Pop Culture

As frequent Los Angeles Philharmonic guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya pointed out, Tuesday night's Hollywood Bowl concert had a unifying theme. Every piece on the program was written by a French composer, and every piece was affected by the "Spanish tinge" -- as Jelly Roll Morton put it -- to some degree. Sometimes you had to listen hard to find Spain in the sound, but it was there. It was the kind of classical program that symphonic pops conductor and once-perennial Bowl visitor Erich Kunzel -- who passed away Tuesday at the age of 74 -- would have felt at home in. At the same time, it was a type of program that has been rendered obsolete over the decades as film and TV music, pop culture, Lloyd Webber salutes and the like hijacked the summer pops trade.

Three media veterans looking to profit from Hollywood's obsession with everything "geek" have found inspiration in a newsletter for women who love shopping. Producer and former Sony Pictures chief Peter Guber, digital media entrepreneur Peter Levin and Gareb Shamus, owner of comic book and pop culture magazine Wizard, will unveil an e-mail newsletter today called GeekChicDaily aimed at young guys interested in comics, video games, technology and genre films. The business is being explicitly patterned after the hugely successful DailyCandy, an e-mail newsletter focused on fashion trends that was acquired by Comcast Corp.

In this digital era of distraction and celebrity, how long could the sound of simple sidewalk music possibly echo? The answer, it turns out, is five years and counting. Tonight, nine street musicians from across the globe will play at Club Nokia under the banner of Playing for Change, a name that winks at their busker background and declares their mission of making the world a better place through melody. That's a dangerously earnest goal in this ironic age, but Playing for Change, one of the surprising stories in 2009 pop culture, has made bold optimism its backbeat.

The parking lot scene at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre earlier this month had all the sights, sounds and smells of a Grateful Dead concert: sweaty vendors hawking tie-dyed T-shirts, patchouli-scented waifs begging for free tickets, veggie burritos sizzling on a portable gas grill. The only thing missing was the Grateful Dead, the improbable music industry success that called it quits after the Aug. 9, 1995, death of Jerry Garcia, the band's spiritual and musical soul.

Zeitgeist--n. [German, from zeit, time, and geist, spirit.] the spirit of the time; the moral and intellectual trend of any age or period. * Bill Clinton sensed it early, at a private White House screening. Bob Dole chased its spirit three weeks ago, with press cameras, popcorn and a seat at the Cineplex Odeon.

When the edgy industrial-rock band Ministry came through town recently for a pair of shows at the Hollywood Palladium, the group attracted a fashionably alternative crowd--tattooed, pierced and largely dressed in black. The fans no doubt came for a cathartic wallow in Ministry's high-intensity urban angst, but before they got their blast of all that, they were confronted with the music of sunshine, summer and unstoppable up-tempo fun: surf music.

It's a sweltering Wednesday morning outside a theater in the posh Ginza district. Hundreds of women line the sidewalk holding flowers, cameras and fan letters. A shorthaired woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses alights from a cab and cuts through the crowd. Instamatics flash, video cameras roll and fans scurry behind her. Schoolgirls, housewives and grandmothers swoon. "Oh, she's so handsome," sighs one elderly woman, clutching her handkerchief.

The pilots of a Boeing 767 jetliner, misled by the complex gauges of their new aircraft, ran out of fuel in midair with 69 passengers aboard. A convict, under computer-monitored house arrest, slipped his electronic manacles to commit murder because the system monitoring his whereabouts was not designed to redial authorities when it encountered a busy signal.

The phone rang. It was for his wife. I'll get back to her, the caller said. The next morning Charles Schulz, a decade older than most people when they retire, a man who long ago amassed more than enough money to do whatever he wants, was in his office by 9, staring at the white strip of paper he must fill each day for more than 300 million readers around the world.

When does a buzzword become legitimate? Merriam-Webster Inc., publisher of Webster's dictionaries, moves at a less than scintillating pace when it comes to including faddish terms. The Springfield, Mass., company's collegiate dictionary only recently installed definitions for "greenmail," "golden parachute" and "bean counter"--favorites from the 1980s, the merger-studded Decade of Greed.