Call me old school, call me a snob, but We Want Some Too is the kind of book I would usually only poke with a 10-foot pole. When people start mixing Beck and Adorno, I get antsy. I feel trendy talk about the semiotics of soda pop coming on, and I flee. Imagine, then, my delight in discovering that We Want Some Too,for lack of a more genteel term, rocks all over the place.

Hal Niedzviecki's ebullient prose is deft and funny, whether he's delivering a scathing screed, an oddball statistic or a finely etched portrait of a bona fide weirdo. The book is charmingly unafraid to mix unabashed polemics about meaning and memory in the age of mass culture with an all-you-can-read buffet of references. If you shake the book too hard, names will fall out onto your floor. It's a testament to Niedzviecki's wit that he gets away with it, that it seems like part and parcel of the book's enthusiastic, hell-yeah disposition, rather than tedious fan blather, or pop-cult, quiz-kid name-dropping. There is, quite simply, an awful lot of swell art that Niedzviecki wants you to hear about, check out -- and while you're at it, hey, try this at home, kids!

We Want Some Too makes an impassioned case for an aesthetic of plunder. The current ever-presence of ephemeral, effervescent pop culture means that all of us of a certain age are steeped in references. We're soaking in it, Madge. This leaves us with logos in our dream lives, with sitcom characters as imaginary friends, with romantic comedies and pop songs as yardsticks for amorous relations in real life. This can be galling and baffling, by turns. I fear that someday I will lie on my deathbed, so senile that I fail to recognize myself or my family, singing Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran with eerily perfect recall. On the other hand, people all over North America form communities over these self-same snippets of culture, rearranging references in inventive and liberating ways.

Niedzviecki, whose novel Lurvy, a reworking of Charlotte's Web, was published last fall, is insistent that on some level, we're all sampling, all wannabes. The ubiquity of the mass media makes it impossible to do otherwise. "Culture," he writes, "is everything and nothing. Culture is George Bush puking on TV. Culture is life as entertainment, and entertainment as a way of living life." All this slack-jawed gawking and bellying up to the cathode teat contributes to a general sense of passiveness and malaise, the "je ne care pas" of the stereotypical slacker. But why, Niedzviecki asks, do these so-called slackers, these go-nowhere, do-nothing malcontents, spend hours and bucks they ain't got on bass guitars and copying sketchy black-and-white comix at Kinko's?

Granted, some do such things hoping for celebrity, praying they will produce the fluke Blair Witch Project zeitgeist-grabber that will make them rich, rich, rich. But the vast majority of people producing comix, zines and indie rock, in basements and grungy lofts and rec rooms across this great landmass, entertain no delusions whatsoever about their impact on the mediascape. Much culture is made for the proud few faithful by the embattled handful, and Niedzviecki sees something sweet and sad and good in this. Whether they're blessed with an audience and income or not, people keep cranking out culture because they feel they have to, because they are compelled to produce instead of just ceaselessly consuming.

One of the most telling images in the book is plundered, a comic by the fine, funny and mordant Marc Bell. In it, a scrawny, boxer-clad slacker lies in his bed, shaking his tiny fist at an indifferent world. He shouts, "I'll fuggin show you world -- just as soon as I sleep this shitty day off and lie around for a few more and get the hell out of this place." A scroll-style caption in the upper-right-hand corner reads, "All was broken but his spirit," and then next to that, one last wink: "made up quote." The comic captures the blend of irony, defiance and semi-depression that, for Niedzviecki, marks our mass-mediated age. There is no shortage of people obsessively documenting the wide variety of nothing they do in a day, if for no other reason than to keep that same dull day from being a total dead loss.

Just to keep everything nice and ambiguous, the plunderers often become the plundered. Mass culture, for all that it may keep zine- sters down most of the time, occasionally paws and slobbers over the underground, seeking the bleeding edge, the new indie-cool that can move the products. Niedzviecki's examination of this exchange between the fringes and the corner offices is timely, given the current buzz about culture jamming and active resistance to capitalist thingmafication through art and entertainment.

What keeps We Want Some Too from being merely trendy, though, is its argument for the absolute necessity of art, and the way it details art's often compromised conditions of production. In other words, why bother? Why make stuff? Because if we don't, the world sucks a little more. Because if we won't, they'll cram more crap down our throats sideways. Because there is nothing better to do in this hick town, this sorry suburb. Because we feel like we have to, whether anyone watches or not. Because we can. Such concerns are very old school indeed, in the best possible sense. Laura Penny is the co-author, with Trevor and Troy Forbes, of the zine Shiny Things, which enjoyed a 1997 print run of 50 issues or so. If you weren't in Halifax that summer, you've never read it. Issue number two is due, like, whenever.

Why ignore local talent?
Charles Gordon
Maclean's, August 21, 2000

Sometimes, summer news and summer reading converge. The convergence is produced out of summer musing, done best while engaged in a mindless pursuit, such as splitting wood. There, being careful not to hit yourself on the foot, you can apply the lessons of the book you left on the dock to the newspaper you bought at the marina.

The summer reading in question consists of We Want Some Too, by Hal Niedzviecki, and A Student of Weather, by Elizabeth Hay. The first, by a Toronto writer born in 1971, is a nonfiction cry for elbowroom for twentysomething culture; the second, by an Ottawa writer born in 1951, is a fictional journey through the mid-part of the 20th century.

The summer news, absorbed in isolation, unfiltered by office gossip, is about a changing of the guard in the ownership of Canadian newspapers, an event that offers up both sweet possibilities and a fresh round of thinking about what newspapers do and could do better.

