I never understood why “summer reading” automatically means mindless, time-wasting crap. Is there some unwritten code that when the temperatures crank up, we’re obliged to fill our heads with lesbian vampire fiction and celebrity tell-alls? Who exactly is it that’s dying to read this stuff? Thankfully, not the people at Tin House, who are busy […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inUncategorized
Mad Props
Late-Night Veggie Grub in St. Johns?!?
St. Johns has always struck me as a wellspring of untapped “cool neighborhood” potential. As the migration of young homeowners moves northward, it seems inevitable that the abundance of storefronts lining N Lombard will soon house shops, nice restaurants, and boutiques selling duct tape wallets. The cool factor of downtown St. Johns got a major […]
Posted inMusic
That’s Not Kool
Dr. Octagon Never Called Me Back
GIVEN KOOL KEITH’S er, “spotty” history of professionalism, I wasn’t too surprised when he stood me up not once, but twice for a phone interview. After all, if he disappeared off the face of the Earth on the eve of Lollapalooza ’97, and allegedly holed up in a Hollywood hotel room blowing his record advance […]
Posted inGeneral
The Baby Issue
Who Are They… Where Are They From… WHAT DO THEY WANT??
Pullout: The Baby Issue
Posted inArt
Video Library
Video art, as small A projects owner Laurel Gitlen points out, is simultaneously one of the toughest forms of art to replicate, as well as one of the easiest. “You can’t really look at it in a magazine or as a JPEG,” she says. “But you can burn every video you’ve ever made onto a […]
Posted inGeneral
Buddha vs. the Mafia
The Real Story of Steven Seagal and the Mob
The Steven Seagal Issue!
Posted inBooks
The 33 1/3 Roundup
Surely you’ve seen the 33 1/3 books at some point, even if you’ve never read one. They’re pocket-sized paperbacks, each of them personalized studies of a single rock album. There are more than 30 books in the series now, encompassing prolonged meditations on albums by everyone from Prince to Radiohead to the Smiths. Since these […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Love, Menace, and the New West
Down in the Valley‘s Ripe, Sinister Secrets
Everyday, people around me bitch and moan about the state of American cinema. They whine that there haven’t been any real auteurs since the ’70s, they complain about Tom Cruise, and they act like there’s hasn’t been a good American film since Mean Streets. To these people, I say: bullshit. If you look at the […]
Posted inArt
Internal Guidance Systems
In recent years, folk art has become as much of an imitable style as it is a designation for art made on the fringe of culture, far removed from the elitist trappings of the art world. A woman I know in Louisiana—San Francisco born and raised, art educated, and far from mad—makes assemblages from bottle […]
Posted inFeature
Making the Grade
The Mercury Food Issue Checks In with Old Standbys
Making the Grade