Pop Culture

The octo-spectacle just won't go away. And instead of running from the limelight, Octomom Nadya Suleman and her zany cast of characters have thrust themselves head-on into the circling, hungry maw of the 24/7 cable-radio-Internet-Twitter news cycle. Suleman's media juggernaut reached new highs this week, starting Monday with her ex-boyfriend, who tearfully went on national TV to demand a paternity test.

Lee sits on a bar stool in a plexiglass box near a highway offramp in central Taiwan. It's late afternoon and the 29-year-old is dressed in a red negligee, a fake rose planted firmly between her breasts. "I work from noon to midnight, and it's psychologically tiring," she says. "Furthermore," she adds, pointing to her husband a few yards away, "he takes all the money." Before you jump to conclusions, she isn't selling her body. In fact, she's using her body to sell . . .

Forget the garlic, the crucifixes, the security of daylight. Nothing is holding the vampires at bay these days. With the wild popularity of movie, TV and literary properties including "Twilight" and HBO's hit series "True Blood," the bloodthirsty undead are dominating the pop culture landscape in ways Count Dracula could have never imagined, and the trend seems unlikely to abate any time soon. "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," the second film adaptation of the popular series of novels, is set for release in November, with the third installment to follow in June 2010.

What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook? "Social notworking." A steeply devalued retirement account? "201(k)." A painfully obsolete cellphone? "Brickberry." These linguistic dispatches from the land of cooler-than-you come courtesy of wit-mongers Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-headquartered full-service agency with a tidy billion dollars in annual billables.

Popular culture and classical music have had different sorts of relationships over the years. Old-timers conjure up a time when radio stations supported great orchestras, television networks commissioned opera and Leopold Stokowski could shake hands with Mickey in "Fantasia" and then go home to Garbo. Classical music has never left the cinema, Broadway stage, airways or gossip columns. But relationships change. For the most part rose-colored glasses have come off. Once portrayed as stick-figure heroes, classical artists are now more likely shown as deeply flawed misfits, outsiders to an era obsessed by pop culture like none before it. Still, they are seen, and seen quite a bit in current films and plays that attempt to engage with the subject of classical music in pop culture terms.

We shopped. Then we dropped. Then we started making culture again -- dancing on the rubble of our own excesses, stitching together art from the ragbag of our desires. Every generation or so, throughout modern American history, the culture of hardship has followed hard on the heels of the culture of consumption and prosperity.

On Aug. 16, 1977, the day Elvis Presley died, folklorist William R. Ferris remembers that in Memphis "it was like the ground began to shake." Within hours, hundreds of pilgrims had descended on Graceland, and the process by which a beloved public personage is transformed into a mythic figure was underway. But which Elvis would be mythologized, and whose legacy would be preserved? The youthful rock rebel or the Las Vegas glitter god?

Over the course of a career that has variously infuriated anti-graffiti task force officers and enthralled Japanese street couture collectors -- meaning winning props from hip-hop superstars Kanye West and Pharrell Williams -- the pop artist KAWS has carved a unique niche for himself. The soft-spoken 34-year-old Jersey City native, born Brian Donnelly, created a new business model that bridges the high-low culture divide in ways that would have made steam come out of Andy Warhol's ears.

The rancher's wife takes the stage in a white cowboy hat, a brown fringed shawl and an oversized silver belt buckle. A spotlight illuminates her hazel eyes and sly grin. Yvonne Hollenbeck, who has spent 63 years on the plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, clutches a microphone at the Elko Convention Center and shares her poem's title with hundreds of ranchers and their kids: "The Bail-Out Plan." The audience titters.