Hay's novel is set at three of the important points in Canadian myth: Saskatchewan, Ottawa and New York City. As in all Canadian myth, the weather, referred to in the title, is a major factor, both actual and metaphorical. The novel begins in the Dust Bowl Thirties and extends into the Seventies. Ostensibly about two sisters, it is all about us. It has love and dust, and trees in all colours; it has trust and betrayal, snow and emigration, death and near-death in automobiles.

A Student of Weather is complicated, compelling and beautifully told. Hay has been nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for a previous book, Small Change. She has written three other books, won several literary awards and appeared in prestigious collections, such as the Journey Prize Anthology. Yet she is far less well known to Canadians than she should be -- which leads to some thinking about Canadian newspapers in their new circumstances in the new century and some of the things they could be doing better. Scouting Canadian talent is one of them.

Canadian readers are smart and the people who write and edit newspapers are smart. Yet they often pretend to the contrary when it comes to covering culture, both high and popular. Newspapers, which have the intellectual arrogance to lecture politicians on policy and investors on investing, turn completely stupid on their entertainment pages, treating every new belly button pushed forward by the music industry as if it belonged to somebody of lasting importance and gravely echoing the network hype for increasingly dumber television programming. This, at the expense of letting readers know about genuinely talented bands, artists, actors, musicians and writers -- like Hay -- in their own community, their own country. While the larger papers carry book reviews, book news concentrates mostly on dollars -- not who makes books, but who makes money out of books. The mere mention of the name Harry Potter illustrates the point. The economic tribulations of Chapters get more coverage than any of the books sold there -- except for Harry Potter.

The situation is dealt with emphatically in We Want Some Too, which is subtitled "Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture." Niedzviecki writes that we live in "a climate where all arts reporting is driven by the marketing machine that feeds a steady stream of prepackaged mass entertainment products and, most important, accompanying ads to editors only too happy to have their job (determining what cultural events are significant to the reading public) done for them."

This may seem harsh -- there are many fine editors and writers working on the arts pages of the nation -- but it is worth thinking about as you scan the lists of best-selling DVDs and weekend movie grosses in your Monday paper, as you note the column inches devoted to Hollywood marriages and, if you are Niedzviecki's age, try to find one word about the indie rock scene in your town. "In the mediocre world of top-40 crapola, in our made-in-Taiwan-product-ridden universe, there is . . . precious little room for the individual as anything other than a buyer," Niedzviecki writes. That can be seen in some of the media attention his generation does get -- usually as free-spending dot-com new millionaires or exotically dressed fashion functionaries.

Niedzviecki, named Canada's best new magazine journalist in 1999, has written about culture for a number of publications, including Utne Reader and Adbusters. These few quotations don't do justice to We Want Some Too, which ranges far more widely in thoughtful coverage of what the author calls "the complex, horrible, wonderful hold pop culture has on our lives." But they do help spur some summer musing on the newspaper and the young. Niedzviecki doesn't hammer too hard at the generation gap, but it's obviously a factor. Let Tina Turner play at the local hockey rink and it's front-of-the-section news, has been ever since the first baby boomer sat down at an editing terminal 30 years ago. A young Canadian involved in independent culture hits the front of the section only as a freak or a victim.

Now, the newspaper's difficulty in covering and appealing to youth is far from new. And it would be wrong to suggest the task is easy. But summer musing leads to the conclusion that the newspaper of the new century, no matter who owns it, should try to do a better job.

Surviving pop culture: Author has hopeful vision
Marla Cranston
The Halifax Daily News, May 6, 2000

You can't help feeling better about the world after talking to Hal Niedzviecki, or reading his exhilarating new book We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture. It's a relief just knowing somebody out there is studying pop culture's massive hold on society's attention, and the bombardment of information crowding original thoughts from our heads.

A friend of mine has a home movie filmed from the back of a pickup truck in 1981 -- back then, the scenery along the north end of Barrington Street was mostly scrubby bushes along the harbour. Now there are 31 billboards. At work and home, phones, e-mail, faxes, the Internet, TV, radio and magazines all clamour for our time and too much time is spent filtering the crap.

"This constant invasion of our mental space is sort of reaching a crisis point," says Niedz-viecki, editor of Broken Pencil magazine and recipient of the National Magazine Foundation's 1999 award for best new magazine journalist.

"We can't walk on the street, we can't take a bus, we can't fly anywhere, we can't exercise, we can't have solitary moments with ourselves without encountering an ad or bad radio music piped in or the ubiquitous tiny TV screen hanging from the ceiling. The pop message becomes ever more insistent: `Do your own thing, seize the day, but do it through us. Through the unreal real of the celebrity montage and its 22-minute sitcom resolution."'

For many of us, drowning in the minutiae of celebrity worship provides meaning and fills the void in a world where family and spirituality are no longer the central metaphors by which we live.

"Those metaphors are pop metaphors now. So it's not `If I'm good, God will deliver me to heaven.' Now it's `If I practise my lip-synching really hard, I'll be noticed and end up on MTV.' Which is sort of our present-day morality tale: poor teen achieves pop success and lives happily ever after and buys mom a bungalow and a satellite dish," says Niedzviecki.

His book is ultimately optimistic -- once you accept there's no going back to a simpler time, it's what you do with all the information that's important, and staking out your individuality in the unreal world that surrounds us.

Mass culture and the underground are vanishing as the lines blur between the two, and Niedzvicki postulates it could all lead to "a cultural renaissance of unprecedented proportions."

It's impossible to do justice to his timely philosophies in just a few paragraphs. So if these issues are making you fret, get down to Cafe Mokka for his book launch today, from 5 to 7 p.m.

