It’s Been 20 Years: The L.A. Riots…This Revolution WAS Televised.

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the L.A. Riots. 20 years ago I was sitting in a classroom, wearing a Catholic school uniform. In my personal life, I was listening to Guns’n’Roses, Metallica, Queensryche and Nelson, about to be 14 years old (my birthday is in May), and things were…well, as good as they can [...]

So This is Permanence: Joy Division and Me, Pt. 2

I never realized the lengths I’d have to go All the darkest corners of a sense I didn’t know. Just for one moment, I heard somebody call, Looked beyond the day in hand, there’s nothing at all Now that I’ve realized how it’s all gone wrong, Gotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long [...]

Get Into the Groove: Desperately Seeking Susan and Genre Revision

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.             -George Orwell When Susan Seidelman received a script entitled “Desperately Seeking Susan,” in 1985, it had already been floating around Hollywood for 4 years. When she saw the title, she knew that it [...]

More Than Two White Stripes: For Poly Styrene and Ari Up

         When I heard that Poly Styrene died yesterday, I thought it was another cruel internet joke. See, apparently the internet and celebrity deaths have become the best “joke” companions, as I have heard rumors of, quite literally, at least 4-5 other famous people dying within the last few months and they have been [...]

Cover to Cover: The Palimpsestic Identity of Sin City

We’ve all heard it before- there are no new stories, just new storytellers. While people may buy into this theory, seeing only familiar plotlines, tired characters and repetitious outcomes, many times it is in the retelling of a familiar text that innovative styles and new diegetic constructions are born. Raymond Chandler once said that a [...]

Forged in Fire: Heavy Metal and the Male “Bromance”

Disclaimer: I will have you know that I hate the word “bromance.” I hate it with the burning heat of a thousand fires. That said, as a writer and a pop culture participant, I will retain the use of the damn word in my title as it has become part of popular language and is [...]

Drug Me: The WWE and The Death of Michael Jackson

Well, fuck.  Am I REALLY going to have to write something about this? Apparently I am, because two things that should have stayed the hell out of the way of each other due to obvious mutual concerns have come up. So I was on the Internet this morning, because I heard that, yes, once again, [...]

G’night, Sweet King…RIP Michael Jackson, King of Pop, 1958-2009

So Michael Jackson died today. He was 50 years old. And a whole bunch of people are “not upset.” That’s fine. I understand. I get it. There’s terrible things going on in the world. Iran, the economy…I mean who can blame them for not giving a shit about a pop star, right? Well, I have [...]

Thank You For Bea-ing a Friend…:RIP Bea Arthur,1922-2009

I will be the first to admit that my gay sensibilities are ostensibly heightened and terrifically off-the-charts much of the time when it comes to…well, almost anything. Go ahead and point it out. I will shrug at you. I will shrug quite loudly at you, in fact. I have recognized that there is a very [...]

Journey to the Center of a Girl

Growing up in Los Angeles- Hollywood, to be precise- can be a very odd experience. Not that I would know any different, so I suppose that it should all seem perfectly normal to me. However, as someone who is a trained critical thinker, I do consider my evolutionary process quite frequently, moreso when an icon [...]