"The Best Film Scores of All Time That Aren't by Michael Small," they mean

Great book at great price!

You have $15K. What are you ordering?

Nice handling of the "finger dilemma"

The Seduction of Joe Tynan & Grogu

"Stereo 105" Harry Shearer is just astonishingly great in this SNL sketch with Howard Hesseman. vimeo.com/585616786

Highly recommend Chris Nashawaty's book THE FUTURE WAS NOW if you're interested in reading about how we got to have a summer of E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and The Road Warrior: us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

Mood:

out on the street for a living picture's only begun got you under their thumb

how I feel when I ask "what do you have on draft?"

Ironically, this moment would have been very good timing for Wasp Network (*not a great movie!) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/u...

Tremendous, sensitive musical telepathy between Marian McPartland and bassist Linc Milliman (1940-2026) www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0yT...

This is excellent, you should read it. (You might want to print it out and sit down with it.)

still waiting

Kubert and Toth have been translated to "Cuban & Toast"

this transcription feature is besmirching Carmine Infantino's good name: "I was in enormous cocaine, your partisans with cocaine Carmen Latino"

Letters column from the final issue of GHOSTS, May 1982

Recording phone calls on iphone: Does anyone else have the experience of sometimes not finding a menu option to transcribe the call after it's been saved in Notes?

That duck won't be so easily discouraged, you can just tell

Jazz band rehearsal à la Mike Hinge.

"Nonviolence isn’t refusing to embrace or use power. It’s learning to develop and use it in different ways." degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/on-violence

This is really great.

Fittingly, Rex Reed once sent me a "worst movies of the year" list when I was on that beat for Vulture. #2. "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: Not quite as insufferable as INCEPTION, but the continuing slobber over Christopher Nolan is one of the current cinema's most unsolvable mysteries."

It’s a truism that’s being hauled out more than ever now in the AI era, but it’s nonetheless accurate: You learn what you want to say about something in the work of writing about it. First draft of this issue was so bad I almost scrapped it. Revision was where I found a point and a structure.

Post your warning sign

Was just reminded of this beautiful Don Cherry performance of Jim Pepper's "Witchi Tai To" www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVTg...

Indicative of Hollywood's interest in promoting actual comic books in superhero movies: Grand Central newsstand in SUPERMAN (1978) is stocked with issues of Gallery, Club, Penthouse, Chic, etc. not a comic in sight.

"Kat is a Chicana detective who can fight her way through anything—the U.S. Marine Corps, CIA espionage, California swimming pools, S&M bars, even rape—anything except her passion for the beautiful Angel Stone, a best-selling feminist author certain people are out to destroy..."

Art by the great Bob Pepper!

Jack Schiff on Bob Kane: "He had an unmistakable style—actually, a distinctive flair—and even though other artists drew better technically, it was hard to match his schmaltz."

rare 1939 ad celebrating Superman's original powers (clockwise from top left): diving; holding a hose; smelling exhaust; conceding to gravity; aided piledriver; kneeling on speedlines; cape-over-subway-grate; goofing on logo

15 years ago

Author, bookseller, and publisher friends: Please keep posting your positive stories about selling books through Bluesky, and I'll package them up and show them to publishers so that we can get more book publishers and even more authors and book conversation here!

Superman and Clark Kent by Sergio Aragonés, 1973

New playlist from Hi-Fi Village. Enjoy! recordlung.substack.com/p/the-shroud...

"midnight in manhattan...listen to your junkman": gary cohen paraphrasing early springsteen as this 8-4 mets game reaches the 9th inning

If, like me, you're interested in seeing the hour-long broadcast with Robert Caro: www.c-span.org/program/book...

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex." (Susan Sontag)

Green Lantern #47; art by Gil Kane

40 years of Yo La Tengo albums: Their debut, Ride the Tiger, came out around this time in '86. Called by Ira "a Dave Schramm album" but in places you can hear the post-Schramm YLT to come. With Mission of Burma's Clint Conley on bass on a few tracks