The bourgeois blues

FOR 10 years, BlackBook magazine has been doing a bait and switch: using fashion to direct people’s attention to more provocative issues. Tucked within its glossy, ad-laden pages is some of the more boisterous prose to be found on a magazine rack. Now, BlackBook’s editor, Aaron Hicklin, has gathered the best of that writing into an anthology celebrating its first decade, “The Revolution Will Be Accessorized: BlackBook Presents Dispatches From the New Counterculture.”

Hicklin describes his magazine as “the product of competing but, ultimately, complementary desires ... a faintly quixotic marriage of literary aspiration with a downtown fashion aesthetic.... If that has sometimes served to muddy the waters, well, we like it that way.” Far from muddy, the anthology reads like a core sample of contemporary culture, offering a crystalline view of the passion, protest, frivolity, entropy, bitterness, romance and fear on which American life is built. Throughout there is a fine dusting of postmodern irony. Excavating this cultural terrain are some of the most interesting voices of our time, including Matthew Barney, Joan Didion, William T. Vollmann and Meghan Daum (a Times op-ed columnist). A mixture of essay and conversation, the book is fractious, fascinating and often surprising.

“The Revolution Will Be Accessorized” opens not with a raised fist of protest but with “L.A. Bourgeois,” Daum’s sigh of capitulation to her middle-class desires. Hastened by her move to Los Angeles from New York, she explains, “the assimilation process feels a lot like the aging process: We mellow out, we settle down, we accept.... we let the tides of bourgeois culture crash over our rough spots until we’re smooth as stones.” Anticipating a new Target store in her neighborhood, Daum notes: “The revolution did indeed come. It’s just that it was a revolution not of politics, but of style.” In a culture obsessed with how things look, Target succeeds where Marxism has failed, erasing all visible signs of class distinction -- the poor shop alongside the rich and everyone can have a chic Michael Graves-designed teakettle. “[T]he democracy of design can give us the illusion of real democracy,” she observes, leaving us all in the big, “bourgey” middle, endlessly processing lifestyle trends, opiated by affordable creature comforts.

The difficulty of hanging onto one’s ideals also animates Bruno Maddox’s scathing portrait of Karl “King” Wenclas, founder of the Underground Literary Alliance, a group of writers that stages actions against the established literary elite. Wenclas finds himself in the awkward position of being welcomed by the rarefied world he rails against, which “spoiled everything,” Maddox asserts. “If your entire sense of self rests on the idea of being a Barbarian at the Gate, then all of a sudden the gate opens up and there’s George Plimpton in a blazer beckoning you in ... well, you’ve got a problem. Now you’re a barbarian at a cocktail party.”

Of course, these days, all would-be revolutionaries face this dilemma, as the symbols of protest become co-opted. In “The Big Sell,” Mike Albo points out that “[d]uring the WTO protests, rioters in Seattle threw rocks at Starbucks while wearing Levi’s and Nikes.” He looks at the scary future of “neuromarketing” and tries to find a mode of resistance, suggesting that we just say no to the latest Norah Jones CD. Then he admits: “I guess that doesn’t seem so revolutionary. I wonder if there is any way to escape.... Do we really want it to go away? I mean, I kind of love Beyonce.” In the end, the best he can come up with is to “be constantly vigilant of your tastes and to stay slippery.”

This ideological quicksand becomes even more liquid when found in the pages of a shiny, consumerist rag like BlackBook, a contradiction the magazine giddily embraces. In the regular “Vs.” feature, its editors pair two notable personalities for a discussion that usually ends up being far more collaborative than adversarial. Douglas Coupland and Naomi Klein earnestly probe their discomfort with trying to subvert “the lipo-industrial complex” from within a fashion magazine: “[H]ere we are, trying to have a dialogue and save face when we know it’s going to end up sandwiched between pages dripping with ink.”

We are a restless nation, and these pages offer many journeys. In his stirring essay “Ghostwalk,” Victor Bockris visits ground zero a month after Sept. 11 and declares, “This country is not about the celebration of firemen; it’s about the celebration of freedom. The most important freedom of all is the freedom of speech.” DBC Pierre travels to Hayastan, on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and stumbles upon romance in a remote village. “I ponder that crucial component of romance that is isolation,” he writes, “being outside of, at odds with, the wider environment: being forced to carve a lonely niche in lieu of wider acceptance by the world.”

“The Revolution Will Be Accessorized” does falter occasionally. A collection of six-word stories by famous authors feels like a party game you’re not invited to play. Augusten Burroughs’ piece about his troubled family’s lack of ritual feels off-topic and out of place. A semi-historical gag bit on April Fool’s Day reads like ... a fashion magazine puff piece.

Yet ultimately, what’s most surprising isn’t that we are occasionally reminded that these are magazine pieces but that this is so easy to forget. It makes me want to take out a subscription to BlackBook, which I would, of course, read only for the articles.