Law & Order: These Are Our Stories

An elderly Jewish man is trying to convince police that he helped his ailing wife commit suicide out of love, but what is the real truth? Is he a devoted husband and Holocaust survivor, or Jacob Schulman, a former Nazi death camp officer trying to cover his tracks?

Screencap by megacaps

In 1996, I turned on my TV, randomly flipped to a channel, and became instantly riveted to the screen by the story just described. Eric Bogosian, who had completely blown my mind in Talk Radio a few years earlier, was portraying an attorney defending the fictional defendant, David Steinmetz, in a New York courtroom. This is how I discovered Law & Order. The episode was called “Night and Fog.”
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The Producers vs. The Product

Adding his voice to the multitudes of musicians clamoring to be heard, Duran Duran’s John Taylor proposed that the Internet is stifling creativity during a speech he gave at UCLA’s 40th Anniversary Of The Internet Symposium.
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Irish Things We Love: Dracula, By Bram Stoker

Ask people to name some Irish things that they love, and they may come up with a list of things that are obviously Irish, like the band U2 or Guinness beer. I would argue though, that our cultural milieu, especially these days, is heavily inspired by the work of an Irish writer, specifically, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Both Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of Bram (and co-author of Dracula: the Un-Dead), and Dennis McIntyre, director of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula Organisation, advance this point of view.
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Confessions Of A Recovering Anglophile

Rupert Everett in Dance With A Stranger, 1985

It wasn’t the Beatles; despite Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and select songs from the White Album, I could hardly tell they had accents. And it wasn’t David Bowie because he wasn’t even from Earth, never mind the UK. I should probably blame Julie Andrews, since it was surely my obsession with The Sound Of Music and Mary Poppins that started it.
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My Problem With Halloween

It’s nearly Halloween, the night when ghosts and ghouls prowl the darkness, when witches and vampire bats scour the sky for victims to spook, and when I reach for a good book to read.
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Why I Love Halloween

One of the best things about living in the greater Toronto area is that, unlike my native New Orleans, there are actually four seasons here instead of “hot and humid” and “slightly less hot and humid.” So when the wind turns cold and scatters fallen leaves throughout the streets, I begin to think of Halloween.

Okay, who am I kidding? I practically think about Halloween every time the thermostat dips into the high teens and a cool breeze blows by. It is by far my favorite holiday.
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I Just Can’t Stop Loving You

The reaction to Michael Jackson’s death surprised me. I can’t pretend to be like the true hardcore Michael fans; I have always hovered on the edges of the fandom and kept it to myself, too much perhaps. For years I have kept quiet about loving him, even as part of a music fandom where coolness doesn’t really matter. There has just been so much wrong with loving him—truly and wholly—in the eyes of the world for so long.
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On Memories And Michael Jackson

It would be absurd to have a magazine devoted to pop culture and fandom and not have something to say about Michael Jackson. The man contributed so much to our culture that we were often unaware of references to him. Upon his death, these references we had seen before somehow became more poignant: a zombie character in a video game wearing a red jacket and walking backwards used to be a funny homage, worthy of a chuckle. Today that same image evokes emotions on top of that, as we realize it as a caricature of a man we never fully understood, even if we did love his work.
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Record Stores Died For Somebody’s Sins (But Not MySpace’s)

Pretty In Pink, 1986
Screencap from Striped Wall

The new millennium has become the Battle of the Social Networking Websites. Which one you prefer depends upon how you utilize each one. As much as Facebook fans may bitch that MySpace is ugly and user-unfriendly, when people want to hear what a band sounds like, they usually go to MySpace.
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Tear It Up

MTV blew my mind in 1981. I would spend hours Velcro’d to the screen of my grandma’s wooden console TV waiting for my favorite videos to come on. Even then, my mom was uneasy about the sort of “messages” I was getting from this weird new music.

Adam Ant’s allusions to S&M were the naughtiest of the lot, but nothing compared to The Cramps. I actually heard them before I saw them. By 1985, I was fully ensnared by WTUL New Orleans, the student-run college radio station of Tulane University. It was there that “New Kind Of Kick” wormed its way into my eardrums.
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