Latest news with #Zillennial
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse' Review: Down the Y2K Clickhole
The image is instantly familiar: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears crammed into a car, caught in a paparazzi flash, on the cover of The New York Post. That iconic photograph, from 2006, and the inside article's headline — '3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse' — conjures a time when Calvin Klein boxers peeked out from low-rise jeans, pop star aspirants pinned their hopes on MTV's 'Total Request Live,' and a juicy tabloid meltdown could end a career. In 'The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse,' a deliciously fizzy new musical from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley that opened Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, something is different in this version of the photo. The painted tableau of the three bimbos that looms briefly onstage contains a previously unnoticed detail: a slim wrist, at the edge of the frame, dangling a charm bracelet that spells out 'Coco.' Now, in 2025, a Zillennial internet sleuth who goes by Brainworm (Milly Shapiro) fills us in: Coco was a one-hit wannabe who had uploaded her own music videos to YouTube in the hopes of going viral, or at least bacterial, before she disappeared. We see the red-maned Coco (Keri René Fuller) appear onstage in a midriff-exposing top, belting out a murderously upbeat tune. 'I don't think therefore I am!' she sings before needling her listeners: 'the less you try / the more they cry out for ur bag of tricks / (they're dumb as bricks).' The song is catchy as hell, and plays like an underdog bid for MTV immortality. Brainworm enlists the help of two other 'worms' — teenage shut-ins who also spend their waking lives online — to track down Coco: Earworm (Luke Islam), who sports cat ears and decodes pop culture and fashion, and Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk), who sifts through media and politics from his Nebraska bedroom. Like Brainworm, who identifies as an 'intersectional feminist' and specializes in tracking down missing girls, they are descendants of and Tumblr true-crime threads. Soon, they fall into a clickhole of clues. An obituary for Coco surfaces, which mentions that she 'went on a bender and spiraled out of control.' Grainy flip-phone photos are studied. Is that a knife jammed into a clothing rack? Could it have been used as a murder weapon? And what to make of the 'Coco' charm bracelet Brainworm received from an anonymous sender? Is it a hoax? In their search, the worms leave no monogrammed outfit unturned. (Cole McCarty's costumes revisit the era's rhinestone-studded jeans, velour tracksuits and garish, faux-glam accessories.) And lyrics to Coco's song are obsessively analyzed. The best of the musical's tunes, which includes Coco's ecce bimbo opener as well as more speculative numbers sung by the worms in places like Walmart, have the tingle of soda pop reaching a tender spot at the back of your throat. (The music director Dan Schlosberg leads a small but mighty band upstage.) While it has become a trope for shows to display projections of group chats or online comments (often with redundant voice-over), 'Bimbo' refreshingly steers clear of such contrivances. Under Rory Pelsue's fluid direction, we hear online comments voice-bombing Brainworm's internal monologue. They range from fetishistic ('show me your toes') to hostile ('my day sucked and you made it worse'), and are alternately read aloud by Brainworm and menacingly embodied by the other worms. Unsurprisingly, the more vicious the comments, the greater the number of viewers on the worms' TikTok channels. Breslin and Foley, whose previous work includes 'Circle Jerk' — a fantasia about the creation of an indomitable influencer — bring a similar fascination with the desires and insecurities of the extremely online to 'Bimbo.' But their new musical also ventures beyond cybernated spheres into a world largely devoid of technology. In this analog world, we meet Coco's mother (Sara Gettelfinger) and sister (Natalie Walker), who reveal a very different side of Coco. To say more would spoil the plot-twisty show, which wastes not a second of its 90 minutes. (Some of those soap-operatic turns recall Michael R. Jackson's equally ambitious, though less disciplined 'White Girl in Danger.') Especially in its latter half, 'Bimbo' traverses the gap between the very online and the very not online with exuberant intelligence. Earworm and Bookworm have a lovely number about who they are in their private realities, when no one's looking at them. For a show about pop stardom and fandom, it has a surprising amount to say about oblivion — and our inalienable right to it.
