60something
Nov. 12th, 2006 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm sitting with a 22 year-old Japanese girl at the KulturForum, the Berlin culture bunker behind the Sony Centre. It's late summer, and we're sipping white beer on a wooden terrace. Some skate kids are rolling around the concrete nearby, but at the tables around us everyone seems to be exactly 60 years old. I apologize to Nao. "I haven't exactly brought you to the funkiest place, have I?" Later, we run into a crowd coming out of a classical music concert nearby. Again, everyone is 60.
There's something about 60 year-old people. They seem to blend into the background. You don't really see them... until suddenly you realize they're almost 100% of the audience at many cultural events, even avant garde ones. (Think of Robert Wilson snoozefests at the Lincoln Centre in New York.) They make a lot of cultural life possible, because they have leisure time and disposable income. And yet it's hard not to find them bland and annoying, with their bald spots, their beige clothes, their slow pace, their bourgeois affluence. Look, they're even at Peres Projects openings, beiging out the pink and yellow highlights worn by the 20- and 30something hipsters!
"The young generation's estrangement from the classical world is perhaps a global phenomenon," wrote Tetsuya Ozaki, editor of RealTokyo, in a recent column detailing a trip to London. "Even the Michael Clark Company's "Mmm...", which I saw at Barbican Centre, was visited mainly by elder people, so maybe it's not only an estrangement from classics, but even from high art altogether. For this time's "Stravinsky Project" the "punk ballet" choreographer is using the music of Wire, P.I.L. and the Sex Pistols, so I'm not sure if Clark's work deserves an attribute like "high art", but considering that he made his debut in 1980, it's certainly a fairly "classical" artist, at least for the young generation. In the piece, by the way, appears an image of "Mona Lisa" that gradually morphs into Andy Warhol's "Liz". Today's young people surely have no idea who Elizabeth Taylor was. As a matter of fact beyond the artist's intentions, Lisa becoming Liz in a contemporary setting surely has no more allegorical meaning."
I speak as someone bang in the middle between the 20somethings and the 60somethings. I can spend time with both age groups, and find common ground. The knack is just to remember not to make any references your listeners won't understand. (Will 20somethings know that calling them "20something" is an allusion to a 1980s TV series called Thirtysomething? Best not to assume it.)
I'm starting to share the oldie's grumbly hatred of many aspects of modern life -- cell phones, MySpace, stupid jeans and stupid trainers, stupid loud music in stupid clubs, the sheer savagery of casual dating. Then again, plenty of 22 year-olds hate that stuff too. I know I did. Back then, I thought Josef Beuys, Jacques Brel and Samuel Beckett were the funkiest people imagineable. What was cool was to be old, and have that sort of old person's wisdom, compassion, cynicism, self-knowledge.
I remember thinking, when I was 25, that it was just 15 years until I was 40, and being terrified, because it meant becoming responsible and established. It hasn't turned out how I imagined. In fact, being in your 40s -- for me, anyway -- is pretty much like being a student, only older. You know who you are a bit better, you have more anecdotes to tell people. So now there's a new prospect of terror; it's just 15 years until I'm one of those culturally-active 60somethings myself. So the horizon of unacceptable oldness has receded: it's now 60somethings, en masse (because, sure, there are cool ones with names like Waits and Wyatt), who define utter beige, slow, bourgeois naffness.
Because I'm a tail-end boomer living in countries with increasing numbers of old people in them, the invisible oldies everywhere are just going to get more visible, and more numerous. And one day, not so terribly distant, I'll be one of them. As I age, the people around me at cultural events in cities like Berlin and Tokyo will get older too, until there's just this sea of baldy grey heads and saggy eyebags everywhere I go. And I'll catch sight of myself in the mirror, and I'll look pretty much like everyone else.
"I saw "Reading Beckett" at Theatre Tram right before leaving Japan," continues Ozaki. "It was a rather sober event of readings of Samuel Beckett's later novels and dramas, but even here I didn't see many young people in the audience. The youngest was probably around 45, and the average age of visitors I would estimate between 55 and 60. If these performances continued like this for another 10, 20 years, the average age would almost reach the 80 mark... Added the facts that 1939-born director Ota Shogo is now 87, '46-born Toshima Shigeyuki 80, and actor Kanze Hideo (born in 1927) even 99, I wouldn't be surprised if they just discontinued the event."
Of course, the Reaper will probably discontinue them first. Or, as old people's culture magazine The Oldie puts it, "everyone buys it eventually".
