Body Rockin’ Rites of Passage
I slipped my father’s aviator sunglasses onto my face under the red bandanna I had tightly strapped around my head. I sauntered through the cold storage doors to the full length mirror in his bedroom. I stared at the 12 year old facing me, complete with fishnet t-shirt and long-sleeved, red matching knit undershirt beneath, blue sweat pants with the corporate logo from my father’s company hidden beneath Bruce Jenner-style shorts. My socks were pure off-white, another product of my dad’s dresser, and the shoes: pink and purple Vans. I was a rainbow of fruit flavors. A costume designer for… Continue reading
E! Entertainment Television
Cable network devoted to round-the-clock entertainment coverage, often determined by the promotional agendas of its subjects. E! was originally founded in 1987 as “Movietime,” a channel sinking under heavy rotation movie trailers and stale infotainment segments; in 1989, the network was sold to a cooperative including HBO, Warner Communications, and United Artists (Disney/ABC and cable operator Comcast bought majority control in January, 1997).
Lee Masters, creator of such MTV successes as Remote Control and The Week in Rock, was appointed to mastermind the restructuring of the network; his dedication included frequent donning of a mohawk wig shaped like the E!… Continue reading
Dinah Shore Golf Classic
From the Dinah Shore Golf Classic webpage
Palm Springs golf tournament named after the late talk-show host (and former paramour of supermacho actor Burt Reynolds) that occasions the “biggest lesbian party of the year.”
Every March thousands of gay women converge on the town for a series of dances and balls loosely associated with the Nabisco-sponsored event.
Palm Springs itself is something of a gay tourist mecca: in the official visitors’ guide, the Greek letter lambda identifies dozens of gay accommodations in the town.
Number of View :271DILBERT – Quest for Love in the Nineties
"Access Denied" by Scott Adams (Andrews & McMeel).
Hapless hero of the wildly popular comic strip that bears his name; white-collar schmo who resembles Bart Simpson in a curiously erect necktie. In 1989, Scott Adams (b. 1957) started drawing cartoons about the rigors and inanities of modern corporate life to kill time during boring meetings at Pacific Bell.
The comics proved Adams’s ticket out of the boardroom and into unexpected stardom; his drawings and observations now appear in three best-selling books (including corporate survival guide, The Dilbert Principle), some 1,200 newspapers, and numberless fluorescent cubicles nationwide.
With keen fellow… Continue reading
The Spiritual godfather of cyberpunk – Dick, Philip K
The spiritual godfather of cyberpunk science fiction, Philip K. Dick wrote more than 40 novels and dozens of short stories that envisioned alternate worlds only barely held together by the plaster and greasepaint of quotidian reality.
A prolific master of ’50s pulp sci-fi, Dick’s first masterpiece was his award-winning alternative history of postwar America, The Man in the High Castle (1962). Propelled by scotch and speed, Dick’s ’60s work involved increasingly fantastic scenarios of looped time, nested hallucinations, unreliable memory, and paranoid despair.
In 1974 the burned-out author experienced a revelatory “divine invasion” sent courtesy of a Vast Active Living… Continue reading
Def Comedy Jam
Popular late-night HBO cable show created in 1992 by rap mogul Russell Simmons. Originally hosted by Martin Lawrence, Def Comedy stood out from the glut of televised comedy by exclusively showcasing black stand-ups and emphasizing forcefully delivered blue jokes.
Weekly, a series of raunchy turns would whip the Def Comedy Jam audience into a burlesque frenzy with material that flew directly in the face of political correctness, driving a wedge into African-American class and gender divides.
DCJ apologists argue that the overwhelming number of pussy jokes from male comedians is redeemed by the quantity of dick jokes from the show’s… Continue reading
Cybercafés
High-concept coffee bars that combine the ’90s craze for high-end java with burgeoning Internet fever. Icon Byte Bar & Grill in San Francisco, which opened in 1991, claims to be the first café to have installed computer terminals and modem linkups that allow customers to surf cyberspace while sipping a cappuccino.
As of mid-1995, a London-based World Wide Web site devoted to cybercafés cited more than 80 worldwide, with dozens more in the works. They range from high-tech emporiums like Cybersmith in Cambridge, Massachusetts (with 53 terminals available at hourly rates), to mom-and-pop cafés in towns like Boise, Idaho, and… Continue reading
Communications Decency Act
1995 bill proposed by Senator Jim Exon, Democrat of Nebraska, to effectively outlaw cybersex. The law–actually an amendment tacked on to the Senate Commerce Committee’s version of the first major reform of U.S.
communications law since the advent of network television–included fines as high as $100,000 and prison terms of up to two years for transmitting material that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent.” The CDA drew an anti-censorship howl on the Internet and mockery from those acquainted with the impossibility of enforcing such restrictions.
A “dial-a-porn” phone sex law with similarly broad language was judged an infringement on… Continue reading
Coen Brothers
Perpetually precocious sibling dyad responsible for the most feted and controversial American cinematic oeuvre of the last decade. Joel (b. 1955), an NYU film school graduate, is nominal director, while Ethan (b. 1958), a Princeton philosophy grad, is ostensible producer.
Nevertheless their six-feature-film output is a full-blown collaboration (originally using the joint pseudonym Roderick James), with the brothers’ collectively rampant obsessions providing the occasion for recasting the history of American film in a series of droll homages that blend arch parody and terminally black comedy.
Their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, for instance, was a studious replication of noir classics, while… Continue reading
Club kids
Outrageously dressed, aggressively whimsical, attention-seeking young nightlife denizens. The epithet “club kids” gained currency in 1988, when a New York magazine cover story featured a posse of young nightcrawlers who managed to parlay their exhibitionist antics and fondness for glitzy, flamboyant getups into budding careers. Paid by promoters just to show up and be ogled by the less-fabulous clubgoers, the most enterprising of the bunch–Michael Alig, Julie Jewels, Michael Tronn, Mathu, Zaldy, Keoki, among others–were taken under the wing of clubowners, earning as much as $1,000 per party.
Outlandishness was the only common denominator in a look that incorporated glitter… Continue reading