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Mark Steyn: YOUNG AT HEART (Are we approaching the end of youth culture?)
SteynOnline ^ | 1/28/2009 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 01/28/2009 4:46:42 PM PST by mojito

Do you remember The Matrix? It was big a couple of years ago. I think I quoted it in this very space – something about red pills, blue pills, and how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. It was part of the lingo for a while. But the dogs bark and the pop culture caravan moves on. Anyway, a couple of months back an interview in The Guardian with the film’s composer happened to catch my eye. Usually, when an interview with a guy who’s big on the electronic “dance music” scene catches my eye, my eye promptly glazes over, my eyelid closes and declines to re-open until the review of The Roger Ebert Illustrated Guide To Great Lesbian Movie Scenes four pages further on. But in this instance I stuck with the interview all the way to the end.

Rob Dougan, an Aussie who lives in a cool loft on the south bank of the Thames in London, had been asked post-Matrix to remix some Sinatra tracks for the cool kids – add some hip-hoppish electronica here and there. Unfortunately, he liked the records pretty much as they are. He took a crack at “That’s Life”, and was told his remix was not “modern” enough. So it was back to the old drawing board. And then Mr Dougan observed:

“In Sinatra’s time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man. You put on a hat and a suit and you keep on going until you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix their hair, and you think: ‘Whatever happened to real men?’”

Well, maybe they had hormone treatments.

(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: adulthood; manhood; marksteyn
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The man is always a pleasure to read.
1 posted on 01/28/2009 4:46:42 PM PST by mojito
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To: mojito
Perhaps that situation will continue indefinitely, until everyone on screen looks like Dr Christmas Jones, and everyone in the European and Canadian and Japanese audiences looks like Ethel Barrymore’s grandmother. Or perhaps Hollywood will rediscover the charms of age, put its hat on, and go to work.

Last paragraph of another brilliant piece. To co-opt a line from a song: "When we ever learn"...

FMCDH(BITS)

2 posted on 01/28/2009 5:06:58 PM PST by nothingnew (I fear for my Republic due to marxist influence in our government. Open eyes/see)
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To: mojito
"Think of a gated community in Florida: To be sure, once every so often they get up a party to go see Tony Danza in dinner theatre."

LOL. I have to say, I love to go to bed. I enjoy sleep. And I used to be a rock and roller. I have gotten to the point where I hate going out at night: we might have lunch out, but seldom a real "dinner" after 6:00. Like Billy Crystal said in "City Slickers," "Then you turn 50 and you have a surgery---they call it a procedure, but it's really surgery. Then you're having breakfast at 5;00, lunch at 11:00, and dinner at 4:00."

3 posted on 01/28/2009 5:13:07 PM PST by LS ("Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually." (Hendrix))
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To: nothingnew

I think of some of the movies I love, and “True Lies” comes to mind. Arnold was no spring chicken, and Jamie Lee Curtis was clearly a woman, and not a girl in that. But I agree that the ridiculously young (and always female) scientists and “world renowned” paleontologists, biologists, weapons experts and so on gets old. The absolute worst was Kelly McGillis as an “instructor” at Top Gun. Uh huh.


4 posted on 01/28/2009 5:16:02 PM PST by LS ("Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually." (Hendrix))
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To: mojito
Dougan...had been asked post-Matrix to remix some Sinatra tracks for the cool kids – add some hip-hoppish electronica here and there. Unfortunately, he liked the records pretty much as they are.

Being "young" myself, there are certain things you shouldn't reproduce. A Warhol painting, maybe. But not a Sinatra.

5 posted on 01/28/2009 5:19:23 PM PST by GOP_Raider (Have you risen above your own public education today?)
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To: mojito

I remember when I was young, my dad, my uncles, the neighbors, my friends dads, my coaches, my male teachers, were all MEN. Most, if not all of them, fought in WW2 and Korea. They worked hard, and they had a good honest attitude that “business was business” and “what’s fair is fair.”

I wonder if kids look up to us the same way. I suspect not, because too many of my kids’ teachers, their coaches, their dads and their dads friends, want to be the kids’ friends, not adults.


6 posted on 01/28/2009 5:19:26 PM PST by henkster (When I was young I was told anyone could be President. Now I believe it.)
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To: mojito
Not necessarily ridiculously young, like Dr Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards a couple of Bond films back.

Silly line thrown in from left field. Denise Richards was 28 at the time, hardly "ridiculously young" to play a nuclear physicist out in the field...heck, I was nearly in the same place as those scenes at the same age, doing that job.

The ridiculous part was the airheadedness for her part as a nuclear physicist. She's not a bright woman or good actress, and it was obvious.

