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It’s become a cliché, even for post-Baby Boomers, to look back wistfully on the early ’70s as some kind of untouchable golden age for popular music. But when you survey all the era’s best albums in list form, it’s hard not to trust that instinct.
I mean…
holy shit.
In 1971, the psychedelic era hadn’t completely wilted; prog was nearing its popularity apex; Motown was still a revolutionizing soul music; the folk-rock movement was in full flight. The possibilities were limitless.
You know it’s a banner year when 50 albums don’t begin to scratch the surface when both John Lennon and Paul McCartney release definitive LPs and neither make the top 10. Was 1971 the greatest album year ever? We’ll save that debate for another time (or maybe another list).
Game of Thrones: Sean Bean Reflects Ned Stark s End in Season 1 Finale
Game of Thrones: Sean Bean Reflects Ned Stark s End in Season 1 Finale
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It s no secret that
Game of Thrones came a long way since its initial first season. One of the biggest plot twists, which
George R. R. Martin s A Song of Fire and Ice series were well aware of, was the grisly fate of his first book s main protagonist in Eddard Ned Stark. The book title, which shares the same name as the HBO series, saw the patriarch, King of the North, and the hand of King Robert Baratheon (
It s been 28 years since National Public Radio first broadcast The Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris slightly exaggerated memoir of working as a Christmas elf at Macy s in New York.
Since then, the erstwhile Raleigh resident has topped the best seller lists with a dozen collections of his snarky, self-deprecating stories, essays and regurgitated diary entries.
Now comes The Best of Me not exactly a Greatest Hits album ( Santaland is conspicuously absent) but a collection of 46 New Yorker pieces by Sedaris published over the last quarter century. It s a fine core sample of the essential Sedaris..
There are the holiday stories ( Christmas Means Giving tracks a battle of conspicuous consumption in a gated community) and the parodies. A snooty theater critic savages an elementary school Christmas pageant: In the role of Mary, 6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.