There's a weird paradox in the way Gen Y lives and works. Everywhere I am reading about how the Millennials are super-driven, hyper-informed, search engine wizards. We chug lattes. We get to work early. We leave late. We want to be promoted. We expect to make millions by age 30. If all of this is new to you, read Lindsey Gerdes's work on young professionals at BusinessWeek.
 
A friend told me she was at her book club meeting in New York when a young writer started crying. She's turning 30 and she hasn't sold a book yet. Her career is over, she believes.
 
Some would say this makes perfect sense. We've got the technology to do everything faster, and get more information, more mileage, for every minute of each day. Why shouldn't we want to maximize that potential and feel inadequate when it takes too long?
 
But isn't it also true that everyone lives longer now? A 30-year old today is less than a third through her life–she's more like a 22 year old in the last generation's reckoning. That calculation has had a slowing effect on most other life choices–people get married and have kids later now because they know they've got more than enough time for family.
 
Why is our professional life speeding up when life's getting longer? Why am I sprinting for a finish line that's further and further away?
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In Sarajevo, as the wife of a BBC war correspondent, Rosie Whitehouse and her five children “heard the firing of the shots that started a war”. Heather Ryan asks what else she had to juggle in the raising of a most unusual family.  

“Family travel with bullets” is not a synopsis that could be applied to many books. But “Are We There Yet” is no ordinary travel memoir. Author Rosie Whitehouse and her war reporter husband, Tim Judah, brought up their children in Bucharest, Belgrade, Croatia and Bosnia during their most unstable years rather than separate their family. Her book not only describes the struggles of a wife and mother trying to create a stable home environment in the midst of war and social upheaval, but also examines the (positive) effect that a childhood spent following Daddy across Europe has had on her children’s identity and development. 

Whitehouse is a journalist herself; indeed, she and Judah met while working on the student newspaper at the London School of Economics. She was News Editor, and he was Arts Editor; he caught her eye when he delivered his article to her office, and she managed to get him to ask her out by setting up an arts magazine, inviting him to contribute, and hoping he would take her on dates with the free tickets to cultural events that he received. Needless to say, it worked. Studying International History at undergraduate level, and then Russian government and politics at Master’s, Whitehouse’s university career was good preparation for her career in the BBC World Service. 

It was as an ambitious editor of Newshour that Whitehouse “woke up one morning and felt sick”; she had fallen pregnant with her eldest son, Ben. In 1980s Britain, she tells me, “women were expected to look as poised and elegant as Princess Di, and hold down a full-time job as well – to have it all”. In spreading themselves so thinly, Whitehouse counters, women “ended up with nothing”. Finding it increasingly hard to go out to work and leave her son with a babysitter, she decided to become a full-time mum, a move which precipitated her husband – a freelance reporter – to approach the Times and ask for work. He was dispatched to cover Bucharest, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall – revolution had swept over Romania and thousands of people were dying in street-fights. Despite the daunting political situation, Whitehouse was “delighted” with her husband’s assignation and there was no question that she and Ben would be accompanying him.  

Did Rosie ever wonder whether she was doing the right thing? Of course, but although she concedes “perhaps I’m slightly crazy”, Whitehouse insists that her family’s experiences have enabled her children to “meet history head-on”. She is confident that their unusual upbringing has given her children an appreciation of history, politics and culture that conventional education can’t provide, and this is perhaps borne out by the fact that her firstborn Ben is now studying Modern History and Politics here at Oxford. Whitehouse had a somewhat unconventional childhood herself. Her father was a doctor – a “workaholic” who took his daughter along on his ward rounds on Christmas Day – and his work took him to Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein, and Poland in the grip of Communism. Family holidays consisted of accompanying her father on business trips abroad. However, she is adamant that her identity, as a child who travelled often but from a settled base in Britain, differs fundamentally from that of her children, two of whom had never lived in the UK before the family recently re-settled here. She uses the Troubles as an illustration. With an Irish Catholic mother, Whitehouse says that she “grew up with an Irish identity that fed my interest in politics”. In contrast, when she visited Ireland with her children, they “identified with the ethnic strife on the streets of Belfast” but do not self-define as Irish, taking instead “a worldwide approach”. 

