By: Douglas Wolk

It can be hard to distinguish BRITNEY SPEARS (born 1981) the performer from Britney Spears the cultural construct — which one shaved her head, again? which one’s got the unerring song-sense that led her to […]

By: Douglas Wolk

CHESTER GOULD (1900-85) missed his calling as a professional designer of deathtraps. In the middle of one 1943 Dick Tracy sequence Gould wrote and drew, the villainous Mrs. Pruneface chains the valiant detective to the […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo) and a one-man jazz “quintet” (Yesterday’s New Quintet), among other alter egos. Since 1993, he’s contributed to dozens of recordings, and his breed […]

By: Douglas Wolk

JOHN ZORN (born 1953) has been the nexus of the musical avant-garde in New York for a couple of decades — an unbelievably prolific composer and performer and curator and label-dude whose early look-how-eclectic-I-am tendencies […]

By: Douglas Wolk

OGDEN NASH (1902-71) was the American master of light verse, an art that has fallen on hard times, since it requires both gentle jokes that everyone can find amusing and barnstorming verbal agility of the […]

By: Douglas Wolk

Pity Mohandas Dewese, d/b/a KOOL MOE DEE (born 1962): briefly one of the most popular rappers alive, he’s now mostly remembered for a feud with LL Cool J that the market effectively decided in LL’s […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I’ve been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing “The Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by MARCEL […]

By: Douglas Wolk

For a good chunk of the 1940s, the R&B chart (or the “race records” chart, as Billboard called it then) might just as well have been called the LOUIS JORDAN (1908-75) chart: he scored hit […]

By: Douglas Wolk

ALEX TOTH (1928-2006) occupies one of the strangest positions in the pantheon of great cartoonists: an artist of enormous power and lasting influence, he produced almost nothing but ephemera, throwaways and hackwork. Toth could strip […]