Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn on June 16, 1957 in Tucson, Arizona ) is an American artist who lives and works in Venice Beach, California.

Pettibon earned an economics degree from UCLA and worked as a high school mathematics teacher for a short period, before pursuing and completing his BFA in 1977.

In 1977, his brother, guitarist/songwriter Greg Ginn, founded the influential punk rock band Black Flag. Initially, Pettibon had been a bass player in the group when it was known by the name Panic. When the band discovered that another band called Panic existed, Pettibon suggested the name Black Flag and designed their distinctive "four bars" logo.^{[citation needed]} Around the same time, Pettibon adopted his new surname, from the nickname petit bon (good little one) given to him by his father. Pettibon’s artwork appeared on flyers and records for Black Flag through the early 1980s, and he became well known in the Los Angeles punk rock scene.

Known for his comic-like drawings with disturbing, ironic or ambiguous text, Pettibon's subject matter is sometimes violent and anti-authoritarian. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he was closely associated with the punk rock band Black Flag and the record label SST Records, both founded by his older brother Greg Ginn. Beginning in the mid 1980s, he became a well-known figure in the contemporary art scene.

Alia Martine Shawkat ( /ˈæliə ˈʃoʊkɑːt/; born April 18, 1989) is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Maeby Fünke in the Fox series Arrested Development.

Shawkat was born in Riverside, California, to actor Tony Shawkat and Dina Burke. She grew up in nearby Palm Springs. She has two brothers. Her maternal grandfather was actor Paul Burke.

Shawkat is of Kurdish descent on her father's side and Irish and Norwegian descent on her mother's side.

Shawkat made her acting debut in both film and television in 1999. In that year, she played the daughter of the character Amir in the feature film Three Kings, in which her father Tony Shawkat played a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, and appeared as a young Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie on one episode of JAG. She landed her first starring role in 2001, playing Hannah Rayburn in the television sitcom State of Grace, which aired in the United States on the cable television channel Fox Family (subsequently renamed ABC Family) until 2002.

As Maeby Fünke, Shawkat was a regular cast member of Arrested Development for the entire run of the show (2003–2006). The series received nearly universal positive reviews, with Shawkat's performance occasionally singled out for praise; pop-culture commentator Brian M. Palmer remarked that she was "one of the brightest lights on a show populated solely by bright lights," and Scott Weinberg of eFilmCritic described her as "one funny young lady." In an interview with The A.V. Club in 2010, Shawkat remarked that many of her "formative moments" as an actress took place on the Arrested Development set: " [Show creator] Mitch Hurwitz was like a father figure to me...In a way, it was great to be around [the cast], because I feel that my understanding of comedy was able to grow really well during that time." Shawkat, along with the rest of the main cast, are set to reprise their roles in the upcoming Arrested Development feature film.

Lance Bangs (born September 8, 1972) is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and music video director who has created videos for Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Green Day, the Arcade Fire, the Shins, The Thermals, Belle & Sebastian, Menomena, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, R.E.M., Mike Watt, Death Cab for Cutie, The Black Keys, Kanye West, and Pavement. He directed the David Cross film Let America Laugh. Bangs has also been heavily involved in the filming and production of MTV's Jackass television series and its subsequent movies.

Bangs was born in Sacramento, California. He founded Flicker, a series of Super8mm and 16mm film screenings while in Athens, GA in 1990 along with Michael Lachowski and Angie Grass.

As a commercial director he has worked with UPS, Nike, Subway, Rock Band and Volvo for several campaigns, including the Titanium Lion winning Life on Board campaign from the 2005 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

He produced DVDs for the Directors Label Series, covering the work of Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek, Stéphane Sednaoui, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn. He has also been involved with Spike Jonze on a number of occasions, recently being one of the cinematographers for Jackass: The Movie, Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D. He also was a part of the Jackassworld.com: 24 Hour Takeover, filming behind the scenes material. In 2009 they were shortlisted for an Academy Award for "Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak."

Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. He is half-Jewish. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer. The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as “thrilling” and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was “as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel.”

Lee M. Ranaldo (born February 3, 1956) is an American singer, guitarist, writer, record producer, and visual artist, best known as a co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore the 33rd and 34th Greatest Guitarists of All Time, respectively.

Ranaldo was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, and graduated from Binghamton University. He has three sons, Cody, Sage and Frey, and is married to the experimental artist Leah Singer.

Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands and joining the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. Among Ranaldo's solo records are Dirty Windows, a collection of spoken texts with music, Amarillo Ramp (For Robert Smithson), pieces for the guitar, and Scriptures of the Golden Eternity. His books include several with art or photography by Leah Singer, including Drift, Bookstore, Road Movies, and Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt (from a full-length book of writings on Moroccan travels and music). Ranaldo has also published Jrnls80s (published by Soft Skull Press), as well as a book of poems, Lengths & Breaths, with photography by Cynthia Connolly. His most recent book of poetry, Against Refusing, was published by Water Row Press in April 2010 with cover artwork by Leah Singer. His visual+sound works have been shown at galleries and museums in Paris, Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Los Angeles, Vienna, and elsewhere.