Rob, since when did vitality always link with optimism and contentment? Anyone who is wondering about the youth's vitality after J18, Seattle, Prague, etc. needs new glasses. :)
I'd agree with Carl that much of life has a mummified, museum-like feel (Guy Debord was right - the non-living moves much more visibly than the living in our world), yet nostalgia for lost vitality is as much of a stuffed corpse.
>
> We have a nanny-state, I reckon - bent on liberating big capital and its
> owners whilst it closes down every avenue of spontaneous self-affirmation
> on the part of the rest of us. A bloody great panopticon, bent not just on
> generating and enforcing rules, but on transforming the community into a
> battalion of smug health fascists, 'norm'-police and regularised
> consumption nodes
The health fascism is only one part of it. There's a traditional party here in Cape Town organised by something called the 'Mother City Queer Project' (where queer is taken to mean sexuality beyond the bounds of straightness, rather than simply referring to homosexuality) which has basically turned into a big expensive rave in fancidress. I went last year, had a great time doing utterly unhealthy things to my body - the place certainly had an aura of sex, drugs and techno. Unfortunately, the commercialisation of space was just so obvious: apart from the venue, the laser show, the DJs, etc. there were the 50-something white guys (who obviously couldn't get a job anywhere else) guarding the cars parked outside, and before the party even ended there were people with blowers cleaning up rubbish, and when you left the venue at last, you weren't allowed back in even if you had forgotten something inside.
It was all too obvious that the feeling of community and shared fun was sustained not only by lotsa drugs but also by an enormous commercial machine (and the fact of a party full of queers being 'protected' by almost-certain-homophobic security guards was damn creepy). Things like the Criminal Justice Bill in Britain play an important role in forcing public interaction into privately owned spaces.
At the same time, I've heard stories from Germany, from the US, from South Africa which suggest that the struggle to carve out spaces for non-mummified living continues. And the youth aren't exactly absent (as the volume of graffitti on Observatory's walls shows :).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B