A vitally important news story that deserves your attention.
Favourite quote:
“Young people today… hardly any of them I think can write. Let alone… they’re very good at doing all this, and texting. And their lives are so busy, and I don’t think they put pen to paper.”
What I love about this is most of the people who are being interviewed were probably our age in the 60’s. They are hardly victorians. It was them that started the ball rolling, they can hardly complain when we finish the job. Their generation invented rock music, enjoyable sex, drugs and crap art. I actually think that the paradigm we exist in now is far tamer than that of our parents. The amazing thing we are going to experience is the older generation astonished at how dull this fixie bike riding, fitness obsessed, wasabi munching, mac using generation are. Bearing this in mind check out this link. The language is foul, but it makes the point fairly well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n34eeXWjUQ
Ha ha, I love the sociological theory that enjoyable sex was invented in the 1960s. Makes you wonder why people were doing it for millennia prior to the 20th century…
I suppose the only conclusion one can come to is that those fellows rutting away in various combinations between the pages of Fanny Hill or on the frescoes of Pompeii were doing so out of a sense of biological duty, and were absolutely not having any fun whatsoever.
And let’s not mention the Opium wars or the pre-war modernist art movements.
I think it’s fair to say that any sociological generalisation fails to take into account the swathes of people who don’t fit the idea the theorist has come up with. Therefore, using the generalisation that the 1960s was when all the fun started, fails to take into account the millions of people for whom the 1960s was a stiff-upper-lipped and boring beige place. Some of those individuals (who may as well be ‘Victorians’ if what we are describing is a temperament rather than an historical period) were interviewed in the video.
You don’t seriously think those upper middle class housewives with their marrow contests all spent their youth rolling around in LSD-fuelled orgies at music festivals? They’re the same generation, but different people.
Also, the character that Doug Stanhope personifies in his stand-up is (rather like Stewart Lee) a shouty angry semi-ironic exaggeration. I honestly don’t believe he’s making a serious point.