Week 7 | Youth | Contents
Tuesday | Poetry | 'A Kindred Spirit'
Wednesday | Fiction | We Need To Talk About Yoof: Letters to the Grown-ups
Thursday | Music | Postcards From Italy: the First, Second and Third
Friday | Chapbook | The Jam Trap, by Chrissy Williams
Saturday | Mixtape | Italy
“How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.”
Robert A. Heinlein
Sex proverbially sells, or so ‘they’ say – however, I’m not entirely sure ‘they’ know what ‘they’ are talking about. In fact, it is nothing to do with sex per se – it is youth that is being sold - in truth, youth sells.
Youth is not the gap between childhood and adulthood in this instance – it is beauty, vitality and a state of mind. It is the holy grail – eternal life – what we seek at all times of our lives and that is exactly why advertisers associate the products they are representing with it. It is youth as commodity – something you can obtain through purchase. Mostly importantly here, it is believable – it is a real magic. However old you are there are days when you feel ‘young’, when a certain vibrancy peels back the years, it a universal we all know – it exists and therefore can be bought.
Advertising has always been an art, but now it is more closely aligned than ever – with an industry so saturated with content it has to be. Art has always sold youth – Hugo Williams’ poem ‘Peach’ for example always sticks in my mind as capturing this idea of youth – as he takes us up the ‘lookout tree’ and kicks the ladder way – however the line that hits it on the head is ‘It was almost impossible to get down’, as he goes on to say ‘that was the whole point’. It touches upon youth as that perfect commodity – rare ‘almost impossible’ but something that can be believed – a real magic.
This week we will mostly be talking about youth.
James Harringman
Editor
