Archive for October, 2006

Be prepared to say goodbye to the days when you could ogle at nurses during your stay at the hospital for that slipped disk. Speaking of disks, here’s the reason why: the Aizu central hospital in Fukushima, Japan has started employing two robots to help them get work done in the ER. But the two [...]

There must be something in the water they pump through those Chicago pipelines. Sure, MC JUICE (no product placement there; that’s really what he calls himself) might have put Chi-town on the map in the early Nineties with his mic-killing freestyles, and Common and Twista have been representing the city’s cutting edge hip hop aesthetic [...]

I’ve just stumbled upon an excellent site by artist Luke Chueh, who came up with the idea for these decidedly edgy yet cute little critters. Subversive misappropriation of children’s icons is almost old hat (remember the Happy Tree Friends?) but Chueh’s takes on the subject matter is a lot, lot darker. Check out his massive [...]

There goes the neighbourhood. Li Wei is a Beijing-based artist who specialises in shock performance and visual art. Born into a farmer’s family in a Chinese village, he travelled to Beijing to explore his artistic ideas, and has now had exhibitions in Milan and Madrid. His signature Mirror series has him walking around with a [...]

Everyone knows by now that the new Transformers movie is coming out next July 7th. Some people know that Michael Bay (of The Island, Con Air and *egads* The Rock infamy) is directing it. Few people know what the movie will turn out looking like. We can only pray. Well, how’s this for more than [...]

Look, forget what you heard about the Power Summit, that annual hip hop industry elbow-rubber which maps out the course of mainstream rap music and hip hop culture for each year. That’s kid’s stuff, a staged professional wrestling event in comparison to the National Hip Hop Political Convention. Organized in part by Jeff Chang, co-founder [...]

I never realised how much I appreciated architecture and building design until my trip to the UK recently. Everywhere I went I’d see historical buildings and find myself taking pictures of them. But like all snap-happy adventures, my camera finally ran out of memory space and I had to trash most of these pictures. But the ones I did hold on to were the pictures I took [...]

Pretty heady stuff, this site has. Having been around for a little over 5 years, the Wooster Collective is an online repository of urban art - graffiti, installations, videos, Banksy-style pranks - from all across the globe. The New York couple who started the collective weren’t artististically inclined until… but wait. i’m not going to [...]

Some of you might be familiar with Definitive Jux Records, New York City’s avante garde, music snob hip hop label whose roster of artists would probably burn to a crisp and just die if they were ever thrown into a Daddy Yankee video. (Probably.) The label has been responsible for anarchy-inducing underground classics from artists [...]

Your name is Chris Rock, you are 13, you live in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, your mother has 99 ways to stick it to you, your dad is one of four fathers on the block and has two jobs, your little bro is bigger than you, has more luck with the ladies and better clothes, your little [...]