A dreamscape world: The only way to deal with the corrosive uniformity of pop culture is to subvert it
Philip Marchand
The Toronto Star, April 23, 2000

The title of Toronto cultural journalist Hal Niedzviecki's new book We Want Some Too: Underground Desire And The Reinvention Of Mass Culture could headline the manifesto of any number of aggrieved groups, from squeegee kids to racial minorities. A lot of people "want some, too," whether it's money or guest appearances on a Pamela Wallin show or appointment to the Senate.

So who's Niedzviecki's "we," and what do they want? The short answer is that "we" are people born after 1970, and what "we" want is to feel a sense of reality and importance, like the rebels of the '60s. "We didn't get to see the Sex Pistols or Bob Dylan or even bp Nichol with the Four Horsemen," Niedzviecki complains.

By no coincidence, the 70s were the decade when television finally, definitively swallowed our culture. In our post-1970 television world, there is no meaningful distinction between culture and counter-culture, underground or mainstream - "underground culture is for sale 24 hours a day," Niedzviecki notes, mostly on the tube. Politics is unreal - it is hard to launch political movements "in an age where everybody wants to be their own personal cause, their own underground myth, subject of their own fan club."

Nature is also a rumour. Our environment is one of ads, pop songs, televised images and what Niedzviecki calls "where-were-you-when moments of space shuttle explosions, celebrity murders, hung juries and ice storms." These are essentially media moments, and, Niedzviecki comments, they "corrode our sense of having personal experiences; they shore up our collective memory, allow us to make friends quickly and easily with the person sitting next to us at the airport bar, while never having a single conversation with our next-door neighbour."

In such a world, we forge a fragile identity through our choice of consumer goods, and navigate via irony. (As in, "This book is so post-Generation X.") Our hold on reality is weak. "The moment TV became something we could not and would not live without," Niedzviecki observes, "life became unreal and entirely subjective - a dreamscape world without standards." Not coincidentally, the tone of pop culture has grown "ever more morbid, sarcastic, self-referential, ironic and negative."

What a mess. Yet Niedzviecki is writing his book partly in answer to grumpy critics like Neil Postman who hate pop culture. Despite everything, Niedzviecki loves this culture - or at least he recognizes it's all he has. "To negate pop culture is to negate the very foundation of our lives," he states. The challenge is not to go back to pre-electronic ways of life but somehow to re-invent pop culture, to take control of it, to subvert it "by becoming our own critics and creators," to "use the very elements that demean and reduce us to try to find dignity in our lives."

Hence the book's praise of performance artists, indie bands, web site creators, zine editors - zines are basically self-published periodicals - and even Trekkies and hobbyists like Pennsylvania's Phil Petra, who has amassed the world's greatest collection of Tarzan memorabilia. (Over 40,000 items at last count.) All these individuals have appropriated aspects of pop culture as a kind of personal statement.

It may not be Rembrandt or Matisse or Joyce, but it's all the art we're likely to create these days. And if it's not great art, at least it's democratic. "You have to think of reality as a kind of cultural democracy," Niedzviecki advises. "You cast your vote by making a television show, cutting an album, publishing a zine, singing an opera, writing a short story; or, if you are unable to actively create, you cast your vote by collecting, by watching, by wearing, by `appearing' on talk radio and talk television and game shows." Niedzviecki sums it up at another point by remarking simply, "we are all the artist."

To see this art flourish, all we have to do is get rid of marketing experts and advertisers. "There's nothing wrong with pop culture," Niedzviecki insists. "It's the ad world." From such a sophisticated culture critic, this statement is surprising. Niedzviecki seems unaware that the "ad world" is embedded in the heart of pop culture. Kill that world, and pop culture dies.

Moreover, while the kind of mental jujitsu Niedzviecki advocates in dealing with pop culture is appealing, it's hard to see it leading to much more than pastiche and parody, which we have plenty of already. (Niedzviecki talks about a new kind of "ethical and defensive" irony that is not "a sarcastic, disembodied wanderer but a physical presence, a comforting hug, the lingering warmth of Mom's embrace" - this seems to be one of the parts of the book that are pure baloney.)

It doesn't help that, in trying to express his hopes for a flowering of more imaginative and personalized pop culture, he falls back on the slogans of pop psychology and identity politics. Phrases such as "telling our own stories to ourselves," and rebelling "against those who seek to reduce us to cogs in the machine" recall old, dumb polemics. They do not bode well for Niedzviecki's purported search for a "new language" that can "convey what is authentic and true about mass culture."

Niedzviecki also tries to pre-empt criticism by scattered references to "middle-aged pundits" and "pundits of earlier generations." Since I myself am only 29 years old - it's not true that I can recall live episodes of the Howdy Doody show - I don't take this personally. But it might be worthwhile to go back to a really old pundit, an English critic who's been dead for more than 40 years.

Wyndham Lewis, in his 1926 polemic The Art Of Being Ruled, saw it coming - the "we are all the artist" mentality in which people willingly forsake a "serious" career in order to concentrate on their hobbies and pop culture obsessions. He predicted that people in their recreations would no longer be "content to find their pleasure in the convenient role of spectator" but "would insist on a competitive activity."

Lewis also pointed out that this future culture in which most grown-ups would devote themselves to play, self-expression and art-making would also be a culture in which grown-ups were encouraged to remain emotionally in childhood and adolescence.

"We too want to play a character and we want it to be ourself," Niedzviecki writes, and the pundit of an earlier generation is reminded of the late professor Christopher Lasch's 1978 jeremiad, The Culture Of Narcissism. But the television-saturated individuals who want to be the star of their own lives may not be narcissists so much as adults who will never leave their childhood and adolescence behind them.

