Cui Jian, a musician whose songs embodied the spirit of hope and protest among young people in China in 1989, rehearsed at Beijing Workers Gymnasium before performing a 3D rock concert. The concert has has been made into a film, called “Transcendence.”

BEIJING — On May 9, 1986, a classical trumpeter turned rock guitarist belted out “Nothing to My Name” at Beijing Workers Gymnasium, unaware that his raw lyrics beseeching a girl for respect despite his poverty would become an unofficial anthem of the democracy movement on Tiananmen Square three years later.

Last week in Beijing, exactly 26 years later, Cui Jian, generally acclaimed as the father of Chinese rock ’n’ roll, showed up at a screening of a new 3-D rock concert movie for an audience of fans now predominantly in their 40s.

The film, “Transcendence,” captured Mr. Cui and his band in a concert at Workers Gymnasium in 2010, this time backed by an orchestra and facing a transformed country that was soon to become the world’s second-largest economy and home to 600 million Internet users caught in a social media explosion.

As Mr. Cui sang “Nothing to My Name” onscreen, the audience clapped and sang along. Grainy 1980s footage showed fleets of bicyclists moving through Beijing. Many in the audience wore red bandannas above their 3-D glasses, in homage to “A Piece of Red Cloth,” another favorite of the era by Mr. Cui. At the first bars, they passed a giant red banner hand to hand overhead. Both songs, which Mr. Cui, wearing a red blindfold, performed for the students occupying Tiananmen in May 1989, became the soundtrack for those whose lives were forever changed by the military suppression of the protests that June 4.

The film’s producers, Bai Qiang, 43, who was in the square in 1989, and Michael Peyser of the United States, hope to release “Transcendence” in theaters next month. They face formidable obstacles. Theater operators tend to favor the Hollywood blockbusters currently dominating the Chinese box office. And in June the government typically discourages any discussion of the violent 1989 crackdown, which ended with the deaths of untold numbers of civilians.

Interrupting the screening, Mr. Bai and a China Central Television commentator invited the audience to reflect on Mr. Cui’s music.

Cheng Lin, a popular singer, recalled her early friendship with Mr. Cui. “We had nothing, but we had a sense of ourselves,” she said. “Cui Jian’s lyrics shook the whole country.”

Through most of the 1990s, Mr. Cui, whose lyrics were seen as challenging authority, was blocked from large-scale public performances. He and his band persisted, however, playing in hotels and restaurants.

In 1993, Mr. Cui and the filmmaker Zhang Yuan co-produced “Beijing Bastards,” with Mr. Cui playing himself, an underground rock musician whose applications for public performance permits are repeatedly rejected. The film was never released in China. Occasionally in those days, however, Mr. Cui snubbed the unwritten ban. In 1997, he gave a concert at the French Embassy, and Chinese fans climbed the gate, willing to risk arrest to see their hero play live.

Over the past decade, though, as the Chinese music industry expanded to large modern venues, promoters approached Mr. Cui to headline concerts where tickets could run as high as 1,800 renminbi, or nearly $300, each. He was allowed to play many but not all of his songs.

Meanwhile, China’s younger rock scene leapfrogged into the Internet era with punk bands like Subs or Hedgehog. Mr. Cui, the onetime spokesman for disaffected youth, was seen increasingly as a figure from an earlier time. Some critics accused Mr. Cui of selling out to the government-run culture system, with appearances on state television, in a effort to reach a broader audience. But, Mr. Bai said, “a taboo around him persists.” Mr. Cui taped a performance for the CCTV Internet Spring Festival Gala this year, but the segment was never shown.

“He’s suffered so much for his art, but it’s made him who he is,” Ms. Cheng said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in this man. There’s simply nothing more important than to be able to express yourself through music.”

The CNN correspondent Jaime A. FlorCruz, who reported for Time magazine in China in the 1980s, remembered Mr. Cui emerging on the scene just after the British singer George Michael and his band became the first Western pop act to tour China, in 1985.

“I remember how tense it was when Wham! played Beijing. Everybody was stony-faced, including some cadres, who were trying to figure out what was going on. Then there were all the police,” Mr. FlorCruz said after the screening. “Then came Cui. He was the man who broke all the rules, broke the mold of Chinese rock.”

Brian Sweeney/Roadside Attractions

Luke Treadaway and Natalia Tena in David Mackenzie’s romantic comedy “Tonight You’re Mine.”

Pop music has a way of dressing up familiar themes and emotions in new beats and sonic textures, and “Tonight You’re Mine,” David Mackenzie’s new film, does something similar. In outline it is an absolutely standard meet-cute romantic comedy, with the usual obstacles on the way to the central couple’s triumphant kiss, which takes place against a backdrop of fireworks and cheering crowds. There are inconvenient rivals who must be gotten out of the way, and comical sidekicks to lighten the mood. But the look, the rhythm and the scruffy, on-the-fly ambience of the film make it feel unusually fresh and lively. It may be the same old song, but it’s also a catchy remix.

