“There is always a disco version.” That qualified truism became a recurring in-joke in our house last autumn, as my excavation of childhood nostalgia hit a rich vein of film and TV soundtrack singles from the latter half of the 1970s. The film-score-to-dance-floor phenomenon didn’t start with Meco’s “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,” but the stratospheric […]

The House on the Hillside has been getting something of a makeover for the past year and a half. While the biggest driver has been the pending arrival of the kid, it began as a pair of independent projects where Maura wanted to carve out a studio/reading room for herself in the attic and I […]

Pal Keith was ruminating the other day about his recent trip to Berlin, and how much its high-density, pedestrian-friendly model contrasts with the auto-happy sprawl on this side of the pond. Some of that can be chalked up to the encirclement the west sector of that city experienced during the Cold War, along with Europe’s […]

I turned in earlier than usual last night in hopes of better acclimating myself to the effects of Daylight Savings Time. That did not happen, but I did get a chance to catch an episode of Night Gallery on MeTV before nodding off. The plot centered around a mental asylum for rich folks (somewhere in […]

Sorry for the dry spell, but Monday’s snowstorm and Wednesday’s dentist appointment have thrown off my stride. The plague of distractions does not look like it will be easing until sometime next week, so expect the low content mode to linger a while longer. Please accept this 1982 trade publication ad as a consolation prize. […]

The Seventies were a time of terror, and I’m not just talking about the fashion styles. The upheavals of the late Sixties ushered in a Strange New Decade of heightened anxiety and an loosening of cultural mores. The face of the looming unknown took a multitude of shapes, with a significant number reflecting those subcurrents […]

NEWLY DECLASSIFIED FROM THE SECRET VPL DATABASE: THE POLYESTER FOUR PART PLAN OF 1975: 1. Trap the smell of sweat, body odor, and other environmental scents in the fabric to an eye-watering degree. 2. Cause your clothes dryer to burst into flames. 3. Realize how awful you actually look. 4. Donate the stuff to a […]

When I started getting back in the habit of buying records again, I shot my pal-slash-occasional-collaborator Daniel Butler a short list of albums to keep an eye out for at the place where he works. None of my requests were in stock at the time, though he did send me a copy of George Harrison’s […]

As much as I might’ve tried to tell myself otherwise, it was inevitable that setting up a turntable in our living room would lead to me settling back into my old record collecting ways. I tried to fight it by pulling a short stack of my perennial faves from the attic archives and hoping that […]

The North Woburn apartment where I lived as a kid was cramped, but it didn’t lack bookshelf space. Nearly every room — with the exception of the bathroom — had at some place set aside for the large number of books my family owned. The enclosed back porch which doubled as a laundry area and […]