Get a reality-based life
Jennifer Van Evra
Vancouver Sun, May 27, 2000

LIFESTYLE CULTURE, ACT I

One of the most influential figures in your life has died, and you areoverwhelmed with grief. You dig into a tub of Haagen Dazs, looking for solace, the meaning of life, or both. You phone a call-in radio show and line-camp, hoping for a chance to express yourself, because after all, you deserve to be heard. You've spent days locked in your apartment, and a friend drops by to make sure you're okay. "Jeez," he says. "It was just the Friendly Giant."

- - -

Until recently, Bob Homme's name probably didn't ring a bell in the minds of many Canadians, yet the public outpouring of sorrow over the 81-year-old "Friendly Giant's" death was enormous. On one radio call-in show, a man confessed that he had been reduced to tears over the news. Another caller tried to explain why we were mourning a fictional character who, in reality, had died 14 years before when his TV show was cancelled: "It's really a nostalgia, but I'm not sure that it's an empty one, that we're making up memories about our childhoods. It was very, very real."

One person who wasn't surprised was Hal Niedzviecki, the 29-year-old journalist, zine publisher and media-appointed "underground guru." In We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture, he argues that because we've been soaking in "mass culture" for decades, it has not only influenced our personal points of reference, it has replaced them. Our earliest memories, thoughts, relationships and our very identities are now jumbled up with TV characters and Hollywood flicks, rock bands and soft drinks, clothes and cars, logos and slogans. Stuff -- and lots of it. Welcome to what Niedzviecki calls "lifestyle culture." And yes, it is "very, very real." The problem, he says, is that we're not sure how to admit that Stuff has picked up where Meaning left off.

"People don't really have a language to acknowledge their relationship to pop culture," said Niedzviecki in a phone interview from his home in Toronto. "You can only really talk about it when somebody dies, because you can't mourn a TV show. But we grew up with the Friendly Giant, and he became a transplanted relative. Some of these things mean more to us than if a real relative actually did die.

"But if you were to ask people, `Would you consider the Friendly Giant a seminal moment in your childhood?' they would probably say `No.' We're in collective social denial that pop culture really has replaced other experiences that we might have had as children. And what do we do with these emotions, these feelings? We haven't really figured that out yet."

Are we really willing to throw in the Bay Day towel and concede that pop culture has had that deep an impact on our lives? Are we ready to admit that THEY have won, that we have succumbed to the grasp of the cultural monoliths who clutch our throats with one hand while reaching for our wallets with the other?

Both denial and rejection are futile, argues Niedzviecki in We Want Some Too. Because our selves have been sealed into one massive cultural stay-fresh bag with the stuff that THEY produce, to deny or reject "lifestyle culture" would be to ignore who we really are. Scary. Then again, to concede that pop culture has made us who we are -- while giving us only the illusion of choice -- is to concede that our lives are balanced precariously on a heap of disposable crap. Even scarier.

- - -

LIFESTYLE CULTURE, ACT II

Desperate to hear your own voice within the pop-culture cacophony, you fix your hair into a mohawk with Super Hold hairspray, slap on your Fluevogs and hit the streets in search of the portal that will lead you into this dark, mythic world of the underground -- the last bastion of logo-free integrity. But suddenly, you discover you're being watched by a hip-hunting corporate executive who wants to turn your quest into a new TV show, video game and clothing line.

- -

According to Niedzviecki, not only do THEY now own the "underground," the "mainstream" has out-undered it to the point where the two have fused. "Mainstream culture has become what underground culture used to be: instant provocation and meaningless violence posing as a challenge to the status quo through the constant pushing of boundaries. These are the tricks of mass culture, and we see them every day on TV, on billboards, in our newspapers, in the toys we buy our children," he writes before pointing to the mainstream TV prison drama "Oz," which regularly features nudity, rape, profanity and extreme violence. "What could our underground artists possibly do to trump lushly filmed scenes of anarchistic violence in which the state and its machinations are mercilessly mocked at prime time?"

So we are perched on a mega-corporate fence, and there's no substantial ground on either side. According to Niedzviecki, however, there's one thing THEY have forgotten: although our cultural language may be pieced together from pop, we still reserve the right -- and harbour the desire -- to arrange cultural signifiers as we please, to imbue them with our own meanings, and ultimately, to mould them into our very own -- and very meaningful -- culture. But deep down, we're reluctant. Because pursuits like zine publishing, indie film-making, community theatre and pirate radio don't come to us through channels that THEY have sanctioned, we're automatically suspicious. Few would pick up a copy of Niedzviecki's book if it were self-published and available only at independent book stores; but once it's selected by a major publisher and written about by ordained "experts," we assume that it must be worthwhile. Even so, THEY are beginning to sweat, says Niedzviecki. Our cravings for participation are creating cracks in the cultural dam. Now THEY are frantically creating reality-based TV shows, karaoke, radio call-ins and interactive (you-fill-in-the-blank) before the dam bursts: anything that will make us feel like we're participating so we won't start making stuff ourselves -- and taking profits away from them.

Too late, says Niedzviecki. The more THEY try to repress our urge to participate in pop culture, the more those desires will crop up in increasingly demented ways -- like the figure known as Rainbow Man who won his 15 minutes of fame by wearing a rainbow-coloured wig and dancing for TV cameras at sporting events. When the media lost interest in him, Rainbow Man resorted to taking hostages and demanded to be put back on TV.

