'Ring'

A horror film about a ghoul that scares people to death. The victims aren't eaten or beaten. They see what they see and their heart stops with fear.

Now that's a horror film.

'The Nightfly'

Steely Dan broke up and Donald Fagen recorded a solo record, The Nightfly. On the cover is Fagen in a collared shirt and tie resembling the jazz DJs that he would tune into in the 1950s and 1960s in suburban New Jersey. 

Fagan said living in the suburbs was a prison. A bit of an exaggeration because the suburbs may be boring but they are far from as disastrous as Fagen would like to pretend. 

The album itself is strictly autobiographical with tales of listening to late-night jazz DJs and bomb shelters. 

Of course, by age 11, Fagen had become a self-admitted "jazz snob" and developed an "anti-social disorder." Maybe it was all the suburbs' fault. 

Worth noting that apparently he played in a band with Walter Becker and Chevy Chase (drums) while at Bard College where they all studied. Chase apparently has perfect pitch. 

'Pleasure Principle'

Stop and do this: Think about the top 20 most influential musical artists in history.

Write them down.

Disregard how good the artists were and consider only this question, "If this band/musician didn't exist, it would've set off an irretrievable set of events that would've changed pop culture forever." Meaning, without Band A a whole genre or Bands T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z don't exist.

Disregard, also, the first caveman to whistle or King David plucking his lyre. Also, try to disregard the influences of the influential. Do the Beatles exist without Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry? Probably not. But I don't think the Beatles' influence necessary should reflect on Little Richard, who was himself influenced by others.

Also, disregard most classical musicians. 

My list, in no order: The Beatles, The Ramones, Hank Williams Sr., The Clash, Metallica, The Rolling Stones, Beethoven, Run DMC, Tupac Shakur, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin and The Velvet Underground.

OK, expand your list to 25 and I dare you not to include Gary Numan. Before you laugh me off the Internet, consider that few were doing with synthesizers and electronic music in the 1970s quite like Numan. His influence would be notice immediately in the New Wave of the 1980s, but the influence I think reaches its apex among more edgey and artistic folks starting with Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, DJs and dance and house music creators, hip-hop guys and even folks like Animal Collective and others that utilize almost exclusively electronic instruments.

Now, Numan wasn't alone. He was contemporaries of others like Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, the prog bands and Brian Eno. Numan didn't event anything nor what he probably the best, but he made it popular.

Again, Carl Perkins and Little Richard were never going to do what The Beatles were going to do.

Numan did make it popular with Pleasure Principle being his most popular album. Numan himself is not too different from his stage persona (if indeed you define it as a persona that is separate from his own personality). He's suspected of having some social disorder like Asperger's Syndrome. He's been medicated for depression before. His distant and stoic self that's on the stage is little different than that persona at home. He's a dude that doesn't like other people. A true artist.

By the way, listen to "Random" from this album and tell me it could be re-released next week.

'Faith' & 'Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1'

I've never understood why George Michael was such a polarizing guy. I guess in conservative America in the 1980s a blatantly homosexual singer could turn heads. Then again, he sold a gajillion records, so most people had little problem with his sexuality at this point.

But my memory of the late 1980s might not be as accurate as I perceive. I don't remember a time when George Michael was never a heterosexual. And I'm starting to question that memory only because I recollect a time when I thought Michael was pretty cool with that quaffed hair, the stubble, earrings, leather jackets and sunglasses perpetually perched on his nose.

Michael admits to bisexuality and (despite Wham! being incredibly gay) basically going through women like air during his heyday of the 1980s.

Reading more about the guy, the more I sorta respect him. If you take his quotes as gospel about how he really feels, sexuality had less to do with how they were attracted to a male or female form. It had to do with love. He thought he was a heterosexual in the 1980s because he was in love with a woman. It had less to do with who he wanted to have sex with (I only assume he had sex with whoever he was in love with). Then, he fell in love with some guys and he's not so much heterosexual anymore.

I also get the feeling that George Michael is in love with falling in love.

Later, when Michael's sexuality was pretty well known and he started to get into legal trouble he suddenly became an uninteresting lightning rod that occasionally released pop records.

