Shorter Brooksie: why can’t status and culture continue to be about over-priced cars and coffee and record collections and Ivy League educations than relatively cheap electronics and downloads and Wikipedia? Hey, you kids get off my Bohemian suburban lawn (I used McCarran’s Landscaping—he makes it look expensively shabby, but that blue-collar brute is actually quite reasonable. I wonder why? *wink*).

You’re correct, Jesse: the selfish Boomers who read Brooksie will definitely be the ones who quietly vote for McCain and then stop at Starbucks and congratulate each-other on saving democracy during the ‘60s.

Now Kristol is just an awful joke, and I also understand there’s a healthy loathing here for Dowd’s bitter chick-lit political analysis, but for me the spot of top douchebag on the NYT‘s columnist roster consistently goes to this smugly disingenuous neoCon apologist.

I dunno, I just got embarrassed for him reading that… like he wasn’t even disguising his naked jealousy and used a major newspaper’s op/ed section to whine and throw himself a pity-party. While I’m sure that he can afford the hip new gadgets, his roll as dweeby neocon leaking assbag denies him the indie hipster cred he has associated with the new gadgets. No one takes time to check him out at the cafes when he’s reading Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives on his Kindle. No one offers to check out his playlist when he’s listening to Benny Goodman on his iPod. All those hip bitches keep offering themselves up to those impossibly skinny dudes in the tight pants rockin’ the bedhead. But if you can’t buy hipster cred, what are those commercials for? WHAT, I TELL YOU?!

“You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom.”

A tiny anecdote:  when Rigoletto was in rehearsals before its debut in 1851, Verdi would not allow one of the arias to be performed in open rehearsal.  All of the rehearsal for “La donna e mobile” was done behind closed doors.  Why?

Because Verdi knew that it would be pirated by street vendors as soon as it was out in public, and he didn’t want to lose his hit single.  So he kept it under wraps for as long as possible.

Yeah, opera and theater were all about high culture.  That’s why the people in the cheap seats at the front used to throw rotten fruit at actors or singers they didn’t like.  Ass.

(You can see Pavarotti perform “La donna e mobile” on YouTube.  You may not recognize the title, but you know the song.)

Cranky Kong?  Going all SNES on us?

Awesome.

Brooks’s cultural criticism has much in common with marketing. He has a product line, and he’s just trying to put different stuff out on the market, promote it, and see what “catches on.” This forces him to say any number of stupid things, because something might actually resonate with readers, and when it does, he’ll write a book centered around that theme.

In the meantime, all his “failures” end up as embarrassing testimonies to the stupid stuff he has pontificated on.

I didn’t think he was particularly favorable to “intellectual snobbery.”  He was merely saying that being an early adopter gadget-fetishist is similar to being the douchebag who won’t shut up about Kierkegaard. 

He says:

“In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.”

This doesn’t sound like an affectionate description of a lifestyle.

I didn’t think he was particularly favorable to “intellectual snobbery.” He was merely saying that being an early adopter gadget-fetishist is similar to being the douchebag who won’t shut up about Kierkegaard

Yes, but his underlying question is really “what happened to all the quality pretentious twits?”

The answer, of course, looks back at Brooksie from the mirror every morning.

The funny thing is that Brooks is actually a week YOUNGER than Obama, even though this is far from the first time in the past few months that he’s gone into “thum kids these days” mode.

Gracchus,

I read Brooks’s point as being that the new twits are the same as the old twits.

Also, Donkey Kong Country jumped the shark when Wrinkly Kong died and came back as a ghost.  Selling Rare to Microsoft was a smart move on Nintendo’s part.

I read Brooks’s point as being that the new twits are the same as the old twits.

That’s one way of reading it. I read Brooks considering his intended audience: a bunch of selfish and self-satisfied Boomers who want to hold onto the liberal intellectual cred of their college days even though they’ve been voting Republican since 1980.

This audience likes to be re-assured they have still a lot more respect for Kierkegaard (and the pricey education that implies) than the new iPhone (and the $200 hardware price that implies).

Totally off topic (sorry) but I concur with Mitchforth that Nintendo dropping Rare was a brilliant move, especially considering their recent output.

*goes back to lurking*