Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS: Wilson Pickett’s wicked wail

You can make the case that, in the scheme of things, Wilson Pickett is a fairly minor figure in the history of American popular music. (You’d be wrong, but you could make the case.) There are only a few of Pickett’s songs that seem to retain any relevance beyond golden oldie status today. “Mustang Sally” seems to have become a favorite period signifier for some film directors.
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J.D. Salinger chose his own way out

My favorite bit of social media shrapnel that stuck in my cyberfilter in the wake of the author’s death on January 27 was a short item from The Onion headlined “Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger”
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SPIRITS: Hot toddies are balm for winter’s maladies

Snow days come at a cost, and not just in workplace productivity. Cold makes bones remember their misadventures; last weekend I could feel a seam in my right ankle, a souvenir from a 1978 basketball game. In winter, joints stiffen and creak, knees settle decades old scores.
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Movie Review: A Single Man

Elegant on the surface, A Single Man digs deep emotionally

Maybe the harshest criticism that can be legitimately leveled at Tom Ford’s remarkable debut movie A Single Man is that it looks like a movie directed by a fashion designer.
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ON FILM: 10 Best Picture nominees make worthy contenders

I don’t invest much in any awards show; at best they are just overproduced infomercials for show business. They’re OK to watch if there’s no good ballgame or movie on.
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Home movies

Recent DVD releases: Zombieland (R, 86 minutes) An almost simple-minded movie, Zombieland is elevated by warm empathy-grabbing performances and macabre humor.
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CRITICAL MASS: Big Love is not a big deal

There is a temptation for me to make too much of Big Love, HBO’s series about a polygamist family living just under the radar in Utah. I don’t watch much television (more precisely, I don’t watch much programming that is made specifically for television), and my attachment to Big Love probably has as much to do with its time slot (8 p.m. Sunday) as it does with the show’s content.
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The indestructability of a song

You may have heard the story behind Rosanne Cash’s lastest album, 2009’s The List: In 1973, Johnny Cash wrote out, on a single sheet of legal paper, a list 100 of what he considered “essential” country songs she needed to learn.
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ON FILM: Mining gold

Avatar hits the mother lode but doesn’t dig that deeply.

Last week James Cameron’s Avatar officially replaced Cameron’s Titanic as the biggest movie of all time — or at least the movie that has earned more than any other. It still has about $50 million — a couple of weeks — to go before it passes Titanic as the U.S. box-office champion.
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Baseball’s Hall of Fame not what it used to be

So far the sportswriters who vote on candidates for baseball’s Hall of Fame seem disinclined to elect any player even suspected of using performanceenhancing drugs during their playing careers.
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