“L!fe Happens” opens with two girls driving down the streets of Los Angeles with the windows of their Prius rolled down and the Chamillionaire anthem “Ridin’ Dirty” blasting from their speakers. This is the sort of movie that’s kooky enough to exist under the ridiculous premise that these women, best Read More…
There are just as many celebrity portraits as enigmas in the Berkeley Art Museum’s latest exhibit, “Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240.” O.J. Simpson clutching a football. A young Diane von Furstenberg, wild-eyed and wild-haired. But also lesser-known faces like the mysterious Frau Buch — dark-haired and clutching a black Read More…
From March 8 to 18, the Center for Asian American Media presents the 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. This is one of many homegrown Bay Area fests that pays tribute to cineastes of difference who have otherwise been marginalized by the Hollywood machine. We cannot turn to Read More…
The theme for this year’s ASUC Perspectives Showcase was “the people in the headphones,” that is, it was a spotlight on the apathetic Cal student — the one who turns a blind eye to her peers, to Occupy, to the “krumping boy at the BART station,”— in her own little Read More…
Tyga is the newest in a line of mainstream rap artists of Young Money Cash Money Billionaires (YMCMB) fame, and his latest album, Careless World: Rise of the Last King, is just as hackneyed and unnecessarily hedonistic as anything the label has ever put out. Don’t get me wrong — Read More…
“The Vow” is a movie about amnesia and thus comes with a plethora of requisite amnesia jokes (i.e. “Who’s the president?” “Obama.” “The senator?”), which are one of the few things going for this endearing flop of a chick flick. Gearing up for Valentine’s Day, “The Vow” follows happily married Read More…
Lana Del Rey wants you to own her, love her, objectify her, abuse her and worship her. Now, there’s enough here — in her image, her music and the backlash it’s all received — for a whole team of pop culture critics, feminists and intellectuals to fuss about, but, all Read More…
Take one look at Deborah Oropallo’s artwork, and you haven’t seen anything. This Bay Area artist’s hybrid prints are so intricate that one’s eye must linger and settle to take it all in, peeling away the layers to extract a narrative. And that narrative is certainly a unique one. In Read More…
You might have heard of The Big Pink from the catchy single “Dominos” off of their first album, A Brief History of Love. This track had a brief surge of mainstream attention when it was sampled in Nicki Minaj’s “Girls Fall Like Dominoes,” and, like most of this British duo’s Read More…
“The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible,” screams the words of Oakland-based street artist and printmaker Paul Barron from his Art Attack Mural, painted on an otherwise nondescript wall in Rome, Italy. Barron, and others like him, are not only artists, but activists, people whose work are Read More…