I am interested in the conflict between motherhood and career to which Whitehouse alludes in her discussion of the book. “When you have a child,” she tells me, “you mutate – your child becomes the focus of your life. You’re torn in two.” As a foreign correspondent, finding a satisfactory work-life balance was particularly difficult. But when she was a full-time mum bringing up her children in the Balkans, she gained a new perspective on the things that people work in order to buy: “We don’t need half the rubbish people buy in the UK. Do you really need designer baby clothes?” However, she’s not advocating that women should forego career in favour of motherhood, and feels that the workplace battles her generation fought have prepared the ground for our generation to have a better work-life balance. 

Whitehouse is a vocal critic of newsrooms, which she says “neglect” the families of the foreign correspondents they dispatch to dangerous situations. In 17 years of her husband’s career, only once has somebody from a newspaper – the Times – contacted her to check everything was all right. How could this be remedied? Firstly, she says, a journalist calling with news of her husband should “think before they open their mouth” – because ringing late at night, and leaving terse messages such as “Your husband isn’t dead”, are common occurrences that raise more concerns than they alleviate. She illustrates her assertion that journalists are often thoughtless by describing a recent visit to Warminster in Wiltshire, site of an army barracks. “Reporters were asking the Army wives how they’d feel if their husbands were killed!” Secondly, she suggests an Internet forum could be established for war reporters and their families. “Men need an outlet where they can talk about trauma,” Whitehouse says, “and there could be a closed forum where people could ask advice, and post bits of information and messages of support.” 

Whitehouse hopes that, in the absence of such a forum, her book can offer some support to families in a similar position to her own. “No parenting guide I’ve ever seen tells you how to explain to your five-year-old why war has broken out, or what to say when your child asks if Daddy loves Iraqis more than he loves them.” In more ways than one, “Are We There Yet” is a first.
Rosie Whitehouse will be speaking at QI on Tuesday, June 26^th, at 7:30. Tickets will be £3 on the door. “Are We There Yet” can be bought from www.reportagepress.com – it costs £8.99 and part of the proceeds go to the Rory Peck Trust, which helps the families of freelance newsgatherers who are killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned. 

Rosie Whitehouse has a blog, which contains excerpts from her book: www.travelswithmyfrontlinefamily.blogspot.com
By Heather Ryan
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Once upon a time, Facebook was for Ivy Leaguers, iPods were for tech geeks, and CNN was for the politicos.
Nowadays, Oxford tutors are on Facebook and grandmothers carry iPods. Politicians are getting on YouTube! to reach the young reluctant voters they need to secure if they want to survive into the next decade.
Tony Blair thinks new media is a feral beast, but he’s smart enough to use it himself. When Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of France a month ago, Blair gave out he usual “welcome to the club” message statesmen send one another, but he did it over viral video. After chuckling at his school boy French, I have to give Blair credit. Like it or not, he knows there is no going back to the old-media days.
Back on my side of the pond, Hillary Clinton is doing her part to run a new-media campaign. This month, she asked voters to help pick her campaign song in a series of kitschy viral video spots, the last of which offered a decent parody of the last Soprano episode.
Do young Americans have really poor taste, because they picked Celine Dion’s “You and I”? More likely is that Hillary’s video campaign never reached the hip young things she was after. As Jessi Hempel of Businessweek explains on her blog, Hillary’s schtick comes across as decidedly old school, meant for TV networks. Internet video is its own beast, and the style needs to feel authentic. To come across as young and cool, you have to be young and cool.
For Barack Obama, a political novice, this is good news. And the Obama campaign has the chance to reap big benefits from YouTube video, namely the I’ve Got a Crush on Obama video recently launched by the comedy site BarelyPolitical.com. A sultry young woman in short shorts and a shorter t-shirt grinds up against posters of Barack and croons, “I can’t wait for 2008/Baby you’re the best candidate.”
A smart candidate would capitalize now to tap the population of young voters that no one’s been able to bring to the polls, despite all the chatter about youth activism each election year. A smart Obama would buy the rights to that video and post links to it on official campaign sites. A smart Obama would offer the 5 teens at BarelyPolitical a day shadowing him on Capital Hill, where they could video tape him at work, and YouTube! the footage.

A stodgy candidate would take offense at a video that highlights just how young and inexperienced Obama is. The video signals that Obama is young enough to attract a woman young enough to be the daughter or niece of most middle-aged voters.

I’m an Obama-skeptic, and so far, I can’t tell which camp he’s fallen into. And importantly, it’s not Obama’s own charisma that makes the video so powerful—it’s the fact that teens, not campaign staff, came up with it, that it rose to fame as part of the ideas MoshPit online, and was never planted into prominence by Obama2008.

