Death has the unexpected benefit of restoring relevance. Michael Jackson is dead so we forget about the bleached, siliconized, plastic surgery testing ground that was once his face, and we chose to set aside his suspicious activity with children, and we toss the Liz Taylor obsession, the crotch-grabbing, and his increasingly stilted moonwalk into a [...]

Graffiti is more than just a hobby for Chicago-based graffiti artist Ray Noland; it’s a way of life. He has a penchant for creating works of street art inspired by political figures. Back during the 2008 election season, Noland helped contribute to Barack Obama’s grassroots campaign by creating mesmerizing stencil graffiti pieces. More recently, Noland [...]

Among my friends it’s known as the boxer story—the day I ripped a wide hole in the crotch of an old pair of boxers, pulled it over my head, and wore it to the mall with a girlfriend I was desperate to dump. Of course I lacked the courage to break up with her, and [...]

Here’s a fresh stencil graffiti piece by ABOVE. It features none other than a greedy AIG executive doing what he does best — cheating & stealing. This is one of my personal favorites — I love the triumphant expression on his chubby face. Be sure to watch the video below. Have a great Easter Sunday [...]

The certainty of death and taxes accepts a new recruit this week: the certainty of a college freshman breaking up with her long-distance boyfriend.
I should have seen it coming. So goes the refrain of the dumped, in this case my 21 year-old self living in a basement apartment in Buffalo, NY. We met at summer [...]

Who would have thought that the archaic cassette tape could be utilized to create visually stunning portraits of pop culture icons? In iri5’s “Ghost in the Machine” art exhibit he does just that. From Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix to Marilyn Monroe, iri5 brings them all back to life. Take a look at the pics [...]

These days, the ongoing corporate greed on Wall Street seems to have taken over the headlines. In this stencil graffiti piece, artist Vinchen wants to remind everyone of the effect that this will have on our future generations. This is one of the more culturally relevant graffiti pieces that I’ve come across lately. Take [...]

Speaking of fantastic terrible movies, I watched Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond last night. It was much better than its source material—a Lovecraft short titled, oddly enough, From Beyond—and it got me thinking about that Anglophilic old mollycoddle. Lovecraft, I mean. Not Stuart Gordon (who is neither Anglophilic nor a mollycoddle, as far as I can [...]

There’s no grand unifying theme for this week’s column. Sometimes—and only sometimes—reductionism is inappropriate when referencing pop cultural artifacts, because evidence of a particular epoch need not be found within the subtext of obsolete trends and memes. Sometimes—and only sometimes—we can look at a pop cultural artifact as its own phenomenon. It remains both timeless [...]

We’ve become so cynical that even the most mediocre manifestation of the Hollywood marketing juggernaut—the video game adaptation of a Hollywood blockbuster—is now regarded with a shrug. Blame it on decades of desensitization to low quality and quick-buck schemes, but even the most reliable pop culture critics (I’m referring to that spicy blend of hipster, [...]