Rating: ★★½ (out of 4) I bought High Fidelity about a year ago on the recommendation of fellow Earn This writer Grant. Earlier this week, my computer crashed. I was too lazy to fix it that night, so I grabbed the first book I saw on my bookshelf and started reading. It happened to be Fidelity. I…
Dear Readers, Dutch post-rock crew All Shall Be Well has announced the winner of the Storytellers contest I told you about. I hope some of you submitted! This is an exciting project, and I encourage all of you to follow along at the band’s website, where they will be posting updates over time to “make…
Last week, I found the script for the pilot of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming new HBO show The Newsroom; the day after I finished reading it, Dan sent me the new series’ trailer. Unfortunately, the show’s genesis has twisted my mind into a cognitively-dissonant pretzel that’s harder to untangle than recent Gossip Girl plotlines. The freight train that is my…
I’m not sure if I’ve ever officially commented on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” by Bruce Springsteen on this site, so let me do that right now: It’s one of my favorite songs of all time, if not my favorite. I also think that the studio version is more or less perfect, unassailable. There’s so much…
Bruce Springsteen’s two most beloved albums are the Borns: to Run and in the USA. The former (his third album) was the album that propelled him to mega-fame and contains two tracks that Rolling Stone later ranked in the top 100 songs of all time, Born to Run and Thunder Road. The latter (his seventh album)…
“Every one of Joel’s songs — including the happy ones — are ultimately about loneliness.” – Chuck Klosterman For a singer known best as a Tin Pan Alley-inspired, Broadway-loving, pop balladeer, Billy Joel has a pretty big dark streak. You may not hear it in “Just the Way You Are” or “Uptown Girl,” but Joel’s…
Up here in Boston, we’re in the midst of a 90’s music renaissance. Or so I’m told. Sometime a year or two ago, the local press wrote enough about this purported revival to power a hot air balloon, and they flew that baby as far as it would go. Meanwhile, as a recent transplant to…
3/5/12, 3:02 PM – At midnight tonight, Mass Effect 3 is released. I will be sharing thoughts (and maybe screenshots) as I play through the game. On this post. If you’ve been paying close attention, you will have noted that I declared Mass Effect 2 my favorite game of all time, an assertion that still stands.…
Public service announcement courtesy of EarnThis.net! The short version: a talented new indie band from the Netherlands is now accepting short story submissions so that they can pick one and write a soundtrack for it. Read their official announcement here and see details below. ~ All Shall Be Well (And All Shall Be Well And…
Every now and then I browse through the archives of Earn This — and my colllege newspaper columns, and my old personal web-site, etc. — and I usually come away some combination of pleased and disgusted. Pleased, in that my writing has become progressively more readable. Disgusted, in that so much of what I’ve written…