Adbusters - C or D?

If it's setting itself to be media rosaries - penance for all our materialist indulgence, a meditation to clear our heads of corporate mindfuckery - then it should be more hair-shirt & self-flagellation. Or at least have some fucking information in it.

Also becoming increasingly difficult to seperate the magazine from the cultural left coast bubble it occupies. It really has very little relevance to someone who lives in the hinterlands of Canada.

In the case of Adbusters, though, I don't think it's so much self- righteousness but ineffectiveness. Maybe they've just run out of steam. I really just wish they would pursue some different ways of looking at ads. It's such a huge topic, I'd really like to see them explore it from some new angles.

'advertising is out of control. ...
er......
that is all.'

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/The_American_Lefts_Silly_Victim_Complex.html

Well SORRY. Maybe we should be out doing something politically useful like CULTURE-JAMMING, MAN!

i like taibbi but that piece swings wildly from decent insight to cheap gags at the expense of hippie strawman. like srsly the points on the media and the donor class were a lot more substantial than the jokes about dudes on stilts. (maybe that should read "i like taibbi because etc etc", that is kind of his schtick)

xpost uh hurting i don't think you really got it

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/71/inside_silly2.jpg

journalism is the art of taking a half-decent one-liner and stretching it into 17 column inches, on a periodic basis

"why would you want to call yourself the left when everbody knows in America we drive on the RIGHT"

xpost uh I got it fine. It's a pretty easy article to "get." It's also been written 100 times before and better.

I was just trying to point out that this:
To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things – political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn’t have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It’s about goals, not people.

is pretty ironic considering the supposed point of the article, as "commercialism" is one of the pet issues of the ineffectual liberal elite, and the whole thing is ironic considering it's in Adbusters, whose whole approach to leftism suits that very same elite liberal "creative class" quite well.

taibbi annoys me because every time I read his shit I'm dumbstruck by how such a seemingly smart dude has gotten himself pigeonholed into writing columns where every paragraph seems like it ought to be punctuated by "HEY-O!!!"

hurting have you ever heard of the trees? they're what the forest is made of

Based on this article, Mike Taibbi doesn't seem to have any better ideas about how to reconnect progressive ideas with mainstream America than the people he decries, so what's the forest?

taibbi's a better reporter than columnist, his gags need to be grounded in observable reality or else he just floats off into "LOL CHE SHIRTS"

and i'd never call him a progressive, really.

lol hurting you should prob read like one other thing by matt "mike" taibbi before you continue making him into the strawman he's ripping on here

Fair point, but it would be pretty easy to turn him into that straw-man based on his bio (son of journalist, Bard college-educated, etc.)

The only person I ever knew who had a Che Guevarra t-shirt was doing pretty dangerous organizing work with maquiladoras in Mexico.

I once dated a girl who was an organizer for the SEIU. She was from a rich family, and people used to make fun of her all the time for her "out-of-touch" sounding political and social comments - and sometimes they were funny. But the fact is that she was busting her ass organizing for the SEIU while everyone making fun of her was just sitting around.

I know this isn't the larger point, and I know the larger point about the base of the (dramatically weakened) left being with well-off, pet-issue urban/suburbanites who don't care much about the old progressive issues is well-taken. But this piece just comes off as a lot of wallowing.

luv taibbi 4ever for http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14952564/giuliani_worse_than_bush

also funniest things about the death of the pope

Rudy moves on. "How about you?" he says to the next boy.

"I want to be a policeman!" the kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

"A fireman and a policeman, huh?" he says. "Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along."

Huh? Amid confused applause, Rudy flashes a queer smile, then moves on to the heart of his presentation, a neat little speech about how the election of a Democratic president will result in certain nuclear attack and the end of the free market as we know it. I'm barely listening, however, still thinking about the "make sure you get along" line.

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani's heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Given all that, why did Rudy offer this weirdly unsolicited reference to the controversy now? Was he joking? And if so, what the fuck? It was a strange and bitter comment to make, especially right on the heels of his grand-slam performance in the previous night's debate. If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what's he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn't wound that tight.

This magazine is just the most vapid, inane "anti-consumer" crap ever, isn't it.

I'm sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.

The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.

“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.

“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”

“Are you a hipster?”

“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

That's precisely the article I was thinking about.

