In Popular Culture
- Mark Twain's Roughing It, published in 1872, provides a humorous and informative early description of Mono Lake in its natural condition in the 1860s Twain found the lake to be a "lifeless, treeless, hideous desert... the loneliest place on earth."
- The general appearance of the lake and surrounding mountains circa 1973 can also be seen in the Clint Eastwood film High Plains Drifter
- The Diver, a photo taken by Storm Thorgerson for Pink Floyd's album Wish You Were Here, features what appears to be a man diving into a lake, creating no ripples. The photo was taken at Mono Lake, and the tufa towers are a prominent part of the landscape. The effect was actually created when the diver performed a handstand underwater until the ripples dissipated.
- The band Cinderella filmed the video for their power ballad "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)" at Mono Lake
- Monolake is the stage name of a Berlin minimal techno artist
- The volcano scene from the award-winning 1953 film Fair Wind to Java was shot at Mono Lake. Today the remnants of the volcano host California gull researchers on their visits to the island.
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)