Some of the wayward, jumpy energy comes from the setting, an actual rock festival in Scotland. Mr. Mackenzie and his crew made their way through the hordes of drunken fans and the muddy tents, unassumingly inserting the fictional characters in the midst of real-life musicians and revelers. The director, whose previous films include the dour, abrasive dramas “Mister Foe” and “Young Adam,” retains some of the stylistic aggression of those movies but lets go of the overwrought psychology and the swaggering sadism. Like a punk band tiptoeing toward the mainstream, “Tonight You’re Mine” does a bit of posturing, but it’s really all about sweetness and fun.

It is hostility, however, that first brings Adam (Luke Treadaway) and Morello (Natalia Tena) together. He is the poutier, prettier half of a successful American duo called the Make. With his partner, Tyko (Mathew Baynton), and a video crew, he is rolling onto the festival grounds when a confusing scuffle breaks out with the members of the Dirty Pink, an all-female band. Morello, who is its leader, threatens to smash Adam’s guitar; he steals her jacket; and all of a sudden, thanks to the intervention of a deus ex machina with a beatific smile and a V.I.P. badge, the two antagonists find themselves handcuffed together.

To complicate matters, it turns out that though they are physically attached to each other, they are romantically attached to other people, who are not amused at this situation. Adam’s girlfriend is a volatile model named Lake (Ruta Gedmintas); Morello is involved with a reliable banker named Mark (Mr. Mackenzie’s brother, Alastair), and they stick around long enough for all four to tumble awkwardly (and chastely) into bed.

And also long enough to witness the kindling of a credible spark between Adam and Morello. She has no choice but to drag him onstage for a Dirty Pink set, and their impromptu duet of “Tainted Love” provides the film with one of several moments of unembarrassed pop bliss. The link between music and sex is obvious enough, and “Tonight You’re Mine” is happy to note some of the tawdry aspects of that connection. But it also captures the romantic, ecstatic longing that unites the musicians with one another and with their admirers.

From time to time Mr. Mackenzie checks in with Tyko and the Make’s boorish manager on a drunken excursion into rock ’n’ roll decadence. You hear some pretty good songs by real bands and surprisingly not bad ones by the Make and the Dirty Pink. The atmosphere of genial chaos and the sense of an event being caught on the fly gives the movie a superficially Altman-esque vibe, but the story is really as simple and earnest as they come, handcuffs notwithstanding. Boy meets girl. Etc. “Tonight You’re Mine” is as ephemeral as its title — as thin as a jukebox dime but pretty catchy all the same.

“Tonight You’re Mine” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, drugs, etc.

Tonight You’re Mine

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by David Mackenzie; written by Thomas Leveritt; director of photography, Giles Nuttgens; edited by Jake Roberts; production design by Judi Ritchie; costumes by Kelly Cooper Barr; produced by Gillian Berrie; released by Roadside Attractions. In Manhattan at the Loews Village VII, 66 Third Avenue, at 11th Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

WITH: Luke Treadaway (Adam), Natalia Tena (Morello), Mathew Baynton (Tyko), Ruta Gedmintas (Lake), Gilly Gilchrist (Bruce the Roadie), Alastair Mackenzie (Mark), Gavin Mitchell (Bobby), Joseph Mydell (the Prophet), Jonny Phillips (Jay) and Sophie Wu (Kim).

Jason Decrow/DECRJ, via Associated Press

Original members of The Beach Boys, from left, Brian Wilson, David Marks, Mike Love and Al Jardine, performed Tuesday night at the Beacon Theater in New York.

What amazing songs. That’s the lingering impression from Tuesday night’s Beacon Theater concert by the reunited Beach Boys , who until this year had not performed with Brian Wilson since 1996.

Over half a century after three brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson), a cousin (Mike Love) and a high school classmate (Al Jardine) started a band in 1961 in Hawthorne, Ca., the surviving original Beach Boys have put schisms, battles for credit and lawsuits behind them to perform songs that are no less startling for their Top 40 familiarity. The Beach Boys are in their 60s and 70s now, and it showed, but memory and a knowing backup band supplied what mortal performers cannot.

More than 40 songs breezed by in the concert, nearly every one packing musicianly marvels into its two or three minutes. The Beach Boys performed the obligatory hits along with more obscure songs like “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a flopped 1965 single with unexpected pauses, sudden harmonic swerves and, Mr. Love said afterward, “nine million vocal parts.” Another oddity was “All This Is That”, a song Mr. Love and Mr. Jardine wrote about transcendental meditation. They had a new one, too: “That’s Why God Made the Radio”, with echoes of both “Surfer Girl” and “Sail On, Sailor” carrying lines like “It’s paradise when I lift up my antennae/Receiving your signal like a prayer.” It’s the title track of a new album due in June.

