Junk was a series of fanzines thrown together from 1992 to 1994 by a bunch of over-educated, under-employed, disilusioned and bored slackers. We were the so-called Generation X looking for a clear path ahead where everything seemed pointless and boring. This was a time when music was finally decent after a decade of 80s garbage; a time when new art was plentiful and the term 'grunge' extended beyong music to a lifestyle choice. Junk was started by Nick Klauwers and Alfredo Bloy while they were both bored shitless in England. Soon others - some of them even talented - joined in the fun. Junk was a messy, insulting semi-regular newsletter of sorts aimed at keeping them and their friends around the world amused, if only for a few minutes. A private joke drawn on a napkin. Among the scribbles and bad poetry there is a flavour which tastes totally 90s. Widespread internet use was just a couple of years away. And to cut and paste still involved scissors and Pritt stick.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Generation X

Douglas Coupland - Generation X - Junk Equation
Generation X is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s--a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething."


Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges--landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

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