If, as Martin Heidegger wrote and Michael Heim clarified, philosophy is to stay one step ahead of science, then art is to stay one step ahead of philosophy. Art has the most freedom as a form of exploration, as a method by which to find the limits of a domain of research. That said, Eugene Thacker doesn’t necessarily consider himself an artist, but, as he told Josephine Bosma in an interview for Net-time, “I have always been interested in approaching things from a theoretical viewpoint, as well as exploring the …

Being active in Hip-hop, which is typically thought of as strictly a “youth culture,” doesn’t age well. Growing up is weird enough as it is, but trying to grow up, stay fly, stay true, and stay striving is downright daunting.
Well, Cage Kennylz has grown up in this culture, and unlike those who look silly rocking the mic into their thirties, Cage is growing up and pulling Hip-hop up with him.

Lori Damiano has been skateboarding and making stuff for so long that I can’t even remember when or where I was first introduced to her work. Somewhere among her involvement in the zine Villa Villa Cola, her animation (she did the menus for the Spike Jones DVD, for one example), and skateboarding like a madwoman, she recently earned a master’s degree in experimental animation from The California Institute of the Arts and helped VVC get the Getting Nowhere Faster DVD out.

“Why the hell didn’t hip-hop albums ever have liner notes?!!??” quoth journalist Brian Coleman, “Hip-hop fans have been robbed of context and background when buying and enjoying classic albums from the Golden Age: the 1980s.” With his self-published book, Rakim Told Me (Waxfacts, 2005), Coleman set out to fix that problem and to fill a void in the written history of hip-hop. That, and where a lot of writers who acknowledge the influence and importance of hip-hop tend to focus on its sociological implications, Coleman stays with the music, how …

Brian Tunney conducted this interview with me for the impecable DIG BMX Magazine. Here’s an excerpt: “The impetus behind frontwheeldrive.com remains to collect and spread the word about cultural artifacts and the people that make them. I try not to limit the subject matter anymore because I view the mind as an ecology. For any ecology to grow and flourish, it needs diversity. New stuff comes not from the well-defined fields, but from the interaction between them. Allowing theorists, artists, BMXers, musicians, skateboarders, etc. to rub shoulders, frontwheeldrive.com attempts to …

Several years ago, my friend Greg Sundin gave me Mike Ladd’s Welcome to the Afterfuture (Ozone, 2000). I was instantly hooked. Ladd’s spaced-out beats and intelligent wordplay push the limits of hip-hop until they break into noisy splinters. Genre distinctions can’t hold the man. He’s been performing in every possible way since age thirteen, but his body of work reflects the very best that hip-hop can be. After digesting Afterfuture, I simply had to hear more.

In the early 90s, the sport of BMX all but died. The magazines, sanctioning bodies, and many of the companies disappeared. In the void left, the pros of the previous era started their own companies and events, following the model Steve Rocco had established in skateboarding in the late 80s. With many of the old pros busy with companies and organizations and the field of riders thinned-out in general, this new milieu left room for new pros. It was during this time that Taj Mihelich emerged as one of BMX’s …

Mark C. Taylor is one of those people you stumble upon and wonder why you were previously roaming around unaware. His countless books explore many areas of culture, philosophy, art, theory, and, most recently, commerce. I originally came across his work while doing research on artist Mark Tansey (Taylor’s The Picture in Question explores the mix of messages and theory in Tansey’s paintings).

If, as Marshall McLuhan insisted, puns and wordplay represent “intersections of meaning,” then Aesop Rock has a gridlock on the lyrical superhighway cloverleaf overpass steez. Every time I spin one of his records, I hear something new, some new twist of phrase, some new combination of syllables. These constant revelations are precisely why I’ve been a hip-hop head since up jumped the boogie, and Aesop keeps the heads ringin’. I’d quote some here, but you really just have to hear him bend them yourself.

Remember when thoughts and theories about so-called “Generation X” were on the tip of everyone’s tongue? We were called “slackers,” and older people said we lacked motivation and passion. I’ve always taken issue with these characterizations because I’ve constantly seen people my age pursuing paths and interests that had no prior archetype — and working very hard at them. Now that the focus has shifted to the next generation, and now that we’ve been pushing for a while, our generation is emerging in new careers and pursuits quite different from …