Twitter’s Reputation, Social Revolution and The New News in 2011

I admit it; this time last year I was one of the Twitter nay-sayers.  I had an account with a picture, I had ‘Tweeted’ and followed people’s accounts that popped up.  It seemed simple enough to me and, quite frankly, pretty dumb.  I’d given it a shot – and I didn’t get it.  I passed the same meme to others that I had absorbed myself, and dismissed Twitter as an over-hyped soapbox where people document what they had for breakfast.

This is, for many, the default judgment of the social network based around 140 characters and second in line to Facebook’s throne.  In hindsight this is a verdict solely of those who don’t understand Twitter or know how to use it to its full potential.  A recent report by Wildfire found that even many Technology and Media company heads who have jumped aboard the Twitter bandwagon with a business profile haven’t actually grasped its ability for real interaction and engagement.  A recent Business Insider article held the headline ‘Media Tycoons Say they Understand Twitter But Have No Time For It-Then Reveal They Don’t Understand It’ which basically says it all.

Like a Trending Topic on the site itself Twitter snobbery can at-times seem like fashionably current viewpoint, in fact its ignorantly outdated.   Just look at the events of the past year.  You won’t have to look far for headlines in which Twitter featured, played a part in or out-scooped.  Twitter in 2011 has not only made the news but helped create the events that have instigated radical social shifts and major, global headlines.  As the Business Insider wrote recently Twitter has become “a revolutionary new interactive media platform and media distribution system, an interactive ‘cable company’ for the digital age.”

However the misconception that Twitter is solely for talking at people rather than conversing and sharing still persists.   Twitter can indeed be a one-way conversation in the ‘asymmetric model of sharing’ -a bit like an RSS feed.  It is, of course, very popular in this way as favoured platform for public figures who use the service to relate to fans and publicise various aspects of their work or life without having to personally connect to every follower in the way the Facebook is structured.  The list of public figures from popstars, high fashion designers, politicians, philosophers, campaigners, writers, film stars and media figures is veritable who’s who of the world and has proved a new source for information on those who regularly feature in the news, for the first time direct from their keyboards (unless, like some, they are managed by their PR team, which for some overly verbal stars could have saved some scandal.)  It’s a new, more direct way of those in powerful positions coming into contact with the, well, 99% of the population.  Just imagine Martin Luther King, Marylin Monroe or Jimi Hendrix’s Twitter accounts…the mind boggles.

Conversely Twitter is also an extremely efficient platform for multi-way communication to various and open amounts of people and groups.  This is by employing simple tactics while Tweeting.  Twitter, basically, has its own coded, practical language: @ signs and # hashtags perform important links between topics, people, events, organizations and trends and acts like a channel or stream to direct posts to audiences, regardless of whether you follow each other.  Once embraced, those hashtags and @s started to illuminate a social network that is not only as informative as the news and email but actually better.  If news is to be new, it cannot get fresher than from the mouths of those making it.  From the person on the street to the person on your screen.

It is a duality between Twitter’s ability to act as a one way feed as well as a communication tool between exponential amounts of parties that makes it such an effective social and news tool and the one way model is not to be dismissed either;  As Mark Suster points out Twitter’s asymmetrical model means users have a new form of online identity, distinctive to email or Facebook identity (although Google+ is doing this now and Facebook has followed suit) by being m0re of a multi-layered business card or channel rather than a personal space or address.  In response to those who say that Twitter is just inane noise, I now respond; ‘just click unfollow’.  Less etiquette-riddled than the Facebook version to ‘unfriend’ Twitter is what you make it and who you allow to populate your feed.  Breakfast history posts need never feature, and be warned I’m ruthless on this rule.