Even Obama can’t force his way into social media—his application on Facebook has gotten eye rolls from most of my friends as “trying too hard.” David Cameron, who has one of the better political blogs, can’t force it either—Cameron’s site has few comments, and as far as I can tell, most Britons aren’t reading it.

That’s the problem for politicians in the new media age—success is about knowing how to ride the waves created by viewers and voters, not about making your own waves. What do you think—which political leaders “get” the Internet, and how much difference does it make to you if they do?
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

Hi all,
I’m taking a break from end-of-year packing to introduce myself, and this blog, to you. Mine is a big packing job, since I’m heading back to the US of A after 9 months as a Visiting Student in this watery isle and spire-y university. The year’s been incredible, and I leave with rich impressions of England and the English, most of which I’ve published in my opinions column at the Brown Daily Herald. If you’re interested, check out my musings.
I’ve been writing for the Herald since 2004, on politics, culture and how our generation (Y, if you were born between 1980 and 2000), experiences the world. Oftentimes, defining Gen Y culture has a lot to do with the technology and trends (iPods, e-books, wikipedia, facebook and blogs like this one) for which we 20-somethings are the guinea-pigs.
If there’s one place that the Internet has made its biggest impact, it’s in schools and universities—can you imagine writing an essay without Google or JStor? I can’t. And if you believe social theorists like David Brooks, who say that the biggest culture wars occur over education, that people are defined by educational experience, then changes in our world, in the lives of 20-something students, are the harbingers of changes in the world at large.
The second front in the Internet culture war is the world of journalism. As a Herald columnist, a blogger here and elsewhere and a news reporter for Cherwell and Cherwell24, I’ve watched news media slowly adjust to the Internet Age. Mainstream print papers are diving into the blogosphere; blogs are turning into big business. As the place we turn for the truth about our world, changing news media means big changes in our social worldview. Once again, as the first group to grow up with GoogleNews, LexisNexis, RSS feeds and CNN Pipeline, we, generation Y, are the test case.
Here at Instant Cappuccino, I’ll post news stories and videos about our changing world. I’ll post my thoughts on technology, politics and popular culture. As a forum for students, Cappuccino will focus on issues in education and the spread of information. As a blog, Cappuccino will be part of the transformation.

Of course, what makes our culture of Wikipedia and YouTube different from the first Internet revolution of Yahoo and Netscape, is that interaction is overtaking information as the premium capital.
So please, post your own thoughts. Tell me when (and this happens often) I am wrong about what’s trendy. Link to Cappuccino on your own blogs, and tell me what other sites I should be following. With your participation, over a cup of virtual coffee, we can make sense of the new world we live in, and predictions for the world to come.
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

Genet’s The Balcony is a very strange play. First performed in London in 1957, its opening night was laced with drama as Genet accused the director of ruining his play. Indeed, it’s a very easy to play to ruin: constructed in a series of overlong vignettes that drag pace and slow momentum, it’s a challenging task for any director.

The Balcony focuses on Madame Irma, the proprietress of a ‘house of illusions’. Clients from all walks of life come to The Grand Balcony to fulfil their fantasies. She provides the machinery for their odd, sometimes diabolic re-enactments: a Bishop chastises a beautiful young penitent, a Judge condemns a thief, a General rides his ‘young filly’ in battle. Meanwhile, a revolution is raging outside (a fact repeatedly brought to our attention by background gunfire: a nice touch, but unsubtle as it continued a few hours into the play). As insurgents foment rebellion, real figures of authority are deposed or killed, and their fake counterparts must take their places.

Meg Jayanth does a credible job of bringing this difficult piece to the stage, and must certainly be applauded for excellent stylistic vision. The set and costumes were both impeccable, and the opening of the second act was unconventional but highly effective. The play dragged considerably, however, and during many of the scenes I felt a lack of tension (sexual or otherwise). During the initial fantasies, the characters appeared more bored than aroused; I expected to squirm in my seat, but instead found myself wondering when the tableaus would end. The play, particularly in the first act, should cause a frisson of discomfort and voyeuristic guilt/pleasure. Unfortunately, the prevailing atmosphere was stale rather than electric.

Melissa Julian-Jones’ performance as Madame Irma grew on me. Much of the first act she flounced about, swishing her robe and performing the same distracting, fluttering gestures (a hand on the breast, a hand touching her hair). But she surprised and impressed with her depth in scenes with Carmen and in conveying her hopeless, masochistic love for The Chief of Police. Her chemistry with Laurie Penny’s Carmen made their scenes some of the most crackling of the night. This was partially due to Penny’s winning and natural performance. Morgan’s Chief of Police was terse and sinister, his megalomania more pronounced as the night wore on. The Bishop (David Coghill), Judge (Jonathan Totman), and General (Alex Stewart) all turned in convincing performances, but could have been more hyperbolic in their ‘roles’, the better to show anxiety when actually thrust into them.

