I first wrote about the Alice books here in early 2010.
While it was clear that they and discussion around them were things I loved, I’d not
yet begun this series of posts — although Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice work got referenced in the debut installment later that year. So inducting them officially into my roster of 55 Favorites (and counting) didn’t feel necessary until a few recent events persuaded me.
The above pic came to light as I was going through some cloud photos. I had wanted
to provide a look at my Alice items on the shelf, unpacked from the boxes they’d been in; however, I’d rearranged and decided the best place for them was on a vintage dresser topped with a mirror — if you get it, you get it — and pieces set to hold small lamps but also good for teacups. Since the items have been sitting piled on that dresser with other stuff mixed in for too long now, I’m sharing the older incarnation despite having added to my modest collection and sadly not being able to revert the photo to the wider shot I must have taken back then.
The record that won its namesake 2001’s Grammy for Best New Artist, I Am Shelby Lynne wasn’t actually her first album but her sixth.
I’ve mentioned before on the blog — 15 years ago, granted — how much I loved Shazam!, Filmation’s live-action series based on the original Captain Marvel that aired Saturday mornings on CBS in the mid ’70s.
Not very long ago it was incorporated into a dream of mine. An immortal Elder from the show appeared to me but (a) he looked more like Batman foe Maxie Zeus as drawn by the great Don Newton than Zeus himself or any of the other legendary figures making up the acronym that is Billy Batson’s magic word — yet still in the style used to illustrate those figures in the ethereal vision sequences in which they appeared, unmoving — and (2) he freaked me out by lifting his arms up instead of remaining static. I think he was giving me a mission that had something to do with cats.
Unlike most dreams, I could trace the components of this one quite clearly to stuff
from my waking life. It came as Matt Re’s look at the stretch of Batman and Detective Comics written by Gerry Conway, which ran throughout 2024 on his blog Not a Hoax! Not a Dream!, was drawing to a close; a fair number of those stories were penciled by Newton. And more germanely to the post I’m writing now, I’d begun playing the intro to Shazam! in an act of self-soothing on an almost daily basis to center myself before getting down to this or that task amidst my latest health crises and the general insanity of life.
Despite what I said at the end of my last Favorites post, I’ve opted to swap in another topic for the sake of a trilogy.
The Rule of Three is a powerful lure. And while the general, you know, oomph — sorry ’bout the technical language — of the previous two entries in this series could hardly be more different, they still both involve songs. I’m closing out the unorthodox triad with a brief ode to Firefall’s classic 1976 earworm, “You Are the Woman”.
Now, I love it chiefly because it’s just a killer little pop tune, but its construction fascinates me.
A friend and I mark the second week in October, during which our respective birthdays fall, by sending each other videos.
We’ll throw fresh material into the mix but it’s mostly old reliables. I’ve shared a
few on the blog in years past; the one that hilariously interprets lyrics to Joe Cocker’s performance of “With a Little Help from My Friends” at Woodstock [4:06] — a.k.a., to us, “I Did Some Wonder Loaf (Hoggify)” — I rather inexplicably have not ere now and it is among my favorite things. While the video’s been around so long that its original link/uploader is lost to the mists of time, I’m pretty sure the mysterious Dan’s name has always popped up at the end.
I’ve had Don McLean’s “American Pie” on the list of things to include in this
series from the start.
Once upon a time, I figured that when I did finally write about the song it would be
in large part to annotate or explicate it. That was before. It was before cyberspace got quite so full; before I realized that with age the mystery and myriad possible interpretations of the lyrics grew more interesting to me than any definitive answers; before McLean slowly began to break his silence on the subject, most recently and distinctly in a documentary that premiered on the Paramount+ service last month called The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie”.
Welcome to one among thousands of posts about David Letterman’s last day in
late night.
I had a typically punnish title ready to go before realizing that the survey of my
favorite things begun here for my 40th birthday hadn’t been updated in over a year.
A click on Dave’s name in the labels below will show that his brand of television, unsurprisingly, merits the designation.
Lake Street Dive is my latest jam. I’ve had their whole discography on repeat in anticipation of today’s release of their new album, Bad Self-Portraits.
The band, whose members met at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, consists of Rachael Price (lead vocals), Mike “McDuck” Olson (guitar, trumpet, backing vocals), Bridget Kearney (acoustic bass, backing vocals), and Mike Calabrese (drums, backing vocals).
This post is currently down for maintenance.
42 Favorites: #1-3 ... #11 | #12 | #13 ... The Page
Until my post on The Iron Giant, this here fits-’n’-starts 40 41 42 Favorites series
had run in alphanumeric order — from 1980s superhero-team comics to Airplane! on through crossword puzzles. I’ll probably keep with that order for the most part, but occasionally circumstances will suggest breaking it. Now, for instance, is a great time
to talk about seeing movies in a theater.