Twitter’s Year

For me it was the summer of 2011’s London riots where suddenly a new perspective on how incredible Twitter actually was as an information-sharing platform dawned on me.  While sitting in the Vexed offices news from Twitter about how and where the riots were spreading, and the subsequent #riotscleanup that followed provided my first experience of how Twitter surpasses news in speed of delivery and relevance and numbers of sources.  From Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, Bin Laden’s death, the UK Riots, the Occupy movement, Press ‘super-injunctions’, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the Royal Wedding have all been scooped by Twitter or had Twitter playing some part in the story.   For example in Marches front page news story the Japanese earthquake and tsunami this year
Twitter became a replacement communication service when phone lines went down, and on the other side was one of the most tweeted-per-second topic of the year.

The adbusters co-founder and person credited with building up the #Occupy movement into a global phenomenon praised the simple power of a Twitter hashtags saying: “[Occupy] started off when the Twitter feed started going crazy with that hashtag”, saying that social media played a crucial part in taking the movement worldwide and mobilizing the idea into mass actions.  In freedom of information stories such as phone hacking, Wikileaks and injunctions the power to share information in such an effective way is effecting power structures all the way to the top of politics, bringing fear into regimes and governments across the globe.  In the case of the #injuction one footballer took to keep an affair a secret the gagging order didn’t cover Twitter’s mouth as people gleefully and freely passed the truth that the press couldn’t utter at a dizzying rate of tweets per second.  Twitter’s ability this year to out-news the news has seen it at the epicentre again and again of debates about freedom of information.  Its no coincidence it is one prominent tool that activists such as WikiLeaks and hacking groups such as Anonymous use readily.  John Naughton wrote in The Observer this  month; ‘I had a fascinating conversation with a State Department official who […] told an instructive story about how a senior colleague was baffled when a demonstrator appeared in Tahrir Square holding up a placard that contained only a Twitter hashtag. “What’s that?” asked the baffled diplomat.’ Indeed.

Twitter’s power, like most social networks, is that it is a cross section of society from highbrow journalists to people on the streets who would be news sources, but instead now have a direct platform themselves – with the power to pass information widely, at speed and with clever marketing tactics.  So although Twitter is named after a rather unimportant chirping and chatter its important to note that its power comes, like the uprisings it is enabling, in numbers and the power of information and freedom of sharing.  A single bird’s tweet, if you like, sounds deafening when millions of birds are chirping, a powerful motif for a new-era of power of the masses.  With 100+ million active users and over 250+ million tweets per day Twitter, used to its full potential, passes information more efficiently and directly between locations, sources, groups and topics around the world like ever before.  Suddenly the outdated notion of Twitter as just silliness seems rather facile.

Looking forwards, Twitters future lies largely in the freedom to share information remaining untouched by the governments it challenges.  For now, however, you’ll find me browsing Twitter for my daily fix of news, as well as interacting with people from across the world about topics as serious as #FreedomofSpeech and #TheWaronWant to #OMGWTF

We all know power is knowledge, only now it comes in at under 140 characters.

by Elle Holgate aka @HoxtonHers and @africanelle

Links / Sources:

We Have Only Scratched The Surface of The True Value of Twitter, Both Sides of The Table, Mark Shuster

2011: A Year In News-Breaking Tweets, Kate Bussman, A Twitter Year, Stylist

http://www.businessinsider.com/media-tycoons-have-no-time-for-twitter-2011-12

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-self-serve-platform-launches/37263/

http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/12/05/the-top-hashtags-and-topics-of-2011-charlie-sheen-egypt-mcdonalds-and-apple/

http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/tps.html

http://mashable.com/2011/12/06/tweets-per-second-2011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

http://mashable.com/2011/10/27/occupy-wall-street-adbusters/

http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/tps.html

Tribute to An Undeniable iCon

by Elle Holgate

A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see – and hits it. ~Anon

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.  ~Napoleon
Bonaparte

Where-ever you stand on the Apple vs. Microsoft lifestyle choice debate, the recent news of Steve Job’s untimely death hit the industries of digital media, technology, advertising, music, design, software andfilm with as much impact and fanfare as the hysteria that new Apple product launches have become known for.
Reading through online newsfeeds in the days following his death it was clear, this wasn’t a man whose contribution was exclusive to one field or discipline but one that cross fertilized between different industries successfully.  His vision, leadership, influence, and ultimately products, were and remain omnipresent in almost all aspects of modern industry, art and commerce.  That the company he headed was started in the back of his garage and not taken seriously by industry insiders and only accounting for 1% of the computing industry for the last decades of the past millennium, just highlights the greatness of his achievements in a relatively very short time.

