SIEGE OF TROY

  The boys should form a cover band that only plays songs by brothers that fought a lot.  Oasis. The Kinks. The Beach Boys. The Bee Gees.  Or just bands that had brothers in them. INXS. Cowboy Junkies. The Stooges. Allman Brothers. AC/DC. Van Halen. Arcade Fire. And so on. Name? I'M TELLING MOM.

 Hey, kids. Welcome to a new label, THAT TIME . . ., which will be devoted to occasional instances of supreme weirdness, cool events, or odd occurrences that may or may not be writing-related. Here's a good example: That time my Oz article made the Today Show website. My recollection of the relationship between Whomever Owned Newsarama in 2009 and The Today Show is lost in the mists of time, and I don't care to look it up. But apparently there was some sort of reciprocal agreement that allowed Today to post certain articles on their site. That happened with me a few times, but this one, IIRC, was targeted for attention. With the (then) 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz  film coming up, I did a piece about its influences. Soon after, it went to the House of Roker. Over time, I had a few articles that made that leap, but this remains one of my favorites. It's not dissimilar from the stuff that I still do today for The Saturday Evening Post . At any rate, enjoy. https://www...

Slippery When Wet Sign, Caution, Floor, 1/2015 by MikeMozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube THE STANDARD INTRO: ROCK SOLID is my semi-regular music column. Its Mission: To re-examine acts and songs to find stuff that’s, if not critically good, at least entertaining or enjoyable. Am I going to find charitable things to say about acts that have been marginalized or maligned? Sure. Am I going to take up for acts that have just one good song? Sure again. We should always be re-examining or re-evaluating. You might find that something you shied away from is something that you actually like. (But not Imagine fucking Dragons). This time, we’re tackling something that I like to call “The Betrayal of Bon Jovi.” Essentially, I’ll be saying good things about a segment of the catalog, but not the rest of it. And part of that ties into a couple of central problems that I have with the concept of “Bon Jovi” in total. The first thing is that most people don’t know that the band it...

FROM THE SHOTGUN REVIEWS ARCHIVES: PORNUCOPIA aka THE AMAZING PORN ESSAY (1997)   If you’re one of the few, you happy few, who remember the original ShotgunReviews.com , you might be saying, “Wait! I thought The Mighty Shotgun didn’t open until 6-29-99!” And you’d be right. I wrote “Pornucopia” in 1997 while I was still working at Old Towne Video in Terre Haute. Grad school was wrapping up, and I’d depart for Indianapolis in October of that year. But I was still writing things just to have them and would kick off the original version of Shotgun on ComicKingdom.com, a site officiated by my friend Nick Jankowski. This piece, nicknamed “The Amazing Porn Essay” by Shawn Delaney, would end up being the anchor of the Feature Forum section on the Shotgun site. I decided to put this one up because, in some ways, it’s hilariously quaint. Video stores are basically gone; even the brick-and-mortar Family Video stores went down in January after 42 years. Really, only Redbox is the last k...

SUPER-ARTICULATE: YOUR COLLECTING TIMELINE (The original version of this piece appeared on Graphic Policy on February 7, 2020 as part of my ongoing column for that site, Super-Articulate. I'm going to use the Figure This label for when I talk about the topic here. But this is a great intro to how I got started and why I continue. Enjoy.) I was posed this question by a co-worker yesterday. He asked, “ How and when do you decide what to collect? ” He meant specifically in terms of figures, but I suppose you can apply it to anything. I had a multi-year period where I collected baseball cards due to an increased interest I had in baseball around junior high. I’ve been getting comics nearly my entire life. But figures is an interesting question, and I think I can break that down. First thing, I’m going to subtract just “generally getting toys” from the timeline. I had Fisher-Price Adventure People, for example, but I couldn’t say that I actively “collected” them. I’m only going to incl...

 ROCK SOLID .38 Special performs during the sixth annual Air Force Materiel Command Freedom's Call Tattoo June 25, 2010, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (Photo by Ben Strasser, U.S. Air Force; Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) Hey, a new feature! ROCK SOLID is going to be the semi-regular music column, but it's overall mission is going to be a little different. Sure, it'll have overlooked stuff, and classic material, and more, but for a while, it's going to be devoted a bit to one idea: in the pursuit of cool music, I think a lot of us become snobs. We don't mean to do it. Hell, a lot of us gravitated to our music tastes BECAUSE they were outside. It's history, really. Kids gravitated to rock and roll because it was different than what their parents liked. Metal, punk, goth, hip-hop, disco, college rock, alternative, fucking ska . . . there's a bit of that in almost every genre. Music was (and still is to a lot of kids) central to identity. The ...