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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Twenty-nothing Revisited
September 04, 2012
So what was the result of all that “twenty-something” soul-searching that so enlivened the mass media over the last year? After months of delicate inquiry and painstaking attention to the subtleties of “our” generation’s experiences, angsts, and deep ...

Life as Style
American consumers are in the throes of a turgid love affair with multiculturalism. Having depleted our domestic cultural resources, we turn our jaded gaze elsewhere, looking for ever more exotic excitements, ever more picturesque pastimes. Signs of the illicit relationship crop ...

The Name-Caller
August 29, 2012
It’s the end of summer and the air is getting slightly sharper, slightly more articulate. The annual Minnesota State Fair just rolled into town—a colossal affair of farm animals, live music, fireworks, exhibits, fried cheese curds, corndogs, carnival rides and games, etc. ...

Sweet Portable You
Selections Palace Brothers, There Is No One What Will Take Care of You (Drag City) The most sincere heart-split to come out from this land in many a day, friends, layed out in a sprung-free style that brings to mind a holy mingling of the Carters and Blind Joe Death. A gnarled ...

A Nest of Ninnies
August 29, 2012
Selected Reviews The Germs, GI LP Pure punk rock fueled by hate. Darby Crash does a growl that might be “supposed to sound tough” in a world where pain wasn’t such a big deal and cars weren’t something to be afraid of. But the Germs lived in Los Angeles, and it sucked, ...

Let’s Talk Rock
August 29, 2012
A Cosmic Battle for Insanely Low Stakes Hilarious that rock criticism started with critics noticing things bands wouldn’t notice about themselves (ineptitude, accidental references, supernatural side-effects, mind-boggling stupidity) and ended (as it does every day, coughing ...

Picasso at 25
1963: Before Picasso In 1963, Chicago architect William Hartman was assigned the task of procuring an appropriate sculpture for the plaza in front of the newly-built civic center his firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, had designed. The center was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ...

Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!
An Exclusive Baffler Blunting! No one can say the New York Times is out of touch with the young. Like so many other organs of official culture, the Times has lately declared a newfound enthusiasm for all manifestations of The Hip, launching a new “Styles of the Times” ...

Twenty No-Think
The music is generically edgy, synth-poppy with a dollop of minor chords and staccato percussion—it makes clear references to all the record industry styles MTV so benumbingly purveys, giving every target market a slice of acoustic pie to say, hey, this show’s for you. The ...

The Packaging of a Literary Persona
The world’s only negative review of The Secret History by twenty-something superstar Donna Tartt, Knopf, 524 pages. I’m Nobody! / Who are you? / Are you Nobody — too? / Then there’s a pair of us? / Don’t tell—they’d advertise—you know! / How dreary to be Somebody ...

Art as Lifestyle (Monoculturalism)
The following was read at a real-life provocation staged by The Baffler on October 21, 1992 at the Hot House, a Chicago “performance space” and favorite art-lifestyle hangout. Capture the ambience of the moment by shouting this piece angrily as loud as you can and tearing ...

Riot in the Eye
Five Dream Units: 1. Knock the frog 2. Kick it out 3. Push it through 4. Cranial amphibian 5. Forget the happening 6. Your head/furnace He brushed his teeth with rainwater and mowed his lawn with billy goats. He marvelled at certain sticks and tufts of moss he found in the ...