by Brett Warner
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggle.” – Karl Marx
“It’s always about the money, isn’t it?” – Coach Eric Taylor
There is a scene late in the fourth season of NBC’s Friday Night Lights in which a sixteen year-old high school student named Becky Sproles confronts the football team’s star running back, Luke Cafferty, with some bad news: “I’m pregnant, and it’s yours, and I need an abortion…It’s really expensive, it’s like $300. And I don’t have all of it right now, but I can come up with half if you can come up with the other half.”
Television critics were quick to praise the show for its brave pro-choice stance, but Friday Night Lights adheres consistently to its “quasi-Marixst understanding that economics dictate everything.” (Ginia Bellafante, NY Times) Despite their clear eyes and full hearts, the residents of fictional working class town Dillon, Texas wind up losing quite a bit over the course of four football seasons; their televised drama reflects the struggles, worries, and economic woes of a significant percentage of the United States for whom the recession is far from over.
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by Nicole Powers
“She’s a bit of a skank.”
– Rufus Dayglo
It’s been a couple of years since Tank Girl made her dramatic comeback. Since then she’s been kicking a lot of physical and metaphorical butt. After a hiatus of over a decade, the punk rock comic character is making up for lost time, with a slew of new adventures in book and comic form.
Created by anarchist wordsmith Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, Tankie (as she is affectionately known to those in the know) first made her debut in the pages of UK comic magazine Deadline in 1988. Her “fuck you” attitude instantly resonated with Britain’s disenfranchised, Thatcher-abused youth, and it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. However MGM’s 1995 film, which captured the look but not the spirit of the comic strip, pretty much stopped Tank Girl in her tracks.
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by Brandon Perkins
for the record, this is some shit i just thought of y’all, science fiction that’s not admissable in no court of law.
– mf doom
Everyone on the bus was horribly disfigured. Warts, scars, stains, blemishes, matted hair, and various other dismembering smells. Fifth-generation t-shirts that started with sports-playing grandsons ended their tattered saga on the drooping shoulders of a youngin’s great grandmother. Hand-me-downs were hand-me-ups. It all went in reverse. The passengers sat two-by-two or stood in the aisles, grasping sweaty bars for balance. Their day to day bus was taking them into the night and the Brown Between had a tendency to jerk rather suddenly.
The bus ran from Los Angeles’s most maligned residential line (Compton’s Circle) to the #720 and back again. Higher class routes existed for higher-class passengers who lived in fancier places. It was mostly the poor that rode the Brown Between. Its primary purpose was to shuttle the cleaning staff, rat catchers, dishwashers, fast food short order chefs, sheet metal deburrers, and other employees of undesirable servitude to and from their overcrowded residential complexes on an impossibly rickety set of tracks-and the Brown Between was the only line in the city that still seemed to be on tracks. When the seats were comfortable they felt infested with unimaginable insects. And when they weren’t comfortable? The fabric looked frightfully diseased and the insects actually crept up everyone’s legs.
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by Nicole Powers
“I was used to the realities of sucking at something.”
– Justin Halpern, author of Shit My Dad Says
Justin Halpern is an ordinary guy who curates an extraordinary Twitter page. In less than a year it’s garnered over 1.3 million fans who follow Justin simply to keep track of the latest and greatest shit his dad says. Justin’s talent lies in realizing the aforementioned shit was of a superior quality to that emitted from other dad’s mouths. He also has a knack for conveying the underlying heart behind his father’s seemingly harsh witticisms.
Raised on a farm in Kentucky, Justin’s dad, Sam Halpern, is a man of few words – who knows how to make every syllable count. The exact opposite of passive-aggressive, Halpern, Sr. has never been backwards about coming forwards with his often-unsolicited opinions and words of advice. Growing up, this brutal honesty was difficult to deal with, but now Justin is reaping the rewards. His @ShitMyDadSays Twitter page has spawned a hilarious yet surprisingly touching book of longer vignettes — brilliantly retold by Justin — and a TV sitcom produced by Warner Brothers for CBS starring William Shatner, which was co-written by Halpern, Jr. in association with the team behind Will & Grace.
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by Brett Warner
Few bands manage to perpetually frustrate their fans the way Weezer does. With each new album, singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo – a semi-secret musical genius, we’ve been instructed to keep in mind – continues to disappoint a very vocal legion of cynical, skeptical, and especially jaded twenty-to-thirty somethings with one word on their tongues: Pinkerton. No other album in rock history (save maybe Sgt. Pepper) gets tossed around as much; you won’t find any Weezer album review after 2001 that fails to mention it. The 1996 proto-emo classic was a commercial flop upon its release, but word of mouth and the band’s 5-year hiatus lifted it to cult classic status. Its supporters tend to hail the album’s intensely personal lyrics: a smorgasbord of frustrations aimed at groupies, lesbians, Asian girls, and Cuomo’s various other insecurities. Weezer’s latest album Hurley (their first on independent label Epitaph Records) has gotten some choice positive reviews, many comparing its rougher, lo-fi sound to Pinkerton’s – but still, many rock fans seem unwilling (or unable) to give the band another chance. To them, the deeply confessional tone of Pinkerton’s songs has been replaced on post-millennial Weezer records with sarcastic, ironic, sophomoric humor – when in actuality, Weezer have never been ironic. They are quite possibly the only completely honest, agenda-less band to come out of the ’90s alternative boom. So why the shift in general cultural opinion of the group? The reason why Weezer continues to frustrate listeners is because they draw attention to the generational shift between X and Y listeners. Throughout this significant transition in social attitudes, Weezer have remained remarkably consistent – we’re the ones who’ve changed.
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by Alex Dueben
Dame Darcy is a renaissance woman. The Idaho-born artist has crafted a broad and powerful body of work. She’s an illustrator and fine artist, a musician, dollmaker and designer. Her work has been exhibited in galleries around the world. In 2006, Penguin released a new edition of Jane Eyre heavily illustrated by her. She has an etsy store where she sells not just prints and original art, but dolls and other handcrafted work. She’s collaborated with Alan Moore and contributed to the Tori Amos comics anthology Comic Book Tattoo. Her other books include Gasoline and Frightful Fairytales.
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by Nicole Powers
With her idiosyncratic style, DIY aesthetic, and kick-ass attitude, Tank Girl, who made her debut in Deadline in 1988, is without question a proto-SG. I was therefore jolly chuffed to receive a spiffy, glossy bound copy of her latest adventure, Skidmarks. Written by Tank Girl co-creator Alan Martin and drawn by the awesomely awesome* Rufus Dayglo, the gzillion thrills a minute plot is basically Wacky Races for an audience with a penchant for punk rock, smelly chicks (Tankie rolls with a pungent aroma), on-fire farts (see previous) and esoteric references.
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