// Category Archive for: Over the Gadfly’s Nest

Armchair Casting Director: Dark Shadows

By Lisa Anderson

As a pre-teen vampire fan in 1991, I was very excited when NBC launched Dark Shadows, starring Ben Cross as vampire Barnabas Collins. The show got good ratings, but was pre-empted so often by Gulf War coverage that it was canceled in March after premiering in January. I realized at the time that it was a revival of an earlier show, but it wasn’t until I was in college that I got to watch some of the original Dark Shadows, which aired on ABC from 1966 to 1971, and in which Barnabas was played by Jonathan Frid.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously

By Brenna Chase

Photo credit:
http://boston.com/

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is our entire five-part series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Unless you are a Hanson fan, you may not be aware of these simple facts:
1. Hanson is still alive.
2. All three of them are of the male gender.
3. They are still together as a band

Allow me to clear this up for you. Yes, Hanson is very much alive and writing and performing songs—successfully enough, in fact, to make a living from it. Though you may assume they went out of style back in 1998 (if they were ever really “in style” at all), their new material is actually better than most of today’s mainstream pop music.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously, Part Five

By Brenna Chase

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is part five of our series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Read parts one, two, three, and four. To read the article in its entirety, go here.

Those who’ve dismissed Hanson as just another passing fad from the ’90s are under-informed. The band has earned three Grammy nominations, making Zac the youngest songwriter in history to receive such an accolade. They’ve sold over ten million albums, singles, EPs, and videos to date and continue to chart significantly with each independent release. Hanson is a model for how to survive and thrive in the dying, post-millennial music industry.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously, Part Four

By Brenna Chase

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is part three of our series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Read parts one, two, and three.

So Hanson is constantly moving forward, but they’re old school, too (apparently they’re one big paradox). Sure, they’ll always be associated with the ’90s-pop-MTV-generation, but the inspiration for the music they make goes back way further than that.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously, Part Three

By Brenna Chase

Photo credit:
Hanson.net

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is part three of our series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Read parts one and two.

By the way, while the rest of the world forgot about them back in 1998, Hanson has maintained a loyal fanbase that will buy from them and die for them. The band knows they owe their continued success to their (obsessively scary, 90% female) fans, and they do not take this for granted—they consistently give back to those who support them to make their fans feel special.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously, Part Two

By Brenna Chase

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is part two of our series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Go here for part one.

Although Hanson might be a more liberal, noncreepy, modern day version of the Osmonds, these guys are hipper than you might think. In a time when “indie” rockers are touted by major labels, Hanson is the true definition of a DIY band.

After the sophomore “slump” of their follow-up album This Time Around (a mere 262,000 records sold in 2000) and years of struggles with their label Mercury Records during the messy Island Def Jam merger, they parted ways with Mercury due to irreconcilable differences. Whereas countless bands in the same position were neglected and eventually dropped from their major labels when the overly confident industry of the ’90s was just beginning to collapse, Hanson got out of their contract on their terms and forged ahead on their own, by choice.
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Hanson Is Cool. . . Seriously, Part One

By Brenna Chase

Photo credit:
http://boston.com/

To celebrate the upcoming release of Hanson’s newest album, Shout It Out, and to commemorate their recent “5 For 5” concerts, here is part one of our series on Hanson. Yes, Hanson.

Unless you are a Hanson fan, you may not be aware of these simple facts:
1. Hanson is still alive.
2. All three of them are of the male gender.
3. They are still together as a band

Allow me to clear this up for you. Yes, Hanson is very much alive and writing and performing songs—successfully enough, in fact, to make a living from it. Though you may assume they went out of style back in 1998 (if they were ever really “in style” at all), their new material is actually better than most of today’s mainstream pop music.
(more…)

Armchair Casting Director: Water For Elephants

By Lisa Anderson

Over a year ago, I saw that a friend of mine was listening to a book called Water for Elephants on audiobook. I did not know at the time that it had been a commercial and critical success, or that author Sara Gruen had orginally written it as part of National Novel Writing Month. I did, however, have a fascination with elephants at the time, so I asked her to let me borrow it.
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I Haz A Flavor: Context

By Matt Keeley

Not too long ago, I read an essay about context in journalism from Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog. It’s very much in the same vein as the Popshifter Manifesto and the Anti-Snark Manifesto that launched The Believer.

There’s something to be said for this, particularly when there seems to be so much criticism in criticism. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it often seems less like helpful guidance and more like hobby-horsing.
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Leading Men Have No Character

By Less Lee Moore

Cillian Murphy

Recently, the media announced that the latest Cillian Murphy film, Peacock, would not be released in theaters but would go straight to DVD. Another recent Murphy film, Watching The Detectives, suffered a similar fate; in addition, Hippie Hippie Shake, starring Murphy and Sienna Miller, was completed almost three years ago and has yet to find distribution. A commenter on ONTD noted that, “[Cillian Murphy] really used to excite me, then too many of his movies went straight to DVD and I lost interest.” Ouch.

An online friend of my own framed the news in a less harsh, but more problematic way, saying that Cillian Murphy looks to be on his way to being a character actor. The contradictory nature of the term “character actor” suddenly seemed frustratingly inappropriate, particularly to an actor of Murphy’s caliber.
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