Along the way to greatness Jobs was savvy, creative, hungry, a little bit foolish, at times undeniably ruthless and always exceptional.  He resourcefully grabbed the opportunities of the era in which he came of age, utilized and re-designed inventions that were under- developed and tapped some great minds that he met along the way.  David Kokkte (later an integral early Apple employee) said in a recent interview; “Steve paid a lot of attention to those doing good work”, and Jobs-himself confirmed that “Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team.”  He was an innovator, not an inventor and despite this, perhaps because of it, he goes down in history as an icon in a broad arena of human ideas, progress and creative brilliance.

To understand what drove Jobs in his c0-creation of Apple it has often been sited, even celebrated, that he was a college drop out, once traveled to India on a hippie pilgrimage and openly stated that his experimentation with psychedelics at that time was “one of the two or three most important things I’ve ever done in my life.”  It may seem sensationalist to highlight this yet these early countercultural aspects of his life remained, if you look closely, fairly fundamental to his life’s work until the end.

Jobs and Kokkte traveled to India after reading seminal hippie tome ‘Be Here Now’ and gaining interest in Buddhism, which Jobs converted to with gusto.  These idealistic hippie ideologies were then applied to Job’s and Wozniak’s vision for personal, and later home, computing as a creative empowerment for the ordinary individual and masses.  You could liken their journey for spiritual enlightenment in India to their quest to reach the nirvana of what technology could be and the coming phenomenon of the information revolution: “between the iPhone and the Internet and Google, all the knowledge of the world is in your hand, that’s a miracle […] What someone can do with their iPhone is magic!“ Kokkte has said.

Perhaps it was this search for magic, knowledge, enlightenment and minimalist brilliance can be seen quite clearly at the heart of Job’s product design, which has set Apple apart in the tech industry.  Only now are technology makers accepting that aesthetic and design are not only the superficial identity of the product but can, and should, be linked to its functionality and user experience.

“Steve was the marketing person [and] brought the design aspect to it.” Kokkte says of his experience of Apple’s early days. 

Job’s designs set the bar for computing, portable mp3 players, smartphones and most recently tablets, with every product spawning a string of copycat designs running throughout the industry.  Since the iPhone it is sometimes hard to see at first glance which smartphones are actually Apple following the adoption of the ‘i’ look of slick touch-screen interface and minimalist mini-tablet functionality.  Or take the recent launch by Asus and Intel of the ‘Zenbook’ (reference to Buddhism or Macbook anyone?) it couldn’t be anymore Apple if it was sat in a basket of Pink Ladies.  From the brushed chrome casing, the effort for slimness and the low easy keyboard.  Even the interface seems to have been paired down in a minimalist style, as if to trick the eye that it might be the 11.6-inchMacBook Air.  In my humble (and a few other’s) opinion the exterior of these copy cat products have never held the same level of ergonomic excellence within.  So OK I’ll admit it, I’m an Apple fan kid.  Sue me.
Job’s value for creativity, his single focus and the minimalist and high quality aesthetic he pioneered in technology design all were informed by a fearless experimental mindset, and has always added to his image as a maverick, cultural icon and a rebel of rock n roll proportions.  Being fired from Apple only to re-emerge the victor only cemented this.  As one aging rock star branded him last week, Job’s was in many ways; ‘The Bob Dylan of Machines…the Elvis of the hardware-software dialectic”, fitting as Rolling Stone prepares a commemorative issue for release.  His presentations as CEO of Apple show a man playing to his audience with the swagger and deft touch of an artist on stage.  Iconic, even down to his ever-present black turtleneck, his attire as recognizable, minimal and ergonomic as the casing for Apple products themselves.

