Pop Culture

"Get ready to go higher, faster than you've ever gone before," tease the producers of a new video game, N2O: Nitrous Oxide--also the name of a dangerous intoxicating inhalant used at parties and rock concerts by many of the same young people who play video games. "The ultimate rush. . . . Give speed freaks the fix they need."

By now, some biologist must have worked out a comedic taxonomy for the varied species of rictus Americanus: The comic: Punch line Muzak for the change-of-feathers at Minsky's. Rim-shot warmups for the early-bird lounge show, inaudible over the ice in the highball glasses. Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. The comedian: Performance-driven, marquee-billed. This guy is the show. Think Richard Pryor. Think Steve Martin before he started writing and got promoted to . . . .

I've always spent more time at movie houses or huddled next to a TV than with my nose between the pages of a book. I read only books directly related to my research and a few literary faves. Sit down with a 600-page best-selling biography? Who has time in the age of MTV? I want to see colors rippling across a wide screen. I want a soundtrack of violins and trumpets composed by a nonagenarian Russian emigre.

Hollywood has come bearing gifts: young heartthrobs, hip-hop soundtracks, wisecracking adolescent characters. But its object of affection--America's ballooning population of teenagers--has mixed feelings about all the attention. "I think a lot of people ignore it," said Katie Rosen, 16, of Westchester. "It's so. . . . They're going about it all wrong." Nevertheless, Rosen went to see the popular slasher parody film "Scream" and its sequel. "I liked those--they were different," she said.

Alexis Smith is a culture scavenger. For 25 years, she has drawn quotes from authors as disparate as Jane Austen and Jack Kerouac and combined them with found objects such as posters, matchbooks, ticket stubs, toys, puzzles, car parts, costume jewelry or whatever else might catch her magpie eye. Quirky, amusing and wry, she has been labeled a principal second-generation inheritor of the L.A. Pop tradition.

The old men paused as they filed past Junior Wells' coffin and glanced at the bluesman's final show of splendor: his creaseless sky-blue silk suit and matching homburg, a shiny trove of harmonicas laid out beside him, a pint of gin nestled nearby to ease his journey home. The 63-year-old musician had been "Junior" all his adult life, and now that the youthful peacock was gone, the mourners knew their own time was coming.

MTV's "120 Minutes," the late-Sunday alternative to the music channel's regular programming, began offering edgier artists than the prime-time fare of Michael Jackson and Bon Jovi some 12 years ago. Several pop trends after its inception, how relevant is the concept of "120 Minutes"? The aesthetic, if not the anti-establishment mind set, of underground culture now represents the norm in pop culture (e.g.

A Crayola 64 box from Easton, Pa.-based Binney & Smith Inc. will be displayed by the Smithsonian Institution as a piece of American cultural history, the company said. Now a unit of Hallmark Cards, Binney & Smith began producing crayons in 1903, with just eight colors, and the 64-crayon pack was introduced in 1958. The box donated to the Smithsonian is one of the original Crayola 64 packages, with a built-in sharpener.

The buzz over "Seinfeld" is building. Not just to pre-punctuate its May 14 finale with endless loud oom-pah-pahs and to worship reverently at the altar of the planet's funniest comedy. But also to establish the immortality of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, and celebrate their lasting imprint on humankind. How lasting? "It defined an entire generation and changed television forever," someone with a wild sense of humor was saying about "Seinfeld" on TV recently. Come again?

A long line of twentysomethings, waiting for the 10:15 p.m. show at Mann's Chinese Theatre, snaked down Hollywood Boulevard and halfway up the next block. Women sporting bobby socks flounced their ponytails at men with slicked-back hair and cigarettes stuck jauntily behind their ears. I gaped at the number of moviegoers decked out in Angora sweaters, full skirts and leather jackets. My generation--the so-called jaded Gen-X--had unaccountably gone "Grease."