And the time is right for dancing/fighting/racing in the streets. Posting will probably be a bit irregular for the next couple of weeks, due to my summer vacation and general August torpor. And when I’m at Burning Man next week, any comments requiring approval will get queued up until I return. We’ll return to normal […]
posted 19 August 2008 in Self-reflexive. no comments yet
Legendary record producer Jerry Wexler died on Friday. His contributions to rhythm and blues were immense–starting with the fact that he coined the term–but he ranks high in my pantheon of interview subjects for a totally different reason. Out of the hundreds of people I’ve spoken with in the line of work, he’s the only […]
posted 18 August 2008 in News, Tasty Bits. no comments yet
I got a cool email from Debbie Falb: This afternoon I was reading a stack of old family correspondence and stories and found something written by my great aunt called “Penny Walk.” Turns out that in the early ’20s on Staten Island my great grandfather would get all his kids and a lot of the […]
posted 15 August 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
We return to a chortling Kevin Seal. Once again, he screams and jumps over the VJ desk to communicate his extreme state of overstimulation in regards to the top 100 of 1988. He points out that the “Circle in the Sand” video, being shot on the beach, marks a return to the setting of Belinda […]
It turns out my longer article about Trent Reznor is also up on the Rolling Stone website now. During the interview, Reznor briefly had to excuse himself with a bloody nose. “Are you sure you’re clean?” I teased him. He laughed. “That’s what I think of too: people are going to think I was doing […]
posted 13 August 2008 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet
The commercial break kicks off with another airing of the “Big Bang ’89” promo, hyping the big show live later on MTV that night. Sandra Bernhard looks skinny and sexy and mean (in marked contrast to her subdued, puffy appearance on Project Runway recently–is she on some variety of steroid medications, or was it a […]
posted 12 August 2008 in 1988. no comments yet
The new issue of Rolling Stone has two articles by me; one of them, a profile of guitarist/producer Ry Cooder, is available online. It turned out Cooder and I had a friend in common: the most excellent Mr. Jalopy. Two footnotes on the piece: the turkey sandwich was, indeed, excellent. And the last paragraph might […]
With this flipwalk, I’m two-thirds of the way to completion of this project. (There’s other pleasing aspects to the number, including it being the fifth power of two–or given my binary decision-making process, the number of possible paths for about three minutes or so of walking.) That’s a teaser image, as usual: click here for […]
posted 8 August 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
Kevin Seal explains that they’re shoehorning in another video that didn’t make the cutoff date, one that will in all likelihood appear in the 1989 countdown. (Basically, this means that MTV blocked out time based on ten videos an hour, but some hours (two out of the first two), they have time to play eleven.) […]
posted 7 August 2008 in 1988. 2 comments
Possibly the most clichéd place possible to do a celebrity interview is at the Chateau Marmont hotel. I’ve done quite a few there, many of them with people who are Los Angeles residents and use the place as the equivalent of a conference room. Lily Allen, as it happened, was actually staying there. Before we […]
posted 6 August 2008 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet
