Youth Culture // Current

Premature Aging in Athletes

Are we killing our young men in sports?

Ruth_Kongaika
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28 days ago
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0 comments

BLOG ACTION DAY: THE INTERNATIONAL YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT FOR COP15

THE INTERNATIONAL YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT FOR COP15 We need to mobilize for... more

ecohope
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1 month ago
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Rupert Goold is wrong: Judi Dench is not 'strangling theatre'

"To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger actors ought to have a bit more respect for the traditions to which they belong, as Rupert Goold has done, is insulting, absurd and maybe even self-serving. The director is hugely gifted, but he’s surely guilty of Year Zero, clean-slate thinking.

For him, freshness is too often about imposing his own clever-clever ideas on plays, not in discerning and fulfilling an author’s aims and intentions. And that’s not a generational problem, as Goold must have discovered when members of his own cast rebelled against his reinterpretation of King Lear, with the result that it was a bit more Shakespearean when it moved from Liverpool to London.

On the other hand, he’s right to defend younger actors from any inference that they’re less able than their predecessors. He’s equally right to add that they’re more physically adroit than, say, many members of the Gielgud generation. One can only judge the quality of actors from their performances on stage and my own recent experiences tell me that the future of acting and therefore of the British theatre is very bright indeed. Just last month I went to the little Bush Theatre in West London to see a play called 2nd May 1997, was delighted by a mainly young cast, and thrilled by a total unknown, a recent RADA graduate called Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

She played the unlikely pick-up of an earnest Lib Dem on election night — and suggested vulnerability, need, damage, even desperation, behind a tipsy, flirtatious and immaculately observed exterior. Would her and others’ performances have been better if they’d immersed themselves in theatrical history or watched their seniors from the wings, as Dame Judi did? In this case, probably not. In the case of major classical actors performing major classical plays, well, maybe.

Vanessa Redgrave is said to be able to walk on stage from the wings and, without obvious preparation or missing a beat, to transform herself into whatever character she is playing. American Method actors such as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino will spend hours thinking, feeling, willing themselves into a role. Dame Judi herself tries to have a quiet, reflective time, girding herself for the fray in her dressing room and, when she’s not on stage, turning on the Tannoy and listening to the unfolding production.

To watch Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi herself evolve their characters in rehearsal and then present the result on stage is obviously an education.

But each performer must find his or her own way to excellence. It’s not as if the pressure is missing. In a profession where unemployment often exceeds 90 per cent, performers who fail to exploit every opportunity for self-improvement — well, they would have to be foolish, self-destructive, mad.""To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger... more

St_Alia_10191
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1 month ago
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0 comments

'Whatever' Tops List of Most Annoying Words

"So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in conversations.

The popular slacker term of indifference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.

"Whatever" easily beat out "you know," which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent), "it is what it is" (11 percent) and "at the end of the day" (2 percent).

"Whatever" -- pronounced "WHAT'-ehv-errr" when exasperated -- is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana ("oh well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.

It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or where they live.

"It doesn't surprise me because 'whatever' is in a special class, probably," said Michael Adams, author of "Slang: The People's Poetry" and an associate professor of English at Indiana University. "It's a word that -- and it depends how a speaker uses it -- can suggest dismissiveness."

Adams, who was not involved in the poll and is not annoyed by "whatever," points out that its use is not always negative. It also can be used in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like "six of one, half dozen of the other," he said.

But the negative connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know," which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.

Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 U.S. adults by telephone Aug. 3 - Aug 6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.""So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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11 comments

The Rise of the Creative Class

I just finished reading Richard Florida's article about the rise of the creative... more

TheCatalystPoet
added this
2 months ago
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3 comments

Art + Tech + Youth = The Future (Hasn't it Always?)

"Long before tonight's opening of that most epic of Seattle Opera productions — the "Ring" cycle — a college student out to demystify the Wagner saga for other young people already has filmed an online reality series: "Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer."

A few blocks down the street, under a large multicolored tent, dozens of school kids leap and tumble at circus camp — for many, their first exposure to another local arts organization, Teatro ZinZanni.

