Author: Eric

Post No. 75: Unlimited Mileage

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mileage

Every 25th post, darkadaptedeye takes a planned break from normal business to plumb the shallow depths of its author’s psyche and/or overtly explore the locked attic of memories it only ever really dabbles in otherwise. You might think of it as a pit stop, or maybe a soft reboot. In “Danse Macabre”, Stephen King termed his own such digression “An Annoying Autobiographical Pause”, which I choose to think was kind of charming. Please know I take seriously the challenge of making patent self-indulgence interesting – actual results be damned – and I appreciate you being game. We’ll return to our irregularly scheduled programming shortly…

I traveled to my first ever concert, even if that only involved driving twenty minutes to a neighboring town. I was twelve at the time, eyes wide and overwhelmed, senses primed for meltdown, attention seemingly focused everywhere at once and dutifully lip-synching along to the “hits” even as I struggled to pick words out of the all-encompassing sonic wash. The act in question – whose identity, assuming you don’t already know it, you will only learn from my deathbed – hardly warranted such excitement, but I was content with what I had to work with. That wouldn’t always be the case. Continue reading “Post No. 75: Unlimited Mileage” →

The Top Ten (+5): New millennium stand-up comedy albums

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oswalt

Obligatory disclaimer: What follows is my latest list of highly specific things I like, presented in the order I like them. This list makes no allowances for anyone’s taste but my own, nor for colossal, head-slappingly obvious omissions, of which, I’m sure, there are many. It’s pretty much as complete as it’s ever gonna get. By reading further, you absolve me, the author, from any liability related to your potentially scarred psyche – permanently furrowed brows, heart palpitations, etc. Feedback on your own favorites, or what I got wrong or right (or wrong), is both welcome and encouraged.  

In a different time, under different circumstances, I might have been one of those outdoor kids so romanticized in fiction, parenting guides, and modern television commercials touting youth activity (in my day, the NFL sadly couldn’t be bothered to help motivate my butt off the couch). Ideally, I would’ve been off running through a field somewhere, or climbing trees, catching crawdads down at the creek bed or building forts with my little friends. Instead, I was the shy latchkey kid of a hardworking, divorced parent, often left to my own devices and largely bereft of friends. So I spent my childhood diligently making my own fun. I liked watching sports, but didn’t play any except youth soccer and backyard basketball. I loved to read and listen to music, and spent an awful lot of time formulating what would become lifelong passions at the feet of MTV and HBO. I never felt deprived. HBO in particular would prove to be a seminal influence, and among its specialties in the 1980s were movies, boxing, and stand-up comedy. I’ve already spoken a time or four here on the first two topics, but comedy proved no less influential on me growing up. Continue reading “The Top Ten (+5): New millennium stand-up comedy albums” →

Movie review: “Heathers” (1988)

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heathers

“I can’t believe this is my life…I’m going to have send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford!”

Sandwiched in between its predecessor’s grit and flamboyance and the waist deep, affected irony to come, the decade of the 1980s is often stereotyped as a particularly naïve and superficial time. People forget that it had teeth. Consider Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, a sort of poisoned pill response to the earnest ubiquity (and presumed complexity) of John Hughes’ by then shopworn cinematic high school milieu, snuck into the decade just under the wire, like a pipe bomb stashed away in a forgotten basement. The old military aphorism states that “history is written by the victors”, which is an uneasy notion for Lehmann and screenwriter Daniel Waters, who immediately set out to upend and disprove it. Continue reading “Movie review: “Heathers” (1988)” →

Steelers Thoughts #7 (1/14/15): Off-brand Aftermarket Parts Bonanza!

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tomlin

Also known as the NFL offseason. Yes, I know meaningful games (and the Pro Bowl) are still left to be played, and I plan to at least pay lip service to this weekend’s impending conference championships and the gridiron scraps what precursed them, but let’s be real. This is a Steelers column, intended (mostly?) for Steelers fans, and for the Steelers, the offseason has already started in earnest. Because I intend for this to be my final published word on the team until well into NFL Draft run up, if not after the Draft itself, I’ll look to cover a lot here, very likely too much. My apologies in advance. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #7 (1/14/15): Off-brand Aftermarket Parts Bonanza!” →

Movie review: “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014)

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hobbit 3

“Farewell, Master Burglar. Go back to your books, and your armchair…plant your trees, watch them grow. If more people valued home above gold, this world would be a merrier place…”

The enduring popularity (and usefulness) of those gargantuan “Extended Editions” of director Peter Jackson’s celebrated Lord of the Rings adaptations – which graft between thirty and fifty minutes of exposition, exploration, and effects onto epic films that already pushed (and punished) the three hour mark theatrically – isn’t difficult to surmise. LOTR is an existential, near-apocalyptic, struggle, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a dense, fairly miraculous setting for a film, full to bursting with hidden treasures and wonders to behold, populated by many distinct races, each with its own obscure motives and ancient grudges to nurse, facing half a dozen or more delicious varieties of increasingly hearty evil, from giant spiders and undead bounty hunters, to treacherous sorcerers and impossibly vast armies of genetically-enhanced butchers, to the wellspring embodiment of darkness itself, to the heartrending corruption of the mortal soul. Continue reading “Movie review: “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014)” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2014 + supplemental lists

