We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes–who knows, really, but shifts in taste don’t...

They saw me. Milton’s smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease...

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball +...

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there’s someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who...

I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a “bad girl.” Mariah was...

He was a boom boom shake the room ” kind of guy

It’s basically a joke.” “I think it’s cool,” Julian says. “It’s all about control, right?” He considers something. “It’s not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you’re also one of the producers–”...

Rocket Fever Grips Nation’s Teenagers’ cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation’s sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set...

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin’s so pale she looks like she’s just broken dawn.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda’s...

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds–the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking...

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space...