Apple’s revolutionary insistence of integration amongst their products and harmony between different functions were always highlighted in the finished product, first most evident in the “plug and play” experience of an iPod and Mac. Integration this sophisticated just hadn’t been done before, and the sheer enjoyment of using a technological product, which was key to Job’s designs, took Apple to the next level.  As the Harvard Business review wrote last week: “Apple existed to delight customers first”, all else fell into place around that, and it worked.

“His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me.” Larry Page of Google.

The designed synchronization between Apple products was criticized by some as a way of trapping people into picking only from the Apple tree, one of many criticisms aimed at Job’s and co throughout the years.  Some felt Apple was creating a “walled garden approach to media on their devices” by taking a 30% cut from subscriptions and sales via their platforms.  Many questioned this as just simply ‘greedy’ and an exploitation of their position as leaders.  Jobs was, after all  a hard-nosed business man for all his cool-credentials.  However his contribution to e-commerce revenue is immeasurable; from the $2.5 Billion in revenue from apps over the last 3 years with 70% going to developers, to the way iTunes addressed the downloading deficit in the music industry.

Yet even for someone who doesn’t buy into Apple, Job’s involvement with Pixar makes him an important figure.  Pixar, which was founded as an offshoot of LucasFilm to develop imaging technology, was bought by Jobs in 1986 after he was kicked out of Apple and then later acquired by Disney.  Under Jobs as CEO Pixar became a technical and creative leader of CGI animated films, Pixar’s John Lasseter saying that Job’s vision guided them; “He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us did.”

When all is weighed up his loss cannot be overstated.  He may not have ever imagined or set out to innovate and revolutionize across multiple industries (he was innately always most interested in technology, software, and design) but he brought something utterly new to this emerging industry and was never afraid to integrate, innovate and move things forward or to borrow from unexpected places to cultivate beauty in a once quite sterile landscape.

The greatest feat he achieved, on a personal level, was producing an operating system that I ‘got’, even enjoyed.  iOS worked intuitively in a way I hadn’t experienced before with computing, which until that point I had loathed and rejected.   iOS and the Apple products around it made computing and interacting with technology easy and encouraged me want to use it.  For the first time I felt instilled the notion that great and creative things could be created on a computer and using modern technology.  For a long-time technophobe and lover of the archaic and low-tech approach that was huge.

It is easy, in hindsight, to brand a person a genius.  In death all accolades are heightened by finality however if ever a man deserves the title, I feel Job’s earned it.  Genius doesn’t mean he was always fair, nice to work with, never wrong, greedy or biased – It just means he shot at something no one else could see, and hit it.  And in doing so lit up our screens, and our age.

RIP Steve Jobs 1952-2011

Techno Remix at Glastonbury

You’d have to have been living in an internet-less basement in Outer Mongolia to have missed noticing: Festivals are a staple of modern British life now.  No longer the domain exclusively of hardened party animals and alternative hippies the truly new-age festival attendee is often fashion conscious, teched up and may even come with an executive job or children, or both (utter madness).  So with the transformation of the festival crowd comes a timely and truly experience-changing innovation to the 'little timetable on a string round your neck thingy': The Official Glastonbury 2011 app.  

Now I’ve been to Glastonbury a good few times but sadly the last time I went phone apps still meant, to most people, the calculator on your Nokia.  This meant that even while vigilantly checking my soggy programme with the dim light of a pocket torth and asking people in neon jackets where the Leftfield music tent is (those neon jacket wearing folk always turn out to be partygoers who are a lot more lost than you and think wearing a neon jacket is the height of festival fashion) hence even with a passable level of effort I still missed some amazing acts and never did find where the Leftfield stage was.

