Tidbits

[staleyg]

I just read Up with Grups in New York Magazine and found it pretty interesting in terms of how I see my life. I still buy my jeans at old Navy, but I definitely identify with the unwork ethic of sorts. What do yall think?

Did anyone read Calvin Trillin's essay about Alice? Anyone? muffybolding?

Last Saturday we had the first ever Memphis Rock-n-Romp and it

Comments

[baldomom]

I just totally ignored the economics of that article. On those terms, I found it interesting but not at all different from what anyone else has ever said about Generation X. "Don't wanna work for no soul-sucking jerk"--that was Beck, right? And "Alterna-Dad?" Um, how is that different from hipMama except that Neal Pollack writes for Salon and Nerve and is somehow a Big Writer Guy because he's a man?

But still: No fucking Wiggles. I don't think that can ever be overstated.

[staleyg]

i thought the pictures were hilarious--i mean those people looked exactly alike. i have the print version so there may be more there, but dang.

[leakyandsnort]

did you read last months' Details article on Gen X? (I loved it.)

[staleyg]

who wrote it? (so i can google it)

[freakstorm]

yes, it's true. Our kids are just not cool without us. I don't know. We seem to live the lifestyle but we don't have any money. If we had real day jobs we might have money to look like we didn't have day jobs. I just don't have any "passion" for buying $450 jeans. Thrift store levis are just fine for me. $14 max. besides I like it when my girl looks like she just stepped out of a dick and jane book. little socks, short dress, maryjanes. it's true she does like the White Stripes. Oh, god! what have we done... I need to think about this some more.

[leakyandsnort]

I am not done reading it, but I think that

Never mind. I just got to the part about the music. I was going to say that I think a lot of it has to do with music & other cultural common ground - back when rock&roll was scandalous, it divided generations even further. But now that it's the norm, and has just evolved...I don't know.

Fuck all that NYC BS about the money, though. god.

[slipbluenight]

yeah, the money part.

i mean, that's sort of the lifestyle a lot of my friends and i live, excpet that we tend to have made career and lifestyle choices that are also alternative, as an antithesis to our parents who worked thirty years for the same company waiting out the retirement in a tract house in suburbia.

the idea that you can be a stock broker rebel who wears band tees on the weekend is really just some new york style justification for yuppiedom. "but i'm not a yuppie! see? i have a phish bootleg playing on my iPod!". ew.

or as they say up here "just cause the cat had kittens in the oven don't make em muffins."

[unemployia]

yea - massive consumerism in that piece.

the thing I did find interesting was where they said there was no generation gap because of the music:

"And then these Clash-listening kids grew up and had kids of their own, and the next generation of kids started listening to music, like Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and Bloc Party, that you might assume their parents would absolutely despise. Except it doesn’t really work that way anymore. In part, because how can their parents hate Interpol when they sound exactly like Joy Division? "

Because this is true! My interpol loving teen age daughter started understanding me more once she starting learning her indie music was derivative. I totatally am the Joy Division mom with the interpol kid.

besides that, its all a bunch of malarky. food for thought though - this "your not growing up anymore" thing - I want to go think on it.

[battleaxe4real]

Well, its blatant consumerism aside (since today's mass media is all about product placement), I could identify with some points in the article, especially the lines, "To motivate a baby boomer, offer him a bonus. To motivate a Generation-Xer, offer him a day off" and "For a Grup, success isn’t about how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk, or boogie-board, away." And especially this: "Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth-or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about." I just took up beadwork again, a childhood obsession that I had abandoned a dozen years ago, and it feels almost subversive to spend time with something I've loved since I was very young.

It's kind of funny, though, to read a piece trying to pin down a generation whose defining characteristic seems to be "don't pin me down"....

[staleyg]

that's how i feel about roller skating/roller derby. like it is cool that i have a *reason* to skate.