Punk Rock

Brendan Mullen, founder of the Masque punk rock club in Hollywood that helped launch the vibrantly anarchic music scene on the West Coast in the late 1970s, died Monday after suffering a massive stroke over the weekend. He was 60. Mullen died at Ventura County Medical Center, said his companion of 16 years, Kateri Butler. The couple had been traveling through Santa Barbara and Ventura celebrating his 60th birthday, which was Friday. "The doctors are completely perplexed," Butler said.

Michael Mayer tried to contain his growing frustration. For more than nine hours at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre over two recent afternoons, Mayer's creative group was laboring to fix the glitches that were making a mess of a key sequence in the world premiere rock opera "American Idiot." Progress was fleeting. For the two days of technical rehearsals, director Mayer and his team were stuck revising just three minutes of the show -- an elaborate fantasy dance passage in the adaptation of the pop-punk band Green Day's Grammy-winning 2004 album of the same name.

A rock 'n' roll soundtrack gets teenagers through their ups, their downs and their angsts. It may evolve from classic rock to grunge to emo to pop to punk and beyond, but it's a lasting, rebellious fixture. So it should come as no surprise that novels for young adults are as steeped in rock 'n' roll as teenagers themselves. Cecil Castellucci, author of five books, including the rock novel "Beige," picks novels with characters whose lives are changed by (turn that down!) music. In alpha order: "Audrey, Wait!"

In her landmark book "Gender Trouble," feminist philosopher Judith Butler argued that gender is a performance, a put-on constructed out of lipstick and fainting couches or neckties and pigskin. Butler called for opening up ideas of gender to more radical expressions, not just the scripted roles found in "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," which has informed us, in short, that women like to talk and men don't.

Except for his bald head, there isn't much monkish about Noah Levine. His body is covered with tattoos, his speech is spiked with profanities, and his style (T-shirts devoted to his favorite bands, lots of black) is a throwback to his days as a hard-core punk rocker. So it looked a bit unusual to a newcomer when, on a recent evening, Levine, 37, sat cross-legged at a Buddhist center in East Hollywood to lead several dozen people in a guided meditation.

The front door shuts with a thud, and Hiba Siddiqui heeds her father's footsteps, heavy from a day at work, plodding across the foyer downstairs. Time to change clothes, Hiba thinks, peeking her face over the balcony to shout "Hi, Baba!" before rushing into her bedroom, brightened by lime green and tangerine bed covers, splashed with the words "I ROCK." A magazine photo of a punk band called Anti-Flag is taped behind her door.

It WAS fast, it was furious and it was over in a blink. But photographer Edward Colver's shutter blinked a fraction faster. If not for his poking in and out of hot, dank punk clubs across the Southland, a whole big chunk of L.A.'s early hardcore scene of the '70s and early '80s would have hurtled -- visually -- out of memory. If you were there, you remember him. He was everywhere -- Hong Kong Cafe, the Cuckoo's Nest, Perkins Palace -- impossible to miss: The tall guy smack in the middle of the churning mosh pit, towering over the melee ("When they push it, I tell 'em I'm 5-17."