Archive for the ‘Magazines’ Category
Adbusted
When I was high school, my friends and I played pranks that were slightly out of the ordinary. We printed out dozens of our favorite quotes and hung them around the school; we slipped messages into empty soda bottles and threw them into the town pool, for the lifeguards to discover in the morning. 
One particularly boring night we hung large newsprint signs about town, with large arrows helpfully directing motorists to turn right to find sheep. Another sign, with what we felt was exquisite cleverness, labeled the rough-hewn crossbar of a park fence, “Tree.”
If we were more self-aware at that time, and had heard of the phenomenon, we might have identified ourselves as nascent culture-jammers.
Why do I, at this moment, bring up these adolescent hijinks?
Because this week, for the first time, I purchased and read an issue of Adbusters magazine, a publication that holds itself out as the Bible of culture-jamming. Every page of this periodical is infused with the same earnest, raw, passionate spirit that inspired us back then–and I am not sure I mean this in a good way.
What is most noticeable about the magazine is that the writing in it isn’t very good. The subject matter is appropriate to a college freshman who is first discovering a sense of social consciousness; Starbucks, we learn, is evil and marketing, we are told, encourages young girls to present over-sexualized personae, which is also bad. The actual writing matches the sophistication of the ideas expressed. It is unpolished, coarse, and unimaginative.
My guess is that this style (or lack thereof) is an intentional choice, an attitude my college self might have expressed as “an unwillingness to accept a dominant aesthetic that priveleges syntax over emotion.” As I initially flipped through the pages of the magazine I was sympathetic to this philosophy, but soon wearied of such poetic musings as “Authenticity is/ Found in the ironic laugh/ Dripping from Al Gore’s patented shoes.” Bearing a remarkable similarity to the angsty verses my high school literary magazine might have published does not make a poem more genuine. It just makes it poorly written.
And on the subject of the philosophical purity of the organization behind the magazine that prides itself on its anti-consumerist stance…if the corporate monoculture is such a blight upon our society, why then did I buy this publication on the newstand at a Borders bookstore?
