Pop Culture

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

On Monday, shortly after delivering a speech to the graduating class of Barnard College extolling the role of women in public life, President Obama continued his theme with a visit to ABC's “The View.” His appearance will be broadcasted Tuesday. It was his fourth time on the show, his second as president. The ladies of “The View” like the president, and as it turns out, he's pretty good for them; in July 2010, the president helped the distaff gabfest earn its best ratings ever (6.59 million people watched the show, according to the network)

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.

CAIRO - When filmmaker and Egyptian democracy activist Amr Salama watched Hosni Mubarak's regime collapse in 2011, he couldn't have been more heartened. Salama had been making films for years and had found himself hamstrung by the government's censorship board. This was finally the opportunity he'd been waiting for. So shortly after the regime fell, Salama resubmitted a script that had been rejected under Mubarak - one whose story centered on tension between Cairo's majority Muslim population and its Coptic Christian minority.

The independent film "The Room" didn't exactly make a splash when it opened six years ago. Critics panned it -- the few who reviewed it, that is -- and moviegoers stayed away in droves. So why, on a Saturday night, are hundreds of people lined up around the second-floor space of Laemmle's Sunset 5 theater on Sunset Boulevard, waiting to see it? And why are many of them lugging bags full of plastic spoons? "The Room" has become the latest cult movie sensation, complete with its own rituals and rules of engagement.

Diana Ross has never won a Grammy. Though nominated 12 times for her work with the Supremes and for her solo efforts, the singer behind pop classis such as "Baby Love" and "Upside Down" has never taken home the award. This Saturday, she will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy along with Gil Scott-Heron, the Allman Brothers, Glen Campbell, George Jones, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Memphis Horns, at an invitation-only ceremony the night before the Grammy telecast.

WHEN VH1's "Best Week Ever" debuted in 2004, some critics viewed the show an unfortunate byproduct of the network's many incarnations of the nostalgia-heavy "I Love the . . ." series. After the '70s, '80s and '90s were picked apart and reminisced about, what was left to be dissected but last week? Some talking heads bemoaned the program as a symbol of the country's collective short attention span and television's lack of originality.

IT'S the tuft of hair on the chin, the relief of a goatee on the smooth aluminum surface of the face, that gives the character's identity away. Otherwise, the 17-foot-high statue of a big-eyed "Oval Buddha" could be just another of Takashi Murakami's cute creations: a wandering space alien, perhaps, or a member of a tribe of ghosts. The character sits like Humpty Dumpty on the lip of a flower vase, his oversized head far too big for his tiny torso. He has a potbelly. His spine sags.

Chomp: A Novel Carl Hiaasen Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $16.99, ages 10 and up South Florida is known for many things: Alligators, orange groves and the writer who spins the area's most sensational attributes into even more sensational story lines, Carl Hiaasen. In his many bestsellers for adults and kids, Hiaasen has demonstrated a unique gift for wrapping real environmental issues into apocryphal, bust-a-gut books that parody pop culture - a talent he furthers in his most recent middle-school novel, "Chomp.

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.

Chomp: A Novel Carl Hiaasen Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $16.99, ages 10 and up South Florida is known for many things: Alligators, orange groves and the writer who spins the area's most sensational attributes into even more sensational story lines, Carl Hiaasen. In his many bestsellers for adults and kids, Hiaasen has demonstrated a unique gift for wrapping real environmental issues into apocryphal, bust-a-gut books that parody pop culture - a talent he furthers in his most recent middle-school novel, "Chomp.

Joel McHale has the kind of face you might recognize without knowing where you've seen him. Before sitting down for an interview at a sidewalk café, McHale disappears inside and a middle-aged woman seated outdoors does a double-take, trying to peg him: He's on that show … on CBS … or is it NBC? When McHale later returns and plants himself in a nearby table, he acts exaggeratedly important. "Is this thing on?" he mutters into the tape recorder. " I need to promote this huge NBC show.

The Simpsons of Springfield, U.S.A., will mark their 500th episode as a TV family Sunday. "The Simpsons," in its 23rd season on Fox, is already the longest-running cartoon, the longest-running situation comedy and the longest-running scripted prime-time series in the history of American television. There is something especially improbable about this particular household, with their goggle-eyes and cantilevered overbites and complexions betokening an advanced case of jaundice, claiming these crowns.

Diana Ross has never won a Grammy. Though nominated 12 times for her work with the Supremes and for her solo efforts, the singer behind pop classis such as "Baby Love" and "Upside Down" has never taken home the award. This Saturday, she will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy along with Gil Scott-Heron, the Allman Brothers, Glen Campbell, George Jones, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Memphis Horns, at an invitation-only ceremony the night before the Grammy telecast.

Concert giant AEG is teaming up with Ryan Seacrest, Mark Cuban and Hollywood powerhouse talent firm Creative Artists Agency to launch a pop culture and music cable channel that is expected to debut in June. Called AXS, the cable network primarily will carry live programming aimed at entertainment aficionados. It will include a heavy diet of music and concert coverage as well as lifestyle programming. Los Angeles-based AEG's downtown L.A. Live complex will serve as the network's on-air home.

A new music and entertainment cable channel is launching. Business entertainment reporter Joe Flint says concert promoter AEG is teaming up with Ryan Seacrest, Mark Cuban and Creative Artists Agency to start AXS, a pop culture and music cable channel that is expected to debut in June. The channel will specialize in live programming, especially music and concert coverage. Los Angeles-based AEG's downtown L.A. Live complex will serve as the network's on-air home. Seacrest won't be an on-air personality, Joe Flint says in his story today , but his production company will be involved.

Remember when "Avatar" was just a movie? There have been breathless reports that "Avatar" is so vivid and so powerful that moviegoers walk out feeling let down by the gray world here on boring old Terra. "Movie-goers feel depressed and even suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet" may sound like a headline from the Onion but, nope, there it was in the Daily Mail of London and, a day earlier, on CNN, which quoted a forum post by someone named Mike who glumly said that the majesty of the movie has left him feeling, um, blue.

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

In an often repeated 2001 segment from the syndicated radio program " This American Life ," people are asked which superpower they would prefer: flight or invisibility? On the show the choice becomes shorthand for two sides of human nature, and that kind of consideration of motive plays a role in "The Visible Man," a novel by pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman about one man's ability to disappear. Built out of a series of session transcripts and notes from Victoria Vick, an overmatched therapist in Austin, Texas, the book introduces her new client "Y__," an arrogant and generally unpleasant former scientist who uses a suit from an abandoned government project to become not entirely invisible, but unnoticeable.

Candles flickered outside Apple stores, where bouquets of flowers encircled photos of Steve Jobs. Thousands of online mourners replaced their Facebook photos with the black Apple logo. And tributes flooded in from world leaders and industry pillars, including Apple's most bitter rivals. The outpouring of sentiment -- the kind usually reserved for pop culture icons like John Lennon or Michael Jackson -- was unprecedented for a corporate executive. Why so much adoration for Jobs?