This week marks the fifth presidential election since I launched Meet Me in Montauk, a number that frankly surprised me.
I looked back to see how I handled the other four and was shocked to see that I largely ignored them. Only once did I program blog content related to Election Day.
That was in 2016.
The week of Nov. 3, 1964, found The Supremes atop the Billboard Hot 100 with their classic ‘Baby Love.’ I posted that song way back at Song of the Day #339, early on in a Motown Weekends series.
At #2 was J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’s ‘Last Kiss,’ a recording of a song originally released a few years earlier by the song’s writer, Wayne Cochran. While that version stalled out on the charts, this one did quite well.
Throwing back to the week of Nov. 2, 1954, we find a familiar trio hanging on at the top three of Billboard’s singles chart: Eddie Fisher’s ‘I Need You Now‘ and two Rosemary Clooney tracks, ‘Hey There‘ and ‘This Ole House.’
At #4 that week was Perry Como’s ‘Papa Loves Mambo,’ a tune that capitalized on a nationwide interest in the Cuban dance music style.
My final horror movie post of the year sings the praises of the genre’s acting. While many low-budget scary movies are notorious for wooden performances, particularly by dim-witted teens being lined up for slaughter, others are showcases for extraordinary screen acting.
The Academy Awards have famously ignored this genre, along with comedy, for nearly 100 years. Only six actors have won Oscars for horror movies: Frederic March for 1931’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Ruth Gordon for 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, Kathy Bates for 1990’s Misery, both Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster for 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, and Natalie Portman for 2010’s Black Swan.
One of the main reasons I’ve come to love horror movies is that, for all of their lowbrow pleasures, they so often are high art. Horror directors play with style, form, and technique with a freedom and fervor you don’t find as consistently in other genres.
I think part of that has to do with budgets. Horror films are famously low-budget affairs, which benefits them in a couple of ways. First, it forces filmmakers to innovate, whether it’s using practical effects or utilizing camera movement and editing to generate suspense. The most famous example is probably Jaws, in which Steven Spielberg came up with his shark’s-eye view because his mechanical shark wasn’t working.
Meet Me In Montauk 