The Glastonbury 2011 App is basically your super-organized, geekily knowledgeable festival comrade, except it fits in your pocket, looks hot and won’t get moody when the teepee’s a mess.  Complete with the entire schedule (no more squinting at a dusty rag of a programme on the last day), a personalized planner so you know where and when your crucial acts are on, an interactive map, the latest news and the ability to share on Facebook this app is the way of the future for a festival that prides itself on eco-friendly alternatives.  Quite frankly it beats said geeky festival friend hands down, especially at knowing about that secret Radiohead gig, and all updates are available at your grubby little fingers throughout the festival.

I spoke to the guys at Brighton-based digital startup Future Platforms who brought this lovely app into being.

Enter Dominic Travers, 14 times Glastonbury veteran and Product Owner of the project at Future Platforms; '[Orange and Glastonbury] wanted us to keep it simple, for us to bring the core features of a festival app to a user-friendly, clever and effective platform and they wanted it to be available not only on iPhone, but be inclusive of other smart phones and android'- no easy task then.

Designing apps for festivals pose some key challenges anyway, as Future Platforms founder Tom Hume points out; 'In many ways Glastonbury is just an extreme testbed for the constraints of mobile which [digital agencies like Future Platforms] have been working with since day one', battery life and signal connectivity issues at a festival site being a challenge.  Also the sheer scale of Glastonbury provides a unique challenge;  'We had well over 2000 complex items, 55 stages and ever-evolving news to factor into the app which test the platform’s capabilities to the extreme.'  Well you wouldn’t expect anything less from one of the largest festivals in the world. 

The project took in total 3 months to complete but was a labour of love for the team, which included Glastonbury fans, and Dominic stated that Orange were ‘a joy to work with’.  However, to paraphrase a well known saying: the proof was in the mud pie.  Buzz about the app went wild in the week running up to the festival with 56,000 mentions on Twitter before the festival had even officially kicked off and user’s resounding approval and grateful reviews ( the favourite being 'Glastonbury App is Well Good!!') before, during and after the event brought delight to the Future Platforms team.  Guardian Music Editor Tim Jonze even added on Twitter that the app was ‘literally the best thing ever.’ -now that’s praise.  Its easy to see why with something that just works, making life a lot easier during a grueling weekend of fun in Somerset.

Glastonbury is not on in 2012 due to the regular four-yearly land break however should Future Platforms work their magic again on the app for 2013 they already have plenty of ideas up their sleeve.  For now they are elated at the response the 2011 app has got and were surprised when even Police officers at the event told them it had proved invaluable in providing information and taking care of business at the festival this year.  This App is, literally, all you’d need to get around, see those un-missable acts, and share it.  I can’t wait to put this newfound technological aid to good use at the next festival.  Now all I need is an iPhone and a Glastonbury ticket for 2013…anybody?

To Sign or Sing

Interesting, if somewhat sobering, article on the current state of the record industry for budding musicians or fans.

Not really much new.  We all know the days of big ass record deals and crazy money tours just ain't flying no more.

Any thoughts on this?

Beautiful Band Marketing

These days sometimes it seems one has to stand side by side with 'the man' when putting out some rock 'n' roll.    But as these arresting posters promoting new band Dry The River show perhaps art and beauty are sometimes all you need. Certainly are something that grabs your attention as well as being original and just gorgeous.  

Or as these articles lay out, is no publicity the new publicity?

mmm fascinating

yup you might have a point

  

Since Damien Hirst's gratuitous money-loving art hit the YBA scene a growing trend of artists who are also savvy marketers and promoters has coincided with the internet revolution.  Musicians and artists now need a whole new set of skills to make themselves visible in a highly crowded cultural network.  Somehow, though, it feels just a bit incongruous to have our artist cultural commentators engaging in such high level capitalist 'business'.

I feel a little like, I wish just being an artist was still enough.

But has it ever been?

Site of The Day

Three Things to Check out in Your Lunch break Today:

Hype Machine has just added Fast Forward which lets you jump through songs while still reading through music blogs, making keeping up with all your favorite music blogs (yes you, you lovely audio geeks) more time-effective.

