| Teens Studied in History and Culture
In exhausting detail, Jon Savage's "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture" uses primary accounts of individuals set against a tirelessly thorough depiction of historical periods and cultural shifts to capture the dueling images of teenager as delinquent, teenager as market force and teenager as soldier. Discussing various adolescent types from hooligans to Boy Scouts to zoot-suiters to GIs, Savage hops between Europe and the United States. His research traces the evolution of that nebulous age group from before the turn of the century to the advent of the word "teenager" in 1944. Savage's greatest strength is bringing to life some of history's most notable young characters: Rudolph Valentino, Peter Llewelyn Davies (of Peter Pan fame) and Anne Frank, "an intelligent young girl forced by extraordinary circumstances to accelerate her adolescence." The pinnacle of an otherwise dry text is Savage's chilling description of Nazi youth culture.
King celebrates his 50-year reign on top of TV talk
When CNN Presents: Larry King -- 50 Years of Pop Culture airs, Anderson Cooper says a joke about his CNN colleague Larry King is that King likes to ask questions. His favourite question: Will you marry me? Yes, King has had many queens -- he's been married seven times to six different women. But while his matrimonial record is curious, it's just part of the legend of Larry King the broadcaster. The show was pre-empted for continuing coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. It will air on a later date. This week, the mighty, suspenders-wearing mouthpiece is celebrating 50 years in the broadcast game. During that half a century, King has notched 40,000 interviews. .
When tragedy strikes, we grieve, then move on
Throughout the Mid-Willamette Valley this weekend, wherever there are youngsters in uniforms, we will temporarily yield to laughter, applause and chatter. Public-address announcers will ask for a moment of silence to remember the tragedy at Virginia Tech that ended 32 precious lives and that of a killer. And then, after that moment, we'll play ball. It's no disrespect to the Virginia Tech community or anyone who has lost loved ones. The reality is that headlines -- and our nation's psyche -- change quickly in our instant culture. We grieve, we act and we move on. The conundrum that all TV news directors and newspaper editors deal with is figuring out when a story moves on. On Monday, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 innocent people and then took his own pitiful life.
NYU's king of pop culture trivia
As he sung the Goo Goo Dolls' "Name" into the microphone, Andrew Unterberger's khaki pants and light blue T-shirt glowed in the black light of a pink-walled private room in Koreatown's Toto Karaoke. His shaggy, curly brown hair moved with him as he moved with the music, belting out the lyrics.
His friend teased him for his enthusiasm. "This is my soul talking, thank you very much," Unterberger retorted.
Unterberger, a CAS junior majoring in journalism and English, knows where most of the songs played that night landed on the music charts, and when.
"The success of this song has nothing to do with Shaggy's involvement in it," he said as he and his friends prepared to sing "It Wasn't Me." Since his childhood in Pennsylvania, Unterberger has been memorizing pop culture trivia, making lists, and spending long hours watching TV and movies, according to his mother, Alyse Unterberger.
Diary of the EMP pop conference
Novelist Jonathan Lethem ("The Fortress of Solitude," "Motherless Brooklyn") opened the EMP Pop Conference on Thursday night in Sky Church with an operatic, confessional sweep. He surely is the first keynote speaker to refer to the confab as a "ferschlugginer enterprise." Culled from Mad magazine, the faux-Yiddish word (meaning "wretched") felt appropriate for the gathering. In the grand tradition of rock criticism inaugurated in the '60s by Crawdaddy magazine, ogle-eyed grad (and ex-grad) students conflate — with a straight face — Sanjaya, Iggy Pop and the Beatles with Nietszche, Marx and Joyce. Lethem commanded this pop culture/high culture territory so seamlessly (perhaps too seamlessly), that if he didn't exist, EMP surely would have been forced to invent him.
Simon Pegg: Zombies, Cops and Ewoks?
Three decades before British actor and comedian Simon Pegg was smacking zombies upside the head with a cricket bat (Shaun of the Dead) or chasing down suspects in a not-so-innocent English village (Hot Fuzz), he was, like many kids of the '70s, completely enthralled by bizarre characters inhabiting a galaxy far, far away. "I was at my friend Chris's birthday party in 1977," Pegg says. "He'd already seen Star Wars, although at this point I had not. Someone had bought him a set of rub-on transfers of all the characters which I helped him apply to the Death Star diorama that came with them. I clearly remember being fascinated by the character names and not knowing who was who. I wondered why the old man's sword appeared to be on fire. It's the last memory I have before the day my parents finally took me to see the film.
Why we love Kerry Katona
The claim by Gordon Brown, in Saturday's interview with this newspaper, that we in Britain have "fallen out of love with celebrity" shows that the prime minister-in-waiting is way out of touch with the popular culture of his times. If Brown were right, he should have had someone from his office get in touch with Prince William and his former girlfriend Kate Middleton and tell them the good news - hey guys, you don't have to split up. The public are no longer interested in celebrity! But Gordon Brown shouldn't feel too bad about getting it hopelessly wrong. For he belongs to a group of illustrious pundits, pop stars and professional zeitgeist watchers who have, since the 1990s, all predicted the end of celebrity culture - and they've all been wrong. I should know, I was one of the first to make this mistake in 1995 when I wrote about the rise of "celebrity fatigue".
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