Matthew Newton

In Uppercut, the concept of violence as reality check is at the core. Gints Klimanis and his fellow fighters engage in 60-second garage-based warfare as a reminder, to themselves if no one else, that they are more than their work. It’s the pursuit of living life a little deeper, as Klimanis says toward the end of the film. For many of these men, the fights are as much a defining moment as writing code or engineering software.

In the Fast Food Wars of the 1970s and early 1980s, before Wendy’s Clara Peller and “Where’s The Beef” became a national phenomenon, it was a death match between McDonald’s and Burger King. With stiff competition from Ronald McDonald and his McDonaldland cohorts — Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, etc. — Burger King conceived a rival fantasy world dubbed the Burger King Kingdom.

In last night’s only Super Bowl commercial that wasn’t punctuated with a soda can to the groin, animals in various states of LOL, or Roseanne Barr being pummeled by a tree trunk, Chrysler made a statement regarding its legacy, and more vividly, the city that spawned it – Detroit, Michigan.

A sort of anti, anti-smoking message for moviegoers from a young John Waters: “Smoke anyway, it gives ushers jobs. And if people didn’t smoke, there would be no employment for the youth of today.”

Take one look at the man depicted in Twist’s “Corporate Pigs” piece and you see not only the power of graffiti, but also the potential. The notion that a random message left by an anonymous source can inspire or anger a public audience. It’s what I saw as a teenager, the idea that you could be a fuck-up or an introvert or a total asshole and still say what’s on your mind.

This evening, a series of photographs over at Tiny Vices caught my attention. These shots, taken by Sean Stewart, showed frame houses perched high atop concrete reinforced hillsides, cannibalized muscle cars covered in primer and body putty, and gray overcast skies that reminded me of every winter I’ve ever known.

In the early 1990s, Daniel “Chaka” Ramos was one of the most prolific graffiti writers in Los Angeles. His block letter style tag (inspired by Cha-Kah from Land of the Lost), done almost exclusively in either black or silver spraypaint, was everywhere in L.A. and beyond.

On the runway in Milan, male and female models with matted hair and smudged makeup, pushed shopping carts and sashayed amidst empty cardboard boxes. The whole scene evoked a sense of déjà vu, channeling an aesthetic straight out of the film Zoolander, when Ben Stiller’s inept male model attempts to mount his fashion world comeback as the face of Jacobim Mugatu’s homelessness-inspired Derelicte line.

It turns out there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about being a real-life superhero (RLSH). First, you should have a fondness for justice. After all, it’s the cornerstone of any real superhero’s value system.

If only these two weren’t so partisan in their approach to music, their careers could really flourish. Much like Christian rock, music written for the sole purpose of political sloganeering is not the gravy train so many believe it to be.

As I stare at the towering stacks of unshelved books in my home office, I fantasize of meticulously categorizing them on crisp white shelves. There are eight stacks, each 15 or 20 books high, across a teak coffee table; several smaller stacks on the floor beneath.

For years I subscribed to the idea that a pair of tennis shoes slung over a telephone wire indicated the place to buy drugs in a neighborhood. It turns out that’s not entirely true, at least according to this post over at The Shazzamity that looks at the potential origins and meanings behind shoe flinging or “shoefiti.”