and Young MC.

I read almost all of Blume's '70s/early '80s books, but I think I got through Then Again, Maybe I Won't about 20 times in middle school. That thing was like crack to me for a little while.

I, on the other hand, love just about everything about her!

Also, they might not have been monster hits, but I think Drag Me to Hell and his Oz movie both did pretty well at the box office, relative to their respective budgets.

O'Neal used to write some of the best obituaries I've read anywhere ever. Brilliant, beautiful tributes.

Excellent film - but I love all his early stuff. Flirting with Disaster is gold.

I give her older stuff a shot every once in a while and find it pretty bland. But damn if "Trouble" isn't a great song.

There's a few tracks I don't love, but yeah, it's pretty great. There's a mid-late section where "How You Get the Girl" and "Wildest Dreams" play back to back (can't remember the order) that continues to wow me every time.

Indeed - one of many major problems with that book!

It's so the opposite of boring.

That video is fabulous. The song itself is hypnotic and blazing at the same time. And the closeups on the band, which seem to make it more "personal," are also really confusing and chaotic, which pushes the music's intensity. A great example of how compelling "simplicity" can be.

The way it transitions from Daniel's whacky dancing . . . the lights go down, the music changes, everything gets dark . . . your first read is, oh, here comes the romantic part. Then Liotta slides into frame . . . "hey, baby."

The Last Battle is not very good for a lot of reasons. It's got some cool, underdeveloped ideas for sure. But it's pretty listless prose for the most part, the protagonist is muddled and boring and pretty much skips out halfway through in favor of CSL's extended religious tract, which is as annoying as most remember…

The BDS is a well-organized boycott that has a large base of support within the country itself and that has also done a fantastic (as in effective) job of targeting a large spectrum of organizations and industry, from academia to the arts to businesses. The "don't play Israel" movement has been going on for a decade…

Jesus, I love the internet!

Favorite version is the Liz Phair/Material Issue cover from the mid-90s (yes, I have a favorite version of this song).

It could also be related to the rainbow peace flag (often written as PACE), which has been kicking around Europe since the '60s. Not sure how well-known it would have been in the US in the late '70s, so that's pure speculation. But rainbow flags representing social progress had been around for a while . . .

Thanks for sharing that link. I'd often kicked myself for missing out on those shows, and had never bothered to just plain look and see if they were out there. Excited!

Yes . . . I don't completely get the "he can't direct action" claim, when he often does it so well. He may not be as "flashy" as some (as if that somehow equates to "good," or even "interesting"), but he has a knack for integrating character, narrative, and his film style in ways that few action directors take the…

It's fantastic - that opening world, within a world, within a world . . . then the long take re-introducing the crew and ending with River, which ties it right back to the opening sequence. Great stuff. Really great fight scenes (River's in the bar, Mal vs. the assassin dude). It's tightly edited, delivers great…