The current Beach Boys also include two longtime associates. Bruce Johnston, who has been in and out of the Beach Boys since 1965, sang his song “Disney Girls” and seized the swooping high vocal line in “Fun, Fun, Fun.” The guitarist David Marks, who briefly replaced Mr. Jardine in 1962 and has performed in latter-day Beach Boys lineups, joined the vocal harmonies and fired off rowdy surf-rock leads. They were bolstered strategically by the band of Beach Boys experts that helped Brian Wilson return to regular touring. Jeff Foskett, a guitarist, claimed most of the high, pure falsetto vocals, and took over the lead of “Don’t Worry Baby.”

The Beach Boys played under a video screen showing images of surfboards, cars and bikini-clad girls. But if the Beach Boys had only been a surf-rock band, they would have disappeared when surf-rock lost its novelty. Brian Wilson, the band’s songwriting and production genius, had far more to offer. He started out writing songs that invented California as a teenager’s utopia but matured rapidly and idiosyncratically.

He was both a mirror and a shaper of 1960s America, as his songs moved from the buoyancy and innocence of “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun Fun Fun” to the introversion of “In My Room” and the sweeping ambition (and seesawing tempos) of “Heroes and Villains.” Even when he was writing songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Mr. Wilson’s music was already merging, and extending, the rock and roll fundamentals of doo-wop and Chuck Berry, the jazzy vocal harmonies of the Four Freshmen, the melodic grace of Tin Pan Alley and the urge to pack multiple key changes and surreal transitions into the brevity of a single.

Yet while the technical splendor of Mr. Wilson’s songwriting was one of the Beach Boys’ lasting achievements — one that echoes down through generations of tuneful studio experimenters — this wasn’t a concert to get too technical about. It was a show of youthful exuberance and inspiration battling the effects of time.

Mr. Love was the lead singer for most songs, and memory filled out his thinning voice. Mr. Jardine, who sang lead on “Help Me Rhonda” but few other Beach Boys hits, was the heartiest among the band’s original singers. The set list was more egalitarian than need be; Mr. Jardine sang “Help Me Rhonda” — along with most of the audience — but also got “And Then I Kissed Her” and “Cotton Fields” when there could have been more Beach Boys originals. (Meanwhile, John Stamos, the actor who introduced the band, grew intrusive in return visits to the stage, sitting in on drums and clowning on guitar.) The Beach Boys also accompanied video clips of the late Wilson brothers, Dennis (whose video clip malfunctioned) and Carl, who was heard in “God Only Knows.”

Memory also heard the best in Mr. Wilson’s voice after his years of struggle with mental illness. He sat at a white grand piano, looking impassive but participating, until near the end of the set, when he stepped forward and strapped on a bass. (The backup band’s bass player continued to play.) And he took his share of lead vocals, determined but faltering, in songs like “Sail on Sailor,” “Sloop John B.,” “This Whole World” and the gorgeously timid 1965 album track and B-side “Please Let Me Wonder.”

As a young man, Mr. Wilson was already thinking about how fleeting time is, and the reunited Beach Boys seized on songs like “All Summer Long,” “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” and the inevitable set-starter for a reunited band, “Do It Again.”

In the concert’s most touching moment, Mr. Wilson sang “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” a song from “Pet Sounds” about being an innovator who’s universally misunderstood: “Every time I get the inspiration to go change things around,” he sang, “No one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found.” The chords and melody climbed, lingered, fell back; Mr. Wilson stayed with them, fighting his limitations, as the Beach Boys sang harmony. It was an aching memory and a heartbreaking vindication.

Chris Farina/Getty Images

The Beastie Boys performing in 2004: Michael Diamond, left, Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz.

Adam Yauch, a rapper and founder of the pioneering and multimillion-selling hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 47.

His mother, Frances Yauch, confirmed his death. He had been treated for cancer of the salivary gland for the last three years.

With a scratchy voice that grew scratchier through the years, Mr. Yauch rapped as MCA in the Beastie Boys, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. They offered many listeners in the 1980s their first exposure to hip-hop. They were vanguard white rappers who helped extend the art of sampling and gained the respect of their African-American peers.

While many hip-hop careers are brief, the Beastie Boys appealed not only to the fans they reached in the 1980s but to successive generations, making million-selling albums into the 2000s. They grew up without losing their sense of humor or their ear for a party beat.

Mr. Yauch (pronounced yowk) was a major factor in the Beastie Boys’ evolution from their early incarnation, as testosterone-driven pranksters, to their later years as sonic experimenters, as socially conscious rappers — championing the cause of freedom in Tibet — and as keepers of old-school hip-hop memories. The Beastie Boys became an institution — one that could have arisen only amid the artistic, social and accidental connections of New York City.

In the history of hip-hop, the Beastie Boys were both improbable and perhaps inevitable: appreciators, popularizers and extrapolators of a culture they weren’t born into.

