Word: 1950s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...just a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley. With online price comparisons, automatic grocery shopping and the ability to get whatever we want whenever we want it, 21st century Americans will face a radical reshaping of the consumer culture we've been building since the 1950s. Think, for a second, about the revolution that shopping malls created in the 1970s and 1980s. They defined not only how we bought stuff but also how we spent our time. The malls themselves became essential parts of a new suburban design, where castles of consumption shaped town layouts in the same...
Since transsexuals burst on the scene in the 1950s, when a G.I. went from George to Christine Jorgensen, journalists have periodically revisited the subject in tones varying from the dryly medical to the hotly sensational. But today many forms of gender nonconformity have actually become mainstream. In the past five years, several movies, plays, tabloid shows and famous cross-dressers like RuPaul have moved drag from the fringes of gay culture to prime time. Even Teletubbies, a show for toddlers, features Tinky Winky, a boy who carries a red patent-leather purse...
ALLEN GINSBERG (1927-1997) He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
...rampant. Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him "just the greatest artist who ever lived." Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime "represents the futile gesture of the poet today." Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers...
...Vegas. Bourbon on the rocks and snap-brim hats were your parents'--no, worse, your grandparents'--idea of hip, stuff that looked quaint beside the bug-eyed alienation of the 1960s. Hippies wore blissed-out smiles and ponchos. Sinatra wore cuff links, roughly $30,000 worth in the mid-1950s, when that kind of money bought a house or two. In the Oedipal drama of the counterculture, Frank was the daddy-o who must die. He could swing his raincoat over his shoulder and cock his hat all night. Compared to Jim Morrison, he still looked like...