"so... this is a hipster party?"
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/435422616_475b6228dc.jpg

"so... not gonna happen"

Adbusters mocking hipsters is a lot like Furries mocking Cosplayers.

oh, is it time for "a youth culture someone told me about is RUINING EVERYTHING" articles again?

According to the article, hipsters are vapid and just an easy fake counter-culture. Unlike, ya know, Whole Foods shoppers who are FUCKING DANGEROUS.

yes, adbusters is a waste of time, welcome to 1998 and No Logo

your deleuze and foucault and adorno will get you farther, not much

I'm thinking at this point that they should change the magazine's name to Self-Righteous Twenty-Year-Old Member of the Student Socialists Organization Who, Despite Never Having Lived Outside Of His Parents' House or a Dorm That His Parents Are Paying For, Somehow Feels Qualified To Judge Real-World Issues in Purely Black-and-White Terms, Maaaaaaan Monthly.

I wonder how he knew her glasses were non-prescription? Did he try them on?

your deleuze and foucault and adorno will get you farther, not much

In my case, I'm hoping they'll get me to a tenure position.

According to the article, hipsters are vapid and just an easy fake counter-culture. Unlike, ya know, Whole Foods shoppers who are FUCKING DANGEROUS

lawlz
lawdy lawdy

as I've posted elsewhere:

DUD for self-aggrandizing / apocalyptic worldview

I thought that article was terrible. Isn't ensuring that you don't use the same terms over and over and over one of the most crucial things of, you know, writing about stuffs? It's so unneccesarily angry and fuming while lacking any sort of memorable justification. They're not ruining a damn thing; the ultra-narcissistic arrogant ones (which, in my real-life experience, are much more few and far between than anyone would like to have you realize) are annoying, but they're having fun without causing any harm, so why not just let them be?

no no, you fail to see the real grievance, let me break it down for you:

if you are re-appropriating cultural signifiers for the purpose of FUN and FASHION, then you are killing all culture, forever, times one million.

if you are re-appropriating cultural signifiers for the purpose of HUMORLESS PROVOCATION and ANTI-CORPORATE SUBVERSION, you are a gold-star hero.

My friend got asked to put one of her collages in adbusters what should she do

she should insist on GETTIN PAID

^^^^^^

"Hipster" as pejorative.

close fingers, then rub thumb across fingertips; then extend open hand, palm up

universal sign for GIVE ME MONEY

Self-Righteous Twenty-Year-Old Member of the Student Socialists Organization Who, Despite Never Having Lived Outside Of His Parents' House or a Dorm That His Parents Are Paying For, Somehow Feels Qualified To Judge Real-World Issues in Purely Black-and-White Terms

lol ILX etc

lotta adjectives in that article, that's how you know it's good

they're having fun without causing any harm, so why not just let them be?

OTM. OTM about any group that is having harmless fun! Speaking of, how come they don't have midnight screenings of Newsies where everyone dresses up as a character & sings, ala Rocky Horror? IT'S ABOUT TIME. For this to happen.

That movie is pretty damn homoerotic.

"Anyone who resists can survive only by being incorporated. Once registered as diverging from the culture industry, they belong to it as the land reformer does to capitalism. Realistic indignation is the trademark of those with a new idea to sell."

Haha, Adorno tears Adbusters a new one.

I went through an Adbusters/No Logo phase at the end of high school before I realized that I enjoy being part of soul-crushing capitalist/consumerist society.

Am I wrong in thinking that No Logo's anti-consumerism is still more sophisticated than Adbusters?

No.

Adbusters is the college student with the tiresome worldview. No Logo is the college professor with the tiresome worldview.

challops 101

Speaking of, how come they don't have midnight screenings of Newsies where everyone dresses up as a character & sings, ala Rocky Horror? IT'S ABOUT TIME. For this to happen.

Abbott, my girlfriend kisses you.

Am I wrong in thinking that No Logo's anti-consumerism is still more sophisticated than Adbusters?

No Logo is better written but ultimately it's just as hectoring as Adbusters is. Neither one of these is as sophisticated as classic Mad Magazine.

SAILEM, DON'T INHALE 'EM

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/adbusted/

pretty awesome takedown of adbusters' one-dimensional, reactionary version of "anti-consumerism"