“The Beasties opened hip-hop music up to the suburbs,” said Rick Rubin, who produced the group’s 1986 debut album, in a recent interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “As crazy as they were, they seemed safe to Middle America, in a way black artists hadn’t been up to that time.”

The rapper Eminem said in a statement, “I think it’s obvious to anyone how big of an influence the Beastie Boys were on me and so many others.”

The Beastie Boys started their major-label career with two pivotal albums: “Licensed to Ill” (1986), a cornerstone of rap-rock that became the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard chart, and “Paul’s Boutique” (1989), a wildly eclectic, sample-based production that became a template for experimental hip-hop.

The Beasties brand expanded well beyond music: with their own magazine and record label, Grand Royal; with the social activism of Mr. Yauch’s Milarepa Foundation, which produced an international series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts; and with work in film, as Mr. Yauch (calling himself Nathanial Hörnblowér) directed Beastie Boys videos and went on to start Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film production and distribution company.

The Beastie Boys’ appeal endured. Into the 2000s they could headline large events like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Each of their albums up to “To the Five Boroughs” in 2004 has sold at least a million copies, and many of them have sold in the multimillions, in the United States alone.

“I burn the competition like a flame thrower/My rhymes they age like wine as I get older,” Mr. Yauch rapped on the Beastie Boys’ 2011 album, “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.”

When they started rapping in 1983, the Beastie Boys — Mr. Yauch, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) and Mike Diamond (Mike D) — were greeted by some hip-hop purists as a novelty act. They were Jewish bohemians, not ghetto survivors; they were jokers, not battlers. Yet the Beastie Boys recorded for a label that was a bastion of New York hip-hop, Def Jam, and they toured alongside Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J.

They went on to garner admiration and influence with productions that kept coming up with surprises — including, eventually, the rappers’ playing instruments again — and with rhymes that would mingle humor, boasting and an increasing idealism. Even when the Beastie Boys were treated as a joke, it was a joke they would be in on for decades to come.

Adam Nathaniel Yauch was born on Aug. 5, 1964, in Brooklyn. Playing bass, he and Mr. Diamond started the Beastie Boys in 1981 as a hard-core punk band. The group’s original drummer, Kate Schellenbach, has said, “Whereas other bands, just as awful as the Beastie Boys, would actually believe they were good, for Mike and Adam the whole point was to be terrible and admit it.”

That group broke up after releasing an eight-song, seven-inch EP, “Polly Wog Stew.” The Beastie Boys reappeared in 1983 with Mr. Horovitz on guitar, and made “Cooky Puss,” a 12-inch single of prank phone call recordings over a rock guitar riff and hip-hop scratching. The group had been listening to New York hip-hop since the late 1970s.

Pete Fornatale, a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Mark said.

FM radio had been around for a while but did not come of age until the 1960s, when, amid the whirlwind of a growing counterculture, the federal government mandated that FM stations carry different programming from that of their sister AM bands. Enterprising D.J.’s grasped the chance to play longer, fresher, rarer music and give voice to the roiling political and social issues of the day.

Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts.

WNEW-FM may have been the most influential experimenter. When the station dropped rock music for talk radio in 1999, Billboard called it “a legend, affecting and inspiring people throughout the industry.”

Mr. Fornatale (pronounced forn-a-TELL) had actually beaten WNEW to the punch. As a sophomore at Fordham University in 1964, he persuaded the school’s Jesuit leaders to let him do a free-form rock show on what was officially an educational station. He continued that show for a few years after he graduated, and for a while could be heard on both WFUV and WNEW.

WOR-FM became the first commercial station in New York to adopt the format, in 1966, but abandoned it after about a year. WNEW, with the slogan “Where Rock Lives,” adopted it in 1967.

Mr. Fornatale came on board in 1969 and quickly moved to the center of New York’s music scene. He gave early exposure to country-rock bands like Buffalo Springfield and Poco. He did one of the first American interviews with Elton John, and got a rousing ovation when he brought a rented surfboard to Carnegie Hall for a Beach Boys show. He introduced Curtis Mayfield to Bob Dylan at a Muhammad Ali fight.

In 1982 he started “Mixed Bag,” a program that emphasized singer-songwriters, on Sunday mornings. His regular guests included Suzanne Vega, who introduced herself to him by sending a fan letter.

One of Mr. Fornatale’s signatures was playing songs that followed a theme. It might be colors, with a playlist including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” Or it might be great inventions, as when he celebrated the 214th anniversary of the United States Patent Office. Or the theme might simply be radio.

Peter Fornatale was born in the Bronx on Aug. 23, 1945, and graduated from Fordham Preparatory School, on the campus of Fordham University. His introduction to rock ’n’ roll came in 1956 when his father summoned him to the television to see “this crazy guy” — Elvis Presley. The first record he bought was Presley’s “Hound Dog.”

