South by Southwest. Annual Austin, Texas, music festival-cum-industry convention that, since its inception in 1987, has become the prime one-stop showcase for ascendant indie talent; a sort of Rock Snob analog to the Sundance Film Festival (though South by Southwest has expanded its mandate to include film and new media).
Bingenheimer, Rodney. Gnomish L.A. scenester and dogged Anglophile who washed up on the Sunset Strip in the mid-1960s as a teen, attached himself to every musician passing through, and parlayed his shameless parasitism into a pop career, an improbably active sex life, and infamy as “The Mayor of Sunset Strip” (a title bestowed upon him by the actor Sal Mineo and later used as the name of a bathetic rockumentary about him).