Tommy C’s Five Cool Things About 2016 That Hardly Anyone Else Seemed To Notice…

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1. You can still browse in the real physical world if you want to simply rent DVD's for the weekend. It was heart wrenching when Videoport in the Old Port closed up shop. Thankfully, there's Jet Video (on the corner of Pleasant and Stevens, across the street from Deering High), an old-school Mom-and-Pop hang-out that has the feel of a by-gone era, complete with wooden floors and up on the walls, antique VCR/TV combo's playing actual video tapes. Plus, it's an ice cream parlor AND a U.S. Post Office! Why haven't we been going here all along?

2. The Free Street staircase-exit in the One City Center parking garage. It's freshly painted, there's never any trash or graffiti and it's always quiet as a mouse. I've been scurrying down from the 7th floor for years now, and only twice (TWICE!) have I encountered someone else using it too (Ray from the Portland Press Herald and the Bay Club front desk dude, and that's it!). True solitude.

3. TV: "The Exorcist". For about ten weeks, Friday nights at 9 on Fox, this was the creepiest, most well acted, brilliantly edited and superbly scripted horror show of the last twenty years. I get that grotesquery is not everybody's idea of fun television, but it's hard to believe that me, my wife, my daughter and her boyfriend were the only four people in Portland that never missed this much-overlooked gem starring Geena Davis as a grown-up Linda Blair! Probably one of the best shows ever, and no one to talk to about it...

4. Book: "Petty: The Biography". While Bruce's "Born To Run" got all the publicity (and sales), this Warren Zanes tome on Gainesville, Florida's legendary rock boy seemed to just...slip by everybody. Considering Tom Petty's status, it's somewhat strange that so many fans didn't pick up on it. A really fun read, with lots of great stuff on how hard it is to put a genuine rock band together.

5. Movie: Oasis, "Supersonic". Rock-doc of the year, hands down! There's so much more to the Gallagher Brothers than "Wonderwall". Not only are they wicked funny and entertaining (in ways that are seemingly the complete opposite of most rock stars), there's a catalog of monstrously epic songs that they bashed out one after another in just a few years making Oasis...well, frankly near-impossible to fully get a grip on -- they never made a bad record, EVER! The best B-sides in all of rock, they killed it live, and told everybody to f--k off along the way. You should be watching this right now...

Here's to Love & Happiness in 2017....and * * *  G O   P A T S !!! * * *