All Stories

Everything we've published, newest first.

Portrait of artist Manuel Ocampo by photographer M.M. Yu

An apocalyptic chat with Manuel Ocampo: Swastikating between art and death

Manuel Ocampo, between Bosch and Cracked magazine: an apocalyptic conversation on painting, death and the institutional critique of himself.

By Igan D'Bayan · September 14, 2009
Graphic art portrait of Kobe Bryant in his Lakers jersey against a dark background

Mamba No. 3

Kobe Bryant in his Mamba years: from ball hog to facilitator and orchestrator, with the eternal Jordan comparison hanging overhead.

By Igan D'Bayan · July 24, 2009
Illustration of a snarling Wolverine in a white tank top with adamantium claws crossed, in a dim caged room with rain on the windows and the yellow cowl and costume laid out on a workbench behind him

The return of the claw daddy

Hugh Jackman comes down a steel cable onto Cockatoo Island, an entrance only Stan Lee could have written, for the Wolverine press junket.

By Igan D'Bayan · April 24, 2009
Illustration of a Sydney DVD store front and autumn streetscape with movie poster art

Black is the color and none is the number

Autumn in Sydney, the bluest skies, and a DVD-store crawl through gallows comedy, Cheech and Chong, and documentaries about dictators.

By Igan D'Bayan · April 20, 2009
Soviet propaganda-style poster: a three-eyed Cthulhu in a red-star ushanka and greatcoat raises a vodka glass before the Kremlin’s clock tower, Cyrillic slogans hailing vodka and Dostoevsky

Moscow and the morning after the night before

Bogatyrs, troikas, Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin, from a tour guide who will not discuss Rasputin. Plus a Moscow hangover, richly earned.

By Igan D'Bayan · March 20, 2009
The Louvre’s glass pyramid glowing at night beneath a moonlit sky, crowds crossing the dark courtyard

City of blinding light

To run or not to run, I ask myself, rushing past the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Eva Mendes, also touring the Louvre, herself a work of art.

By Igan D'Bayan · January 5, 2009
REKORDR’s Cthulhu mascot, suitcase in hand, at the moat of Norre Vosborg manor in Jutland, Denmark, under a brooding sky

The devil, the Danes and the damned

We are listening to an old man talk about the day the devil went to Denmark, in a Jutland manor five hours from Copenhagen.

By Igan D'Bayan · October 31, 2008
Pasted-up Sex Pistols poster reading Anarchy in Japan on a sticker-covered wall, neon Kabukicho signs down the wet street behind it

The filth, the fury, Makuhari

The Sex Pistols at Summer Sonic in Chiba: four old punks who should have been dead by now, playing tight to a thousand trembling Japanese lambs.

By Igan D'Bayan · September 12, 2008
Sepia-toned vintage studio portrait of a young man with wavy hair in a knit collared shirt, a handwritten inscription reading ‘Devotedly yours’ across the shoulder

Daddy Groovy

The colonel who sketched a dream house that was never built, and the son who has started to see him in the mirror every morning.

By Igan D'Bayan · June 15, 2008
Heidelberg Castle floodlit amber against the night sky, its towers and broken walls rising above the pale facades and dark rooftops of the old town below

Baroque and roll in Heidelberg

‘Put your foot here and you will return to Heidelberg and live happily ever after,’ our guide says. I stepped into the impression. (Narrator: It would.)

By Igan D'Bayan · May 30, 2008
Mock theatre poster for a Poldertheater production of Hamlet: a hyena in an Elizabethan doublet, its face streaked red, cradles a skull among Filipino tombs beneath a tattered Philippine flag

Dead thoughts about death and dying

A real human skull inside a bookcase, mortuary curiosities, and a middle-of-the-night meditation on Damien Hirst and why death spares no one.

By Igan D'Bayan · March 14, 2008
Illustrated lowbrow crowd of eyeball-headed kids, skeleton punks and a vintage hot rod outside La Luz De Jesus Gallery on Hollywood Boulevard at dusk

La Luz in my religion

Inside La Luz De Jesus on Hollywood Boulevard, the gallery that turned lowbrow art into a congregation, with a gift shop of relics and toys.

By Igan D'Bayan · January 18, 2008