Great Martinis

I've been thinking a lot about circles of influence in the independent music world. Also on my mind have been their antecedents in the domain of literature and fine art, as in the first flowerings of "Bohemia" in pre-1848 Paris and its subsequent rhizomatic dispersals and revivals. The other day, though, I realized that I have plenty of material to reflect on that is directly bound up with my own experiences, particularly in relation to Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life and the "Bad List" it presided over in the mid-1990s. Take this message, for example, from an exchange during the list's first year:

Date: Fri, 13 May 94 13:52:29 CDT
From: ana marie cox <amc2@midway.uchicago.edu>
To: Derek Kompare <dkompare@macc.wisc.edu>
Cc: BADSUBJECTS@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: The Baffler

> Well, The Baffler *is* one of the most interesting journal/zines/critical voices around
> these days. The last couple issues are angry and thought-provoking.
>
> But...
>
> Are these guys full of themselves or what?!?!?!?
>
> I find The Baffler's editorial "we" to be just as oppressive as the corporate consumer
> "we" force fed to us. I thought I was being clever in calling them "latter day
> Menckenite wanna-bes" in a paper I presented last month; but I had no idea they'd
> already taken *pride* in touting themselves as the new American Mercury. Jeez!

MEGA DITTOS FROM U of C, home to the Baffler Boys.

If you think that Seth, Tom, Diamonds etal are annoying in print, I officially invite you to come to Hype Park and hang with them in person.

I too dig their scathing ribbing of the culture industry, but jesus, they must realize that any attention the baffler has gotten (nice blurbs at the end, eh?) has come from the very industry they critique.

they also refuse to believe that anyone besides psuedo-academics like themselves can possibly muster the acumen to resist this culture industry. Tom's essay on Sassy (baffler #5) is a great example: he says "look, these people are trying to tell young girls that dressing in a certain (grunge) way is equivalen to rebellion, then using this to sell (grunge) clothing." ok, fine, but then he says "and these girls are (metaphorically and literally) buying it." i don't think tom has spoken to a teenage girl since his youth, and i bet even then he was scared of them.

but sexism in the baffler is another subject...that's just one more thing they have in common with the 30s lefties they ape. (jesus they even dress like funking ezra pound clones, tiny speckles, wide-legged trousers and all..)

sorry to flame, but they annoy me. great martinis, tho.

ana

Ana Marie Cox * "I listen to *Primus,* I listen to
University of Chicago * *Pavement*..."
amc2@midway.uchicago.edu * --tv ad for Best Buy dept. store

Ana, as many of you know, went from her tender undergrad days to a year in a doctoral program at UC Berkeley, during which time she joined our editorial ranks -- and greatly helped us to improve our design sensibility, I might add -- before leaving school to become an editor, then a pundit, then a novelist and now, I guess, a media personality who moves within the interstices delimited by those terms. And Tom Frank, he of the wide-legged trousers and "tiny speckles," parlayed his skills with gin, vermouth and an olive into an impressive career as someone who writes screeds of substance, such as What's the Matter With Kansas? Not to mention that, in his undergrad days, he used to DJ in the time slot after Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, an association that no doubt charmed the insider-trading mindset of Ana, despite her complaints about how his boys club -- "like Urge Overkill," she once told me -- treated women with smarts and sass. The Baffler, in other words, is a good place to track circles of influence pertinent to our generation, just like McSweeney's -- to which I am more remotely and tenuously connected by personal experience -- or N+1.

( Read on about Bourdieu. And me, sort of. . . )