Mr. Fornatale graduated from Fordham with a degree in communications in 1967 and taught English at a Roman Catholic high school before joining WNEW. His voice drew praise for its mellow, almost professorial tone, although some listeners may have chosen to describe it as nasal.

By the early 1980s, stations specializing in what had been known as free-form radio were bringing in business consultants who urged less variety in records and more control over the disc jockeys. Mr. Fornatale later complained that he and his colleagues had been demoted from chefs into waiters, “and fast-food waiters at that,” as he told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 1999.

He left WNEW in 1989 to follow the station’s program director to WXRK-FM (K-Rock), which followed a more conventional approach to pop music. Mr. Fornatale’s show came on after Howard Stern’s. Mr. Stern, whose shock-jock format was becoming radio’s new wave, called Mr. Fornatale the “anti-Stern.”

In 1997 Mr. Fornatale returned to WNEW-FM, which had decided to go back to album-oriented rock after a succession of owners and formats. But within a year the station had changed formats again, to talk. In 2001, Mr. Fornatale returned to where he had started: WFUV. “I love the idea I’ve come full circle,” he said.

Mr. Fornatale wrote several books, including one on the making of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album “Bookends,” and one on the Woodstock music festival. He was also the main writer for a series of 600 trading cards on the life of Elvis Presley.

He had lived for six years in Rockaway, Queens, and the previous four decades in Port Jefferson, N.Y.

Mr. Fornatale’s marriage to Susan Kay Flynn ended in divorce several years ago. He is survived by his sons, Peter, Mark and Steven, and his brother, Robert.

His WFUV show, which like his earlier WNEW singer-songwriter show was called “Mixed Bag,” ran from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturdays.

“If you give me the right idea for a program,” Mr. Fornatale said in 2004, “I can give back to you a three-hour journey where, if you tune in at any time, you’re likely to hear something that will entertain you. But if you take the ride with me, when we get to the end, you’ll say, ‘Wow, what a long, strange trip it’s been.’ ”

WITH its shabby-chic décor and unassuming entrance, Entwine looks like any other neighborhood wine bar in the West Village (which it is). But on Wednesday nights, it has becomes an unlikely place to spot celebrities and listen to musicians like Courtney Love and Joseph Arthur try out new material.

The impromptu sessions started in February and are the brainchild of Kraig Jarret Johnson and Greg (G Whiz) Wiecsorek, fellow musicians who also brought in Angela McCluskey, a singer and songwriter, to liven things up. All three wanted to form a residency to experiment with songs. It is anyone’s guess who will show up.

THE PLACE Tell friends it’s next door to Tortilla Flats, a rowdy Mexican restaurant. There are faded wood walls, old sofas and a small patio on the ground floor. Downstairs are small tables and an intimate stage.

THE CROWD The bar typically draws fashion photographers and art directors from nearby studios, and couples on dates. But Wednesdays bring an older rock ‘n’ roll crowd: creative types in their 30s and 40s who listened to Neil Young on vinyl. Famous faces spotted in recent weeks include Alan Cumming, Parker Posey and Norman Reedus.

GETTING IN For the moment, the door policy is relaxed. But by 10 p.m., it’s standing room only.

PLAYLIST The music can span classic rock, pop ballads and folk. It includes original material, along with rollicking covers of the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone. Ms. McCluskey often takes the stage with her husband, Paul Cantelon, a composer, who accompanies her on violin or electric keyboard.

DRINKS Wines from all over the globe, $7 to $15 a glass. Beers start at $7 and special cocktails are about $15. Mediterranean-style tapas ($3 to $20), like sardines in olive oil, are served until 11 p.m.

Entwine, 765 Washington Street (West 12th Street), (212) 727-8765, entwinenyc.com. Wednesday basement party starts at 9 p.m. and often goes until 2 a.m. Otherwise, the bar is open nightly with varying hours.

A marketer named Moscot has a new mascot, in the form of the heavy metal music community.

For a campaign now under way, Moscot, a family-owned firm in New York that sells eyewear, is turning to heavy metal performers like Chris Adler, of Lamb of God; Matt Heafy, of Trivium; Scott Ian, of Anthrax; Alex Skolnick, of Testament; and Zakk Wylde, of Black Label Society.

Those musicians, along with metal figures from television and radio, serve as the models in ads for five varieties of metal frames from Moscot. The frames, in the Moscot Originals line, are a departure from the usual acetate styles sold by the company, which traces its heritage to Hyman Moscot, who sold eyeglasses from a pushcart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The campaign includes the Moscot Web site, at moscot.com; print ads; social media like Twitter, where Moscot has the handles @Moscot and @MoscotMusic; and ads in stores. There are two Moscot stores in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, and Moscot products are also sold by eyewear retailers around the world.

The campaign is being created internally at Moscot by Wendy Simmons, who is co-president of the company along with Harvey Moscot. (Mr. Moscot, and his brother, Kenny, are the fourth generation of Moscots.)