There's something about 60 year-old people. They seem to blend into the background. You don't really see them... until suddenly you realize they're almost 100% of the audience at many cultural events, even avant garde ones. (Think of Robert Wilson snoozefests at the Lincoln Centre in New York.) They make a lot of cultural life possible, because they have leisure time and disposable income. And yet it's hard not to find them bland and annoying, with their bald spots, their beige clothes, their slow pace, their bourgeois affluence. Look, they're even at Peres Projects openings, beiging out the pink and yellow highlights worn by the 20- and 30something hipsters!
"The young generation's estrangement from the classical world is perhaps a global phenomenon," wrote Tetsuya Ozaki, editor of RealTokyo, in a recent column detailing a trip to London. "Even the Michael Clark Company's "Mmm...", which I saw at Barbican Centre, was visited mainly by elder people, so maybe it's not only an estrangement from classics, but even from high art altogether. For this time's "Stravinsky Project" the "punk ballet" choreographer is using the music of Wire, P.I.L. and the Sex Pistols, so I'm not sure if Clark's work deserves an attribute like "high art", but considering that he made his debut in 1980, it's certainly a fairly "classical" artist, at least for the young generation. In the piece, by the way, appears an image of "Mona Lisa" that gradually morphs into Andy Warhol's "Liz". Today's young people surely have no idea who Elizabeth Taylor was. As a matter of fact beyond the artist's intentions, Lisa becoming Liz in a contemporary setting surely has no more allegorical meaning."
I speak as someone bang in the middle between the 20somethings and the 60somethings. I can spend time with both age groups, and find common ground. The knack is just to remember not to make any references your listeners won't understand. (Will 20somethings know that calling them "20something" is an allusion to a 1980s TV series called Thirtysomething? Best not to assume it.)I'm starting to share the oldie's grumbly hatred of many aspects of modern life -- cell phones, MySpace, stupid jeans and stupid trainers, stupid loud music in stupid clubs, the sheer savagery of casual dating. Then again, plenty of 22 year-olds hate that stuff too. I know I did. Back then, I thought Josef Beuys, Jacques Brel and Samuel Beckett were the funkiest people imagineable. What was cool was to be old, and have that sort of old person's wisdom, compassion, cynicism, self-knowledge.
I remember thinking, when I was 25, that it was just 15 years until I was 40, and being terrified, because it meant becoming responsible and established. It hasn't turned out how I imagined. In fact, being in your 40s -- for me, anyway -- is pretty much like being a student, only older. You know who you are a bit better, you have more anecdotes to tell people. So now there's a new prospect of terror; it's just 15 years until I'm one of those culturally-active 60somethings myself. So the horizon of unacceptable oldness has receded: it's now 60somethings, en masse (because, sure, there are cool ones with names like Waits and Wyatt), who define utter beige, slow, bourgeois naffness.
Because I'm a tail-end boomer living in countries with increasing numbers of old people in them, the invisible oldies everywhere are just going to get more visible, and more numerous. And one day, not so terribly distant, I'll be one of them. As I age, the people around me at cultural events in cities like Berlin and Tokyo will get older too, until there's just this sea of baldy grey heads and saggy eyebags everywhere I go. And I'll catch sight of myself in the mirror, and I'll look pretty much like everyone else.
"I saw "Reading Beckett" at Theatre Tram right before leaving Japan," continues Ozaki. "It was a rather sober event of readings of Samuel Beckett's later novels and dramas, but even here I didn't see many young people in the audience. The youngest was probably around 45, and the average age of visitors I would estimate between 55 and 60. If these performances continued like this for another 10, 20 years, the average age would almost reach the 80 mark... Added the facts that 1939-born director Ota Shogo is now 87, '46-born Toshima Shigeyuki 80, and actor Kanze Hideo (born in 1927) even 99, I wouldn't be surprised if they just discontinued the event."
Of course, the Reaper will probably discontinue them first. Or, as old people's culture magazine The Oldie puts it, "everyone buys it eventually".
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 12:32 am (UTC)the paper is supposed to deal with changing criticism towards an artist over time, or a change in how in artist is perceived by critics as the discourse changes. i'm having a difficult time finding resources and an even more difficult time forming a thesis. any advice?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 01:03 am (UTC)The contrast between your excitement and pride concerning the quality of Oskar Tennis Champion(not to mention your surrounding personal events: your friend's suicide, 9/11, etc.) compared to the horrendously low, rather insensitive review given by pitchfork adds this sort of extra layer of poignancy to it; it made the sparseness of "Palm Deathtop" even sparser; the melodies of "Electrosexual Sewing Machine" even lonelier.