Beyonce: First Pop Queen to Scale the Pyramid Stage

Grrrl Power

I don't know about you but I was more than a little bit shocked when Beyonce's headline performance at Glastonbury this year was highlighted for its feministic poignancy.   Beyonce was the first woman to headline the Pyramid Stage, the first in 41 years of the festival.

That her performance was a tour de force of Woman Power, man whipping curved frenzy just hammered the point home.  Where have the sisters been all these years?  What saddened me more was that although its a dire state for a festival to have no female solo headliner in 41 years could anyone really think of someone who'd have fitted the bill before Queen B stormed the Pyramid?

After casually racking my brains I wondered what of Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Tracy Chapman, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Aretha Franklin, hell, Madonna?  Where were these ladies through the years on the most coveted of festival slots?

The Pop-ularization (with emphasis on the 'Pop') of Glastonbury in the last five years has seen a huge shift in the acceptability of festival going as a summer pursuit (er...Torie MPs in toilets were a large sign of the times, tragic deaths aside) and a noticeable shift in Glastonbury's headline slots towards family/middle of the road/sometimes questionable genres of music for the traditionally indie festival crowd.  Jay Z's hip slot showcase was a huge talking point, which quite frankly bored the bling off me.  Beyonce couldn't have dreamed of playing the festival 10 years ago not because of her gender but her style of music and label in the Pop section of the records store.  But perhaps this shift towards wider genres of music as headliners will see a rise in the number of females topping the bill.

That she should be the first female to play the Pyramid Stage of arguably the greatest music festival in the world was sobering.   That she delivered an astounding performance (backed by an equally impressive all-female band) soaked with soul, rock hard power and physical abandon made her a wonderful 'first' lady of Glastonbury history.  I hope we don't wait another 40 years to see a woman top the Pyramid.  After all its been quite a while since Cleopatra.

Read a review of Beyonce at Glastonbury 2011 here

Review: Kaboom

Or How Some Good Old Fashioned Nineties-Lovin' fills The Void 


by Elle Holgate

Kaboom, is quite frankly  bang on.  Trend, that is.  The recently released film from ‘New Queer’ director Greg Araki is a psychedelic smorgasbord of 90s style teen-flick nostalgia with a great big whack of sex and a subversive dollop of conspiracy thrown in for good measure.

As the title suggests everything is done with the comic book camp of vintage Batman violence and it serves a feisty Kapow! to cinema's often dreary portrayals modern sexuality, flying like a sexy superhero in the face of giving a damn.

Kaboom begins laced with the drôle, erotic cynicism that was encapsulated by Rules of Attraction (2002) which capitalised on the glossy façade of a ‘teen flick’ subverted with dark, post modern existentialism.   The 'teen' screen vision is familiar now, always complete with impossibly hot actors largely in their mid-late twenties impersonating still-pubescent college kids, with varying degrees of unconvincing innocence or lack of.   Both films play on the aesthetic of ‘mega-zines’* (you know the thick, expensive arty tomes with ample artistic adverts) that started in the 90s.  The gold in both films lies in the knowing hint of parody and nihilistic abandon, played with in the Scream series of the late 90s.  It all seems to capture a certain brand of sarcastic irony that 90s culture did so well.  In any of these films do we care much for the characters? Not so much.  Are they hot? Uh, hell yeah.  Could we blow them up with not a care in the (cinematic) world? Yup.  This, in the age of instant gratification, video game (can we still call them such an archaic name?) violence, 'gore-porn'* and throw-away human sex toys, seems to hit a nerve.

We watch their over-sexed, under-academic exploits with the varying degrees of whimsy, cynicism and irony-the same traits the characters purport to embody.  If only, we secretly muse, our college experiences were this fraught with misadventure and gorgeousness.  If only sharp and spicy-tongued dialogue took up those days that were, in truth, spent stabbing spell check while drinking cold coffee. But somehow it feels as though this 90s-style orgy of everlasting teenage anarchy was my own mis-spent youth.  My over stimulated synapses lap up films like Kaboom which, like cinematic hash cake, blur us into the perception that we too lived in a perpetual haze of ‘Dazed and Confused’ meets ‘Wild Things’.  Such is the culturally drugged condition of my generation.