But Steyn seemed to have noticed her! :-)

7 posted on 01/28/2009 5:26:29 PM PST by Gondring (Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)
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To: LS

>>>The absolute worst was Kelly McGillis as an “instructor” at Top Gun. Uh huh.

Was she as bad as Hannah Reitsch?


8 posted on 01/28/2009 5:40:48 PM PST by tlb
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To: tlb

Don’t know this hannah person


9 posted on 01/28/2009 5:42:15 PM PST by LS ("Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually." (Hendrix))
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To: mojito

Steyn really gets it on the cultural levels. I addition to the political and economic


10 posted on 01/28/2009 5:48:25 PM PST by dennisw (Meshuggah Muhammad put the following words in the mouth of his sock puppet deity...................)
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To: mojito; ecurbh

But one thing does remain certain: Men aren’t wearing enough hats.


11 posted on 01/28/2009 6:09:54 PM PST by Ramius (Personally, I give us... one chance in three. More tea?)
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To: mojito

btt


12 posted on 01/28/2009 6:10:00 PM PST by Cacique (quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
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To: LS

I beg to differ, the worst was the then 22 year-old Nicole Kidman as brain surgeon Dr. Claire Lewicki in “Days of Thunder” (where she hooked up with Tom Cruise).


13 posted on 01/28/2009 6:11:55 PM PST by sinanju
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To: mojito
Usually, when an interview with a guy who’s big on the electronic “dance music” scene catches my eye, my eye promptly glazes over ...

My favorite... Good Grief! This is 14 years old! ... well, it's timeless ...

It's a fine day
People open windows
They leave their houses
Just for a short walk
They walk by the garden
They look at the sky

14 posted on 01/28/2009 6:17:53 PM PST by dr_lew
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To: GOP_Raider

Sinatra is timeless and is cool on his own.


15 posted on 01/28/2009 6:22:26 PM PST by Army Air Corps (Four fried chickens and a coke)
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To: tlb

Actually, the Kelly McGillis character was modeled after a real person, mathematician Christine H. Fox, who was thirty-two at the time and not bad looking.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

“..Fox started at Center for Naval Analysis as an analyst and steadily worked her way up to becoming president in 2004. During her 24-year career, she has traveled around the world, working directly with Navy, Marine Corps and joint military forces to help them find the best ways to use new weapons and technology and become more effective and efficient. Fox also served on the independent task force studying the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Fox was even the inspiration for a character in a movie starring Tom Cruise. In the mid-1980s, Fox was CNA’s field representative at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, working on site with the F-14 fighter pilots at the elite flying school located on the base. Film producer Jerry Bruckheimer was making “Top Gun,” an action adventure featuring cool flying sequences as the pilots competed to be the best of the best. Cruise played hot-shot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and because no Hollywood movie is complete without a little romance, Kelly McGillis was hired to play the love interest.

The original script called for McGillis’s character to be a Navy officer. “The admiral assigned by the Navy to oversee the production had script approval,” Fox recalls, adding that of course, the officer–officer romance was a no-go. “Then [Bruckheimer] suggested that the character could be an aerobics teacher at the Officer’s Club,” Fox says. “[The admiral] replied, ‘How about [modeling the character after] my CNA rep?’”

Fox was called into the admiral’s office to meet Bruckheimer, and McGillis’ character became Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood, civilian instructor and Maverick’s girlfriend. Fox worked with McGillis so that she could make her role more realistic...”


16 posted on 01/28/2009 6:23:55 PM PST by sinanju
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To: mojito

I must disagree with Steyn on this one.

Much more likely, hollywood will be full of movies in which the aging hero is pursued by women young enough to be his daughter. We have plenty of those already. Think Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Woody Allen...


17 posted on 01/28/2009 6:29:19 PM PST by sinanju
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To: mojito

Maybe that’s why I find Jon Hamm’s character Don Draper in “Mad Men” so appealing. I remember men like him when I was a kid. Not the womanizing, but the suave coolness. The show may be intended to be an indictment of the olden days—”look at those people, smoking, drinking and cheating on their wives”—but I have to admit I watch it with a touch of nostalgia.


18 posted on 01/28/2009 6:35:11 PM PST by Fu-fu2
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To: sinanju

LOL. Nicole Kidman and brain surgery is as believable as Tom Cruise and, well, sanity.


19 posted on 01/28/2009 7:05:13 PM PST by LS ("Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually." (Hendrix))
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To: mojito
“In Sinatra’s time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man. You put on a hat and a suit and you keep on going until you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix their hair, and you think: ‘Whatever happened to real men?’”

I don't know.

20 posted on 01/28/2009 7:15:08 PM PST by keepitreal (Obama brings change: an international crisis (terrorism) within 6 months)
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