Despite some glitches, this is certainly a production unlike most Oxford offerings. The Grand Balcony is worth a visit.

Lakshmi Krishnan

The Balcony runs all week at the OFS at 7:30 pm.

This version of ‘The Government Inspector’, directed by Sophie Pinn, is a lively, fast-moving comedy that provides a fun night of light entertainment. Gogol’s play is a comedy of errors based on a classic case of mistaken identity: the mayor and officials of a provincial town come to believe that a young visitor to their town, Khlestakov, is a government inspector.  In fact, Khlestakov is no more than a young minor aristocrat who is touring the country for the first time, squandering his father’s money on cards, wine and women.    
The comedy is derived from the obsequious kowtowing of the mayor, his family and the town officials towards Khlestakov.  Grotesque, sycophantic flattery ooze out of these characters, making it is so easy for Khlestakov to exploit them that our sympathy almost lies with him.  At a deeper level, the play is a satire on the hierarchical political structures of the government of Tsarist Russia, and a biting attack on the fickle and selfish nature of humankind. Pinn has chosen to treat the play as pure farce. 
There is deliberate over-acting, lots of slapstick humour and hysterical excitement on stage.  While this treatment will clearly not be to everyone’s taste, Pinn’s approach does produce a sparkling performance with plenty of hilarious moments and memorable characters. All of the cast were clearly dedicated to their roles, but the play owes its success in particular to a superb performance by Alex Worsnip as Khlestakov.  His strong stage presence brings exactly the right mix of imperiousness, arrogance and youthful exuberance to the role. 
There is good chemistry between him and his servant Osip (Austen Saunders), a minor but important character who is privileged with the insight of a Shakespearean Fool.  The Mayor (Philip Aspin) and his wife Anna (Emily MacKenzie) tend to over-act a little, even by the standards of this performance, but nonetheless they manage to garner plenty of laughs from the audience.  
Gogol’s play is firmly rooted within the social and political context of its time and deals with very specific dreams and fears of nineteenth-century provincial Russia: the myth of St Petersburg as a metropolitan paradise; the social climbing and toadying required to progress up through the ranks of government; the massive scale of corruption in the political system. 
Pinn’s production chooses to play down this historical context and instead stress the universal nature of Gogol’s themes.  Although the play undoubtedly loses something in doing this, it has the advantage of making it accessible to an audience with little background knowledge about Gogol’ or Russian society.   
Those who are seeking high-brow theatre would be best to avoid this version of ‘The Government Inspector’.  However, those celebrating the end of a challenging Oxford academic year and recovering from the sober intellectual reflection of exam season will undoubtedly find a much-needed remedy in this light, enjoyable and energetic comedy.

By Connor Doak

I’ve just heard that some members of OU staff are screening the feature-length pilot of Joss Whedon’s show Firefly at the Ultimate Picture Palace on Saturday, back-to-back with the 2005 film “Serenity”. For those of you who haven’t heard of Firefly, shame on you; you can be partially forgiven since the series, thanks to its premature cancellation in the States, was never broadcasted on our shores. But the word-of-mouth success of the DVD set and the hype of the spin-off film Serenity should have caught you by now.

It is possibly unsurprising that the series did not get the required ratings in the distant lands of our American cousins: those expecting another fast-paced, sexed-up teenage vampire-slaying fest à la Buffy and Angel were in for a disappointment. Here was a smart, dare I say character-based, “western in space” in which all the principal protagonists were, shock horror, over 25 years old. And it certainly didn’t help, considering the emphasis on gradual character progression, that Fox aired the 12 episodes (of 14 filmed) in the wrong order, back in its first showing in 2002.

The premise runs thus: in the future, where most planets seem to be colonised by a cross-breed of Americans and Chinese, veteran (for the losing side) Captain Mal Reynolds and his 4-man crew are dodging the Federation which now controls the galaxy, and are forced to scavenge off shipwrecks in space in their creaky-but-reliable little ‘Firefly’ vessel, Serenity (you see the TVàfilm link? Genius). Having picked up a suspicious young doctor and his mysterious cargo, however, they suddenly find themselves on the run from the all-pervasive law.

