We all know the term “Hero’s Journey.” Every high school English teacher has tried to beat the formula into unwilling heads, in an effort to simplify the story-line for Beowulf and every monomyth ever. If only there was a simpler, more entertaining way to deliver that information to bored kids that didn’t include stick-figure doodles on […]
Last month, instrumental hip-hop godhead DJ Shadow was asked by the staff at Miami’s Mansion nightclub to cut his set short, apparently because whatever he was playing was too weird for the crowd. Later, Shadow promised to upload the offending set to SoundCloud so we could hear exactly what had those promoters so worked up. […]
This is Saburo Murakami. He is Passing Through in 1956. He is very excited. He should be very excited because he is part of Gutai, the postwar Japan’s most influential artistic movement, the hotbed of avant-garde of the ’50s and ’60s. One of the most anticipated art exhibits of 2013, the Guggenheim kicks off a Gutai “Splendid Playground” […]
Because our audience surely includes a law-breaker or two, we thought we’d bring you this update on the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: according to the New York Times, the storm pummeled a Red Hook warehouse that was home to “hundreds of seized cars, thousands of guns and 9,846 barrels of evidence containing sensitive DNA material.” And apparently, […]
Massacres at the hands of crazed gunmen in 2012 left us Americans shaking our heads and searching our souls. It also emboldened gun control advocates with a renewed fervor to once-and-for-all enact laws that they hope could prevent gruesome mass shootings from happening again. In the aftermath of Newtown, the main action that the media, the […]
Though NASA’s plans for manned spaceflight going forward are slim, it is exploring its options for using Curiosity-style unmanned robots in future missions. One such potential undertaking, recently confirmed by researchers at the Keck Institute for Space Studies, would involve sending a flying robot into space to wrangle a small asteroid, put it inside a […]
“In Russia, graves are ridiculous!” I swear, if I see anyone reposting these and writing that, I will personally smack them. I will find them IRL and smack them. And so. Not all Russian graves have swag, but when they do… A certain Russian blogger has recently rehashed these marvels. He presents them as opulent post-mortem totems to […]
The Fiscal Cliff compromise deal–which averted the crisis at hand, but was felt by many in Washington to be a bit of a cop-out–diverted attention away from one of the other most important issues of our day: federal relief for states pummeled by Hurricane Sandy. In the flurry of activity over the fiscal deal, House […]
So, there’s a bit of fuss over semi-retired Italian prankster-artist Maurizio Cattelan’s HIM… again. The 2001 sculpture of Adolf Hitler was recently installed in a former Warsaw ghetto alley. It can only be viewed through a small peephole in a rotting gate, looking like a small praying boy. Poland’s chief rabbi Michael Schudrich approved the installation for […]
In a year of a historically terrible storm, an Empire State Building shooting, questionable practices by the police department, handsy and racist Times Square mascots, an epically polluted waterway, several exotic animals running wild, hazardously mislabeled raw fish, a disgusting monster that washed up on the shores of the East River, record arrest numbers, a ban […]