They turned all the great themes into theme parks

I find it very comforting to know that I can reference a somewhat obscure Christian Slater movie from 1990 and immediately have people replying with phrases from the film. It shows that I know my audience as we are all a bunch of non-conformist slackers who are essentially too lazy to conform.

I actually own Pump Up the Volume on DVD as I saw it for like five bucks at Best Buy one day. I watched the film incessantly as a teenager and watching it now my thought is mainly, “Wow, it really is just a Jack Nicholson impersonation.” That and I’m still trying to figure out why there are only six teachers in the entire school. Also, it was nice to know that at one point the government felt that the biggest threat to our country’s safety was pirate radio stations.

What does it say about Generation X that the actors and actresses of our youth have essentially disappeared? Well, that’s not entirely true. Johnny Depp has gone from being on 21 Jump Street to being a pirate, I guess that is a step in the right direction. But Christian Slater has been lost to the mists of time. Winona Ryder is struggling to find work and Molly Ringwald hasn’t had a meaningful gig since The Stand in 1995. That’s the strange thing about our generation, we were so small we will disappear from modern culture in a blink of an eye.

That disappearance is going to happen really soon as well. I often claim that I am at the heart of Gen X. Born in 1973 I was 18 when Smells Like Teen Spirit was released. I am as Gen X as they come and next year I will be 35 and no longer important to any marketer. As part of my job I was looking at trends for 18-34 year olds and I realized that in ten months this will no longer apply to me or anyone I went to school with. Imagine that, popular culture will no longer have to address the slacker culture. It’s a sad state of affairs.

I’m still not sure what our mark on the overall culture will end up being. We certainly created a great deal of good music as well as paved the wave for the mainstreaming of hip hop. Indie films took off, especially the introspective life studies that everyone with a Super 8 camera and a lot of free time discovered that they could make. There are some good writers but I don’t think that our cultural impact is going to be measured by what culture we left behind. I think it is going to be our attitude towards the world. We saw a world that was ruined before we got there and went, “Well, what’s the point?” I’m still asking that question today. People are now running around talking about climate change and I wrote papers about that twenty years ago. No one listened to me then and it’s too late to fix it now. Maybe that will be the epitaph for Generation X “We knew what was wrong, they just wouldn’t listen.” That or “Dude, have you seen my flannel?”

Completely changing subjects: I found out about the website www.ask500people.com where you can pose questions to the internet at large. I’ve of course signed up and posted the “Who should pay for dinner” question because I want the entire world to weigh in on this one. If you want you can hit the site, click through and vote for my question to be asked. Look, we all want to know the answer to this one so help me out.