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Film critic Sean T. Collins sat down and wrote about Road House (1989) every single day for a calendar year - essays, poems, lyrics, meditations, whatever came out when he sat down that day. I love projects that double as feats of endurance, where you see an artist’s creative energy ebb and flow on certain days, or trace their descent into madness from, say, Day 7 (“I have a lot of thoughts about Road House”) to Day 207 (“my God, my God, what else is there to possibly say about Road House”).
See Also: Worst Idea of All Time podcast, Time Trabble by Mikey Heller
Feb 3, 2024
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My friend Richard Turley turned me onto this book in April or so. I’ve been reading it in correlation to whatever the day is. I’m grounded enough in reality to know that next to This Legend, I’m a drop in the bucket. BUT— I am delusional enough to think that in diligently reading his diary, I am able to channel the spirit and the honor with which he lives and creates. My other main takeaways have been that he loves porn and big tits. (Nice.)
Dec 16, 2021
Hard to believe it's nearly twenty years old now.
Three things stand out for me, reading it again today. Took like 3 months of reporting, or so, to get it all done.
1) The Courtney Love vignette from the Shins' show at the Hollywood Bowl (it was all very Ab Fab and unintentionally hilarious). She is every bit the piece of work she was described to be.
2) James was living in a house in Portland, OR that Elliott Smith used to live in. We smoked pot in the basement and he showed me the washer/dryer that was basically where Elliott four-tracked the "Roman Candle" album.
3) He had a guitar hanging in his home studio that had "You'll be Dead" spray painted on it -- a line from Star Wars (I think his brother, an artist I worked with at Starbucks, did that). I used to have a photo of that but IDK what happened to it.
It was a fun era to be writing about rock music.
Apr 5, 2024
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"Short books about albums." Dancing about architecture in miniaturized form. My proposals have been rejected three times (the furthest along I got was for an AC/DC proposal, funny enough; so sue me, I think they're under-loved for all they've accomplished) but that doesn't mean that the series isn't uniformly excellent, whether the author in question is opining about the personal meaning of the album in question (the Decemberists' Colin Meloy waxing poetic about the Replacements' "Let It Be"), making up a story about an album (Mountain Goats' John Darnielle imagining a young psychiatric patient's pining for Black Sabbath's monstrous "Master of Reality"), or a more straightforward recitation of the story of any given LP (my friends Annie Zeleski and Amanda Petrusich knock the stuffing out of Duran Duran's "Rio" and Nick Drake's "Pink Moon," respectively). Geek terrain. My favorite place to be.
Jun 21, 2024
Top Recs from @yessirwhatever
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i remain in awe of how funny this is and must spread the gospel
Feb 6, 2024
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tough break for Van Morrison but i don’t think this is a close one!
Apr 30, 2024
I recently learned about this completely sincere ode to David Duchovny in the X-Files from singer-songwriter Bree Sharp. It’s silly but also a very representative cross-section of 90s pop-rock. High karaoke potential
Apr 12, 2024