Citrosonic
Los Angeles club that moved rave indoors to minimize police and media attention. Started in February 1992, Citrosonic was held on Wednesday nights at The Probe in Hollywood until June 1993.
The crowd was young and racially diverse; house and techno were the music of choice; the original DJs were Barry Weaver and Doc Marten.
Number of View :170Quirky often dark character – Cage, Nicolas
Loopy, hangdog actor with an expansive range that can veer from buffoon to matinee idol to psychotic. A graduate of Beverly Hills High, and a nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola, Cage appeared under his given name with a bit part in the 1982 teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High and in his uncle’s arty troubled-teen film Rumble Fish (1983); he switched to Cage (an homage to comic book hero Luke Cage and avant-garde composer John Cage) to play a Hollywood punk in love with a mall-roaming Valley Girl (1983).
Cage built his career playing quirky often dark characters… Continue reading
Fingerman, Bob
New York comics artist and illustrator whose work first appeared in Fantagraphics Books’s porn line, Eros. After updating the “Tijuana bible” tradition (cheaply printed mid-century cartoon smut) in Atomic Age Truckstop Waitresses (1991), which parodied Twin Peaks and Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Fingerman’s Skinheads in Love (1992) was a naturalistic and truly erotic punk-sex document.
Skinheads got inside a pair of politically correct skins with lives wallpapered by perfectly captured East Village anarchist graffiti and handbills for imaginary hardcore bands. Fingerman’s next major project was White Like She (Dark Horse, 1994).
In this grammatically corrected update of John Howard Griffin’s… Continue reading
Buscemi, Steve
Omnipresent fixture of the U.S. independent film world with a penchant for playing smalltime hoods and whacked-out cranks who rant compellingly about being locked in the loser’s column of life.
A former Long Island ice-cream-truck driver and New York City fireman, Buscemi first appeared as an angry HIV-positive rock musician in Parting Glances (1986).
He subsequently became a Joel and Ethan Coen regular, appearing variously as a gangster (Miller’s Crossing, 1990), quirky bellhop (Barton Fink, 1991), beatnik barkeep (The Hudsucker Proxy, 1994), and sallow hitman (Fargo, 1996).
Buscemi’s widest exposure came as the surly anti-waitstaff hustler Mr. Pink in Reservoir… Continue reading
Blaxploitation
Resurgent African-American film genre of the early ’70s. Blaxploitation movies were low- budget, luridly stylized anti-establishment parables–in most cases, urban action flicks populated by pimps, pushers, and prostitutes. As such they were a marked departure from the type of ’60s films which had featured assimilationist black leads in the Sidney Poitier mold.
The blaxploitation genre offered a crowd-pleasing formula of outsize personae, preposterous costumes, self-consciously ridiculous dialogue, and state-of-the-art soul/funk soundtracks. Key films of the cycle include Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (dedicated “to all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of The Man,” the 1971… Continue reading
The Beats – 90′s contemporary youth culture
Community of writers (chiefly Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs) who in turning their lives into art passed along an intimate and transparent portrait of a literary generation in the wake of WWII and Korea.
Beats (or beatniks) were often invoked in the early ’90s as an influence on contemporary youth culture; superficial similarities between the decades included fashion statements like baggy pants, sneakers, crewcuts, and goatees; spoken word and coffee bar culture; and chatty, spontaneously composed jazz-hip-hop.
There was a modest spate of associated culture-products, such as re-issued books, a Rhino Records CD compilation, and a Francis… Continue reading
Beastie Boys – funk-rap group
Hardcore-funk-rap group and style arbiters of alternative culture, formed as a punk band in New York City in 1981 by Adam Yauch and Mike Diamond. Adam Horovitz joined in 1983, and the band began experimenting with hip-hop, recording the jokey phone-prank rap “Cookie Puss.”
Teamed with Def Jam house producer Rick Rubin in 1986, the Beasties released their debut album, Licensed to Ill, melding heavy metal guitar with hip-hop beats and bratty rhymes; fueled by the frat-boy anthem “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and vulgar live shows (which included a 20-foot inflatable penis), Licensed to Ill became… Continue reading
Baywatch
When Baywatch was first shown on NBC in 1990, it was canceled after a single season. Revived in off-network syndication, it became the most popular TV show on Earth, with, astonishingly, half of all humans tuning in–an estimated 2.4 billion viewers in 120 countries.
The world apparently can’t get enough of this readily translatable sun-kissed vision of an America in which David Hasselhoff (b. 1952, former star of ’80s talking-car show Knight Rider and pop hero in Germany) presides over a group of male and female Malibu lifeguards of considerable comeliness and questionable acting ability.
Stretching their swimwear to near-bursting… Continue reading
The command crew of “Babylon 5,”
Ambitious, syndicated sci-fi television program on a five-year mission to tell the novel-like story of a galactic war in the 23nd century. The brainchild of veteran TV writer/producer J. Michael Straczynski (b. 1954), Babylon 5 has grown into a substantial cult success after a slow start, just as Star Trek did three decades before.
Poorly rated in its first four seasons, B5 garnered hardcore support from, among others, science fiction aficionados, NASA scientists, and Beltway politicians. (The latter group reportedly admire the machinations of the series’ emperors, despots and presidents.) Unlike the Trek universe, which is populated by prosthetically-enhanced variations… Continue reading