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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

They Live!
January 18, 2013
I was just sitting down to dinner when I heard a soft tapping at my apartment door. Opening it warily I found myself gaping up at a sultry giantess in a strapless cocktail dress. Eight feet tall at least, she glowered down at me with a look of woozy, carnal hunger. ...

In the Good Old Wallow Time
As more than 500 U.S. troops disembarked in the Philippines last February, double that number were suiting up on the other side of the world for one of Washington’s more secretive and bizarre tribal rituals. The exclusive Military Order of the Carabao, founded in 1900 by ...

The Rod of Correction: Cogito Oprah Sum
January 18, 2013
The critical impulse has long been the most disreputable desire in the great sensorium of our culture, since sating it usually means short-circuiting a host of other, more lucrative reflexes in the consumer body politic. From the solons of civic journalism to the touts of the ...

The Toys Are Us
January 17, 2013
It’s not often in art that the medium is actually the message, or that form really determines content. But computer animation is shaping up as an exception. Early, hand-drawn cartoons bristled with furry creatures, bucolic scenery, fauns: the familiar Disney pastoral. ...

The Mirror Myth
There are a lot of complaints these days about the declining quality of movie fare, and the worsening taste of the public is typically asked to shoulder a good part of the blame. Other causes are cited as well. When the old studio system collapsed, the high-profile chiefs who ...

The Poetry of Commerce
January 17, 2013
“Who needs God when you’ve got Capital?” mused art critic Peter Schjeldahl in a 1997 salute to Las Vegas. The saying might well have stood as art criticism’s motto of the Nineties. After all, it’s clearly the guiding sentiment of Schjeldahl’s mentor, Dave Hickey, ...

Invisible Hand Job
January 17, 2013
Years from now, the most memorable aspect of our late technology bubble will likely be the palaver. Whether all the hot air pumped up the bubble or the bubble inspired the grandiose talk, our age will forever be remembered for the honking load of bushwa Americans swallowed, at ...

Fear and Lofting in a Silicon Boomtown
I lost a pretty typical argument a while ago with a security manager at San Francisco Centre Mall. The guards had just thrown out a scraggly couple rather than let them use the bathroom. The manager stuck to his three word explanation: “They’re not shopping.” Not much I ...

The Banality of Leisure
January 17, 2013
The leisure class is dead: According to a 1999 article in the New York Times, even the wealthiest of Manhattan trust fund twenty-somethings are seeking gainful employment (“The Rich Find It’s Uncool Not to Have a Job,” announced the bold type.) We are all doing our part ...

Chicago ’72
When future historians of twentieth-century American politics go looking for a single scene with which to encapsulate the Great Reaction against Sixties radicalism and reform—now mercilessly barreling toward its fourth decade—they might do well to examine the harshly lit ...

Generation Backlash
January 17, 2013
It’s back! Bet you thought all that blather about Generation X had ended, what with Douglas Coupland’s sales declining and slacker movies failing at the box office. But, no, the idea of Generation X has returned with a vengeance. This time it’s not about culture, it’s ...