whither the millenium?

(from 2010)

This decade has been a venture into some kind of horrible parallel timestream in which the millenium never came, and never will.  Creative activities have devolved into common sense business ventures- quite boring ones in most cases.  The millenial impulse has been shown to be nothing more than the harmless zaniness of incompetent caricatures;   the dream of Joyce's dirgible man has become Michael Scott- cute, wacky, and a bit stupid because he values humor and friendship over day-to-day resource management.  

All good comedic television this decade would have us follow the example of smugly self-conscious protagonists who cut down all forms of far-out character traits in favor of pragmatism.  To be cool in this decade is to be Michael Bluth, not Oscar; Jim and Pam, the Griffins, Jack Donaghee- all survey the silliness around them with the bemused, cynical eyes of experience, ready to sarcastically pounce on any trace of the millenial spirit.  We want security, not daydreams.  Financial solvency, not starry-eyed communion with nature.  Drunken skirt-chasing, not goddess worship.  Social formality, not boundary dissolution.  Beer and coffee, not LSD and Vajrayana and Alchemy and UFOs.

The liberal mentality has been utterly eclipsed by the spirit of defensive ridicule, and remains on the scene only in the guise of harmless cuteness.  The stench of cuteness and self-conscious cleverness have choked all the life out of everything, especially music.  And advertising.  If commercials as a whole are trying to assure of us anything this decade, its that the world is very cute and sentimental and warm and fuzzy and fully prepared to wrap your fears in a warm blanket of consumerism.  If there is anything really called "indie" music, it is the music made by white people in which the central value being expressed is being attractively harmless.  We're all five years old and like little kids we sing in awkward voices to show how cute we are and how much we love novelty toys and plastic day-glo lite-bright kitchy bullshit.  Hip-hop has tried in vain to maintain its indignant self-righteousness in a world in which it is no longer oppressed or denied as a form of expression; but as it has become fully accepted and celebrated, its fuel of anger and frustration have become less than potent.  Jay-Z and Kanye… it's all exessive consumption and vapid publicity, and therefore just as boring as everything else in this conservative culture, and just as poisonous to us.

In other words, we seem to have crawled back into the repressed terror of the 50's and undone all of the eschatological progress of the last psychedelic revolution by turning it into a vast mine of ridicule and imitation.  There are no more UFOs over New York, no more third eyes bright as street lamps.   The shock of 9/11 forced us into hyper self-critique, put our wariness into overdrive, and thoroughly froze all momentum towards transcendence.  I'm going to assume for the sake of positivity that this is just some kind of decade-long trap door, fleeting, and on the brink of being utterly replaced by an authentic reboot of the imagination.