And at the Olympic Sculpture Park downtown, a recent event designed to attract young people included a dance party with DJs, interactive displays of video art and nighttime tours led by guerrilla artists.

As core arts audiences grow older and attendance declines among young people, big arts organizations across the country are reaching out to potential new audiences in innovative ways. Seattle has become a center for this kind of outreach.

The attempts to create a broader base of attendees are taking many forms and using many tools, from reality TV-style webcasts to social-networking sites, dance nights and scavenger hunts.

Of course, arts organizations have conducted educational and outreach activities for years. Many offer discounted tickets for younger attendees, and a program called Teen Tix allows teenagers to get $5 rush tickets at many Seattle-area arts venues.

But now, "there's a real shift in the way that people connect to arts activities," said Dwight Gee, executive vice president of ArtsFund, which raises money for the arts in Western Washington.

A National Endowment for the Arts survey conducted last year showed that arts audiences in general are older than they were 26 years ago and that the rate of attendance among 18- to 44-year-olds has declined.

Some arts organizations maintain their audiences aren't graying, saying participation remains more of a time-of-life issue — that people trying to build careers and raise kids are less likely to attend arts events.

In any case, to Kelly Tweeddale, Seattle Opera's executive director, a more interesting issue is how behavior has changed among different age groups.

People don't just decide one day to go to the opera, she said. It takes exploration and exposure. And increasingly, younger people want that exposure through Web videos or audio downloads, and to know via social-networking tools what their friends think, before they'll go to a live performance.

"That's very different from our core audience who go to a Web site and look for basics — the who and where — and who use traditional media," Tweeddale said. "It's a huge behavior shift."

Without building a highly engaged community, this idea of building audiences — it just doesn't happen,"""Long before tonight's opening of that most epic of Seattle Opera productions — the... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
3 months ago
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2 comments

Is graffiti a "pathetic attempt to be visible" by people living in a "precarious state"?

Listen to the old man at 1:00. What do you think of his judgment of graffiti... more

PoliticalGeek
added this
4 months ago
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2 comments

Does New York City Still Attract Young Talent?

"Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for young people to pry any free for themselves.

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.

Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music, building a “presence” in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and, more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful. Every month more YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their “big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the physical one.

The experience of moving online actually bears quite a few similarities to becoming a New Yorker. Disorienting and seemingly endless, the Internet conversation moves at lightning speed and according to unstated social rules that can bewilder outsiders. Also, like New Yorkers, residents of the Internet do not suffer fools, or mince words in belittling them, as anyone who has contributed a redundant post to Metafilter, or an earnest comment to Gawker, can attest.""Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
4 months ago
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2 comments

Does Facebook Activism Translate Into Real-World Action?

"Facebook activism, the trendy process by which we do good by clicking often, was in... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
5 months ago
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4 comments

The Top 25 Tearjerkers

EW.com presents 25-1 of the greatest movies that make snot shoot out your nose. From... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
5 months ago
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0 comments

The Youth Movement: RESCUE Event brings about US Bill to Save the Child Soldiers in Uganda

San Diego based NGO (www.InvisibleChildren.com) On April 25th 2009 over 80,000... more

eamartinez22
added this
5 months ago
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0 comments

A Play Unfolds Over Twitter

"Jeremy Gable’s Twitter play, “140: A Twitter Performance,” is now in its... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
5 months ago
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5 comments

Theatres Increasingly Turning To Facebook To Promote Shows

When a marketing glitch left Rahul da Cunha with a stage play ready to go but no... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
5 months ago
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0 comments

Teen Violence Documentary

The documentary you are about to view was written, directed, produced, filmed, and... more

YouthSpeakOut
added this
5 months ago
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0 comments

Teens & Rap Music

The documentary film you are about to view was written, directed, produced, and filmed... more

YouthSpeakOut
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5 months ago
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0 comments

Hurricane Frances Documentary

The video you are about to view was directed, produced, and filmed, by youth at The... more

YouthSpeakOut
added this
5 months ago
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0 comments

BBC's answer to Skins...

and it's shit... Youth culture through the eyes of the BBC. What do you think?

jamieson
added this
6 months ago
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0 comments

Texting at a Symphony?

