Generation Gap

"Joey. " A drama starring Neill Barry, James Quinn and Elisa Heinsohn. Written and directed by Joseph Ellison. Photographed by Oliver Wood. Edited by Christopher Andrews. Music by Jim Roberger. Running time: 95 minutes. A Satori release. At the Roxy, 2021 Sansom st. Joseph Ellison's staunchly artless "Joey" is an Afterschool Special that's made a detour to theaters while en route to television. It's a role-reversal generation gap drama in which the parent does the mooning around, while the child - in this case, Joey - proves to be the responsible one. The plot is simple: Seventeen-year-old Joey (Neill Barry who, in terms of appearance and behavior, is more like 14)

University students are the wild card in the South Korean crisis. Even if the government and the opposition parties work out a compromise on electoral and other reforms, there is no guarantee either side can make the students accept it. While a hard core of leftist students have played a key role in organizing the current demonstrations, the vast majority of students join protests because they share the goal of ending the authoritarian rule...

It's a good thing the smoking ban doesn't apply to cigarette lighters, or most of the audience at Saturday's Stephen Marley show would have been hauled away in chains. On cue from the stage at the Fillmore at the TLA, the air was filled with hundreds of tiny flames, a Milky Way of butane and plastic. It's possible Marley is disproportionately beloved of smokers (tobacco or otherwise). But there was an element of ritual to the miniature conflagration, as if the crowd had come prepared to play its part in a time-honored ceremony.

The spirit sags. So do pants all over the country. For more than two decades now, people generally younger than, oh, 45, have been wearing baggy pants. It's said to be an outgrowth of prison chic. Prison, where you can't wear belts. Prison, where baggy clothes help hide weapons. Down sag the pants, revealing - a vibrant garden of flowered, striped, checked and blinding-white boxers for public inspection. Along with expanses of skin most people don't show. From ancient Rome to downtown 2007, kids like to imitate thugs.

At Saturday night's National Tap Dance Day performance at the Painted Bride, Linda Christensen, one of the organizers, quoted an audience member at an earlier performance as saying, "I thought tap was dead. " Far from it. On a generous bill including seven companies and three soloists - from Washington, Montreal and points in between - tap dancers from their teens into their 80s just about blew the roof off the Bride with their combined performing energy. Philadelphia's third annual celebration of tap (observed in other cities also around May 25, the birthday of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson)

Someone just dropped an office memo on my desk. Let me share it with you so you will gain insight into the difference between modern, enlightened journalism and the stodgy journalism of the past. Here it is: THE ABCS OF GENERATION X By Pat Kampert The generation that has grown up in the shadow of the Baby Boom is now coming of age. Understanding the forces that have shaped this diverse group is a key to covering Generation X, marketing our efforts to Gen X and relating to Xers in our midst.

During a brief recess in class recently, a few students lingered in the classroom, and burst into song. One young woman wearing portable radio earphones was leading the group in an harmonious chorus of "Lean on Me," a tune made popular by Bill Withers nearly two decades ago. I recognized the song, and spoke up to identify it - or so I thought. "No Linda, you're behind, you're out of date," exclaimed one of the students. They were singing a recently released, hard driving, reggaed-up-and- boogied-down version by a group called Club Nouveau.

After a wild week of record-smashing gains, the five-year-old bull market in stocks is living up to its reputation as a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot. But for Wall Street professionals whose lifetimes also include memories of market crashes, this market is much too high for comfort. The veterans who remember how much General Motors stock lost during the 1973-1974 bear market - $55.62 - or what the low point of the Dow Jones industrial average was after the 1929 Crash - 41.22 on July 8, 1932 - are more uneasy about the market today.

I suppose the notion of a generation gap first seeped into human mythology when Abraham smashed the idols in his father's shop and rejected the beliefs of his parents in what was, at the time, undoubtedly a radical and unwelcome move. That kind of tension has always existed between father and son, mother and daughter, old and young - more so when the society around them is jerking with change. What were the '60s about, anyhow, but a generation of young people smashing their parents' idols?

Occasionally, when he saw a man from the old neighborhood who had moved so far above his roots that he would barely acknowledge them, my father would shake his head and say with a humorous edge, "From Poland to polo in three generations. " It was his stock commentary on assimilation, on making it in America, on the immigrant experience. But it was also a commentary on the nature of success in a country whose economic ladder extended from the working class to the leisure class. In theory at least, we Americans worked our way up and out. Of work.

