Slot Car Night was a big event, ranking somewhere between Christmas and network airings of The Wizard of Oz on the childhood anticipation scale. Our apartment was too cramped to set up anything of a permanent nature and my brother and I were too young to play with the set unsupervised, so the box of […]

Every K-Tel “current hits” compilation was disposable by design. Their contents were skimmed from the previous seasons pop charts, pressed to vinyl, and released under some ephemerally significant title and trade dress. They stuck it out in the midlist churn for a brief period of topical appeal before getting booted into the realm of deep […]

Star Wars saved funnybooks as a mass medium. Landing the licensing rights to the franchise gave Marvel a leg up at a time when some suspected the publisher’s days were numbered. Its success was able to turn things around long enough for the rebooted X-Men (and its DC counterpart, the New Teen Titans) to gain […]

Sometime around my fortieth birthday, my interest in plastic crap took a steep dive. I’d like to say that a growing (if long delayed) sense of adult responsibility was the cause. The truth is I had a sad realization that these overpriced artifacts of arrested development would spend a couple of years cluttering up a […]

Even as I dug through a disorganized assortment of crates in search of my copy of Rock 80, another auditory artifact from a bygone era was making its way from someone’s damp basement to my front porch. The album was Right On, a 1976 release that represents the apotheosis of K-Tel’s midlist compilations during the […]

In the years before Lil Bro was born, both my parents held full-time jobs. My father worked a regular 9-to-5 gig doing quality control for a local defense contractor and my mother worked evening shifts as a nurse’s aide at an assisted living facility a couple of blocks away from her parents’ place. This was […]

In times of crisis, I have found it helpful to look back to an simpler equally chaotic and confusing time in search of answers bizarre shit to marvel at through fragmentary memory and a thick nostalgic haze. Sure, things may look pretty grim on a global scale in 2017, but they still haven’t sunk to […]

Another Monday, another truncated ‘n’ squished collection of pop hits from the polyester apocalypse of the early 1970s. The album is the creatively titled 22 Explosive Hits, Vol 2, released by K-Tel in 1972. I purchased it for the same reason I purchased the thematically similar Believe in Music compilation — to cheaply acquire a […]

During the social media hub-bub surrounding the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars’ cinematic debut, some folks in my circle recalled the various venues where they first beheld the film. It was much more interesting than the discussions about the franchise itself, which has been all but talked to death at this point. I can remember […]

Before heading out to see the live-action Beauty and the Beast flick last Tuesday, Maura and I took a side trip out to Wilmington to return a pair of cable boxes to the local Comcast storefront. It wasn’t until we got there that we learned the place had relocated to one of the mixed-use developments […]