 The 90s as this season's favourite 'retro' has been gaining momentum ever since everyone realised that the eighties for the most part sucked, plus who wants to remember the time when your Mom had a perm anyway?  Along with Topshop channeling Kate Moss’ heroin-chic cool circa Depp and CK One, a resurgence of recession-friendly bleached hair with deliberate roots and boys in denim and plaid (always, for me, iconic of Jared Leto in 90’s cult teen angst series, My So-Called Life) the 90s are my generation’s most beloved point of reference.  Close enough for genuine nostalgia; current twenty-somethings remember the days when making a mixtape for your crush’s Walkman was considered hi-tech, Glastonbury was still socially rebellious, and we used words like ‘crush’ and and ‘hi-tech’.  

My generation, who were by and large still children or young teenagers in the nineties, has never-the-less adopted the 90’s as a time that is ours.  It was booming (pardon the pun) economically, began the festival renaissance and made not washing your hair cool.  What’s not to like? The nineties’ was our very own modern twist on the youth counter culture started in the 60’s.  The 60’s has become culturally omnipotent, once a cliché that has now assimilated completely into fashion, music and art.  It’s as if the 60’s never ended, it just bled into a thousand dresses, adverts and festivals.    The 90's had Grunge and Techno, heroin-chic, free-rave rebellion and Ecstasy.  Look I'm not saying all it gave us it is perfect but its ours. Or more importantly, its not our parent’s.

In the hazy afterglow of empathetic amphetamines is it any wonder that with the 90’s ‘second summer of love’ our cultural focus was still on freedom and sex but more about sexual politics than promiscuity as a political act.  A thousand teen ‘dramedys’ were born of this new wave of loved up, horny teenagers who, like the dreary over-eloquence of ‘Dawson’s Creek’, loved nothing better than to jib out, endlessly dissecting the act of bonking in over-sized sweaters.

Yet we hold onto it.  Kaboom plays to the age of the new-youther*, the kids who should be working in serious careers seriously and buying furniture but, post recession, are largely still living the teenage dream (whether they want to or not) in their financially-capped lifestyle. Seeing actors clearly in their twenties playing fresher undergrads gives the recession kids a moment of pure nostalgia woven with current truth.  Have any of us really grown up yet?  Forced dependence on our parent’s economically lucky generation means we may not be able to independently buy a house or contemplate a pension yet but, by golly, we can wear a nose ring and Doc Martins with conviction.

Kaboom is nigh-brilliant.  Its really just a seamless mashup of zietgeist and nostalgia, and it hits the spot nicely.  OK, its attempt at mind bending may not be as psychologically screwed and effective as Twin Peaks but its decided lack of contempt for its ballsy, banging array of characters is refreshing.  No whore’s are punished by death -a la the rules of horror laid out in Scream- no girl simpers quietly through their lip gloss and the gay/bi/whatever girls and boys, who couldn’t give a flying...saucer, inherit the earth.   That is, if earth survives the next big bang. 

The original angst princess Claire Danes in wonderfully grungy My So Called Life with Jared Leto, yup you guessed it, looking stupidly hot and rocking some eye liner and plaid

Guyliner wearer and Jared Leto look-a-like Thomas Dekker gets a lesson in consequence-less banging with Juno Temple in Kaboom

 

Rules of Attraction had it all; quirky, clunky boot-wearing beauty Shannyn Sossamon, stupidly hot gay guy Ian Sommerhaulder and even Dawson-gone bad, James Van De Beek as the resident psychopath

Caped Crusaders

http://www.longstreetstyle.blogspot.com/

Woodstock, Cape Town

                                          Photo by Stiaan Schoeman

His Silver Sun Comes Undone

http://matthewnel.tumblr.com/