Once intended to be a monthly feature, and fulfilled as such for the first year or so, there has not been a new Sexiest Males Alive list since October 2010. As the longest running feature of this blog, and by far the one that has garnered the most traffic over the years, it seems only fitting to return to the SMA now, as the month of its third anniversary is drawing to a close. Looking back at that first list, it’s clear to me that I didn’t really know yet what I wanted the SMA to be, but even then, I showed myself prone to the kind of prognostications that has made later installments more or less a parade of corrections and promises of future success. In that vein, I predicted that Skins co-stars Nicholas Hoult and Mitch Hewer could plausibly both see themselves topping SMA before long, all the while I was congratulating Jesse McCartney as the first winner of the title. Three years on, Hoult and Hewer’s trajectories on the SMA now differ wildly. (more…)
Songs For ‘Adam’
26 JunA year ago, I compiled a playlist for my friend Bryan Borland’s poetry collection My Life as Adam, and Bryan quickly followed suit with his own pop-cultural interpretation of his own book. It speaks to how deeply integrated these two forms of cultural representation are, and how silly it would be to think of them in hierarchical ways. When you open a book, you take a set of values and references with you into reading and interpreting it, and for me that means that fragment of music and movies will always influence my experience of it. (more…)
Clarence Clemons (1942-2011), An Appreciation
19 JunBig Man is no more. Clarence Clemons, a towering presence both in E Street Band mythology and in the distinct sound of Bruce Springsteen’s best and biggest records, has died, at 69. It’s an incredibly sad day for all lovers of rock ‘n’ roll, and for lovers of a rock attitude that combined energy and good humor with the aura of coolness and unflappable dignity that Clemons brought to the scene. With the loss of Clemons, a mere two years after Danny Federici passed away, the E Street Band – arguably the best backing band in rock ‘n’ roll history, and home to a handful of musicians who managed to break out of their backing band status to become stars in their own right, like Clemons, guitarists Nils Lofgren and Steven Van Zandt and drummer Max Weinberg – it’s almost hard to see where the band could go from here. If one person personified the E Street Band, it was Clarence Clemons. (more…)
The Hanson of the ‘Best of 5′ DVD
11 JunThis week, I received my second copy of Hanson’s Shout It Out. Sure, It wasn’t because I’d worn out my first copy (although, if I still played CDs, I’m sure that could’ve been a distinct possibility.) No, the occasion was that the UK release of Shout It Out came with a special Best of 5 DVD that I really wanted. The release coincided with Hanson’s 5of5 concert series in London this week, reprising the US five-nighter (one album a night, for five nights) that launched SIO. Last year, I took the opportunity to put together my list of 25 favorite Hanson songs when writing about the 5of5, which was restreamed to a worldwide audience upon the album’s initial release. (more…)
Finding The Right Words
4 JunYou know you’re either a) a grumpy old man, or b) a child of the information age, when you find yourself processing thoughts like “how peaceful and pleasant it is to finally sit down with a printed book, turn off all digital distractions and give yourself over to the world of words,” but I actually had one of those moments yesterday. (more…)
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