Month: September 2015

Steelers Thoughts #10 (9/28/15): (Next) Man Up

Posted on by Eric

steelers

Though I am a fairly serious sports fan, DAE as a blog treats sports structurally as a sideline rather than headline topic, and only covers two in earnest: boxing* and professional football. The former is built on the strength of individual fighters and individual events, with no true off-season to speak of, whereas the latter is mostly off-season, building to a sustained five-month crescendo of weekly hostilities that dominates each fall. Football, by turns a joyous and vicious game – often in the course of the same sixty minutes – works on such a tight, unforgiving schedule, with every game precious and important in its own right, that its fans have no choice but full commitment from the moment the first whistle is blown. I’ve often worried that doing any real justice to pro football on a non-dedicated blog would be a fool’s errand, and making a cursory review of the nine official editions of “Steelers Thoughts” so far makes me feel plenty foolish indeed. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #10 (9/28/15): (Next) Man Up” →

Concert review: “Weird Al” Yankovic

Posted on by Eric

Al onstage

Tennessee Theatre, Knoxville, TN – August 7, 2015

To its much appreciated and dazzlingly attractive readership, the masthead of this website promises/ threatens, “unrepentant, long-form geekery.” That thought first came to me about a year ago as I upended my brain in desperate pursuit of a Twitter-compatible advertising tagline, unaware I’d stumbled across a possible mission statement instead. It suits the site well, I think, and makes me feel a bit more comfortable and philosophically attuned with the work I turn out here, which lives dead in the middle of the gray area separating “hobby” from “vocation”. I might just as well have written those words in preparatory advance of this review, however, for I am by far the biggest “Weird Al” Yankovic fan I know. It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that this is not exactly a highly coveted position. Continue reading “Concert review: “Weird Al” Yankovic” →

DVR Hindsight #13 (9/16/15): The Bastard Executioner pilot

Posted on by Eric

exec

The Bastard Executioner – “Pilot” – Season 1, Ep. 1 (FX)

Since the days back when The Shield pilot first detonated and announced the network as a surprising new player in cable drama, FX has considered its darkest original programming with a uniform and almost absurd level of solemnity. Just listen to its TV-ratings voiceover guy, that low, gravelly gatekeeper who dutifully appears at the end of each commercial break to absolve the network from liability for all the iniquitous content to which it’s about to expose the many children watching at home. The disembodied voice, lately heard on urban vampire apocalypse saga The Strain and already honed to a near-parodic level of dripping sinister-ness during seven years of hyping Sons of Anarchy, also has a second charge, which is to simultaneously shoo overly sensitive souls back to their knitting and canasta games while tacitly warning more adventurous prospective viewers to hold onto their hats, or, in the case of the overwrought, undercooked Bastard Executioner, their heads… Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #13 (9/16/15): The Bastard Executioner pilot” →

Detour: A song of death, “Death”, thrash, craft, and (almost) karaoke

Posted on by Eric

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

An infrequent occurrence, a “Detour” is an attempted standard review that, either from an excess of subject matter, personal perspective, rank obscurity, or unplanned or uncontrollable digressions, ended up significantly changed from its original form by the writing and editing process, sometimes even for the better. There is a review in here somewhere, I promise. You may just have to dig a bit.

appearing: Toxic Holocaust, Lord Dying, Infernal Death (official Death tribute)                              Ace of Cups, Columbus, Ohio – September 6, 2015

It’s important up front to know a little about my mood going into this. I’m a pretty reasonable guy, sweet, empathic, a little goofy. It’s not that my Labor Day weekend leading up to the Toxic Holocaust show was necessarily bad, but it was…frustrating. I won’t bore you (or revolt myself) with first world problems. Suffice it to say that my plans to that moment, best laid and well-intentioned, had gone awry with comprehensive and perplexing regularity, and I was in a mild funk. I needed thrash metal to mitigate my foul mood, and, after two days of existential drifting, it was finally time to consult…the schedule. Continue reading “Detour: A song of death, “Death”, thrash, craft, and (almost) karaoke” →

Wes Craven: An Appreciation

Posted on by Eric

wes

It could be said that I came of age, as both a horror fan and a fan of movies in general, during Wes Craven’s golden age, but the very suggestion of a “golden age” implies undue disrespect to the several distinct and highly influential phases of his career as the author and director of uncommonly smart, uncommonly affecting, above the bar genre nightmares. Craven was a calm, thoughtful, professorial type, sensible but sly, a horror lifer who never particularly seemed to mind toiling away in a disreputable genre. Instead, his work strengthened it from within. At two flashpoint moments, in 1984 and 1996, he succeeded in bringing the movie mainstream to him rather than the other way around, but some of his most personal and memorable successes were written in the margins of his career comparatively. Neither quite the all-encompassing brand name that was his zombie-wrangling forebear George A. Romero, nor the sci-fi/horror auteur that was his contemporary John Carpenter, Wes Craven’s name on a poster, above or just below the title, still carried impressive weight and, with it, made plain certain, unspoken promises. Continue reading “Wes Craven: An Appreciation” →