AsiaOne
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- AsiaOne
Why I attended The Click Five's concert in Singapore with strangers for nostalgia, Entertainment News
Has anyone else met with this same plight when it comes to finding concert mates? An artiste you love announces that they're coming to Singapore. You forward it to your friends on Instagram. Then, silence. When you're as avid a concertgoer as I am, it's not easy to find friends who are always enthusiastic about shelling out hundreds of dollars to see the next headline act in Singapore. When American pop-rock band The Click Five released tickets to their reunion concert earlier this year, I considered going solo, but decided my experience would probably be enhanced with another fan who shared the same sense of nostalgia. Game plan: Get tickets first, find concert buddy later Within 15 minutes, tickets at the presale for The Click Five's May 6 concert in Singapore were sold out. It would be their first show here in 15 years since they last performed at the Celebration@Marina Bay event in 2010, and clearly, music fans here missed them so. I emerged with a pair, deciding that listing my extra ticket (singular) on Carousell was worth a shot. My ticket was listed without markups, just a plea to find a kindred spirit. To my surprise, unlike the lukewarm responses my friends had shown prior, my ticket (and I) was in high demand: What a feeling! Within minutes, I received multiple friend requests from strangers. New friendships forged thanks to old tunes I met up with three women who adopted me into their friend group for the night. There we were, four grown-ups who'd come off from a full day of work and were ready to unleash their inner child, immersed in the soundtrack of our early teens. I offered my newfound friends a friendship bracelet with The Click Five's music references to mark the night's events. Speaking of which, fans would be happy to know merchandise were available for purchase, and items ranged from guitar picks to band tees. The sights and sounds of nostalgia We agreed that old and tired Zillennial bones were not built to squeeze in a sweaty mosh pit, so we stood comfortably flushed towards the back of the room. Still, the concert itself was such a blast - I found myself in a Time Machine , transported back to the early 2000s as The Click Five strummed their timeless hits such as Jenny, Just the Girl and Pop Princess - tracks that I would have felt so cool displaying on my Friendster account from way back when. The setlist comprised of a good mix of pop-rock hits with the band's recognisable trademark of confessional lyrics, such as Happy Birthday and Addicted to Me, with the numerous ballads that saw the crowd gently swaying along to. The spotlight sometimes lit the faces of fellow concert attendees aglow, and I saw bright smiles and some tears stream down their faces. There was also something beautiful about singing along to songs I hadn't thought about in years - it was like meeting a long-lost friend and realising they haven't changed all that much. And despite this being the first time I'm meeting my concert buddies, I doubt I would have enjoyed myself this much if it weren't for the same enthusiasm they brought. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Click Five (@theclickfive) All night-long, lead singer Kyle Patrick also playfully bantered with the audience with his laid-back humour. He verified if we were all born before their last concert here in 2010, and mentioned how the songs reminded him of shopping for slim-cut pants in the women's department back in the early 2000s when it was cool. One lucky concertgoer even joined the band on stage as he showed off his guitar-playing skills! The song of choice for this fun participatory segment? Hot to Go!. It was the first time I'd been in a crowd that danced along to the song's viral cheerleading moves that spelt H-O-T-T-O-G-O. As a massive Chappell Roan fan, a core memory was formed. I shed a tear or two to their acoustic rendition of Don't Let Me Go. The stripped-down performance and the lyrics "Every night I long for this, making up what I miss" seemed to echo both the band's address to fans since they stopped making music together in the last decade, as well as the crowd's yearning for a time from their younger days. Now, in my late twenties, I think nostalgia might just be my favourite feeling: It's bittersweet, and as I learnt last night, warm like a glass of hot chocolate when shared with friends - whether they're new, old, or ones you made in a crowd of music fans.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Fewer friends, outlets and direction: Why boys are dying by suicide at an inordinate pace.
