IN the hands of actors, writers, directors and producers, Hollywood is a dream factory, a place that cranks out wish fulfillment scenarios like assembly lines manufacture automobiles. In novelist Steve Erickson’s hands, Hollywood is a fever dream, a waking nightmare that elucidates the truth of the self that only movies can attempt to uncover. ZEROVILLE — the latest novel by CalArts professor, Los Angeles Magazine contributor and literary cult figure Erickson — delves into the mystery and allure of celluloid, where a master shot gives the audience its bearing, but the close-up scrambles all perspective and engulfs the collective psyche in freeze-frame moments spanning whole lifetimes.

It was almost two years before Resident Evil 5’s release that concerned parties had already protested outrage over racial issues in the title, a video game that puts you in the shoes of white protagonist Chris Redfield, running and gunning through an infected population somewhere in Africa. For a game that reads as a simulated racial cleansing, anger was inevitable.

IN the Beginning, there was “Superman: The Movie,” and it was truly divine. Then came “Superman III” and “IV” and an icon became a joke, the comic-book superhero a mere soulless commodity. Flash forward thirty-one years from the day we believed a man can fly- back when taglines actually meant something- and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” opens to big box office, but little critical or fan-boy acclaim. Is it too much to ask for something akin to perfection in our filmic adaptations of the illustrated gods of geek? What happened between the emergence of Krypton’s son on the silver screen and the adamantium-clawed mutant leaked to the omnipresent internet? Herewith, I offer a look at the celluloid landscape of the good guys, the bad guys, and those freaky in-betweeners who serve as metaphors for every misfit or outsider who insist on searching for life’s deepest truths in a goddamn comic book.

PHILLIP ROTH’S 29th book (and the 15th of his I’ve read) is the best of the last few, similarly short, novels he’s produced. I thought EVERYMAN was a total waste of time, and saw EXIT GHOST as an interesting but not wholly successful follow-up to THE GHOST WRITER, but his newest really worked for me. The first-person narrator, Marcus Messner, possesses a voice that is equal parts brilliant, precocious, antagonistic [...]

There is a point at which sensuality manifests as anger, and there is a point at which anger matures into the grace of striding confidently forward in time. Santigold’s self-titled debut album masters the rhythm and modalities of this stride, producing in this process the finest debut I’ve heard since M.I.A.’s Arular.

I have nothing but gratitude for the GS Boyz – while their new hit single “Stanky Legg” may certainly not stink its way into any hip hop hall of fame, it has given me just the dance fix I need until Soulja Boi inevitably scribbles down another iteration of the bird walk on his high school chemistry notebook and lays it over a predictable beat. After all, it’s been a dark couple of years for the hip hop dance scene since Fat Joe made fat people falling look like a dance move in 2004’s “Lean Back,” and Down AKA Kilo made fat Mexicans fall over in 2007’s “Lean Like a Cholo.”

The first time I came to Yoshi’s in Oakland’s Jack London Square, I was eleven years old. We came for a Sunday matinee, when adults get in for a discount for bringing their children, and children get in almost for free. I am not sure who I saw that first time- it was either George Shearing or Chick Corea. All I know is that since then, I have always firmly thought of this place as the single coolest thing to do in the Bay Area.

JAZZ has been my drug of choice, but each drug has its complements. Charlie Parker chose heroin, and though his unsettled melodies are intoxicating, I never understood how an intoxicated man could play like that. I need all my faculties just to listen. Huffing paint doesn’t work so well if your bag has a hole in it, and the same is true with jazz. On its own, Mingus’s “Better Get it in Your Soul” is an amphetamine, and Thelonious’s “Epistrophy” clears my head like a good barbiturate should. However, the album I, Lucifer by The Real Tuesday Weld is both a modern-day complement to the drug of jazz, and an album that makes me want to get strung out, have my stomach pumped, and get strung out again.

AS an ex-student, it’s difficult to avoid philosophizing every activity. Free time once spent in lecture turns the Socratic method and critical thinking loose on what used to be simple quirks — “Nolan, how would your teeth look if you didn’t floss every day?” I ask myself in the mirror each night. So through playing Mirror’s Edge and the newest Prince of Persia, I couldn’t help but look for some [...]

AS recent college grads in a dive-bombing economy, most of us find our existence pretty pitiful and our social lives even sadder. Worst of all, upon the conferral of our bachelor’s degree we’re all supposed to magically know Who We Are and what we want to be When We Grow Up.  It’s the perfect set-up for a major existential crisis.
Back at school we could all get together at someone’s apartment [...]