Entries Tagged 'Pop Culture' ↓

Seeing the video for Alanis Morrissette’s “Thank U,” above, released ten years ago today, is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to a religious experience while considering a piece of popular art.

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Tina Fey-lin: Impersonating the Republican VP nominee on SNL

Former Not Ready for Prime-Time Player Tina Fey helped open the 34th season of Saturday Night Live by playing the role she was genetically formed to play: Alaska governor / G.O.P. VP nominee Sarah Palin, above.

With cast member Amy Poehler doing her manic Hillary Clinton jibe, the two delivered five funny minutes straight from the headlines and from Palin’s disastrous interview with ABC news anchor Charles Gibson, completely overshadowing the fact that Olympic octomedalist Michael Phelps was hosting and platinum rapper Lil Wayne performing.

If you missed it this weekend, check it out on YouTube before NBC tears it down like they do everything else on the service. Or, better, just go to Hulu.

Long before its scheduled March 2009 release, Resident Evil 5 (RE5), the next installment in the immensely popular and influential survival-horror videogame series, started coughing up blood…and controversy: In the narrative, a white protagonist, Chris Redfield, sets down in what appears to be an African or Caribbean country decimated by a mutant “supervirus.” Suddenly, freshly dead villagers start to revive as bloodthirsty zombies, and Redfield must slaughter them in hordes to stay alive, a la this scene, below, from the game trailer.

Perhaps Newsweek‘s gaming critic, N’Gai Croal, giving pointed regard to the clip’s images, with their precedents in racist visual history, said it most succinctly in an excellent MTV Online interview: “Clearly no one Black worked on this game.”

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When inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a piece of untreated rubber on a hot stove and “discovered” vulcanization (“Mesoamericans” had mastered the process centuries earlier), he probably never dreamed that, over 140 years later, the notion of burning rubber would lead to a #1 R&B smash for the GAP Band. Yet, alas.

Merci to hyper-cool Digital Femme Cheryl Lynn for linking to the video, which I’d never seen, despite the track being fundamental as 11-dimensional strings when it came to me getting through senior year at Freeport High School. Most of all, though, Lynn argues that “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” should be cited as “Reason #525 why Rock Band needs a Funk Band Expansion Pack.” To which I say, hear, hear.

Look up “GAP Band” on Wikipedia, and you’ll see “Not to be confused with band gap,” beneath the headline.

“Band gap”?? I took the bait:

In solid state physics and related applied fields, the band gap, also called an energy gap or stop band, is a region where a particle or quasiparticle is forbidden from propagating. For insulators and semiconductors, the band gap generally refers to the energy difference between the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band.

Or:

Thank you for your time!

Few Americans, perhaps, understand how massive a medium comic books became after World War II. At their peak, retailers were moving $80-100 million worth of them per week. Plus, they were hugely influential: With a typical issue passed around between six to ten readers, comics were consumed by more people than the number of adults taking in movies, magazines, radio, or TV.

However, fewer of us, even more, understand how frantic the nation became when the medium went completely pulp, highlighting tales of noir crime and horror, like the infamous EC comic cover, above. With the enormous popularity of these criminal, murderous tales, comics were blamed for everything from truancy to homicide.

So argues David Hadju, in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hadju is my guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, August 15, 2 pm ET.

You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

Artist Dan S. DeCarlo (1919-2001), below, is widely recognized as the creator of both the Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats strips. But he is best known as the illustrator who gave Archie—the comic featuring the eponymous redheaded teenager, plus his friends Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, and the rest—their definitive form and line, the look by which they’re most known, and that modern artists must emulate when drawing the characters.

I think it’s for this reason that I love the two recently released Fantagraphics texts The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, and The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo Vol. 2, edited by Alex Chun and Jacob Covey.

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Looks like those feisty Hilton women aren’t just taking up space: They’re actually taking on John McCain’s use of daughter Paris’s image in a controversial campaign ad, “Celeb,” that attacks Barack Obama.

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Madonna, 49, left; Dame Helen Mirren, 62, right.

On September 11th, people repeatedly said that the destruction of the World Trade Center “looked like a movie.” But no one had ever seen a movie before during which an exploding building powerfully, suddenly, ejects thousands of reams of paper with a woeful, confetti-like bloom. That sight was completely unexpected, a detail few would have anticipated, the random visual white noise that reality adds to a disastrous purview.

I thought of 9/11 while scoping this incredible, horizontally-formatted poster for The Dark Knight (double-sided, 40″ x 30″, rolled, $75.00, MoviePoster.com). Of course, that’s director Christopher Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and the late Heath Ledger in his final movie role, opening this Friday, July 18th.

I’m conviced that, especially as we get more and more distance between us and that horrible fall day, imagery straight from the Towers’s deaths will infest our cinematic visions as the only universally credible depictions of apocalypse.

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