I love this movie, have seen it a dozen times or so, including once in a theater in Edinburgh at Christmastime. The one part that always gives me pause is the cut right before George says "I want to live" the last time. When he says the line that last time, the sound has a different quality, like it's dubbed in or…

That's the one where he rips off the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," isn't it? I mean, he basically just strips off the lyrics from that song and puts his own on there. (Unless that's a different song, in which case just move along,nothing to see here, folks.)

I'm talking out of my ass about the short story dying. I'm a failed, once bitter but now accepting-of-my-fate writer and assume that since I've pretty much stopped keeping up with the short fiction world everyone else has too. I'm thrilled to have discovered Alice Munro at this late juncture of my reading life. I…

Dang, I left "Rose" out of that list. That's my favorite of Dubus's stories and one of my top five or six all-time favorite stories.

Yeah, Dubus is definitely worth it, and I'd go with the Selected Stories. I think his stuff is pretty uneven across his whole career, with the very early stuff being kind of turgid and the later stuff being kind of lazy and formless. The Selected Stories has the cream of the crop: "Adultery," "The Fat Girl,"…

I don't think there is a wrong place to start—I haven't read everything she's written, but I've read over half (I didn't really start reading her until a couple of years ago, after years of knowing I should be reading her) and I'm serious in saying I haven't read anything of hers that is less than astonishing. You…

Yeah, it's at 2:20. My buddy Larry amazed us all with his lightning eyesight back in 1985 when he saw that. Larry is awesome.

Most of his songs have whiskey or some derivation of the word "drink" in the title. He's the real shit—not like those posers Gram Parsons or Townes Van Zandt. That voice is like Jerry Lee Lewis crossed with Dante—I don't know another singer who portrays torment and anguish so viscerally, not even George Jones. …

"Lone Star"? God, that's an awful movie. All John Sayles movies just bludgeon you with correct opinions (remember the musical harmony scene in "Matewan"? I wondered where all these poverty stricken immigrants got their shiny new mandolin strings.)

I've read everything Ian McEwan's written, think he's brilliant, including and especially Atonement, and was jaw-droppingly horrified at how bad "Saturday" was. All the way through the novel I was wondering if it was a satire of upper-class yuppiedom (everybody held such proper beliefs, everybody eating such healthy…

Huh. I just googled the show and it says it was December 4, 1982, and it wasn't Santana but . . . Steelbreeze? WTF?

I saw them in 1982 (November or maybe December—it was blue-ball cold, I know that much) at the Cotton Bowl, but it wasn't the Clash and Eddie Money with them. It was Billy Squier and Santana.

Robert Denby, amen, brother, let's form a club. I've read that book three times because it's supposed to be so hilarious, and I still don't get it. I ain't falling for it again. Walker Percy, who wrote the foreword (and who ushered the book into print), wrote my favorite novel, "The Moviegoer," and even that…

I live in Houston. I'm not in a band but I write songs and make videos of a nutcracker doll singing them. My kids, 4 and 7 years old, think they're awesome. So does my dad. But I digress. Houston's sorry state as a music town, both for touring bands and local bands, has been part of the CW since I moved here ten…

I second Bosch. Lennon as uber-hipster pisses me off. He was 90% attitude and posturing, 10% talent. I could be persuaded to adjust that ratio, but not if you ask that the post-Beatles work be accorded equal weight in the analysis. God, all that Lennon solo stuff is atrocious except for the generic and inoffensive…

I know this is the internet and all, and none of us actually exist, but still, the hate, my friends, the hate!

Larry McMurtry's books are mostly so-so but make for sometimes great movies: "The Last Picture Show" and "Terms of Endearment" are both better films than books. The Lonesome Dove mini-series is probably better than the novel.

Good stuff here—you guys ought to be on the internet. But the question is wrong from the start. The Beatles are the American Beatles. Who cares where they came from? It's American music forms they absorbed and remade. We don't need to find somebody born here to compete. That's how Canadians think.

Any discussion of Buck Owens that doesn't give Don Rich near equal prominence will be misleading. Buck Owens would say the same thing.

Todd Snider and Eddy Shaver were buddies. Snider's "Waco Moon" is a tribute/eulogy to Shaver. Very moving and Snideresque.