Notes from the Ironbound

It's been too long since I've done a top ten. I was just talking to a friend last week about my Reagan Dawn theory and we both agree...

I just put up my newest episode of my podcast Old Dad's Records , and I think the hiatus has been good for me. This edition concerns ...

The newest episode of the Old Dad's Records podcast is up!   This time around I was inspired by old music from 1983 I that's popp...

In the 1980s wine coolers bestrode America like a colossus. Yuppies had given wine a leg up, but most Americans didn't know a chardon...

I have been having a hard time finding writing inspiration recently, so I've decided to kick off a new series: Commercials from Hell....

I'm tired and run down from this week but still in a mood to do some writing. I haven't done a top ten of mainstream rock songs, and...

February is the worst month of the year by far. Winter has dragged on, and refuses to leave. The only holidays are either lame (President...

It's been awhile since I've done a top ten, and I realized that I've never done an albums countdown. I chose 1982 because I tend...

We are living in dark times. In these days of woe we need escapist entertainment to distract us. We need cheap thrills. We need dumb fun....

Growing up in Nebraska, late May meant the end of the school year. (Here in the Northeast I've still got another month.) I have very cle...

This poster grabbed my imagination back in '84 [Editor's Note: I wrote this as a submission to an online film magazine asking f...

Different eras have different color palettes. I read a New Yorker article about this once, and it fascinated me. All of a sudden designer...

Right before my parents came to visit I suffered from a pretty intense attack of the black dog. The seasons have a big effect on my menta...

We often tend to mistakenly think of the 1980s in ways that paint it as uniformly conforming to certain trends consistently throughout th...

Growing up in rural Nebraska in the 1980s and early 1990s, MTV was absolutely essential. In those pre-internet days, it was my main cond...

I've been spending a lot of late nights looking up old 80s music videos, and have found peak 80s to be in the 1984-1986 sweet spot. At t...

I've talked a lot on here about what I call the "Reagan Dawn," that cultural period from 1979-1982 where the transvaluation...

I tend to think of 1986 as peak 80s. It's the year that Top Gun game out, the most 80s movie of the 80s. It's before the stock marke...