COLUMN

 » Glaciers of Ice: Volume 31 - With summer blasting full scale, LAS hip-hop resident Jonah Flicker feels the heat in Los Angeles, where the music has been mostly fire… with some ice thrown in just for good measure. An early summer listening guide notes the high points for July.

CINEMA

 » Machine Girl - Fans of The Evil Dead trilogy, the films of John Woo and Japanese anime will all find something to like in the immensely gory Tokyo Shock production of a story about a girl, her gun arm, and her gruesome killing spree.

CINEMA

 » Encounters at the End of the World - Another idiosyncratic and exceptional statement from one of contemporary cinema's greatest directors, Werner Herzog's new feature film, centered on Antarctica, fuels his approach to life as a "chain of catastrophes." The film had its premiere at New York's Film Forum earlier this month and will begin a theatrical run on Friday.

COLUMN

 » Glaciers of Ice: Volume 31 - With summer blasting full scale, LAS hip-hop resident Jonah Flicker feels the heat in Los Angeles, where the music has been mostly fire… with some ice thrown in just for good measure. An early summer listening guide notes the high points for July.

CINEMA

 » Machine Girl - Fans of The Evil Dead trilogy, the films of John Woo and Japanese anime will all find something to like in the immensely gory Tokyo Shock production of a story about a girl, her gun arm, and her gruesome killing spree.

CINEMA

 » Encounters at the End of the World - Another idiosyncratic and exceptional statement from one of contemporary cinema's greatest directors, Werner Herzog's new feature film, centered on Antarctica, fuels his approach to life as a "chain of catastrophes." The film had its premiere at New York's Film Forum earlier this month and will begin a theatrical run on Friday.

PHOTOGRAPHY

 » Toy Cameras - These unsubstantial, plastic film cameras particularly dominated the Chinese markets between the 1960s and 80s, when they were mass-produced and favoured predominantly for being inexpensive and readily available. Now, in the digital era, they're making a comeback.

CINEMA

 » Children of Men - FROM THE ARCHIVES: Being released to DVD next week, Alfonso Cuaron's visionary 2006 film imagines humanity in the year 2027, in a world where the artistic voice has been completely lost among the wreckage of constant war and strife, and it is a world that looks frighteningly familiar.

MUSIC

 » 33 1/3: Reign In Blood - In his detailed analysis of Slayer's seminal 1986 album for Continuum Books' revered 33 1/3 series, D.X. Ferris doesn't open a whole new world of perspective on the album, but he does dig up a few anecdotal tidbits worthy of conversation, and gets Tori Amos to fantasize about menstruation over Afghanistan.

PHOTOGRAPHY

 » Burning Angel Book - Mike Shea examines the new photobook from the alt-porn website of the same name and finds that, with more than 700 images, it "offers nothing that couldn't be accomplished with a mid-range camera phone and five minutes of Photoshop tutorials, and represents an insulting lack of craft even for so-called pornography."

CINEMA

 » Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea - Directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, narrated by John Waters, and soundtracked by Friends of Dean Martinez, this unique documentary recounts the catastrophic past, details the forlorn present, and looks to the uncertain future of one of America's truly weird places.

LITERATURE

 » I Was Told There'd Be Cake - In her book of sardonic twentysomething essays on single life in New York City, Sloane Crosley narrowly extinguishes the flame of "it"-girl backlash with a collection of sometimes poignant, sometimes mundane, sometimes hilarious, but generally entertaining anecdotes.

CINEMA

 » The Signal - Released to DVD last week after a low-key and limited theaters run in February, this remarkable low-budget film - written and directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry (yes, all three) - is a cut above similar films in the resurgent "mass hysteria" horror trend, including M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.

MUSIC

 » Swervedriver / Longwave: LIVE - For Patrick Sullivan, what should have been the triumphant return of former UK rock giants, backed by an under-appreciated local band, was more like "a gig for your older brother's band" where mercy guests reveal themselves as true fans, causing him to wonder, "seriously, where did all the die-hard Swervedriver fans come from all of a sudden?"

CINEMA

 » The Red Violin - Along with Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, director Francois Girard's film, about the history of a cursed violin, is one of the first editions from Lionsgate Films' Meridian Collection of reissues. The period-jumping piece, which features a remarkably subdued Samuel L. Jackson, overcomes many of its faults thanks to John Corigliano's Oscar-winning score.

CINEMA

 » The Visitor - LAS film critic Susan Howson reports on The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy's new film about "a bland, white businessman who timidly joins a drum circle and learns, through a mystical immigrant, how to express himself while my head explodes."

LITERATURE

 » Plastic Words - Uwe Poerksen's monumental study explores the power of words in modern society, particularly within the political arena. Do we truly embrace the abstract language of politicians or is there an inherent danger in such bland platitudes? Brian Christopher Jones discusses the world of language in his review of Poerksen's book, subtitled The Tyranny of a Modular Language.

CINEMA

 » Diva - Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and well known for its cinematography and chase sequence, this early entry into the French Cinema du Look movement of the 1980s has been remastered for widescreen DVD release as part of Lionsgate Films' new Meridian Collection series of reissues.