Dude, we've been trying to reach you for like 20 years. We thought for sure we had talked to you about all this at recess in 1985, but you probably didn't listen to us because we were wearing pants with an elastic waistband. Maybe you didn’t hear us, but didn't we all piss and moan about how nothing was authentic anymore and that even taking drugs was useless, because even "the man" was taking them; and how pointless it was to even try to be different because someone’s college age brother would tease us to tears if we even attempted to "be different" by telling us (boorishly like young college age guys are when they have 2 bits of knowledge to rub together) the exact historical significance of wearing torn jeans or black velvet and old lace; how we couldn’t be punk because that was already over. We pushed up our glasses and talked about how greenhouse gases were going to kill us, if the nukes didn’t first; some things never seem to change.

What am I going on about? No one reads history, and don’t I wish I could write a useless book for the set that some how even managed to miss “Fight Club”.

i can't believe i'm going to write this, because i used to hate these kinds of posts when i was a paid subscriber. it seems like every headline article has at least about a dozen. so i'll just add to the carton.

this article pretty much sums up why i have not renewed my salon.com subscription.

catchy headline, good title.

but what follows (i think, i'm not sure, i skimmed after the first page) is an absolutely lifeless, dull article full on intellectual pap that has nothing to do with my life, my community groups, my neighborhood volunteerism, my optimism, my convinctions, my energy, my friends, my family, and my america at all whatsoever. shucks, this doesn't even touch the my-space'd crunked out apathetic hipster punks i know.

*yawn*

now with my day pass, i'm going to go read dear cary and the fix. omg, call the disillusioned bohos, i need to be restrained.

peace out, salonites. a vacation outside of new york and san francisco might do y'all some good.

ps - _catcher in the rye_ still works for these purposes, i swear.

You know, mid-life crisis stuff.

Kids and 20-somethings have grown up with this celebu-pop-punk'd crap ... nobody for a second thinks anything described in this article is "cool".

The underground is above ground now thanks to the internet, yeah, but the people who based their lives on that stuff were pretty lame anyway (as shown by what, High Fidelity?).

Something tells me that in the 90s, Niedzviecki was a big fan of the journal The Baffler, and used most of his carefully saved back issues as fodder for this book. The Baffler also published a collection of its essays in the 1997 book, Commodify Your Dissent, which, gee, happens to address just about all of Niedzviecki's supposedly eye-opening observations. I daresay that criticism of comsumer culture, et al. wasn't quite a revelation in the mid-90s, either. Interesting to some, perhaps, but seriously...this news is about as fresh as a week-old baguette that can double as a bat to whap Niedzviecki on the head with. Either tell us something new or get with the program, sheesh.

Sure it's possible to say that the pose of rebellion is common and trite. But the shedding of one culture's skin as another is born is a cyclical event, like Beltane or Lent. Did the Sex Pistols or X-Ray Spex ever care that already punk had been invented a thousand times previous? Was Greil Marcus ever less in awe? Look, when I went, as a poor kid, to a private high school in the nineties, no one paid me any attention that I listened to Bad Brains, Mudhoney and Nirvana (and neither did I: they were just a few bands I liked among many) until senior year, when suddenly everyone else was interested too, and the phenomenon that commodifies individuality appeared in my lifetime. But no one then seemed to think it was the first time it had happened. Look at Christianity, for crissakes.

Of course the thought that everyone can be a celebrity is far fetched, just like playing the lottery. But the most special, the most transcendent aspect of, say, Elvis was his lack of special-ness, that he was just like everyone else, only more so. The most phenomenal of superstars distill popular culture and sniff out latent trends. Leaders lead the masses, individuals lead themselves, and in doing so, fire the sparks.

There are still plenty of individuals living extraordinary lives. I consider myself lucky enough to have known a few truly genuine people, whose company I would not trade for a thousand hipsters or rock stars. Consumer culture can do what it likes. It won’t change a thing about the rest of us.

Funny article - it argues against the book's supposed claim that our consumer culture has (1) instilled in everyone the belief that they are special and unique, and then (2) provided bankrupt cliches as aspirational models, creating (3) a large group of deluded and passive consumers convinced of their own specialness.

But the article itself is a name-dropping exercise in proving the author's specialness. The next time he wants to write derisively about a motel receptionist, he should remember that there may not really be that much of a difference at the end of the day between helping travelers get a good night’s sleep while they’re away from their families, and writing puff pieces for an online magazine – no matter how special the author wants to think he is.

And if anyone is interested in my opinion, this is exactly what’s wrong with the left today – that an editor at a self described “liberal, intellectual” media outlet thinks that this type of writing is worth publishing on the front page. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but when did the left decide it was okay to despise the working class?

-AJ