The Littleton killers are another example of that pressure being released in extreme -- and extremely predictable -- ways. "We will not be denied our version of reality, these boys were saying," writes Niedzviecki. "Branded losers, surrounded by the potency of violent imagery imbued with instant pop potential for every loser to become a winner a la reality-TV, they lashed out, mindlessly, crazily, but not without a sense of the way in which their world would spin out in "Reality" as showcased in the newspaper articles, magazine articles, television docudramas, movies, etc. True lifestyle culturites to the bitter end, the duo even left us a home video chronicling the build-up before the shooting."

So, what does Niedzviecki propose we do with all these pent-up impulses? Do we join the Neil Postmans of the world and blame everything from the Simpsons to Marilyn Manson for the handbasket that's carrying us directly to hell? Or, are we really without free will, doomed to lie on our cookie-cutter Ikea couches, flick on our surround-sound TVs, and let pop culture flow into our veins like junk, moving only to wipe the dribble from our chins with our antibacterial Kleenex?

Hell no, says Niedzviecki: "[Let's] see if we can't dodge the cars long enough to make it past the 20 lanes of speeding traffic and into that overgrown grass strip where the hardy weeds flourish." Get off your ass, paint a canvas, and send it to the Museum of Bad Art in Boston. Check out an Active Resistance conference in Toronto. Create your own e-zine, or start up a pirate radio station. In this post-ironic, post-postmodern, post-underground age, Niedzviecki's arguments are as seductive as pop itself. Sure, every era has its own version of the "freedom fighting" voice. But once you read this one, you may just decide to throw your cynicism into that "speeding traffic" and stumble along behind the author in search of your own hardy weeds.

- - -

LIFESTYLE CULTURE, ACT III

You pass around copies of your hand-stapled, photocopied zine -- dedicated to the memory of the Friendly Giant -- at the launch party. Maybe one day, your thoughts will line the pages of national newspapers and magazines, as Niedzviecki's have. Or maybe just a handful of people will read your homemade mag. But whether it's 10 people or 10 million, it doesn't really matter because THEY have some of you, but now you have some too.

Jennifer Van Evra last wrote for Mix on Literary Trips.

We want some too: underground desire & the reinvention of mass culture
Liisa Kelly
Canadian Woman Studies, Winter 2001

In struggling to analyze the everchanging phenomenon that is entertainment culture, few writers manage to maintain a high standard of academic credibility while projecting the passion and energy that, can engage a wider non-academic audience. While pop journalists trip over themselves to remain at the edge of what is "hot," cultural theorists often miss the mark in reaching the audience to which their work is truly relevant. Hal Niedzviecki breaks the mold in his new book, posting a fresh alternative to either side of the fence with work that is both accessible and dynamically complex.

One need not know him as the editor of Broken Pencil to perceive that Niedzviecki approaches the current youth culture as an insider. Though he briefs the tired "evils of consumerism" speech, Niedzviecki's real focus is on the power of the underground to uplift the so-called "TV generation" from the restraints of imposed cultural ideals, allowing us all a place to create meaning for ourselves as artistic producers. He says that art and communication are all that is left to create meaning in our lives now that we have become apathetic to family, work and religion. "Lifestyle culture," as he calls it, now takes precedence in defining the identities of teens and twenty-somethings, which, in the independent context, is not such a bad thing. The "do-it-yourself" creative philosophy proves more empowering than distracting for today's youth who are not brain-washed by the masses but produce entertainment on their own terms and for their own consumption through counter-cultural involvement. With this, Niedzviecki reminds us that the production of art is often more for the well-being of artists than their prospective audience, although by no means is youth culture closed off from the outside world. The works produced by young people in bands, zines and theatre groups express their perceptions of society in ways far more genuine and personally relevant than what is presented in the mainstream. To Niedzviecki, the obsessive creation and consumption of culture is a healthy form of validation for current youth, which is a point that is hard to argue.

Much as he promotes the underground, Niedzviecki can never truly condemn the joys of pop culture to which he refers with a kind of postteenage suburban nostalgia that I found easy to relate to. After all, what could be more interesting to the culturally obsessed than 327 pages of probing into the likes of "eighties cartoons," Beck and the Museum of Bad Art? To some this may seem like the blind and trendy validation of everything "low culture" in the name of art. Yet, Niedzviecki adds credibility to his topics by drawing on classic streams of cultural analysis (for example linguistics, semiotics and "the spectacle"). When quoting McLuhan and Sartre, the casual tone he adopts makes them more palatable to the general public. In other words, the writer's style is equally appealing to the seasoned academic and the young cultural consumer. Of further relevance to the discipline of Cultural Studies are Niedzviecki's deeper questions, such as "What does it mean to create art in the twenty-first century?" "What is creativity and how does it help to get us through the day?" "What is culture," and, most pressingly, "what is reality for the current youth," a "new breed" raised with media overload and mass-cultural influences woven right into their psyches? Niedzviecki's writing entertains but is deceptively multifaceted, valuable on many levels and for a varied audience.

The author's only flaw in the tone of this book is a tendency to lapse into the cynical. Although his views are well-defined, Niedzviecki fluctuates between affection and bitterness for his chosen subjects. One might say that his contrasting treatment of mass and underground culture serves to fulfill a certain "journalistic obligation," although the strength of Niedzviecki's opinions make them come across as a bit discordant. Nonetheless, his pure joy in the study of culture overshadows this minor flaw. Every word he writes is a celebration of art by and for the consumption of everyone, projecting his enthusiasm for freedom of expression and mass involvement in the creation of culture. Niedzviecki's book, in a word, is relevant to its audience of twenty-first century Canadian youth. After all, it is they who "want some too," and, like Niedzviecki, can have it with some spunk and attitude.

