Thinking of the worst Halloween costume involves an artful (rather than scientific) calculation of all the possible pitfalls of holiday disguise: too-clever-by-half current events-references, outmoded pop-culture allusions, unsuccessfully scary (or sexy) get-ups.
In this proudly Protestant, mercantile "Great Britain", the balance of power shifted from the royal court to Westminster and the City, and the aristocratic culture seemed outmoded and exclusive.
Instead, it shows us the notion that you begin on the fringe and climb some invisible ladder until you storm the bastions of high culture is outmoded, and no longer has any relevance in the way theatre operates either artistically or as an ecology.
(Of course, those sorry gay men in their 30s and 40s, who allegedly cling to an outmoded, passé version of gay culture, must be the very same people who, only a few years earlier, were those pioneering gay teenagers, taking their first innocent steps in a brave new world without homophobia, ignorant of gay culture and indifferent to it).
The risk is that we blind ourselves even further to the outmoded ways of thinking coursing through culture today.
Such robust attributes, however praiseworthy, are outmoded in the face of pop-culture platitudes designed to make us think sugar is bad.
Instant-nostalgia snapshots are part of a culture-wide fascination with outmoded technology and "dead media" (Mr. Sterling's term) that encompasses everything from the cults for manual typewriters and cassettes to the steampunk movement's fetish for Victoriana to the recent movie "Super 8".
O'Neal also sought to transform the company's clannish culture, which he regarded as outmoded and exclusionary and, most important, a drag on competitiveness.
For some scholars, defining American Indian cultures by region is an outmoded method, unrealistically schematic.
"The whole Tuvan culture was disappearing because it was outmoded, shall we say, under the Soviet system," Ralph Leighton, the author of "Tuva or Bust!
