Walkabout recommends: Under Fire

For our second obscure sleeper, we have Nick Nolte again, with Joanna Cassidy and Gene Hackman, in a 1983 film about the civil unrest in Nicaragua in 1979 and the American journalists assigned to cover the events. The film is not billed as “based on a true story” and is distinctly a dramatization, but the events that are covered are historical, and there’s a key bit that mirrors read more

Dittyday 10: Faded Flowers

This is another taste of how much the internet has changed things. We go back to 1986 and a movie called Band of the Hand, which I saw in theaters and happened to like (reviews are quite mixed but, you know, listen to reviews only when you can’t form your own opinion.) I’m not here to go into the film, but a particular song therein, which had a very brooding sound, enhanced read more

Walkabout recommends: Cannery Row

So we’re starting a new topic here, one that I’ve been meaning to get to for months, and that is, recommendations of films that I like a lot but aren’t too well known. The downside of this is, it might be a little difficult to locate a copy or streaming service that has it – but that’s not my problem.

We’re starting with Cannery Row, a 1982 film with Nick read more

Dittyday 9: Love Is a Battlefield

I have to admit, I often have to look up the exact capitalization of titles because I don’t understand the rules, and I don’t pretend to know why “Is” is capitalized here, but so be it. I think damn near everybody knows this song, one of the biggest hits for Pat Benatar and never deep into any eighties station’s lineup, but I’m going to urge you to listen very read more

You know I’m good for it

Two follow-ups for this post, both of which I came across early this morning. The first is frivolous yet still formed this trivial frustration to me for, um, a while. I mentioned in a previous post that there was this distinctive theme music to Mutual read more

Dittyday 8: They Might Be Giants

Oh my, oh my my my, this one’s liable to be polarizing, or it might be if I had readers anyway. This band is notorious for, if nothing else, earworms, songs that stay with you for a very long time, but I’ll readily admit this might be a bad thing if they’re really not your thing – I think they accomplish the ‘catchy’ part without necessarily getting to the ‘likeable’ read more

Yes videos: Kinda polar opposites

The 1980s were this curious time in the pop music biz, because it became virtually necessary for bands to create a music video for anything that they wanted to become popular, which was controversial in itself – a lot of artists didn’t care for the medium, didn’t like the idea of making little movies, didn’t have good ideas, resented that the rules had changed, and so on. read more

Dittyday 7: Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo

Being a pop musician is not, it appears, a stable career choice, and cataloging the various iterations involved in this one would take more effort than I’m going to expend – Wikipedia exists for this reason, but I grew up before cut-n-paste was a thing and learned how to write my own essays, so I’ll just send you over there if you want all the nitty-gritty. And I admit that I was read more

BIAB: You’ve been…

I don’t actually care if you’ve seen either or both of these videos before – they deserve another look if you have, and if you haven’t, I’m pleased to introduce you to them.


Okay, the chances are fairly good that you’d already heard that one I’ve known about it for a few years and I don’t even do the social media horseshit read more

Dittyday 6: The Motels

Just so you know, this one was brought to mind, and eventually found its way here, because of a lyrics quiz.*

The Motels are a band that barely escaped ‘one-hit wonder’ status in the early eighties, mostly by having two songs that became popular, but part of this was because these songs departed from their normal style their other work, or at least everything read more

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