Today in Pop Culture: Holy Debut, Batman!

By Jeffery X Martin

He is vengeance. He is the night. He is the darkest of all the superheroes, borne of family tragedy, driven by vengeance and personal demons he cannot exorcise. He faces psychotic enemies and triumphs through sheer force of will.

He is, of course, the Batman.

But the Bat wasn’t always the tortured soul, hiding in the shadows. He was, at one point, a goofball.

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Why the Star Wars Prequels Aren’t THAT Bad

By Tyler Hodg

Star Wars: two short words that mean a great deal to a lot of people.

Yet, until December of 2015, half of the series was generally panned by fans and critics alike. How can something be so beloved and despised at the same time?

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Today In Pop Culture: What is “Ooga-Chaka?”

By Jeffery X Martin

If you had an AM radio in the Sixties or Seventies, odds are that’s all you had because it was the Sixties or Seventies. Thank the gods for real technology, right? AM radio, with its predilection for programming soft rock and one hit wonders, was the place to hear American singer BJ Thomas. The guy had hit after hit. Thomas was the performer of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1970.*

[Do you know which movie “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was featured in? The answer is at the end of this article!]

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David Bowie: 1947 – 2016

By Jeffery X Martin

When I went to sleep, David Bowie was alive. When I awoke, he was not. Strange, the way things slip.

Knock on the walls. Flick your coffee cup with your fingernail. Stomp on the floor. Do you hear it? Something’s missing. There is a hollowness to the world now, with Bowie gone.

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Music Review: JD Souther, John David Souther

By Melissa Bratcher

It’s strange to hear a reissue of an album from 1972 that sounds as current as Omnivore’s reissue of JD Souther’s John David Souther. It’s not a difficult argument to make that Souther’s cult-classic albums were precursors to present day Americana. It’s all here: thoughtful lyrics and a high lonesome voice (on occasion); momentary fiddles and bottleneck guitar. JD Souther is a songwriter’s songwriter, known for writing for the Eagles (all of their good songs? Souther had a hand in those, like “New Kid In Town” and “Heartache Tonight”), and his songs have been covered by artists from Glen Campbell to India Irie to Linda Ronstadt.

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Movie Review: Cherry Tree

By Tim Murr

The weight of the world is on the shoulders of 15-year-old Faith. She’s forced to go to school and act like everything’s normal while her father is dying of leukemia. Faith rages at the unfairness and hopelessness of it all until her new field hockey coach, Sissy, approaches her with an offer to cure her father, using intimate knowledge of ancient witchcraft. In exchange, Faith only has to have a baby for Sissy.

These sort of things always work out, right?

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Today in Pop Culture: David Bowie’s Blackstar Birthday

By Jeffery X Martin

Today is David Bowie’s birthday and I don’t understand why anyone is at work or school. Why aren’t government offices closed? Why is this not a Federal holiday? We should all be in public parks, wearing body paint and having Aladdin Sane lookalike contests. We should put on our red shoes and dance the blues. We should be burning space capsules in effigy in the name of Major Tom.

David Bowie is 69 years old and is still cooler than everyone reading this article, combined.

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Best Of 2015: JG Thirlwell

2015 was jam-packed with life events and huge amounts of work, but I barely left NYC.

Here is my bloated 2015 cultural year-in-review list.
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Blu-Ray Review: Edgar Allan Poe’s Black Cats

By Jeffery X Martin

“The Black Cat” isn’t usually the first story that comes to mind when people think of Edgar Allan Poe. It tends to get overshadowed by his poem, “The Raven,” or his story, “The Tell-tale Heart,” which actually shares a lot of plot devices with “The Black Cat,” but that’s not important right now. What is important is that Poe’s work is public domain. No one owns it. That makes his work ripe for the gutting by film producers and writers. Slap Poe’s name on it somewhere and you’ve got a built-in audience of horror fans and American Literature majors.

Roger Corman certainly made his nut making quickie Poe flicks, but that’s not important right now, either. What is important is what happened to “The Black Cat” in the hands of two stylistically different Italian directors, horror maestro Lucio Fulci and giallo king Sergio Martino. Their two versions of Poe’s old tale can be found in one beautiful box set from Arrow Video.

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Today in Pop Culture: Sing Along with History, Volume One

By Jeffery X Martin

Some days just bring songs to mind. The historical events create their own playlist and allow us the opportunity to be educated and entertained. I call these phenomena “educationerments.” Let’s begin, shall we?

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