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AMC’s watershed, Mad Men, winner of multiple “best dramatic series” Emmys is about to wrap up its last season.  This show has been so good, especially in the first seasons, that it has a set a bar for itself that is almost impossible to reach year after year. Those first seasons were remarkable in their art…

The music industry is a complete mess. Illegal downloads continue to eclipse legal ones and most artists recordings are Trojan horses for live shows. These tours, especially the arena ones, are now the money train of the music business. According to Pollstar veteran rockers mostly rule this concert scene – many of them not even bothering to…

The Grammy Awards have been a source of frustration for music fans for many years. The Beatles and many other Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were never properly acknowledged during their careers. Worse, the “Record of the Year” award, arguably the Grammy’s highest honor that goes to both the artist and the producer…

Growing up in Los Angeles in the seventies, it was impossible not to feel the omnipresence of the Chandler’s LA Times. It had become for a time, under the direction of publisher Otis Chandler, a rival to the NY Times and Washington Post (it ranks third behind those two in terms of lifetime Pulitizers). Robert…

HBO’s Game of Thrones returns this weekend. As fans follow the saga of the Starks and Lannisters heading into a four-decade-long winter, one wonders whether there will there be a moment as startling as the “red wedding” of season 3? And what about Calesi and her dragons? Season 4 may prove to be Throne’s most…

When the bong smoke cleared and rock fans soberly looked back at the 1970’s, many scratch their heads and wonder (to paraphrase the classic Deadhead joke)  “what the F was I listening to!”  Time in fact has not been kind to many of the era’s mega-sellers and live music draws that were labeled “progressive.” Progressive…