Oskar Tennis Champion is one of my favorites of yours, but the context surrounding it makes it into something much more.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 01:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 01:07 am (UTC)Why does everything have to feel so fresh and raw..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 01:20 am (UTC)I am seventeen, but living in a household with three other generations has given me an immense window into cultural references that I can't expect to encounter blow-by-blow in most people.
Yet somehow, miraculously, I have found my way to others like me in this regard, who get the references you try to eschew for the sake of brevity and clarity, and though I know not how, there must be more of us, waiting to come out of the woodwork, who are completely tired of hipster bullshit while seemingly incongruously, being better at it than the hipsters.
I listen to Ace of Base and Yoko Ono and I am not ashamed. That's the first rule.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 02:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 03:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 03:53 am (UTC)At the same time, I totally agree that poor and kind elderly people are fantastic. They dress very well, for a start. Japanese elderly people can be so kind. And so stoical and selfless.
I think my "Taste of Tea" entry the other day -- about Gashuin, the unibrowed actor -- was an attempt, also, to locate coolness in eccentric old age, though that film's a bit of a whimsical fantasy.
I like my own parents a lot, though they're both in their 70s, which is quite a different, more frail, eccentric and perilous decade than the smug, blurred, beige 60s.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 04:37 am (UTC)Well, there's a rich history of proud old eccentrics in the British Isles, isn't there? I present you Jeremy Bentham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham), my archetypal heroic old man. Our Bentham are Mark Twain and Katharine Hepburn, of course; but sadly, it seems the Howard Hughes/Norma Desmond types have won the old man/woman wars over here.
I feel much the same way about my folks -- my Southern mother (a designer), and my Iranian father (a professor). Lovable, kind, eccentric folk both. Maybe there's something about working with fabrics and/or in classrooms that engenders a graceful, goofy aging!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 05:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 05:44 am (UTC)what of the x'ers?
Date: 2006-11-12 06:03 am (UTC)I find myself grumbly about how today's Yoof -- the children of Boomers -- today seem totally feral in some sense, raised by wolves, unable to be silent in movie theatres, choosing to sit on the dirty ground when chairs are available, and displaying an absolute lack of table manners. But in my reaction to them, am I displaying an increasing sense of value in the millions of small acts called "the commons," or am I just becoming set in my ways?
Bruce Sterling wrote a great novel called Holy Fire that extrapolated this trend to a few decades from now, where a "gerontocracy" ruled the world, rich, endowed with fantastically long lives thanks to pharmacological advances, but completely out of touch with contemporary culture. By contrast, the Kids were living incredibly creative, techno-bohemian lives. In fact rereading it today it doesn't seem like science fiction anymore, but just the facts of life for millions of globetrotting 20somethings.
I had the opportunity to meet Sterling years ago and we got to chatting about his other novel, Islands in the Net, one of the few cyberpunk novels to be set completely against the backdrop of Muslim countries (Indonesia, the Middle East, East Africa). There did seem to be a real blind spot in the West about these growing nations and how they would shape the future; Sterling just read the demographic facts and extrapolated what might happen.
Re: so anyway
Date: 2006-11-12 09:10 am (UTC)Re: so anyway
Date: 2006-11-12 09:58 am (UTC)cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 11:17 am (UTC)... two days later I had a little argument with Esther on the subject of Ken Park, the latest film by Larry Clark, which she had been keen to go and see. I had hated Kids, and I hated Ken Park even more, the scene where this dirty little shit beats up his grandparents was particularly unbearable. That film-maker completely disgusted me, and it was no doubt this sincere disgust that made me incapable of stopping myself from talking about it, whilst I strongly suspected that Esther liked him out of habit and conformism, because it was generally cool to approve of the representation of violence in the arts, and that she liked him without any real discernment, in the same way she liked, for example, Michael Haneke, without even realising that the meaning of those sorrowful and moral films by Michael Haneke was completely different from that of those by Larry Clark. ... I explained to her whilst rapidly downing my iced tequila that I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to cynicism and evil, and that I therefore felt myself ideally placed to assert that among all the merchants of evil, Larry Clark was one of the most common, most vulgar, simply because he unreservedly took the side of the young against the old, because all his films were an incitement to children to treat their parents without the least humanity, the least pity, and that there was nothing new or original about this, it had been the same in all the cultural sectors for the last fifty-odd years, and this supposedly cultural tendency in fact only hid the desire for a return to a primitive state where the young got rid of the old without ceremony, with no questions asked, simply because they were too weak to defend themselves... in short Larry Clark and his abject accomplice Harmony Korine were just two of the most tedious - and artistically the most miserable - examples of the Nietzschean scum who had been proliferating in the cultural field for far too long...
