New York Times, Spin, and Vanity Fair contributor Marc Spitz explores the first great cultural movement since Hip Hop: an old-fashioned and yet highly modern aesthetic that's embraced internationally by teens, twenty and thirty-somethings and even some Baby Boomers; creating hybrid generation known as Twee. Via exclusive interviews and years of research, Spitz traces Generation Twee's roots from the Post War 50s to its dominance in popular culture today.Vampire We...

The full story of the rise and spectacular comeback of the band hailed as the saviors of punk rock.It's hard to believe that in early 2004 Green Day was considered over—the band was still together, but they were dismissed as a strictly '90s phenomenon, incapable of re-creating the success of their groundbreaking album Dookie. Then American Idiot debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, stayed on the charts for nearly 18 months, and went on to sell more than four mill...

"A marvelous spin through 90s New York . . . This is criticism and memory merged, and it's funny, beautiful and wise . . . It is the music memoir as art." — Buffalo NewsMarc Spitz assumed that if he lived like his literary and rock 'n' roll heroes, he would become a great artist, too. He conveniently overlooked the fact that many of them died young, broke, and miserable. In his candid, wistful, touching, and hilarious memoir, Poseur, the music jour...

Reunited more than a decade after their brief flirtation with fame in the early 1990s, the middle-aged members of the Ohio-based Jane Ashers suddenly find themselves hitting the big time, with a new record deal, a hit single, fame, fans, and a tour, that transforms their dream into a nightmare of colliding egos, family pressures, and too much success too late.

Taking us back to late ’70s and early ’80s Hollywood—pre-crack, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan—We Got the Neutron Bomb re-creates word for word the rage, intensity, and anarchic glory of the Los Angeles punk scene, straight from the mouths of the scenesters, zinesters, groupies, filmmakers, and musicians who were there.“California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt.” —Kim Fowley“The Runaways were rebels, all of us were. And a lot of...

An expansive biography of David Bowie, one of the twentieth century’s greatest music and cultural icons.From noted author and rock ’n’ roll journalist Marc Spitz comes a major David Bowie biography to rival any other. Following Bowie’s life from his start as David Jones, an R & B—loving kid from Bromley, England, to his rise to rock ’n’ roll aristocracy as David Bowie, Bowie recounts his career but also reveals how much his music has influenced other musicians and forever changed t...

Walter Dabney thinks he’s being practical when he ingests a recreational erectile dysfunction drug called Themis. It will, he reasons, allow him to have a quickie with Annie, his mistress, before his wife returns with her family for a long planned celebratory supper. Only Walter is that guy you wonder about: the one who actually gets the four hour erection they warn you about in those commercials. He must now navigate the aforementioned dinner and the spontaneous arrival of all kinds of ra...

The pressures of life in a post 9/11 world are starting to effect suburban dad Mort Williams in a strange way. His wife has left him and the only two people he can relate to are his unscrupulous plastic surgeon and his "tween" next door neighbor. Eventually the fact that Mort is slowly turning into Michael Jackson becomes a problem that his two grown sons must deal with; even as one has become a survivalist and the other is trying to convince his French girlfriend to keep their baby. Bleak...

Bug Blowmonkey does so much cocaine that he has developed a friendship with one of his chemically induced hallucinations: the confused but still righteous ghost of Marvin Gaye. Estranged from the one woman he had feelings for, Bug begins to question his compulsion to get so numb and frigid. When he meets a new woman, he tries to strip away the icy, hipster facade and accept her for who she is: and not the idealized Vertigo-style duplicate of the pristine ghost he needs to break away from. ...

Dexter and Donna's relationship has gone dull. To spice things up, they head to a trendy eatery on the Lower East Side, secure that "it's safe now." While waiting for a subway train, they witness a drug related shooting and find themselves face to face with a gravely wounded, white B-Boy named Larippo. He orders Dexter to go find help and holds Donna as collateral. Dexter heads up to Harlem to fetch Larippo's boss and a doctor while Donna shares her creative and sexual frustrations with th...

The Farewell Drugs (Reed, Chimpy, Johnny and Sloane) were the worst behaved band on the Lower East Side: heroin snorting, groupie abusing, shoplifting, drug dealing, sexist, racist misanthropes. But they had talent. When beleaguered record industry executive Hella Hecht endeavors to make them over, she finds wild success, marketing them as The Skatekeys, a boy band full of clean cut and polite young troubadours. The Drugs play along but slowly and surely, their old ways creep back in with ...

Moses Malone is a drug dealer who wakes up in the middle of the night with a crisis of conscience. Determined to go straight, live a virtuous life, adopt a dog and give back to the society he’d prided himself on being outside of, Moses must deal with the resistance, frustration and often sheer panic of his loyal clients. It’s a series of breakups that lead to violence, bargaining, and improbably, a real love affair with a doomed soap opera actress. It’s a play about growing up, and looking...