"Cellphones are hardly applauded in concert halls, where it’s considered gauche to... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
6 months ago
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0 comments

investigating suspected Israeli war criminals is welcomed

the Spanish National Court’s decision to continue investigating suspected Israeli... more

Highr0ller
added this
7 months ago
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17 comments

Technology and Culture: Is the Rave Over?

This is a dense article, but it's fascinating.

"Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artifacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later.

it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form. The present moment might in fact be best characterized by a discrepancy between the onward march of technology and the stalling, stagnation and retardation of culture. We can’t hear technology any more. There has been a gradual disappearance of the sound of technological rupture – such as the irruption of Brian Eno’s analogue synth in the middle of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain”, or the cut-and-paste angular alienness of early rave – that pop music once taught us to expect. We still see technology, perhaps, in cinema CGI, but CGI’s role is somewhat paradoxical: its aim is precisely to make itself invisible, and it has been used to finesse an already established model of reality. High-definition television is another example of the same syndrome: we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier.

The principal way in which technology now makes itself felt in culture is of course in the areas of distribution and consumption. Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube. The pop artists who supposedly became successful because of web clamour (Sandi Thom, Arctic Monkeys) turned out to be quaintly archaic in form; in any case, they were pushed through the familiar promotional machinery of big record companies and PR firms. There is peer-to-peer distribution of culture, but little sign of peer-to-peer production.

Yet instantaneous exposure deprives cultures of the time and space in which they can grow. There is as yet no Web 2.0 equivalent of the circuit that sustained UK dance music in the 1990s: the assemblage of dubplates, pirate radio and the dance floor which acted as a laboratory for the development of new sounds. This circuit was still punctuated by particular moments (the club night, the radio broadcast), but, because anything in Web 2.0 can be replayed at any time, its temporality is more diffuse. The tendency seems to be for a kind of networked solipsism, a global system of individuals consuming an increasingly homogeneous culture alone in front of the computer screen or plugged in to iPod headphones.

All of this makes Fredric Jameson’s theories about postmodern culture’s inability to image the present more compelling than ever. As the gap between cultural breaks becomes ever longer and the breaks themselves become ever more modest and slight, it is beginning to look as if the situation might be terminal. Alex Williams, who runs the Splintering Bone Ashes blog, goes so far as to claim that “what we have experienced is merely a blip, perhaps never to be again repeated – 150 or so years of extreme resource bingeing, the equivalent of an epic amphetamine session. What we are already experiencing is little more than the undoubtedly grim ‘comedown’ of the great deceleration.” This might be too bleak. What is certainly clear, however, is that technology will not deliver new forms of culture all on its own."This is a dense article, but it's fascinating. "Those of us who grew up in the... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
7 months ago
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2 comments

tagged w/ Youth Culture

Premature Aging in Athletes

BLOG ACTION DAY: THE INTERNATIONAL YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT FOR COP15

Rupert Goold is wrong: Judi Dench is not 'strangling theatre'

'Whatever' Tops List of Most Annoying Words

The Rise of the Creative Class

Art + Tech + Youth = The Future (Hasn't it Always?)

Is graffiti a "pathetic attempt to be visible" by people living in a "precarious state"?

Does New York City Still Attract Young Talent?

Does Facebook Activism Translate Into Real-World Action?

The Top 25 Tearjerkers

The Youth Movement: RESCUE Event brings about US Bill to Save the Child Soldiers in Uganda

A Play Unfolds Over Twitter

Theatres Increasingly Turning To Facebook To Promote Shows

Teen Violence Documentary

Teens & Rap Music

Hurricane Frances Documentary

BBC's answer to Skins...

Texting at a Symphony?

investigating suspected Israeli war criminals is welcomed

Technology and Culture: Is the Rave Over?

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