Seattle.

I am concerned about Seattle. Perhaps I've just grown up, but it seemed it had more of a spark a few years ago. We were something of a cultural force to be reckoned with. Now, I feel we're all a bit washed up. Portland is the place that all the cool kids want to live, Portland has all the new cool bands coming out of it, Portland has a better fashion community. Seattle is stuck in some Microsoft North Face jacket-wearing, aging hipster limbo where nothing seems current enough, no one is creating culture here. Everyone goes around doing their thing, self-effacing, ironic, nothing means anything, everything is some postmodern symbolic rejection of meaning; everything is commodified. Fashion people think they know the people, but they're lagging years behind street style. They consider themselves arbiters of taste, but no one is listening; they talk only to themselves. If they mattered, they'd be in New York, we assume. Not that anything matters anymore. People on the streets don't care about fashion, they care about expression, the expression of a societal ennui. There is no local outlets for art because there is no art. (see: Jean Baudrillard's "The Conspiracy of Art")

Maybe we've all just been living off of the cool vibe that grunge gave us twenty years ago, still trying to hold onto something that's dead. Sure, we had Deathcab for Cutie, that was a brief phase, which is fortunately over. We've gone mainstream. Where are our emerging artists? What are we known for? We're losing to war to Birkenstock-clad mountain climbers.


I've given up on Seattle, and I've only been here a few months. If we're not the future, we could at least have a past. But the past we have is nothing much to brag about.


I keep waiting around to find my people, the ones who I think will create some sort of movement. But I'm afraid the time for movements has passed. I worry about the void left by postmodernism, it really does seem like the end of history, or at least the end of passion. Nothing means anything. Life is absurd. Wear a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, defy societal norms for the sake of irony. Rob the past and all its icons of meaning. Drink your PBR out of a can, steal things from other times, other classes, other cultures in order to prove that no object, no symbol is of any true value, it's all a commodity in a world where buying is the only job left.


I'd get upset about it, but it's all too goddamn ironic, too funny, too meaningless, too much ennui, not enough substance.


And as much as I'd like to deny it, I'm pretty sure it's the same thing everywhere. Seattle is the world. It's the end of culture.