Moscot typically spends about $650,000 to $750,000 each year on marketing and public relations.

The jest in asking heavy metal musicians — clad in colorful garb, resplendent in copious facial hair and flashing hand signs — to don metal eyeglasses is, of course, meant to draw attention to the campaign. To give the ads the proper setting, they were photographed in a heavy metal bar in Williamsburg named Duff’s Brooklyn.

Moscot is not alone in seeking to market eyewear with a stylish pitch. Perhaps the best example is the long-running campaign for L.A. Eyeworks, which features black-and-white photos of offbeat celebrities and carries the headline “A face is like a work of art. It deserves a great frame.”

The L.A. Eyeworks campaign, photographed by Greg Gorman, has even been gathered in a book, “Framed: Greg Gorman for L.A. Eyeworks,” which L.A. Eyeworks sells on its Web site.

Then, too, there are online purveyors of eyewear like Warby Parker, which are also peddling their products with panache.

“The category, it’s incredible what has happened,” says Ms. Simmons. “We’re amazed.”

“Eyeglasses were a medical device,” she adds. “You bought a pair disgruntled, because you thought you were getting older. Now, it’s an extension of your personality.”

“To see the category blow up as it has is great for us,” Ms. Simmons says, because “it only makes people more interested in eyewear.”

“Moscot has a unique position,” she adds, because “we have this wonderful history,” pointing to the opening of the first Moscot store in 1915. “But we do not rest on history alone.”

Along with history are fashion, Ms. Simmons says, and humor, and “all three things are present across the brand.”

“The trick is, it has to be in equal measure,” she adds.

When it comes to humor, “we’re a goofy bunch,” Ms. Simmons says, “We love what we do, we love the brand. There’s not a great filter.”

But “we make sure it’s in balance,” she adds, “never ‘too cool for school,’ never too witty,” because if the ads are perceived as snooty or snobby, “people will not want to go into the retail shops.”

Likewise, in the style realm, “we never want to be too anything, too fashion-y, too hip,” Ms. Simmons says. “The goal is to make it accessible.”

“It’s a very delicate balance as you become more known,” she adds, to “entice the new people and not lose the people who found you first.”

For instance, five or six years ago, a campaign for titanium frames was “very slick and beautiful,” Ms. Simmons says, but “it was off-brand, much too fashion-y for our brand.”

“It was absolutely not Moscot,” she adds. “Our distributors actually complained.”

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The band Spanking Charlene played monthly at the Lakeside Lounge. Eric Ambel, at center in doorway, is a founder of the bar.

For 16 years, the Lakeside Lounge employed a formula that never changed: a handpicked band every night, a jukebox loaded with classic songs, a cadre of quick-witted bartenders working under strings of colored lights, and an old-time photo booth that spat out strips of pictures shot using real film.

While the bar, on Avenue B in the East Village, held true to the rock ’n’ roll vision of its co-founders, Eric Ambel, a guitarist and record producer, and James Marshall, a disc jockey, the neighborhood gradually acquired a new personality. Upscale restaurants replaced drug dens, seedy gave way to hip, and hangouts for musicians and artists vanished. With rent and expenses rising relentlessly, the party at the Lakeside Lounge will end on April 30.

“The economics of the new East Village caught up with us,” said Mr. Ambel, 54.

Many music fans are mourning the passing not just of a nightspot, but of an era. “We learned how to be a band here, and so many others did, too; where are we all going to go now?” Mo Goldner, 43, asked as he leaned against the bar for a farewell toast. Mr. Goldner’s band, Spanking Charlene, has for years played a monthly gig on Lakeside’s small side-room stage.

The Lakeside Lounge opened in April 1996, taking the space previously occupied by a rehearsal studio and a Jamaican restaurant. The bar’s name was an allusion to the summer trips to Wisconsin that Mr. Ambel made with his family while growing up.

Mr. Marshall, 52, who had worked for WFMU-FM in Jersey City, helped fashion the ambience by installing the photo booth. He filled the jukebox with a collection of music far enough from the mainstream to function as what he called “a self-cleaning oven.”

“If someone wasn’t cool enough to spend a quarter hearing Howlin’ Wolf, we didn’t want them in there anyway,” he said.

In 2009, Van Morrison was interviewed by The New Yorker at the Lakeside Lounge because, he said, of the jukebox. This month, Elvis Costello dropped by for a listen. In December, the Alabama Shakes, an up-and-coming band, played a secret gig between sold-out New York shows.

“This is the machine I heard stories about,” said the band’s singer, Brittany Howard, as she flipped reverently through each selection on the jukebox, which glowed like a beacon in the dark space.

