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:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)