A New Year is the Future Still Orange?

Of course it is a New Year, yes undoubtedly. All the signifiers tell me so. It has snowed, the numbers on the top right have altered to 2010/ twenty ten; yes pronounced like that I note by those in the swinging know. Sounds rather Americanized in my view. Regardless of that undeniable numerical change, call it procrastination, writer's malaise (or any other term that would sufficiently describe absence of entry), there are things that I still have to execute from my little black book regarding 2009. Those of you that know me well, few I hasten to add, will be aware of my avid need to scribble, capture and consider 'the way of things'. A blissfully vague term I know, but wholly convenient. This woolly term, one understands, encapsulates all manners of observation. Given that there are a selection of choice topics to discuss from dated leafs of the late year, the following additions will be consumed with 'past musts'; to explain, I must write about them before they become simply pasts or too passe.

Teenage Dream - Tangerine Cream

I take my inspiration for the given title from the everyday street-scene; possible pretty young things smothered with the aesthetic slick. In short, a look of 'ever-glow orange' is fast becoming ingrained as the acceptable norm within contemporary culture and its streaky band of female youths. Albeit not a direct reference to Edgar Froese and the 1967 German electronic group, the band's namesake seemed to be a recurrent theme in my mind whilst sighting this hegemonic cosmetic wave. I wave not. Sad is the need to daub, lose complexions or clarity of individuality. Sadder still seems the inescapable dilemma for those who simply cannot go out without facial bottled orange. So one, this one, observes a surreal layered on sense of security, and perhaps a more sinister understanding of what 'lipstick, powder and paint' now evokes. For those teens who can afford the time, expense and skin scare the 'spray tan' or cancer booth may accompany the 'ever-glow' look. The orange-faced Oompa Loompa's in the more Deppian version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thus stand to look less like Wonkers than the young girls entrenched in this blanket beauty faux pas. The compulsory coiffure, straighten and spray further enhanced by lashes that emulate a look of 'dead-leg tarantula' accompanied by 'the glow' surely wards off rather than rewards with the admiring eye of other. Perhaps the message portrayed by this image should thus read " back off should you dare to catch a glimpse of something natural!"Should the future foetal scan be child equipped with mascara wand in hand preparing to be seen looking 'the look' at the premiere, the birth? Does the tan become an imperative spray to accompany deodorant? Or does one simply look at our consumerist culture as a blind, oblivious happy contender of the ridiculous? Arguable, peppered with pity for the young impressionables on one hand, and a good dose of Lacanian 'Lack' on the other.