'Top of the Lake' is TV at its best

I just finished watching “Top of the Lake,” a disturbing but thrilling seven-hour BBC mini-series packed with terrific acting, gorgeous cinematography and plot twists that keep you guessing right up until the end. 

“Top of the Lake” stars Elisabeth Moss of “Mad Men” fame, and she delivers a marvelous performance in a complex role that is both inspiring and gut-wrenching. Moss was nominated for an Emmy and won a Critic’s Choice award in playing a troubled New Zealand police detective relentlessly pursuing the mysterious

Click to read more ...

Pure power pop, 20/20 style

Some of my seminal music moments occurred in the garage of my childhood home, where as a teen-ager I lifted weights in hopes of adding muscle and weight to my very slim frame (what I'd give to be so frail and skinny again). 

That didn't work so well, but because I lifted at night I was able to get the faint signal of K100 out of Porterville, a country station by day and adventurous rock at night.

Thanks to the nighttime K100 DJs, I was introduced to new sounds from an L.A. band called 20/20, and in particular, a song called "Yellow Pills." While I was too naive to know what yellow pills were, I was sharp enough to recognize that this music was special.

Click to read more ...

“Robert Christgau: Rock n’ Roll Animal”

I stumbled across a fun half-hour 1999 documentary on legendary music critic Robert Christgau the other day (videos below), and thanks to YouTube, was able to watch it in four segments over the course of four days. Consider it snacking rather than bingeing.  

As the documentary suggests, Christgau can be an acquired taste, although the extreme hatred from Russ Smith, publisher of The New York Press seems extreme. I first discovered Christgau in the 1980s, not from reading Village Voice, where he worked for decades, but from his Christgau Record Guides, once-a-decade overviews of popular music.

Above all, the man has enormous passion for his work, and effectively balanced quality with voluminous production. Remarkably, 15 years after this documentary, Christgau is still going strong, feeding his personal website, a seemingly endless trove of remarkable work. 

Amen for that.