PBR You Kidding Me?

Today Netta e-mailed me the upcoming feature in Adbusters. After reading it, I reflected and sent her the following e-mail:

Yeah, this article is so defeatist. After I took a minute to criticize the writer (step 1), I realized he must have been pressed on a Tuesday to meet a Thursday deadline, so he hopped to that club on Wednesday, ended up blowing lines off that girl's Polaroid with her and Bruce Willis's nephew, and hit the send from his DELL. DESKTOP. some time around 7 am on Thursday. This could explain the fixed-gear bike fallacy (they can, and often do, have brakes) that could have been easily warded off with that last, crucial Wikipedia scan.

Some counterpoints:

That last paragraph is self-obsessed just by being! The Lost Generation died off before WW2. And now that acid and cocaine are illegal, the only things we can rebel against are the war on drugs and gas prices and the Right's deathgrip on consumer efficacy, by getting high and going on a bike ride to the thrift store.

Here's something that "feels real": cash. So having a college degree, especially in the progressive sciences, not only allows you to criticize every aspect of the feeding machine your paycheck powers, but to do so with the backing of, you guessed it, a government-funded institution.

"We are the last generation." He's really given up. He considered throwing those rocks (at a vacant housing development? talk about subversion!) and decided to reveal the huge conflict of interest apparent in this article: the royal "we" and the titular "hipster" are inseparable yet unwilling to admit their point of intersection, the reporter.

Wearing non prescription glasses (I have some) and skinny jeans (I have multiple) and listening to Deerhoof (you've probably never even heard of them) on your iPod (I don't have one, or a Facebook) while making sure everyone on the bus can SEE that you're reading Bukowski (shhh--I haven't read Bukowski, but Pete Doherty interviewed him in VICE) probably has little to do with a disillusioned backlash (not to be ironic) to the West's ignorant overconsumption and excessive reproduction of style and standard. Maybe everyone feels so snubbed by Hollywood that it's less hurtful to create mini, Internet Hollywoods or even pitch them up under a 300-year old bridge (et voila, DUMBO--"Down Underneath the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge" DUH!).

But before this sounds too optimistic, I'll acquiesce to the conservative evildoers who Barry O's obviously grinding a self-challenging, earth-conscious cog against: the American Apparel has been pulled so far towards the belly button that we've been looking for nipple on Last Night's Party instead of even glancing at the dynamic shift occuring in our history that accompanies any change in power. Call it our New Millenium American Dream: We won't take the President, but we'll take a tip from his pastoral origins. Cowboy-fit jeans, white v-neck, and the interning class's perverted darling, piss ass beer.