It Wasn't Just the Beatles Who Changed Everything in 1964:

Remembering Terry Southern's "Candy"

By Steven Rosen

This year, we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in America - the appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show," the conquering of American radio and transformation of American pop culture with an irreverent cheekiness, the jolting shock of something radically new to awaken a society depressed by President Kennedy's assassination.

As well we should.

But while this may seem hard to believe, the late Terry Southern made just as big an impact that year. As a co-screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," he was credited with turning fears of nuclear war, and the beliefs of Cold War hawks, into the stuff of pitch-black satire. The movie was more than a hit; it was a watershed in cultural thinking.

"Long Day?s Journey Into The Ramones?
On the new Ramones documentary ?End of the Century?

By Steven Rosen

Hey! Ho! They?re gone.

Somehow, it?s hard to accept that the Ramones are over ? broken up for more than six years now, two of their four original members dead.

They still seem so alive, so organic. Because of the consistency with which they plied their humane punk-rock vision ? often-funny three-chord songs kept short and played fast by guys who always looked alike? the Ramones never seemed to get old. They were ? are ? rock in the way that Mount Rushmore is. They were heroic in their very existence; their brotherly solidarity as solid as granite from 1974 to the present. They were family.