Friday, May 18 2012
Feeling ‘80s Spirit: Post-Hardcore Punk for the Plastic Generation
Moss Icon and Jason Farrell still sizzle in the present tense, despite years of obscurity.
Monday, April 16 2012
Reluctant Gunslingers and Incorrigible She-Devils
Can classic Hollywood films help us navigate today’s environment of political apathy and cynical media saturation?
Wednesday, April 4 2012
The Future is Female
Sometimes, the prism of the future can be envisioned in the kitchen and playground, in unexpected forms of empowerment.
Friday, February 17 2012
What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and the Power of Music?
Denise Sullivan represents the insider intellectual stamina of rock 'n' roll journalism without the pomp and pretense. She is the past and future of the form, rolled into one uncanny style.
Monday, January 16 2012
Machine Guns and Metaphors: Outlaw Poet Todd Moore Remembered
The tough, vernacular, and outsider writer Todd Moore became an icon of Outlaw Poetry; he disdained academia, embraced gangsters like John Dillinger, and made American poetry pulse with dark blood.
Monday, December 5 2011
Subversive Sexology!: A Conversation with Annie Sprinkle!
With a pure heart and a heavy dose of body politic rebellion, Annie Sprinkle re-invents ecology in the age of eroticised digital culture.
Monday, November 28 2011
Simon Reynolds Redux: A Conversation from the Past About Post-Punk
Simon Reynolds discusses Joy Division and The Ramones, sex and politics, and punk's blatant localism and latent racism around the time of the release of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.
Wednesday, October 12 2011
Mohawks and Korans: Taqwacores Punk Mash-up
The Taqwacore movement seizes space in the punk narrative and social fabric, which allows Muslim voices to take root and explore their own version of rebellion.
Friday, September 16 2011
Epistolary Rex, The Sharp Hunger for Letters: Conversations with Peter Case
A poetic series of ruminations between a journalist and his subject, a folk-hero rebel rocker, who celebrate years of friendship by exploring the rocky, jolting, and quasi-spiritual experiences that shaped both of their lives.
Monday, August 1 2011
Knocking on History’s Door with Singer-Songwriter Tom Russell
Deep in the texture of Tom Russell's songs exists a well-examined stockpile of history told from the point-of-view of a sociologist with nimble literary prowess.
Wednesday, July 13 2011
Call Me Uncontrollable: Deaf Muslim Filmmaker Sabina England
A Conversation with Deaf Muslim Filmmaker Sabina England about punk attitudes, Deaf identities, and Muslim treatment in post 9-11 America.
Friday, June 17 2011
Zombies, Like Punks, Have Been Sedated & Sold, Prepackaged As Pitiful Empty Signifiers
Dr. Logan of Day of the Dead says that zombies can be domesticated and conditioned to behave – that’s exactly what some parents of punks believe, too.
Thursday, May 12 2011
The Civil War and the Uneasy Fabric of American Identity
America's obsession with the Civil War reveals not-so-invisible wounds that linger to this day in the landscape and the nation's psyche.
Monday, April 11 2011
In the City of Friction and Frisson: Street Art and Urbanism
All the illegal art, if taken as a combined unstable code and signature, are like short-lived tattoos on the municipal skins of cities.
Friday, March 25 2011
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love: The Films of Hal Hartley
Hal Hartley's films bridged the world of art school vibes and workplace routines, elite snottiness and pedestrian punches, suburban angst and critical thinking finesse, and mixed-up politics and prolonged personality crises.
Monday, February 14 2011
Punk Rock? It’s a Black, Jewish, Southern Thang
Punk is no vacuum, no airtight, sealed white music form. It's a repository of culture -- magnetized, manifold, and chock-full of merit – that was, and is, impacted by Jewish, black, and Southern experiences.
Thursday, January 13 2011
Can You Hear Me Now? The ‘Last Speakers’ Dilemma
People, places, and languages of our recent past are replaced by strip malls where Chinese porn store and Indian restaurant owners speak fluid Spanish, and Ethiopian-slash-Italian restaurants thrive next to Honduran and Venezuelan hot spots.
Thursday, December 16 2010
Who Owns Punk History?
A folkloric examination of the interview manuscripts of punk historian Jon Savage and The England's Dreaming Tapes.
Monday, December 6 2010
I Am Become Undead: ‘Cronos’ by Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro evokes a sense of literary and filmic magic surrealism, one of the core traits of Latin American creative DNA, popularized by writers such Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who probe the painful politics that often prevail in the Latin world.
Monday, November 15 2010
Gimme Gimme 99 Cent Only Store
The outer limits of any metroplex, where the cheap stores reside, often bear the best fruits, both in terms of food and music. Real hipsters know this.
Wednesday, October 27 2010
The World’s a Mess: It’s in My Art
Cruz Ortiz blends spastic and Aztec in his art -- rich cultural legacies and body-fervor -- this is Chicano, this is street politics glocalized, this is honest country music in irony-laden times.
Thursday, October 14 2010
Dollar Store Sundries and Sacred Spaces: Mexican-American Graves in a Modern Metropolis
Teeming with fruit, soda cans, ceramic figurines, plastic tassels, stuffed animals, even hanging shirts, the “barrio” section of Hollywood Cemetery abounds with vivid, converging, and often holiday-specific ornamentation.
