Our writers' favorite summer events run the gamut from the ultra local fare of a day devoted to mustard in a small Midwestern town to the huge SummerStage series in New York and the glorious Montreal Jazz Festival.

Bakesale is a totemic touchstone of a record, one that is arguably as important to the development of indie rock as a form as Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

How did we get from a society that drove nails through people’s ears for lying in court to a society that seems to condone lying? It's a tough question, but James B. Stewart's Tangled Webs has some answers.

It's the scavenger spirit of self-discovery, with the relative high frequency of opportunities to catch bands at small venues early on, that makes the summer in New York a joy.

Draw the curtains against that relentless summer sunshine. Crank the air conditioner not only for comfort, but to drown out that infernal sound of laughing children. While away some free time this summer in the company of your TV with these recommended shows.

It may seem a stretch to connect the work of Tennessee Williams with that of a slapstick cartoon character, but both pushed sexual boundaries and allowed viewers to consider sexuality outside of the conventional heteronormative values prevalent under the restrictive Hayes Code.

Image Comics’ Li'l Depressed Boy isn't the most conventional series on comic stands. Part comedy, part romance, part drama, it’s also charming, whimsical, snarky, and offbeat. In an exclusive and frank interview with its creators, PopMatters gets to the heart of the cultural influences that go into making this critically acclaimed bestseller.

Surfing is a spectacle of sheer uselessness and excessive pleasure that most of us can only dream about. It provides an ideal image of how we desire to live -- devoted solely to a thrilling and utterly innocent pleasure.

PopMatters writers offer up their favorite songs and albums for summer. From the transcendent vocals and trumpet of Louis Armstrong to the contemporary beats and rhymes of Kanye West, our picks traverse the cultural landscape, picking out summery tunes from every era of popular music history.

As artists have become less concerned with telling stories and more concerned with creating emotional connections and mimicking experiences, art has shifted from creating beauty to expressing the heady nature of 'truth'.

There is a far larger system of class bias at work with games, namely the one that has to be engaged in just to facilitate the existence of this article.

Like we always say, you can't really complain about the movies Hollywood hands you every week - your previous palate for same was the reason they were made in the first place.

PopMatters writers recommend some of their all-time favorite summer reads. Look for music summer picks on Tuesday, film/TV/DVD summer picks on Wednesday, and event and game picks for summer on Thursday.

Obscure New Wave of British Heavy Metal band Hell has made the unlikeliest of comebacks thanks to its biggest fan, who just so happens to be one of the most famous metal producers in the world.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast interfaces with writers from The Border House, Gay Gamer, and The Vorpal Bunny Ranch to discuss inclusivity in video games.

Some have argued that comics is about nostalgia. This is patently untrue. For a medium that requires readers to synthesize a coherent moment from disparate image- and text-sequences, comics is always about that future moment. Here's a summer-long comics cavalcade.