When I was a kid and my family went to the Japanese strip mall across the river in New Jersey, an occasional trip that I always looked forward to, I was mesmerized by the hyper-realistic fake food on display there. Now, you can get these food replicas as iPhone cases! They’re making me hungry.

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From the deep bowels of Patterson, New Jersey, Korean-born artist So Yoon Lym emerges with amazingly realistic paintings of people’s hair and braid patterns. Really awesome, and strangely representative of the Patterson aesthetic. I once made a cameo in a reggaton video that was shot at a boxing club there.

A recent system of storms blew through the entire Northeast, drenching parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, but failing to drop any moisture on heat-paralyzed Baltimore. Still, the massive lightning cloud that loomed just south of the city a couple days ago was amazing to look at. It was probably related to the same system that hit Chicago, simultaneously striking three of the tallest buildings there with lightning.

The other night I got to check out legendary doom metal band Evoken. The five-piece, formed fourteen years ago, drew a tiny crowd in their home state of New Jersey (granted it was quite late and Longbranch isn’t exactly a bustling town), but they crushed the few heads that were there with down-tuned slabs of darkness. I’ve seen a lot of metal in my time, but I’ve rarely seen guys as serious, intimidating, and scary as these dudes — the bassist (David Wagner) looked like a satanic Joe the Plumber. It certainly helped that the venue still had its Halloween decorations up. For those not in the know, doom metal can refer to any variety of metal that is slow and particularly centered around lower-frequency sounds. Evoken’s particular brand is known as ‘funeral doom’, which translates as ‘say good-bye to bowel control’, a sub-genre of death metal that includes bands like Thergothon and Skepticism.

Keith Shore has his first solo show, ‘Jersey Knit’, coming up in Malmo, Sweden starting September 6th. ‘They are a few in a large series of paintings based off of photographs I’ve taken in my old neighbourhood of Lambertville, New Jersey’, he says.

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There’s something so warm and enticing about the illustrations of New Jersey-based artist Vincent Di Nguyen.

Chirgilchin is a phenomenal group of Tuvan musicians that play traditional Tuvan folk music, which means a whole lot of throatsinging. I recently had the chance to see them play in a church in Montclair, New Jersey, and they were simply amazing. It was mind-boggling that the sounds I heard that night were coming out of human beings without the aid of effects.