He's just a man who loves his anonymous sex in roadside bathrooms. It was one time!

OK, it was two times. And he likes weed. No big deal.

The guy's been around for 30+ years now and if enjoying things enjoyed also by heterosexuals (weed, sex with strangers) is the guy's biggest pockmark, then I think that's OK.

'Labyrinths' & 'Ficciones'

Got scared after reading Ficciones and starting Labyrinths and thinking I'd already read the first story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In fact, I had. Labyrinths was just a collection of stories and essays published in Ficciones and Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph. 

And "scared" because Borges is not the easiest of reads in the world. He writes fiction like nonfiction and it's hard -- in the shorter format of an essay -- to differentiate between the two. 

Borges was an interesting guy having been brought up in an highly educated household: Bilingual, reading Shakespeare at a young age, studying the philosophy in German as a teenager. 

By the time he was publishing his essays like Ficciones he had gone blind and captured international renown on lecture tours. He was anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. A native Argentinian, he was anti-Peron. Basically, he thought the people should rule and none of those political systems paid much attention to the people and more so on the ruler. 

He referred to the Falkland War as "a fight between two bald men over a comb."  

Clever guy. 

'Brideshead Revisited'

Hey guys, Evelyn Waugh is a guy!

And he married a woman named Evelyn.

Must've been hard for a guy to get something published in the 1940s so he wrote under a pseudonym.

'Tea For The Tillerman'

If you're not listening to Tea for the Tillerman on a regular basis then you must be an idiot. It's necessary listening.

The A side of the record is as good of a side of recorded music then you'll find in the medium's existence. "Wild World," "Hard Headed Woman," "Where Do the Children Play?" and "Sad Lisa." Just enough blissful heartache to keep you going.

The album was released in 1970 just on the heels of Cat Stevens nearly dying after contracting tuberculosis, which precipitated him discovering religion, practicing yoga and becoming a vegetarian. We can only assume that the experience eventually resulted in him converting to Islam years later.

Fun fact: He adopted "Cat Stevens" as a stage name due to a laborious real name and because he thought people liked animals. Singer, songwriter, marketing genius.

'Robinson Crusoe'

I really feel I've been lied to all these years. What is the quintessential shipwrecked survival story? What piece of pop culture is mentioned in the iconic theme song for Gilligan's Island?

Robinson Crusoe.

Then you read the book and understand that maybe 25 percent of the story is Robinson and his man Friday stuck on that lonely piece of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, most of the book is Crusoe leaving the island, incidentally coming back to save the day and proceeding to sail around the world.

The original title of the book:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates

'Third'

If you were a hardcore subscriber to Guitar magazine like I was, and you wondered why Allan Holdsworth kept getting mentioned, then Soft Machine is your answer.

He played guitar for this prog-rock group at two different times, although, coincidentally, not during the recording of Softs.

Not going to blow my prog-rock load right here because I've got a lot more to go. However, it is worth mentioning that Soft Machine had 20 different line-ups over an 18-year period of synthesizing your nuts off.

I don't know if Holdsworth is in the photo above, but I'd like to think he's the weirdo on the far left.

'Little Women' & 'The Brothers Karamazov'

I've been the gravesite of Louisa May Alcott. At the time, I didn't appreciate her nearly as much as I do today. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. She is buried what is known as Authors' Ridge.

Alcott was an extraordinary woman. She learned under Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She not under learned under those scholars but she was raise by transcendentalists, which is a philosophical movement of the 1820s and 1830s in the northeast, which basically was a belief in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Alcott was an abolitionist, having worked on the Underground Railroad. She was a feminist and suffragist. All before the Civil War. She might also have been a lesbian. Although not unreasonable to go through life with no husband, she was briefly associated with a man once.

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body ... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man," Alcott said.

Little Women is essentially biographical. It is set in Masschusetts and mirrors that of her actual sisters and family. She created "Jo" in her reflection. She too had a younger sister die and felt the sting of separation and growth when her older sister got married.