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2014

Introduction

The (now officially) annual list of the prior year’s top 20 albums is, and will continue to be, a post that holds extra significance for me. After all, spending the better part of two months researching and writing the 2013 edition, only to find no acceptable place to post it, was the impetus for me to launch this blog in the first place. That was the best snap decision I’ve made in quite some time. Even though I fudged some of the housekeeping around it, for all intents and purposes that 2013 edition was the original centerpiece and first post ever for this blog, darkadaptedeye, 8000+ words long and self-indulgent to a fault. That was exactly one year and, now, seventy posts ago. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2014 + supplemental lists” →

BREAKING: Night, house quiet; creatures idle; mouse unavailable for comment

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christmas square

When it comes to the internet, I am not merely a surfer but a scavenger, though where a good percentage of my fellow travelers find themselves overly caught up in social media, I try to use it (only) a bit more judiciously. I’m committed to tending to and maintaining my various pulpits (my friend-facing facebook*, a more expansive and inclusive twitter profile, plus a plucky tumblr account that never really got off the ground), but I find I don’t post a lot anymore. Eh. I’ve found facebook’s posting structure constricting for as long as I’ve used it. Even when the 400+ character limit was lifted many moons ago, I still felt something was missing. I naturally prefer speaking in paragraphs when others might argue I should be speaking in sentences (or less). I actually used to be quite the fiend when it came to facebook posting, holding forth twice or thrice daily sometimes on whatever miscellaneous geekery I felt was compelling. It never did take much to compel me, of course. Then, as now, I can’t speak for how the audience might’ve felt. Continue reading “BREAKING: Night, house quiet; creatures idle; mouse unavailable for comment” →

“Foo Fighters – Sonic Highways”: an uneven soundtrack to a killer roadtrip

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box of records

Fearless independent filmmaker Werner Herzog is a passionate believer in what he has called the “voodoo of location”*, the notion that specific location filming not only naturally informs the look of a movie but also can appreciably influence how it feels, that history is so inextricably tied to a given place that it almost can’t help, on some level, but be absorbed into the production. Though he’s never spoken the exact words, lead Foo Fighter Dave Grohl is obviously at least a sympathetic mind. His 2013 documentary Sound City was a full blown love letter, equal parts celebratory and wistful, to the titular Los Angeles studio, which served over the course of multiple decades as home base for the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, and Nirvana’s Nevermind, among others. Grohl is the kind of music aficionado who turns amateur historian via happy accident, a product of deep-seated enthusiasm and wide-ranging experience, with no traditional academic reinforcement required. Continue reading ““Foo Fighters – Sonic Highways”: an uneven soundtrack to a killer roadtrip” →

“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott: An Appreciation

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Pantera 1994

Even in a genre where the distance – emotional, physical, metaphorical – separating player from fan is so paper thin, in a style of music where, above all others, total commitment onstage is a baseline requirement, I find it hard to imagine a metal musician who took such inspiring, unquenchable, childlike pleasure in his craft and so thrilled to find himself in what some might’ve imagined an unlikely spotlight, as did former Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott. His tragic shooting death ten years ago tonight at the hands of an unbalanced fan on stage at a rock club in my adopted hometown of Columbus, Ohio, is, for the millions worldwide who loved his band and his playing, a wound that sometimes seems as if it will never fully close, let alone heal, the kind of premature and pointlessly cruel removal of a kind man and loving presence from the larger metal community that brings to mind not journeymen but giants – Cliff Burton, Ronnie James Dio, Chuck Schuldiner – the kind of singular artists who did one thing as well as or better than just about anyone who lived, or, failing those lofty heights, did it in a way so innovative and brilliantly different that it redefined the way an instrument was considered and played for years after. Nobody sounded quite like Dimebag Darrell. For a while, though, just about everyone tried. Continue reading ““Dimebag” Darrell Abbott: An Appreciation” →

Steelers Thoughts #6 (12/1/14): Garbage Time

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steely

The various quirks and conventions of this blog have taken root and grown in a highly organic, practically accidental way. Because I was particularly taken with a certain swatch of dialogue and decided, apropos of nothing, to quote it at the beginning of my first ever movie review – for the 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel – the introductory dialogue capture went on to become a feature of my subsequent reviews. Because I happened to be in a serious, self-reflective and analytical headspace, with no traditional subject matter in mind, when the time came to write the blog’s twenty-fifth post, it became an instant (and self-evident) tradition for each twenty-fifth post to focus on personal matters rather than my normal geek and pop culture ephemera. I knew from the moment that I launched DAE that I would periodically write about the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have been my unquestioned favorite sports team since I first “discovered” them at the age of five. I always figured that I would write whenever the spirit moved me, although in my heartiest moments I still never imagined I could stomach analyzing sixteen games per year, not including playoffs. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #6 (12/1/14): Garbage Time” →