Mr. Ambel, who had toured with Joan Jett and Steve Earle, strove to make Lakeside a pleasure for its performers. Unlike New York rock clubs that cram in several acts a night, Lakeside made its one nightly band the star attraction. Musicians played on quality house gear, including warm-sounding tube amps and solid drums. Mr. Ambel personally booked each act and fostered a scrappy community of garage rockers, soul belters, country weepers and urban bluesmen. (This reporter played there with various bands over the years.)

“Making sure the bands had a good experience and were treated really well has always been real important to me, because I’m a musician,” Mr. Ambel said.

In its earliest days, when Avenue B still bristled with danger, the Lakeside was a musical beachhead. Once, while Joey and Dee Dee Ramone played, audience members watched the police raid a nearby crack house and line suspects up against the picture window beside the stage.

Alex Feldesman, 39, a bartender at Lakeside for 13 years, said: “If you like the bar, the bar likes you.” Another bartender, J. D. Hughes, 47, described working there as “like bartending in your dad’s basement.” Erick Hartz, 50, likened it to a clubhouse.

Leslie Day, who has worked at Lakeside since it opened, said she loved its characters but noted, “There aren’t as many as there used to be.”

And there are fewer places for the characters to go. The Life Café, which was next door, closed last year, as did the nearby music nook Banjo Jim’s. So, too, did the Mars Bar, an artists’ hangout on Second Avenue. Mr. Ambel said rent and expenses had more than quadrupled since the mid-1990s, forcing him and Mr. Marshall to face the prospect of deviating from the formula that had served Lakeside, its musicians and its patrons so well.

“I can’t raise drink prices too much, I don’t care to have a D.J. in there, I don’t want to have five bands a night — that’s not what we’re about,” said Mr. Ambel, who will play with his own band at the closing party.

Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia platform it is today, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 51.

Hillman Curtis called himself a serial self-reinventor.

The cause was colon cancer, his wife, Christina, said.

Mr. Curtis was the art director of a San Francisco software company in 1996 when he designed the first Web site formatted for a new technology called Flash Player, a browser plug-in that could be used to turn out high-quality animated imagery quickly. Before then the process would take hundreds of hours.

His mastery of the technology, which had been developed for several years before but never fully deployed in a way that unveiled its creative potential, made Mr. Curtis a revered figure in the emerging world of Web design.

His Flash Player design technique set the groundwork for a format that later evolved exponentially to accommodate online advertisements, Facebook applications and video sites like YouTube.

Richard Shupe, who teaches Web design at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, said Mr. Curtis’s Flash Player design was a milestone that “brought Web design to life.” His ability to teach other Web designers, he added, helped “jump-start a process of Web democratization that continues today.”

In 2000, Mr. Curtis published a popular how-to book, “Flash Web Design,” which sold more than 100,000 copies and remains a standard online design text. Heading his own firm, HillmanCurtis, which he started in Brooklyn in 1998, he produced Web designs for commercial clients including Yahoo, Sprint, Adobe, Rolling Stone magazine, Fox Searchlight Pictures and the Metropolitan Opera.

His mystique in the design world only deepened when, at the height of his career, he gave up Web work to learn to make movies with a handheld video camera.

For Mr. Curtis, who called himself a serial self-reinventor, it was the start of a third career. A nephew of Chris Hillman, an original member of the Byrds, he had played in a rock band in the 1980s and early ’90s before teaching himself Web design.

He was beginning to gain wider notice in his last years for his films, including a 2008 series of short documentaries about designers and artists like Milton Glaser, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister, and a 2010 feature-length film, “Ride, Rise, Roar,” chronicling a concert tour by David Byrne and Brian Eno.

He once explained his penchant for reinventing himself in an interview. “I originally went to school for creative writing and film,” he said. “I then spent 10 years pursuing music, and, after failing at that, I did various random jobs. I got into design out of desperation — I didn’t want to wait tables or pound nails.”

David Hillman Curtis was born on Feb. 24, 1961, in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He and two sisters were raised by his mother and stepfather, Susan and Paul Zimmerman, both high school teachers.

As a student at San Francisco State University, Mr. Curtis formed a rock group, later known as the Green Things, which toured for almost a decade and produced one album for MCA Records before disbanding.

Mr. Curtis learned about art and design drawing posters and fliers for his band. After it broke up he took night classes in Photoshop, he told interviewers.

By then, already in his 30s, he had landed a few part-time design jobs before being hired for a low-level position at Macromedia, where he worked his way up to art director.

Besides his wife and mother, Mr. Curtis is survived by a son, Jasper, a daughter, Tess, and his sisters, Madeleine Curtis and Rebecca Curtis-Cassacia.

Long after designing his last Web site, Mr. Curtis remained an important presence in the imagination of Web designers. And professional online journals, which referred to him as “the Michael Jordan of Web design” and “the Grandmaster of Flash,” remained fascinated by his decision to give it all up.

“It seems like you had it made,” an interviewer said recently on the Web magazine the 99%. “Why did you move on?”