Much is made of the relationships of brothers. The first story ever -- the book of Genesis -- is wrought with stories of brothers from Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. I don't think it's any mistake that all three stories are wrought with badness -- murder, betrayal and jealously.

Those stories are not alone as it continued throughout artistic creation including The Brothers Karamazov. It has a half percent of the sweetness of Little Women, but it does mirror the complications you find between brothers (and a father) compared to sisters. But often the feelings are the same. One thing you won't find in many brother stories is a strong adult female presence like the mother in Little Women. The mother is missing often in brother stories.

It's simple for either sisters or brothers. But if it was it'd make pretty boring literature.

'The Woman In The Dunes'

I tried to find a still from one of the tremendous close ups this film had. I found these significant because it's about a school teacher who gets caught up living in this set inside a dune pit, where sand works itself into every nook and cranny of their bodies, clothes and lives.

Some of the shots really showcase the bodies -- often naked, because sand in your clothes is the worst -- encased in this sand. This is the best photo I could find.

Anyway, in his review of the film, critic Roger Ebert compared it to the myth of Sisyphus, who is damned to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. And he must do this for enternity.

I would agree only if part of the story was that Sisyphus had a tiny rock in his shoe the entire time. The sand in this film makes you want to shower afterwards.

'Q: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!'

I can't get over that the guy on the album cover looks like NFL quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.


There's not really a photo on the Internet of Tom Brady in that style of hat, at least without sunglasses. there are photos of Tom Brady crying and I don't know why he's crying. It's depressing that he'd be so sad about something.

Also, Brady's been on a lot of magazine covers and he's had lots of hairstyles. Yet, I don't know what he even sounds like. Is that weird?

Why am I talking about Tom Brady? What's happening!?

Oh, GOD, Gisele Bundchen!

Eh, he also looks like Benedict Cumberbatch.

'The Big Parade'

Utterly shocked to see how King Vidor portrayed war in this film. Especially for the time (released in 1925 .. seven years after World War I ended), that big battle scene is as terrifying as you'll find on the big screen.

Outside of the first five minutes of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan I don't remember a better full-on battle scene and a more realistic vision of war. As it should be.

'The Last Temptation Of Christ'

I cover high school football for a local daily newspaper. I often arrive at the game really early to make sure that all my equipment is working and that I'm assured a seat. I also often bring a book to read because I'm more often than not sitting there because all is well.

I took The Last Temptation of Christ one night and while reading I was accosted by, of all people, an advance scout from a high school that was preparing to play one of the teams I was covering.

He asked me about a dozen questions. I thought maybe he recognized the title (maybe) although he asked me what I was reading. A lot of the questions had to do with what I thought of the book and my opinions of what was on the pages.

I thought maybe he was asking because the book (and the 1988 Martin Scorsese) has been a topic of controversy because of its depiction of Jesus ... as an ordinary guy despite being ordained by God to be the messiah.

I can't recommend this book enough. Apart from the actual story, it's a rich, textural history of the time providing some revealing cultural discussion points when you consider the times in which Christ lived.

For one, Jesus (or the messiah) was not only expected to be the Son of God, the lamb slain for the sins of man into perpetuity. He was supposed to overthrow the Roman government occupying Judea (and the rest of the world). Not an easy task, even for the Son of God.

What fundamentalist Christians got most angry about was this milquetoast Jesus being depicted. He was forlorn, doubtful and amid great terror in his private moments (in the book, at least, Jesus publicly turned into sort of a badass). As if he weren't human.

Christians want to believe that Christ was sermonizing in the Temple from birth and took to the highway and byways at some young age. In actuality, he was a carpenter's son and he too plied his craft (in the book, he is vilified for making crosses for executions) until the voice of God took him elsewhere.

It's an interesting read and no matter your religious affiliation it is a must-read.

'My Aim Is True'

Elvis Costello's debut album after six years on the club and pub tour.

He kept working at his day job even after the release of "Less Than Zero" and "Alison" as singles. The record company eventually offered to pay him his wages plus a bonus, an amplifier and a tape recorder.

So decadent.