoc, the Trumpist nut, was an asshole homophobe too. His former boss at a Fort Lauderdale pizza restaurant said Sayoc, who worked there as a delivery driver during the graveyard shift, would openly mock her for her sexuality and

Ranking Talk Talk albums

Acts I like (Jenny Hval, Amen Dunes), and acts I don’t (Panda Bear, Shearwater, Radiohead) have spent albums pilfering the aural and compositional experiments of Talk Talk’s later work, but they miss the goofball let’s-try-anything-once attitude of their early work; Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock aren’t the breaks you think.

My unfavorite things

Because my impatience is bottomless. 1. Eminem after 2001 2. Quentin Tarantino 3. Piña coladas 4. Vaping 5. Thump-thump remixes at gay clubs and bars 6. Papa John’s 7. Bumper stickers 8. Baggy jeans after 2011 9. “I’m a people person” 10. Biographical criticism