... I went on, with increasing acrimony, carried away by that strange mixture of nastiness and masochism, which I perhaps hoped would lead me to my destruction, after it had brought me fame and fortune. Not only did the old not have the right to fuck, I continued ferociously, but they no longer had the right to rebel against a world that nevertheless crushed them unsparingly, made them defenceless prey to the violence of juvenile delinquents before dumping them in ignoble twilight homes where they were humiliated and mistreated by decerebrated auxiliary nurses, and despite all this, rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too - like sexuality, like pleasure, like love - seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilising the interest of the young was disqualified in advance, basically, old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional and more and more narrowly limited. In my script The Social Security Deficit, which hadn't seen the light of day, and this appeared highly significant to me, I continued, almost besisde myself - I incited instead the old to rebel against the young, to use them and to show them who's boss. Why for example should male and female adolescents, voracious and sheep-like consumers, always greedy for pocket money, not be forced into prostitution, the only means by which they could modestly reimburse the immense efforts and struggles that were made for their well-being? And why, at a time when contraception had been perfected, and the risk of genetic degeneration perfectly localised, should we maintain the absurd and humiliating taboo that is incest? Those are the real questions, the authentic moral issues! I exclaimed angrily; now that was no Larry Clark.
Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 11:22 am (UTC)I should point out, so as not to look like a hypocrite, that I understand very well the horror of growing old and of beige zombification. But, unless we die young, or do a Mishima (who complained that once a man has passed the age of forty he has lost the chance to die a beautiful death), then age is inevitable. I think one just has to trust in some way that one will always be basically the same person, and, hopefully, will not somehow be transformed into one of the beige undead.
Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 11:30 am (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 11:43 am (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 11:57 am (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 02:38 pm (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 02:52 pm (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 04:04 pm (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 04:07 pm (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 04:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 05:11 pm (UTC)But I always disliked my fellow teenagers when I was a teenager, and now that I'm un university I dislike the hipster university student vibe. I always feel like an outsider looking in of my own peers, as though I am a 45 something male trapped inside or something. I sort of instictively distrust stuff that has an aura of "coolness" aimed at young people, I'm not sure why. Trying to hard? Yes, when I was younger (and still to a certain point) everything older was automatically cooler.
I do have a fetishization of youth cultures, but not ones that belong to me - 50's and 60's.
I remember reading an essay about a woman writing on the whole young girl-older man relationship. She said too much of the blame is placed on the older man when in her case, she knew so many girls who always had a sort of contempt for their peers that never leaves them.
-Monique
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 05:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 05:43 pm (UTC)People my age, a lot of them are definitely disconnected from the World of Culture, especially the ones who look the part. Vintage style is even ridiculed these days, which was the one way to look good at an affordable price ... now even the Hipsters!! (who, on first glance, you'd think belong to some creative scene), dress in ridiculously expensive clothes most of them can't afford.
Hyper-materialism's killing the youth, I say. Or, you can find the cultured kids if you look past the clothes they wear.
Re: so anyway
Date: 2006-11-12 06:30 pm (UTC)Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-12 06:44 pm (UTC)Point to Point Navigation
Date: 2006-11-12 06:48 pm (UTC)So it was a bit of a relief to read your post about those youngsters in their sixties. I'm a Fifty something and Gore had me thinking a bit to much about the exit door. I'm going shopping for a beige leisure suit.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 09:38 pm (UTC)I'm just listening to a radio show about Pope (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/rootsofremembranceday), the 18th century poet whose picture I pinned up on my wall when I was 22. "He even had a lady stalker," says Melvin Bragg. "He did enjoy being a celebrity, didn't he?"
"She did have to be asked not to demand so much attention," says one academic about the "lady stalker".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 11:23 pm (UTC)i used to sit back and listen to that shit and thinkin gomone somone eeesle on the plennnne plannnet knows whwat it's like yo nloon lonely 1986 oh boy i make it up as i go along
Re: cynicism and evil
Date: 2006-11-13 06:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-13 10:56 am (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJpGxj5uT80&mode=related&search=