“Serenity” is effectively the same, save for the fact that it is set after the series (or at least the 14 episodes filmed) and their enemy is a very specific one: a zealous hit-man known only as The Operative, whose one purpose is to track down and recapture Reynolds’ fugitives. Its history is unprecedentedly sweet; in the aftermath of Firefly’s cancellation, the loyal fans who had seen its potential cried out as one, and set about converting, via the power of DVD, all their friends, families, everyone they knew to the ‘Browncoats’, a devoted online community who would fight and fight hard for Firefly’s return. In June 2003, their call was answered, as Whedon, Nathan Fillion (who plays Mal) and Adam Baldwin (who plays resident idiot tough-nut, Jayne) confirmed on the official forum that they were working on a film which would satisfy fans’ desire for closure.

The film, which came to be known in-production as “the Big Damn Movie”, was very well-received, topping the box-office in the UK, and achieving an average rating of 81% on film review site Rotten Tomatoes. The showing, therefore, is an excellent chance to catch this supreme slice of sci-fi gold on the big screen once more: and trust me, it is worth it for the space-chase set-pieces, which are far better executed here than the over-CGI’d clutter of the Star Wars prequels.

However, it is the series that really shines: the film necessarily has a very different feel and pace to the episodes, which don’t need to worry so much about exposition. In the film you get none of the great every-day scenes which take place around the ship’s dinner table (for example) in the series, which let the play-off of the characters really shine: Mal’s paternal attitude to his crew tempered by his need of brutality to survive, versus Jayne’s lust for action and wealth, no matter what the cost for his companions; the strange, strained co-existence of the priest, Book, with the refined prostitute, Inara; or the awkward tension between the Captain’s old friendship with fellow-veteran Zoe and her beloved husband, Wash.

For fans too, therefore, seeing the pilot episode of the series on the big screen would be too shiny an opportunity to miss. Especially considering the screening is in aid of Equality Now, a charity supported by Whedon himself, this comes as a highly recommended event.

Firefly / Serenity Double Bill

Saturday 16th June, 12:30pm (Firefly pilot)

15:00pm (Serenity)

Ultimate Picture Palace,

Jeune Street, off Cowley Road

More rarified but far more famous are the stenciled, spray-painted politically satirical works by Bansky, who is currently graffiti’s poster-boy on the international art scene and in the mass media. On one day this year Banksy, the pseudo-anonymous, yet wildly famous, Bristol-born and London-based graffiti writer, had three works auctioned off at Sotheby’s auction house in London. His Bombing Middle England, depicting pensioners bowling with bombs reached the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction of over £102,000, well over its £50,000 estimate. The other two works that sold that day, Balloon Girl and Bomb Hugger, went for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimate prices. What makes these prices most remarkable is not only that their provenance is from London’s grittier and grimier areas. Most of the hottest selling and most significant art produced and publicized in England since the nineties and the YBA movement was made inside the types of building Bansky began his artistic career by tagging. As Banksy gets more and more famous, his detractors are constantly carping that his inclusion in the realm of "high art" undermines whatever potential graffiti still has to function as a subversive, activist act.
But regardless of its ubiquity or the ability of a few artists to rise to success in the mainstream, money-saturated art-world, the medium remains capable of functioning as an activist statement. ‘Graffiti art is about appropriation of private property’, says Hugo Martinez, head of Brooklyn’s Martinez gallery, which is America’s oldest and most established exhibition space reserved exclusively for graffiti writes. ‘A graffiti writer is engaged in a collaboration, though unwilling, with the architect and the urban world’.
Ana Finel Honigman, critic and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi magazine website

Xenu is Loose:

I’m a Lab Rat, Get Me Out Of Here!

Play On Words

Having won awards in both Oxford and London, Tom Crawshaw’s ‘Play On Words’ goes up to Edinburgh and is sure to cause a stir with some of the critics. Described as a ‘tragi-comedy of quick witted punning and theatrical high-jinx’, it will be interesting to see how the play has developed since it’s run post-NWF. Certainly worth a visit.

The Oxford Imps

Monsters

Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow

Raz-Mataz

"Raz-Mataz. Post-punk posturing, rock’n’roll swaggering, ice caps melting and a celebration of all the living left to be done. The Ruskin School of Art and Oxford’s Experimental Theatre Company invite you to throw yourself off that velour lounger and into the shiznit". Explanation: electro DJs, dancing, art and a huge, glow-paint-coloured culture clash. Still confused? Go and find out for yourself: I will.

The Oxford Revue

Charlotte Brunsdon