If you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text "Hopeline" to the National Crisis Text Line at 741-741. When Dr. Jeffrey Karst sits down with boys for therapy sessions, he sometimes has to peel back extra layers of behaviors learned over time. There's the veil of stoic indifference, what it means to be a man, and the sense that sharing feelings is a sign of weakness. That hasn't been helped by the recent culture wars dictating the definitions of masculinity, said Karst, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "That can make some boys feel very hopeless about their future if they don't match what is expected of them in our current society," Karst said. "It's really hard for a lot of the boys I talk to to think about what values are important to (them) and what is actually going to be valued in society. They feel very alone." Breaking through to access the child's radical authentic self, as Karst describes it, is increasingly important at a time when young men aged 18 to 24 in Wisconsin are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than young women in that same age range, according to data published by the state Office of Children's Mental Health Tuesday. Even prior to new adulthood, however, boys between 10 and 17 were more than twice as likely than girls to die by suicide, the factsheet found. Part of the challenge with boys, said Karst, comes down to combatting traditional masculine stereotypes. Another challenge, Karst said, is access to firearms, the most lethal means of suicide. "There's been a few inflection points, including the pandemic, but a lot of these are long-standing challenges," Karst said. While men make up 50% of the U.S. population, research shows that four out of five suicide deaths from 2023 were men. What's more, the youngest generations of men, Gen Z (18-23) and Zillennial (24-30), are reporting the highest levels of emotional distress and suicidal thoughts compared to other generations of men. Surveys also revealed that, compared to men 30 years prior, more than a quarter of young men don't have meaningful social connections. At the same time, most young men feel misunderstood by women. Men also express their emotional distress differently than women. Typically, boys and men present with a more brusque exterior: irritability and anger on one end, withdrawal on the other. In Wisconsin, anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts have increased among high school boys, according to the 2023 Wisconsin Youth Risk Behavior Report. More than a third of high school boys said they were anxious; another quarter reported feeling a persistent sadness or hopelessness. The picture of a traditional male breadwinner and protector of the family has shifted dramatically over the decades. And while redefining those traditions has helped expand narrow ideas of gender and broaden career possibilities for girls and young women, some boys may feel they are at an impasse. For Linda Hall, executive director of the Wisconsin Office of Children's Mental Health, this comes through as boys and young men not seeing a place for themselves in the future. "We're not looking at boys for those traditional roles anymore, so the question becomes, 'What are we building towards?' and 'Where are we trying to go?'" Hall said. That sense of loss pans out in a few ways. Fewer boys are graduating from college, if they go at all, Hall said. Where Wisconsin women aged 25-34 received their college degrees 42% of the time, just 32% of Wisconsin men in that same age group received theirs, according to the Brookings Institute. It also conjures existential dread, Karst said. For the boys Karst treats, if they are unable to see their value in society, they won't feel value in themselves. That opens the door to other vulnerabilities. "When they don't feel value, when they feel alone, sometimes they're drawn into these fringe groups where misogyny and scapegoating occur, rather than actually just finding support," Karst said. Compounding that, boys and young men typically don't reach out to one another when they're struggling, Karst said. Some of that is the result of not having close connections in the first place. Karst noted that, even 15 years ago, playing video games was a social hobby. Now, most boys play video games with people they know, but they're doing so with headphones on alone in their rooms. If they talk, it tends to be online, which robs young people of seeing the consequences of their words. For example, if you're teasing someone and see them react tearfully, chances are you'll change your tone, Karst said. But missing those basic cues can build into a larger problem. "They're really missing that opportunity to connect with friends on an actual emotional level," Karst said. When one of Hall's sons was struggling in school, he went to a school psychologist. At first, it didn't go well. He didn't open up. Talking about feelings in an office space wasn't comfortable. The psychologist decided to turn the appointment into a walking session. They went outside and walked the perimeter of the school. "That was fundamental. That was life-changing, because he felt a connection to her," Hall said. Later, when he got to high school, he recommended the same psychologist to his other male friends. On another occasion, when Hall suggested a therapist put a basketball hoop in his office, her son felt able to open up because he had another activity he could put some of that tension toward. Hall and Karst both said that when adults, and especially male adults, model healthy behaviors, it can help normalize emotional expressions. That might look like verbalizing your own feelings and asking your son, without judgment, about his feelings. For Karst, modeling is the biggest way to help boys and young men reach out. In-person socializing through hobbies and extracurriculars, can also create a sense of solidarity and bonding. Taking time, more generally, to go outside offers natural serotonin boosts and is really easy to do, Hall said. "Adults really need to see beyond what can present as just disruptive or combative behavior," Karst said. "It can really represent true emotional suffering." Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She welcomes story tips and feedback. You can reach her at neilbert@ or view her X (Twitter) profile at @natalie_eilbert. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In Wisconsin, young men die by suicide at 4 times the rate of girls