Talkin' 'bout his generation
Juan Rodriguez
The Montreal Gazette, June 10, 2000

Once upon a time, we nostalgically recalled the pop song, TV show or movie that accompanied crucial coming-of-age moments, and left it at that. In the media-flooded world of Hal Niedzviecki, "lifestyle culture" rules, making the "stuff that isn't supposed to matter - movies, bands, fashion, toys, TV shows, and an endless world of possible products - matter."

Gen-X talking head, National Post contributor, and editor of a review of alternative publications called Broken Pencil, Niedzviecki is as windy and turgid as bean stew in We Want Some Too: "We elevate the meaningless because we have grown up believing, being taught, that through mass culture we can find meaning."

He finds both salvation and defeat in self-published "zines," in which folks "pronounce their own lives and opinions worthy to be published and read, lives serialized like a soap opera, but without the stereotypes and the preformed expectations."

Wanna bet? Dressed up in irony and "malaise," his target audience marches lockstep to the pablum of pop culture. We "want our lives to have the kind of importance mass culture confers on, say, a celebrity's birthday."

Wrestling with this fatuous book is like telling somebody that Dumb and Dumber is not edifying. He represents whiners with too much time on their hands, too much TV and Internet to absorb, too much cotton in their heads. He's the nodding-out mumbler at the party from hell. His prose is numbing: "Style, of course, is the second half of the word lifestyle, and that's no accident." (Gag me with a spoon!)

In a nutshell, he says: It's a pop culture jungle out there, and we're poor little lambs who have lost our way. We relentlessly consume pop because the Devil made us do it.

If he loathes the "typical portrait of a passive, hypnotic mass culture," maybe it's because he's too busy gazing at a funhouse mirror. He disdains the easy characterizations of the press, but natters on about ways to attract, infiltrate or deconstruct the media. He's the caricature of a pop-culture studies wonk; his book is being added to college courses as he speaks.

Naturally, he rails against such critics as Neal Gabler (Life: The Movie; How Entertainment Conquered Reality), Thomas Frank (iconoclastic and young editor of The Baffler) and, particularly, the "retrograde" and "surly" Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business) "who so fear the great unwashed jumping into the bath with society's chosen few that they regularly preach the near-mythological evils of `technopoly' and `information overload.' " While Postman sees "the written word as the last bastion of civilized, logical thought," Niedzviecki's generation emphasizes "our need to connect, to assert the truth of lifestyle culture." He never considers whether, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, "there is no there there."

Of course, Postman et al. are straw men. The real elites are industry fatties like Gates, Geffen, Eisner, Turner, about whom he's tellingly mum. Indeed, his co-dependence on their pop product will have product-pushing moguls salivating, like the Budweiser guy, "I love you, man!" He's so busy-busybusy gazing at the proverbial pop navel - seeking out his, like, "place" in it - that he forgets the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Quoting a song by "loser" poet laureate Beck, our author summarizes: "He is peeling back the layers of the past until he reaches the thin fake skin of future. We're all dead, dying, doomed to a life of indulgence and meaningless indolence. (You said it, bub!) Authenticity is just another bad joke we're all in on." In Niedzviecki's hands, it's a joke as rancid as a month-old Big Whopper.

He laments not having seen the great '60s icons in action but, hey, my g-ggeneration wasn't in on the ground floor of the Internet. (Care to "experience" polio, bub?)

"In dismissing the marketing promise, our critics dismiss the promise of mass culture that keeps us going." (It sure keeps Hal foaming at the mouth!) "It's not the promise I object to, it's not the easy formula of pop that offends; it's the inability of our `product' to realize that promise." Put your trust in fake - even the ironic sort - and you get fake.

When asked about what he was thinking in Lurvy, his small-press retelling of Charlotte's Web, he admits that "for the longest time I wasn't quite sure how to respond. Then it hit me: what I had been doing was attempting to explore the strange space between identity and mass culture." Then it hit me: this guy's using a mass trade paperback to shamelessly plug his effort. Maybe this guy isn't such a lamebrain. Maybe he's a cynical twirp who's seized on some trendy "malaise" to make a buck. He wants some, too. Just imagine all those university bulk orders for Pop Culture Studies 101. In this respect, his book is deeply dishonest.

It's page 305 and he's still yabbering 'bout zines: "It isn't much of a stretch to argue that zines are not exactly given kudos or respect from the mass media." There you go again - Rodney Dangerfield in a tuque.

Hey, don't get me wrong: I love deconstruction, sampling, etc., as much as the next joe. I get tickled by the odd zine. But a steady diet of the stuff? I'd rather watch Jerry Springer. When he repeatedly harps, like the Energizer Bunny on lithium, that we "speak to each other via our shared assumptions about the pop culture universe," I know he's been consuming too much pop. Why not go without TV for a while? Try it, you'll like it - that's if you're not pining away for The Brady Bunch or The X-Files.

Yes, the academe is snobby. Gleaning worthwhile stuff from low or high culture is a moot point by now. Yet, reading this book made me pine for the rigour and calisthenic of a challenging elite culture, instead of those sitting in front of a cathode-ray screen crying wolf.

You don't think about Barbie when you're listening to Bartok's string quartets, butthead.

An earnest defence of pop culture's promise
Florence Sicoli
The Hamilton Spectator, April 29, 2000

Hal Niedzviecki seems to have a bit of a smart aleck attitude in this new book about mass culture. So he's very lucky if I and others of my generation read beyond the first chapters of his book in which he criticizes "middle-aged pundits" for generally having a hopelessly antiquated optic on popular culture. This from a twentysomething Toronto-based journalist who describes himself as a slacker and who looks like a geeky nerd in a tuque on the book's cover.