WASHINGTON - Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked Aaron Copland. The chief justice countered with Jimi Hendrix. That generational divide at the high court was on display Wednesday as the justices heard arguments about whether Congress acted properly in extending U.S. copyright protection to millions of works by foreign artists and authors that had been in the public domain - meaning they could be performed and used in other ways without paying...

Willing to put his mouth where the money is, singer-songwriter Tim Gleeson will perform selections from his solo CD, No Sad Songs , at your place. "They're called house concerts . . . there's lots of stuff about them on Google," Gleeson says in his Moorestown home studio, a pleasant, orderly space full of guitars and recording equipment. "I've done a couple so far. " Such is the low-fi yet high-tech life of a working American roots musician, even an established local performer whose work appears on other artists' recordings - including a disc recently nominated for a Grammy.

WHEN TATTLE spoke to Emma Stone last month about her role in "Easy A," the busy, 21-year-old actress said that when she finally gets some time off she wanted to catch up on her rest. Scratch that. Stone, whose star has been on the upswing since her debut in 2007's "Superbad," is going to segue from the big-screen adaptation of of Kathryn Stockett 's bestseller "The Help," into her first summer tentpole movie - the reboot of "Spider-Man. " According to Deadline.com, Stone has landed the role of Mary Jane Watson, played in the first three Spideys by Kirsten Dunst . Andrew Garfield ("Never Let me Go," "The Social Network")

There's more than just a generation gap between self-styled Levittown entrepreneur Kyle Kelly, 18, and Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler, 62. It's more of a Grand Canyonesque perception gap. On Feb. 20, Kelly and his brother Corbin, 19, threw a "Playboy Mansion Dance Party" for teens at the Yardley Community Center. Police, alarmed by reports of underage drinking outside the center and overcrowding inside, shut it down at 10 p.m. - an hour ahead of schedule. To Kelly, the party was successful and fun, with not a drop of alcohol found inside.

Sardines, anchovies, smelts. To know them is to love them. Getting to know them properly is the issue, but all that's needed is a "fresh" look. Most of us remember canned sardines or anchovies as something our parents or our parents' parents would eat at home while we turned our noses up. And perhaps that memory kept us from discovering the fresh varieties. "It's a generational thing," says Sam Mink, of the Oyster House, known by locals of another generation as the Sansom Street Oyster House.

How deeply ingrained in your life was the prerecession spending addiction? Look to your birth certificate for clues. That's one place Philadelphia University fashion-industry management professor Natalie W. Nixon checks when pondering how consumers superheated the nation's economy, only to be cooling it down now, one unspent dollar at a time. Nixon, who studies buying behavior and has worked in apparel manufacturing, notes that she is 39 and a member of Generation X - a group whose spending habits fall somewhere between those of the baby boomers and their children, Gen Y. And though the almighty American consumer may seem like one big, hungry giant, she says all three segments of shoppers crashed into the recession with different spending habits.

The U.S. women's basketball team was just off the medals stand, celebrating a 92-65 gold-medal drubbing of rival Australia. Assistant coach Dawn Staley said the world may have just seen the most talented women's hoops team ever assembled. "The most talented team - with the least amount of preparation," Staley said after the United States won for the fourth straight Olympics. "Other [U.S.] teams may have had more chemistry, more time to prepare, more time to be with one another.

Marlon Brando's famous line "I could have been a contender" isn't cited anywhere in The Rocker , but its sentiment - rueful and profound - is all over this rock-and-roll comedy about second chances. OK, maybe not all over, but stuck to it here and there like a piece of gum on the underside of a chair. A slight, silly comedy in the vein of Jack Black's School of Rock (but for the earlier film, Black might have been in this), The Rocker stars Rainn Wilson as Robert "Fish" Fishman, a total loser from Cleveland.

The spirit sags. So do pants all over the country. For more than two decades now, people generally younger than, oh, 45, have been wearing baggy pants. It's said to be an outgrowth of prison chic. Prison, where you can't wear belts. Prison, where baggy clothes help hide weapons. Down sag the pants, revealing - a vibrant garden of flowered, striped, checked and blinding-white boxers for public inspection. Along with expanses of skin most people don't show. From ancient Rome to downtown 2007, kids like to imitate thugs.

It's a good thing the smoking ban doesn't apply to cigarette lighters, or most of the audience at Saturday's Stephen Marley show would have been hauled away in chains. On cue from the stage at the Fillmore at the TLA, the air was filled with hundreds of tiny flames, a Milky Way of butane and plastic. It's possible Marley is disproportionately beloved of smokers (tobacco or otherwise). But there was an element of ritual to the miniature conflagration, as if the crowd had come prepared to play its part in a time-honored ceremony.