What year is this? Number 12 of The Baffler came last week, and that porky's looking awfully tired of turning that same trick by now. Nothing in here The Baffler hasn't said before, and, with more anger and energy.
Like everyone else, I enjoyed the first couple-three issues of The Baffler I saw, back when Tom Frank was an angry young pisher first laying out his notion of how the corporate image factory had co-opted hipness, irony and rebellion, how even punk and alternarock had sold out, etc. It was not a bad argument the first few times you heard it. Not that it was a terribly hew one. Every MAD magazine Tom Frank's dad read as a kid included pointed reminders that advertising was, deceitful, and the Darren Stevens Madison Avenue advertising weasel wa& a stock villain of 50s and 60s mass culture, sort of the Punch and Judy Devil in gray flannel. Still, it's always fun to see some smart new kid rediscovering the deathless truth that grownup culture sucks, man, it's all a pack of lies, and Frank's old (Frankfurt) school faith in the evil power of corporate propaganda was sort of charming.
Well, that was a few years ago. We got the message, but Frank doesn't seem to notice. It became his signature riff, his one-hit tune as he commodified his own spiel, merchandising it in the briefly ubiquitously cited books Commodity Your Dissent and The Conquest of Cool, becoming more and more full of himself, co-opted by his own celebrity. In a great bit on how the left has lost its sense of humor a few weeks ago, Salon media columnist James Poniewozick wrote about hearing "professional anti-ironist Tom Frank" on NPR "reminding us again that this consumerist nihilism is all the fault of those advertising bastards, alluding to Taco Bell's Marxist-themed Gorditas commercials as further proof that you might as well not laugh about anything, because the Man's just gonna find a way to turn it against you."
That hobbyhorse is all growed up into an old nag ready for the glue factory now, but Frank's still flogging it. Number 12 features him sniping at "cult studs" academics in a piece I could swear I read five, six years ago, as well as three utterly no-shit-sherlock "exposes" of how (a) American Irish bars are phony reproductions of authentic Irish pubs (No!), (b) Cadillac marketing is based on snob appeal and (c) punk and indie rock sold out. I'll go easy oh NYPress art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné for having a piece in here; it's about the Bret Easton Ellising of Latin American fiction, and it's the one article in Number 12 that told me something I didn't already know.