Glamour(glamor) Puss Blog

The Baffler, issue 5.

Semiannual, Chicago-based ascetic journal of cultural criticism (founded in 1988 by University of Virginia undergraduates Keith White and Tom Frank) that tackles the big questions weighing on the minds of indie-rock-loving and -hating intellectuals. Defiant, anti-commerce Baffler mottoes include “Accessorize Your Dissent,” “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge,” and, on the back of one of the magazine T-shirts, “Your Lifestyle Sucks.”

Each issue seeks archly to debunk the hip-seeking excesses of the corporate culture business. The early 1994 “Alternative to What?” issue mocked the post-Nirvana commodification of rebellion (or, in Baffler parlance, “consolidated deviance”):

Thirtysomething

American citizens born in the post-World War II baby boom, usually defined as 1946-60. Having largely invented youth culture as we know it in the ’60s, baby boomers are now characterized by an inability to relinquish their grip on it-thus their tendency to institutionalize the culture of their youth, as in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The peak of the boomers’ power as culture makers came in the ’80s, when their middle-aged economic clout made them an attractive audience, films like The Big Chill (1983) and TV series like The Wonder Years (1988) and thirtysomething (1987) profitably echoed the clash of nostalgia with their adult concerns.

The command crew of "Babylon 5," 1997 (http://www.babylon5.com).

Ambitious, syndicated sci-fi television program on a five-year mission to tell the novel-like story of a galactic war in the 23nd century. The brainchild of veteran TV writer/producer J. Michael Straczynski (b. 1954), Babylon 5 has grown into a substantial cult success after a slow start, just as Star Trek did three decades before. Poorly rated in its first four seasons, B5 garnered hardcore support from, among others, science fiction aficionados, NASA scientists, and Beltway politicians. (The latter group reportedly admire the machinations of the series’ emperors, despots and presidents.) Unlike the Trek universe, which is populated by prosthetically-enhanced variations of its human heroes,

First human rights group (founded 1961) systematically to catalog human rights abuses around the world. Based in London, Amnesty became a household name in the ’80s through major concert tours, such as the 1986 Conspiracy of Hope (including U2, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams, and the Police) and the 1988 Human Rights Now tour (including Bruce Springsteen, Gabriel, Sting, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N’Dour). Such celebrity-endorsed events (and massive direct-mail campaigns) multiplied the organization’s membership in the U.S. tenfold from some 40,000 members at the start of the ’80s.

"Mister Peepers," Volume 51.

Thanks to the camcorder revolution, by 1991 there were more than 50 companies (most successfully, Homegrown Videos of San Diego) buying up homemade sex tapes from would-be porn stars (many of whom, apparently, favor shag carpeting). The material, bought for between $250 and $2,500, is resold in a business estimated at $3 billion. Celebrating the phenomenon in the New York Times, Camille Paglia declared, “I think amateur adult videos are very positive because people are not letting the priests, the feminists, the therapists tell them what sex should be.” The new amateur video market spun off its own stars (including a Kentucky lawyer who debuted with two carpenters in Mary Lou the Stud Finder), a series of slickly produced amateur magazines (and expanded amateur photo sections in established porn mags),

The Watchmen (DC Comics).

In the late ’80s, British comic book writer Alan Moore was the hottest fan-boy epiphany since Frank Miller. Moore set out to subvert the costume-hero mythology of his childhood in the Swamp Thing series, Miracleman (1985), V for Vendetta (1988-1989), and most effectively in his 1987 magnum opus, Watchmen.

Moore has largely shied away from superheroics since, collaborating with Bill Sienkiewicz on the Big Numbers series, and his sixteen-part, Eddie Campbell-illustrated take on Jack the Ripper, From Hell (1991).

Outside of the comics frame, Moore has published his unproduced script for

The Baffler, issue 5

Nineties term for counterculture, often of a non-oppositional nature. Current use of “alternative” in the music and youth-culture world originated in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when it described the strain of post-punk music cultivated by a growing, informal network of college radio stations. The word “alternative” already had a meaning related to culture: commonly associated with the independent, oppositional press of the late hippie era, this counterculture label also came to denote any lifestyle outside the mainstream. As college-rock favorites like R.E.M. and U2 became chart and stadium fixtures in the second half of the ’80s, successive waves of

Main porn conduit on the Internet. A daily flow of scanned photos, video grabs, and even videoclips are anonymously posted to separate Usenet newsgroups, including “anime” and “cartoons,” “bestiality” and “tasteless,” “blondes” and “Asians,” “bondage” and “fetish,” “male” and “female.” Learning how to reassemble the GIF, JPEG, and MPEG files is a cybersex rite of passage. The files would be much easier to browse, download, and decode if they were stored at fixed addresses instead of being broken up for broadcast over discussion groups, but …