Spring Break
Magazine Review: Adbusters #1
Caity Cudworth
Issue date: 9/27/06 Section: Entertainment
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It's just kind of hard to enjoy a magazine that treats pressing issues such as torture and global climate change with the same gravity as "how skateboard culture lost its soul."
To a certain extent Adbusters really is "a slick-subversive mindbomb full of intimate epiphanies, geopolitical insights," etc; the articles and pretentious layout challenge the way we think about our consumption-driven lifestyles. Adbusters does a good job of being what it is: an indictment of consumer culture.
But it tends to be a bit too righteous, a little too sure that it is on the right side of every issue. We, on the other hand, are wrong for wasting our lives chasing material possessions rather than going out and spending every waking moment protesting all the injustices in the world.
Maybe I've already been sucked in by the evils of capitalism, but halfway through the magazine all of the consumer bashing and doomsday scenarios were starting to wear on me. And so, thus schooled in the evils of mainstream media and corporate malfeasance, I did what any other self-respecting member of the brainwashed masses would do: I stopped reading and turned on the TV.
To a certain extent Adbusters really is "a slick-subversive mindbomb full of intimate epiphanies, geopolitical insights," etc; the articles and pretentious layout challenge the way we think about our consumption-driven lifestyles. Adbusters does a good job of being what it is: an indictment of consumer culture.
But it tends to be a bit too righteous, a little too sure that it is on the right side of every issue. We, on the other hand, are wrong for wasting our lives chasing material possessions rather than going out and spending every waking moment protesting all the injustices in the world.
Maybe I've already been sucked in by the evils of capitalism, but halfway through the magazine all of the consumer bashing and doomsday scenarios were starting to wear on me. And so, thus schooled in the evils of mainstream media and corporate malfeasance, I did what any other self-respecting member of the brainwashed masses would do: I stopped reading and turned on the TV.
