Slacker guru or sell out?

>> Hal Niedzviecki peddles the underground to mainstream media

by JULIET WATERS

There's a chapter in We Want Some Too that discusses stupid jobs. These are the jobs that the contemporary slacker takes just to pay the rent, to finance her zine, or band, or drinking problem. Usually these fit the traditional McJob category: copy centre clerk, courier, temp slave. Occasionally they have a veneer of cool by being on the lower echelon of the culture industry: record store clerk, publisher's assistant, weekly alternative journalist.

But every once in a while someone lands a job that seems to have all the dignity, significance and respect of a high-status job. Yet when one takes a minute to think about it, it still seems like a stupid job--such as a mass-media anointed "alternative culture guru."

This is Hal Niedzviecki's stupid job, and to his credit he at least seems to know it. "Alternative culture guru" is how Niedzviecki is described on the inside cover of his digressive analysis of the ambitions, malaise and paradoxes of the "TV generation." I met up with him after he did an interview on CBC's Home Run and asked him how he gets across his fairly complex ideas on a medium as reductive as afternoon radio.

"It's been difficult," he says. "I have a couple of pat things that I rely on. I say, 'Yeah, well, we're replacing things like work and religion and family and jobs with our slave-ish and bizarre devotion to pop culture' and that usually goes over pretty well on radio. That's the easy answer. But 'What is lifestyle culture?' [the central question of Niedzviecki's book] has no five-second answer. So you usually stay away from that."

And then there are Niedzviecki's other responsibilities as a guru, like his column in the National Post and his temp stints as radio and TV talking head in Toronto that have landed him on every mainstream Canadian media forum from This Morning to Pamela Wallin.

"It's a frustrating experience to try and express these ideas in a mainstream that deliberately excludes independent culture because it doesn't 'foster a positive marketing environment,'" he says. "We're sitting here today discussing a book published by Penguin, but if it were published by a smaller publisher maybe we wouldn't be sitting here today. Which isn't a reflection on your skills, but a reflection on the whole machine. When I published Lurvy [his 1998 novel] we weren't sitting here. Maybe because it wasn't worth sitting here. Or maybe it was because I didn't have a publicist and I didn't have someone to foster the marketing environment and say 'this is sanctioned corporate material.'"

Of course, some people wouldn't call this a stupid job, they would merely accuse him of selling out. But this, argues Niedzviecki, "says more about how the mass media fails us than it says about my work. To me that's a tautology of brainwashing to say the underground is supposed to be secret because then it's still cool. Those are all just meaningless constructs that are designed to prevent us from making independent culture."

This all sort of fits into Niedzviecki's basic argument that mass media's presence in our lives is not a bad or a good thing, it's just an inescapable thing. "It's not necessarily the best thing. But it's a step forward to acknowledge the fact that we live in a dis-real universe basically made up of mass culture phenomena. More than any other activity, what do we do? We connect in some way to mass culture. Once we acknowledge that, we can look at how we can actually find ourselves in this world where many people are just floundering, reduced to little consumer parcels. How we relate to mass culture is probably the central concern of how we're going to live our lives for the next 1,000 years." A tough job, but somebody's got to do it. :

We Want Some Too by Hal Niedzviecki, Penguin, pb, 359 pp, $25