Mr. Curtis answered that he had always wanted to make films and had accomplished his goals as a designer. He detailed those goals in a 2002 interview: “The reason for designing new media is simple — to subtly and quietly change the world.”

Associated Press

Dick Clark, at podium, and young rock ‘n’ roll fans on “American Bandstand” in 1958. More Photos »

Before Ryan Seacrest became the inescapable prince of all media, there was Dick Clark. More soft-spoken and suave than Mr. Seacrest, Mr. Clark was in the right place at the right time at the right age. When he acquired his moniker “America’s oldest teenager,” the concept of a teenager was still a little exotic and even slightly racy; he helped make it a bit less intimidating.

As an early promoter of rock ’n’ roll he was the opposite of Alan Freed, the passionate radio wild man who could get so excited he would shout and sometimes ring a cowbell. Mr. Clark remained cool and detached and at times could seem almost robotic.

From the beginning Mr. Clark, who died on Wednesday at 82, embodied the stereotype of a certain kind of neutral broadcasting personality skilled at occupying the foreground while remaining in the background. A low-key ringmaster in the rock ’n’ roll circus, he kept his opinions to himself and made sure to offend no one. If he had a public personality, it was the genial but sexually nonthreatening affability of an efficient executive determined to get the job done and to get rich doing it.

Before the invention of teenagers there had been bobbysoxers in the 1940s but no generational tag for adolescence. The cultural deluge of all things “teenage” as the first wave of the baby boom reached puberty made products created for teenagers, from pimple creams to soda pop, big business. Mr. Clark was one of the first show business entrepreneurs to leap onto the bandwagon and ride it for all it was worth.

He instinctively understood that the best way to capitalize on the emerging market was to pose as a kind of older brother, a safe-as-milk intermediary who kept the peace between worried parents and their restless children. His youth made him just hip enough to be plausible as a plugged-in pseudoteen.

As the host of the television after-school dance program “American Bandstand” he made an ideal surrogate chaperone: a wholesome, polite, honorary adolescent. Although he was 27 when the program was first broadcast nationally on Aug. 5, 1957, he could have passed for 17. At the time he seemed the sort of mild-mannered superannuated boy who might once have served on the school safety patrol and been elected class treasurer. In fact he had been the president of his high school student council in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Below his unfailingly polite exterior was a canny businessman who played his cards close to the vest. His underlying wariness was palpable in a 1959 segment of “This Is Your Life,” when he was toasted by the host Ralph Edwards and fawned over by grateful stars he had helped create like Connie Francis, the Chipmunks’ creator David Seville and Frankie Avalon.

As a progressive cultural force “American Bandstand” was a mixed bag. It showcased rock ’n’ roll acts both black and white, and it gave the kids on the dance floor an illusion of power by having them rate new records. “It’s got a good beat” became the much-mocked cliché response.

But the program, which originated in Philadelphia, was also a reactionary force in its promotion of local teen idols like Mr. Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker. During the lull between rock ’n’ roll’s initial upsurge and Beatlemania the show’s support of such wrapped-in-plastic talent helped delay the rock onslaught.

In his interview with Elvis Presley on the first day that “American Bandstand” went national, Mr. Clark could have been a stand-in for Pat Boone, the clean-cut white-bucks-wearing pop star who was the antithesis of the gyrating, wet-lipped Elvis with his pompadour and bedroom eyes.

Mr. Clark’s well-scrubbed appearance and air of modesty undoubtedly helped him escape being seriously tainted during the Congressional payola investigations when he voluntarily divested himself of his profitable pop music enterprises and signed an affidavit denying his involvement in payola. Mr. Freed, not so comely, was also not so lucky.

Once Mr. Clark was in the clear, “American Bandstand” became the platform on which he built a television-based entertainment empire similar to the one Mr. Seacrest is creating. He was free to soar.

But Mr. Clark has had his detractors. Shawn Swords, an independent filmmaker whose 2008 documentary “The Wages of Spin” examined the Philadelphia music scene in the late 1950s and early ’60s, in a 2009 interview with Reuters called Mr. Clark “an alpha villain” whose kingdom was “built on ill-gotten gains.” In exchange for exposure on the air singers were expected to sign away their copyrights and all future royalties. It should be noted that such things were common practice in the music business at the time.

“I’m not saying this man was consummately malevolent, just his business practices and the depth of his avarice and self-enrichment,” he added. “I really think the man’s place in pop music history needs to be re-evaluated.”

A key to Mr. Clark’s appeal was his utter lack of grandiosity. He was perfectly happy to be the messenger rather than message. His most revealing quotations say a lot about this businessman who never seemed to care that much about the artistic aspects of the music.

Content to monitor the tastes of a mass audience and sell to it as an agreeable, mild-mannered pitch man, America’s oldest teenager played the role impeccably.

“My business is teenagers,” Mr. Clark once said. “I don’t set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.”