Word: proto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harvard with a B.A. and a semester of graduate school in design behind him. They were used to the behavioral extravagances and shock-therapy experimentation of the young avant-garde art world, and brought that same go-for-it attitude to their music. Playing at Manhattan's CBGB, the proto-punk club on the Bowery, the Heads dressed in strictly Ivy spiff, like floorwalkers from Brooks Brothers. Byrne, eyes bulging, long neck turning like a periscope, sang like a carny geek who could not digest his chicken. Then there were the songs. "Psycho killer...
...architects' and designers' pioneering zeal seemed to give out, the enfants terribles Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (see following story) had their first shows of paintings in Vienna. Their intense, expressionist works did not flirt, like Klimt's gilded sultanic pictures, with bourgeois prettiness and what the catalog calls "proto-psychedelic sweetness." Schiele, who died young (in 1918, along with Moser, Wagner and Klimt), has been the subject of more passionate popularity than Kokoschka over the years: his images were the more earnestly pained and ugly. As Varnadoe writes, Viennese arts had lost their capacity for compromise between "the giddy...
...wonder. The nation and the proto-pop media were invented more or less simultaneously only two centuries ago. Newspapers and novels made sense. "Those who cry out now that the work of a Mickey Spillane or The Adventures of Superman travesty the novel," Critic Leslie Fiedler noted in 1955, "forget that the novel was long accused of travestying literature." Pamela and Tom Jones were, in a sense, the Magnum, P.I. and The Young and the Restless of their day. By 18th century standards, the new American flag must have seemed gaudy and flamboyant -- patriotic pop; and the national anthem composed...
...London in 1958, the year Britain discovered both rock 'n' roll as an anarchic force and teenagers as a voracious new consumer class. Colin (Eddie O'Connell) is a bright lad who hits the Top 40 of success snapping pictures of mods and trads; Suzette (Patsy Kensit) is a proto-Twiggy fashion model- designer. Sade, Ray Davies and the snakily elegant David Bowie appear in elaborate production numbers--upmarket rock videos, really--and Julien Temple, a master director of the short music form, revs up the visuals so that everything looks like a display in the biggest, fanciest boutique window...
...Cusack, as Lane Meyer, seems uniquely inappropriate after his boisterous role in The Sure Thing to play someone on the down side of teen life. In another dimension, where teen comedies all have good script writers, the pairing of Cusack and Armstrong might have been relatively magical, something like proto-Belushi meets proto-Murray. Instead, they are confined to gags that only a teen messiah could save, and only a child could enjoy. Hopefully, Cusack's role in the Disney flick The Journey of Natty Gann turns out better...