But it is worth getting past Pal Hal's generational sabre-rattling because this oddly titled book delivers the substance to back up the attitude. Maybe such a book needs to be petulant to challenge all those self-righteous, more-intellectual-than-thou criticisms of mass -- and hence "low" -- culture. The book rejects this time-worn, safe assessment offered by many media and academic commentators who view pop and mass culture as simply amoral and unoriginal pap that keeps the masses amused and sedated so they will consume even more media and the products they hawk.

Niedzviecki doesn't exactly disagree with this assessment. He just thinks it's too late and too little to reject or deny or decry something that is so central to our lives. After all, we do live within the belly of the beast, we are captive audiences who are always surrounded by mass culture.

Niedzviecki's book gives the whole matrix of popular culture-entertainment-information the kind of attention and respect it deserves. And it offers a surprisingly earnest and persuasive defence of pop culture's promise and possibilities. In essence, the book promotes a more nuanced, active, creative and even subversive relationship between mass culture and its gazillion consumers.

The book first takes us on an entertaining guided tour of the alternative pop culture scenes in Canada today. It's a world inhabited by young slackers who hold down bad jobs to get by, but who live for and through their cultural "hobbies." The central markers of identity for these cultural slackers are not their McJobs but their everyday pop-culture-related hobbies that create for them a kind of constant alternative consciousness, a way of living. And, to varying degrees, this kind of relationship with mass culture is quite widespread -- whether we are hockey watchers, teddy bear collectors, obsessed with Elvis, writers or producers of our own zines, stage performers in jumpsuits and shades, a member of a rock band, a raver, a Trekkie, or just stamp-affixers devoted to our albums. These are but a few examples of people pursuing forms of what Niedzviecki calls lifestyle culture.

Denizens of the pop culture universe are generally people born after 1960, the generations raised on TV from the cradle, the Truman generation, people for whom the dates of certain TV sit-coms reveal more of a sense of history than history itself. Face it, for these and even earlier generations mass culture is central to our individual and collective identities and memories. At least, it's certainly one of the main things we share as a common experience.

Remember what you were doing when Kennedy was shot?

Mass media culture -- Marshal McLuhan warned us in the '60s -- is unfailingly powerful and ubiquitous and irresistible to "ever more audience involvement and participation." Today, ever more of us are still captive audiences, even if we don't see The Matrix or listen to punk music or watch Jerry Springer or read a fan zine or go on the Internet or attend a street performance.

Niedzviecki acknowledges the ubiquitous mass culture's dangers and failings. Naomi Klein's recent book, No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies, points out the importance of boycotts and political activism in the face of big business's stranglehold on the loyalties and imaginations of modern consumers. But perhaps Niedzviecki's insight into the hegemony created by mass culture is that resistance, rejection or denial are not the point at all. Instead he talks about using "lifestyle culture" to rub against the grain of pop culture's conflicted "legacy of individuality and passive acceptance."

Lifestyle culture involves the way you live, dress, look and what you do -- a whole way of life and identify. An example of this kind of reordering, plundering or reinterpreting of mass culture was provided recently by local DJ-musicians Brian D'Oliveira and Alfonse Lanza, featured in The Hamilton Spectator's It's A Living series last week, who mix, layer and orchestrate existing music with their own compositions to create a new sound.

Niedzviecki suggests it is this kind of everyday, mundane use and reuse and reinvention of pop culture "that allows us to stand defiant in the face of the generic anonymity we are otherwise doomed to. ... We use the very elements that demean and reduce us to try to find dignity in our lives. We can use them, rather than be used by them."

We want some too: underground desire & the reinvention of mass culture
Blayne Haggart
Catholic New Times, May 14, 2000

Lest you be tempted to buy culture expert Hal Niedzviecki's polemical defence of individualistic consumerism and enabled artists, a few points.

This book isn't particularly good. It is also poorly written. References mentioned to support his argument are rarely placed in any sort of context.

Niedzviecki incessantly uses "they" and "we" (as in, to quote humorist Roy Blount, Jr.: "I and also you, if I can slip this by you."). We never find out who "they" are, but they are certainly responsible for most of the bad cultural stuff in the world.

Normally I would have left this book on the shelf, but there's value in sharpening one's teeth against an argument, and I'm always up for a new take on pop culture. And as publisher of Broken Pencil, a zine about zines (tiny independently produced magazines, often photocopied, usually on the bizarre, the personal, and celebrating pop culture minutiae), and a columnist on "independent culture" for the National Post, Niedzviecki is certainly in the thick of things.

Niedziecki argues that "mass culture" (which he defines, uselessly, as everything around us) has wormed its way into our -- the royal "our" -- souls. This culture as consumerism, if I follow his tortured prose, is both the problem and the solution. He argues that this soul-crushing and inauthentic culture has left a growing number of us -- the royal "us" -- as adherents of "lifestyle culture": people who actualize themselves by reclaiming mass culture for their own.

And so we channel surf, start bands that will go nowhere, create zines, stage anarchistic anti-media press conferences.

This, of course, turns most pop culture arguments on their heads. Niedzviecki correctly remarks that most critics see pop culture as something damaging. Writers like Frank Thomas, author of The Conquest of Cool, contend that advertising's message of uniqueness and youthful rebellion is a hollow ploy designed to sell shoes and soap.

Maybe, argues Niedzviecki, but we've been raised on pop culture, and so this message of rebellion, uniqueness, individuality, is all we have.

So we make what doesn't matter, matter. Niedzviecki seems to see anything involving culture that takes even a smidgen of effort as a form of rebellion.

