Roadies spend the majority of their time hauling equipment and tuning instruments. Not Eddie Riggs. After he spills blood on his badass belt buckle in a backstage mishap, the world’s best roadie is transported to an alternate universe ripped straight from a heavy metal album cover. Under the reign of evil Lord Doviculus and his glam rockin’ minion General Lionwhyte, demons have enslaved humanity. Armed with two axes (a dual-bladed weapon and a guitar), Riggs, voiced by Jack Black, must rally the oppressed headbangers and restore rock. With an outlandish script and an amazing cast of rock legends (including Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford, and Lita Ford), Brütal Legend is the best homage to rock ‘n’ roll since This Is Spinal Tap.

Many of the world's historical treasures have been sanitized and Starbucksified until there's little personality left: Moscow's Red Square has tchotchke-hawking souvenir carts, the leaning tower of Pisa has more handrails than a nursing home, and the Great Pyramids have a freakin' laser light show. But somehow Hungary's magical capital city of Budapest has retained its historical charm, even five years after the country became part of the European Union.

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Bugs may very well be the love child of Pablo Picasso and Tamara de Lempicka. For nearly 30 years, he’s been “painting on people with a tattoo machine,” creating a signature style that evokes the modern art masters and sets him apart as an innovator in the tattoo world...

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New York City hardcore could never have been born anywhere else. The music was built in the city, for the city. It came stripped-down, muscled-up, and overloaded with all of the frantic energy and violence of the streets. It was designed to intimidate. The musicians were homeless, AWOL, and just plain crazy street kids who felt fed up with the chaos of early ’80s New York. President Reagan’s economics had knocked the poor to their knees. Unemployment and a raging drug epidemic tried to finish the job. New York hardcore gave that madness a voice. It took form slowly, in shitty clubs and even shittier rehearsal rooms. Agnostic Front built ...

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When Orange County hardcore band Eighteen Visions ended their 11-year run in 2007, frontman James Hart had mixed feelings. He was disappointed but excited by the prospect of starting anew. Since the 2004 album Obsession, Hart had been pushing the band in a more hard rock direction, and some members had pushed back. Now that he was on his own, there was no one to protest. "This is the record I've always wanted to make," Hart says of the self-titled debut by his new band, Burn Halo, which blends intoxicating '80s-style power riffs in the vein of Guns N' Roses with repeated guitar hooks redolent of The Cult and swaggering ...

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the superpower of shooter games. This sequel takes the first-person-shooter genre to new heights with a thrilling story that picks up from the last game and features frantic co-op challenges and the best multiplayer around. The explosive single-player campaign includes dangerous new war scenarios that find you scaling icy mountains to infiltrate a top-secret base, racing a snowmobile down a mountainside while dodging a hail of enemy fire, and tailing terrorist suspects through the crowded Brazilian slums. Multiplayer ups the ante with new customizable kill streaks that let you unleash the fury of an AC-130 gunship upon those suckers sitting in broad daylight. 

If the unbelievable geography, waterfront restaurants, and nearby vineyards aren't reason enough to visit Cape Town, South Africa, consider this news from Damian McGrath, the founder of tattoos.com: “Tattooing down there is sort of what tattooing was like 15 to 20 years ago in North America. There are lots of emerging artists, and the scene isn't as mainstream.” Sounds great, right? Well, that's the reason McGrath has planned Southern Ink Xposure, a weeklong event for international artists that culminates with a three-day convention at the Cape Town International Convention Center.

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Stuck in a house for months without television, music, or a phone is like solitary confinement. Add in flamenco-dancing Tyra Banks, vicious fashionista boys, and a gaggle of neurotic women and it becomes a surrealist nightmare. If you survive, you have what it takes to be America’s Next Top Model. 22-year-old CariDee English calmly climbed to the top of the heap of hopefuls amid all that chaos. “Things got intense and crazy. Sometimes you really just wanted to slap someone,” she says. Since winning the title, she moved from her hometown of Fargo, ND, to New York City. “It’s been a whirlwind,” she says. “I like waking up and not ...

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