While year’s end is a period of reflection in general, certain aspects of life (school)
and pop culture in particular (the TV season, traditionally) don’t fit neatly with the Gregorian calendar. Movies do, partly insofar as — not being a largely serial medium like television is — the end of a Year in Film could fall anywhere. It’s easy enough to make a list of the best movies or books or music releases in the 365 days prior to Date X. But it also works out nicely that we get a volley of would-be blockbusters in the spring and summer months, when days are long and the air-conditioned multiplex beckons, followed by a smaller batch of commercial tentpoles amidst more serious, more intimate fare in the wintertime, as packed theaters offer a respite from the dreariness and cold. In truth many of the Oscar hopefuls don’t even hit the majority of markets until late December at the earliest, bridging one year to the next, and this season will be no different unless the folks misinterpreting the Mayan Long Count calendar turn out to be onto something.
There’s nothing like settling into an auditorium with stadium seating as one swatch
in a patchwork quilt made up of various bunches of a couple or a dozen friends. If libraries and bookstores and parks are where we sometimes go to be alone together, movie theaters are where we go to be together together — not that I’ll knock anyone taking in a picture stag, which I’ve certainly been known to do myself. As much fun as the multiplex can be, however, especially during a raucous comedy or action-packed thriller or superhero bonanza, I love small art-house screening rooms at least equally well. I’m lucky enough to have an excellent local one, The Bryn Mawr Film Institute, gearing up for a serious remodeling that will result in more rooms with better dimensions since the current setup of a pair of side-by-side, way-deeper-than-they-are-wide theaters is a holdover of the days when grand old movie palaces sadly got split in two or three lengthwise. I sit in BMFI’s creaky, aged chairs to watch a foreign movie or American indie gem and feel like a devoted scholar, which is a bit funny because my film classes in college were in a small, fairly state-of-the art screening room in the
main library.
DVDs and streaming services and On Demand have their place, to be sure. Godard knows that I can’t get to everything I’d rather see on the big screen, never mind catching up on classics or taking in special features. Yet theaters are one of the few places where we engage in communal, secular devotion. Potential distractions abound in this modern age — in recent months I’ve endured cell phones, snoring, and kids who should not be at a movie like this — but so far I’m still willing to brave a bum experience in the name of attending cinematic mass. It’s hard to beat the strange frisson of suddenly becoming aware that you’re in an ocean of people equally enraptured by the magic unspooling on the canvas before you.
Agree or disagree?
42 Favorites: #1-3 ... #10 | #11 | #12 ... The Page
Related: Curls on Film • Knives, Chow • Here Am I Sitting in a Tin Can, Far
Above the World • Invasion of the Body Switchers • Ghosts in the Machine
As I mentioned in my last post, The Iron Giant is one of my favorite things.
For my 40th birthday, I jotted down a list of some of my favorite things to prompt a series of occasional posts. My aim was to periodically knock out brief entries that cover a variety of subjects, as I’d been retreating from new content due to frustration with the constant gremlins.
That was two years ago. I had to switch the title from 40 Favorites to 41 Favorites in 2011 and I’ve only added three installments since then — including this one. Sunday,
I’ll need to renumber the series again.
Anyhoo; I’d prefer to talk about...
7. coffee
Oh, I loves me the coffee.
To many folks it’s merely a delivery system for a vital dose of caffeine, and I’m not above using it that way myself. While caffeine is a vasoconstrictor that’s often helpful in alleviating migraines, however, I’m among the minority for whom it’s a soporific rather than a stimulant; I could very well get a brief jolt from it neurologically, were you to look at a brain scan, but I’ll begin to get sleepy from a cup of strong coffee in short order. (I’ve gone off of caffeine entirely in the name of eliminating potential rebound or caffeine-withdrawal headaches from the picture, twice, and the tradeoff was not worth it. Migraines still abound. It’s way better to have caffeine in the arsenal even though going too long without caffeine after regular caffeine intake will probably trigger a headache.)
DC covers by Nick Cardy have long been among my favorite things.
I didn’t always know him by name.
The look at some of my favorite things begun here last year upon my 40th birthday is finally continuing. Now it’s 41 Favorites, since I took over a year off after my last entry — but the number will likely change again.
Fifth on the list spitballed last October is the music of Edie Brickell.
Still from The Big Sleep © 1946 Warner Bros. Pictures.
Raymond Chandler. William Faulkner. Leigh Brackett. Max Steiner. Howard Hawks. Lauren Bacall. Humphrey Bogart.
Some films with such a pedigree end up as perceived if not actual failures. On The
Big Sleep, released by Warner Bros. in 1946, everything went right — at least judging by the end result, never mind this oft-circulated anecdote:
For my 40th birthday I thought I’d share a few musings on favorite things.
Not wanting to get mired in a swampland of categories or graphics nor too much internal debate, I settled on a casual catch-all catalog of whatever popped into my head. The items have been jotted down and put in rough order; now they’re being written up in varying levels of detail as time permits.
Of course such “things” as my nieces and nephews are indescribably precious to me,
but while I share the occasional story about them here I wanted to keep these posts focused on pop-cultural diversions.