Our obsessions define us, he argues; they make us unique individuals. The pop dream is not a lie, but instead is achievable within pop culture, by collecting, writing, channel surfing, whatever.

I can't buy it. I'm sympathetic to those who want to write, who want the world to hear their tunes. But how is this rebellion? Where Niedzviecki sees revolution, I see a mirror reflection of the consumer culture, with everyone wanting to consume tailor-made media products.

This revolution he proposes is a revolution of convenience in which power is not confronted, a revolution that doesn't require you to look beyond your personal obsessions into the world. This revolution is simply consumption by any other name.

A quick list of things that also affect people's lives: children, family, religious beliefs, political decisions by governments and international institutions, the quality of the environment. Not as sexy as ruminations on `N Sync and Chewbacca. To read this book you'd think the world (and he does claim that lifestyle culture is a worldwide phenomenon) was white, overeducated, well-off, apolitical, and Western.

This could have been infinitely better had Niedzviecki lifted his head out of his zine and looked around. Writing, publishing a zine, starting a band -- these are all good. But calling such acts -- which have occurred for longer than television's been around -- revolutionary smacks of a sad attempt to justify a chosen lifestyle.

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby's valentine to a pop-music-obsessed generation, offers just the type of revolutionary that Niedzviecki would love: someone who refuses to compromise his love of pop. Yet he also comes across as an emotionally stunted, 35-year-old teenager whose rebellion is eventually exposed as the childish posturing it is.

Niedzviecki's promotion of cultural obsessions to the centre of life (which he doesn't even convincingly prove is happening) buys into the advertising myth of the eternal teenager. Niedzviecki would argue that's all we have. People with slightly more rounded lives might beg to differ.

We want some too: underground desire & the reinvention of mass culture
RM Vaughan
This Magazine, May 2000

Generally, I am disinclined to read non-fiction. Real life is tiresome enough, so reading about it seems a perfectly masochistic pastime. Every now and then, however, between lofty tales of faraway islands and towers made of the palest ivory, I fall into an account of the here-and-now that backhands me back into bald reality. These three hefty but rich books of reportage belong in that latter category. (Note to publishers: must all non-fiction books have explanatory subtitles?)

When Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May sat down to write FREDERICK STREET: LIFE AND DEATH ON CANADA'S LOVE CANAL (Harper Collins), they must have loaded up on antidepressants. This sad and all too true account of the gradual environmental poisoning of a working-class neighbourhood in Sydney reads like a particularly grim Maupassant novel--the innocent people die and the criminals are never brought to justice. But by telling the victims' stories and overlaying them with a filing cabinet's worth of hard facts and scientific work, Barlow and May have created a document that commemorates and instigates. Frederick Street should be read by anyone concerned with what exactly the Satanic mill down their street is up to. After 150 years of cohabitating with The Devil, the residents of north Sydney are now sitting in Hades's show garden: a miserable stew of toxins, complex carcinogens and lethal vapours simmering beneath--and frequently oozing over--their once-fertile soil. The best part of Frederick Street is the author's unsentimental account of the locals' heroic attempts to win back their lives. Can a feisty Julia Roberts movie be far away? Yes--thankfully, Julia doesn't do accents.

Although protesters at the 1997 APEC conference in Vancouver have cleaned the pepper spray from their faces, the sting still lingers. PEPPER IN YOUR EYES: THE APEC AFFAIR (UBC Press) is a collection of riffs on the myriad political and social issues that fueled the APEC fiasco and still smoulder today. The affair is seen as a call for more police accountability; as the logical conclusion of globalization; and, most compellingly, as a case study in the failings of our half-public, half-private legal system. Some essays will be hard sledding for those who avoided graduate school, but skim the theoretical parts and be amazed at how much you didn't get from the mainstream press. Pepper In Your Eyes couldn't arrive at a better time--the APEC inquiry is winding down and the public's attention has moved on to other Prime Ministerial scandals. In other words, it's just in time for the next federal election.

In reality, Hal Niedzviecki is too young to be a grumpy old man, but after his book WE WANT SOME TOO: UNDERGROUND DESIRE AND THE REINVENTION OF MASS CULTURE (Penguin Canada) hits the stands, he will probably play one on TV. Witty, snarly and compulsively cranky, Niedzviecki's freewheeling essays on pop culture's self-implosion (and the wonderous vacuum created by its own vacuity) will strike some readers as being just another hot-button pressing, I-am-so-now diatribe. But these readers will miss the point. Underneath Niedzviecki's exhaustive cataloguing of the actions and reactions and re-reactions that make up pop culture lurks an indirect autobiography, the story of a life lived among, below, and above the fly-blown shit of our shared culture. Niedzviecki simply can't get enough. He sees every movie, reads every book and peers into every slapped-together zine and broadsheet.

The effect is dizzying, in the delightful way, and a happy response to the rash of ponderous, doom-ridden cultural forecasts we've been fed since the early 1990s. Niedzviecki's central premise (if such a phrase can be applied to a book so dedicated to buckshot analysis) is that a new breed of artist is being created by the 24/7 culture onslaught--an artist who gleefully jumps in and out of mass culture at will, like a magpie hunting for shiny junk to decorate its nest. We need no longer fear mass culture--because we own the material. In this mutable culture, Niedzviecki argues, participants are set free from the powerful/powerless chess game: the board becomes a series of infinite links. But the best part of Niedzviecki's surly utopia is that nobody from the ancien regime can find it on the map. As he notes, "perhaps we should be glad that our leaders are clueless." Well, thanks for blabbing, Hal.