text by GLENN O’BRIEN art from SANTE D’ORAZIO We are living in a world of inverted values. Youth is today accorded the respect and admiration that was once given to age, and elders are despised or dismissed as irrelevent. They are not in keeping with fashion or with modernism, in that they are not new and hence better than anything ever seen before. And so everywhere aging adults desperately resort to undignified strategies of being perceived as younger than they are. Oh, the legions of mutton dressed as lamb! Women who can afford to are having their faces painstakingly rebuilt to resemble those of their youth, while men are exhorted to dye their hair and beards, and to take pills to produce erections that may last up to six hours. Whereas once youths did what they could to appear older and more mature, taking joy in putting on the long…