by Brett Warner
It’s 9:33 PM at the Detroiter Truck Stop in Woodhaven, Michigan and I’m inadvertently playing Duran Duran for the black metal band Goatwhore. Standing bored behind the gift shop checkout counter half an hour before closing time, I had plugged my iPod into the small external laptop speaker display model sitting quietly to my right, humming along to the first couple tunes on 1993’s The Wedding Album. Halfway through Warren Cuccurullo’s guitar solo on “Ordinary World”, I look up to see four very big, very pierced and very tattooed gentlemen standing directly across from me, waiting to purchase a few pairs of winter gloves. Recognizing their spooky font logo, I proclaim in the manliest voice I can muster how my old roommate was a big time fan. It’s too late, though – my metal cred is gone forever. I’ve been outed.
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by Nicole Powers
“It’s an absolutely fucking crazy story.”
– Jaimie D’Cruz
Exit Through the Gift Shop is a film that defies explanation, and one’s ability to suspend disbelief. Indeed the plot would be utterly ridiculous, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true.
It started out life as a simple documentary about street art as seen through the lens of Thierry Guetta, a French national living in Los Angeles. Thanks to a family connection, and his infectious and perpetuity ebullient personality, Guetta gained unparalleled access to the major players in the scene, who are a notoriously secretive and hard to track down bunch by necessity due to the predominantly illicit nature of their work. Guetta’s extreme enthusiasm for the form, and his zealous pursuit of its practitioners, ultimately led him to the scene’s holy grail, Banksy, an elusive British street art superstar.
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by Nicole Powers
“You never make fun of people you don’t like.”
-Lisa Lampanelli
Life is all about timing. Especially when you’re telling jokes that many might view as not funny, and that even more might find downright offensive. Thus, Lisa Lampanelli, the self-proclaimed Queen of Mean, who stars in her first HBO comedy special, Long Live the Queen, picks her moments carefully –– very carefully.
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by Nicole Powers
It was very possible to lose one’s mind…playing Catherine,” says Mena Suvari, referring to her role in the film Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, which opens in select US theaters this month. Indeed the character at the heart of the Ernest Hemingway book, upon which the movie is based, is considered to be one of the writer’s most complex.
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by Brett Warner
It has always been a bitter irony that death is the most commercially viable thing an artist can ever do. From Vermeer to Van Gogh, Nick Drake to Notorious B.I.G., nothing attracts dollar signs and revisionist cultural significance quite like a tragic demise. Despite what the gargantuan pharmaceutical industry might suggest, people are secretly enthralled by the romance of death – it’s why The Dark Knight made more than a billion dollars, it’s why Nevermind, not OK Computer, is the most important record of the ‘90s, and it’s why Sony Music’s new release Michael (in stores now) will sell a shit ton of copies despite not being a real Michael Jackson album in just about every possible way.
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by Morgan
Casual games are often looked down upon in the video gaming community. (For a definition of casual games, check wiki.) But I reject the idea that casual gaming somehow makes a person a less serious gamer or that it is inherently silly. I think one would be hard pressed to refuse to admit that occasionally it’s fun to play something that is entertaining and engrossing but that doesn’t require big time/strategy investments. To that end, I check Big Fish Games and Jay is Games daily to see if there is anything new I want to try out. Here are the top four casual games that I’ve been playing recently, and that I highly recommend.
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by Fred Topel
“I guess Stephen Brill never saw Star Wars.”
– Kyle Newman
With the Star Wars saga officially wrapped up with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, fans will seek out any remaining sliver of that galaxy far, far away on screen. The Clone Wars animated movie gave them a little bit of light drone lasering action, but what really caught their attention was Kyle Newman’s Fanboys.
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