Author: Ryan Thomas

Like young love, some bands aren’t meant to be. However, that doesn’t make music any less enjoyable, love any less pleasant, so much as the people involved weren’t conducive to a healthy discourse. With the death of a band, the chance to create anew is given, something perhaps even better than before. And sometimes musicians…

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Currently, there’s a rather unpleasant radio commercial for some Chipotle sub which talks about some promotion being available for an “unlimited time only.”  That’s not the problem: there is a disclaimer used in the ad that goes something like, “If the world does end in 2012, according to Mayan calendar predictions, due to worldwide earthquakes,…

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Big as America’s military hubris may be, Vietnam was a terrible failure, also one which has been given unyielding film treatment.  In hindsight, there’s no denying that the bodies which lied needlessly in waste were in vein and for a cause too idealistic to warrant such entirely-symbolic bloodshed.  That said, you don’t blame the cattle…

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There are exactly two reasons to be obsessed with Johnny Depp:  his acting and his sex appeal, both of which have a tendency to defy rigid gender norms (that is to say, he played a transsexual in Before Night Falls, and boys and girls alike will unabashedly admit to their unhealthy Johnny crushes).  As a…

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Sometimes the best feeling to experience from a film is confusion.  While mainstream Hollywood loves to churn out countless hackneyed formula-followers, which tell us precisely when to cry or laugh or release tension, having everything spoon-fed and laid out so predictably is a very traditional approach to film.  Sure each has its place, a comedy…

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The eighties were filled with two things: hairspray and hearts on sleeves. There were other, less pleasant things (Reagan, a Cold War, inappropriately bulky technology), but what else stands out so dramatically when revisiting some of the most topical pop culture from the decade?  The hairstyles alone reached unprecedented heights, it seemed like blow dryers…

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The mainstream music industry does a good job of catering to low expectations.  Such expectations are consistently low thanks to the lack of opposition within the music industry (that’s what indie music is inherently for).  The industry wouldn’t be what it is without being an absolutely totalitarian entity, one that holds a dangerous amount of…

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Writers have been adding levels of toxicity to their brains and bloodstreams since the beginning of time: self-diagnosing and self-treating their own misery, boredom, or lack of ideas with foreign self-altering substances. Shakespeare (whether personally familiar or not) included notions of an “insane root” in Macbeth to explain the hijacking of normality by paranormal encounters,…

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