LEAH McLAREN

Saturday, November 11, 2000

A couple of weeks ago I had a terrible moment of self-reckoning. It happened at Caban, Club Monaco's new flagship homeware store, not far from my house in Toronto. So there I was, on a Saturday afternoon, sifting among the putty-toned corduroy toss cushions, boiled-wool throws and sheepskin bathmats, when I realized, I like everything in this store.

Not love, just like. It all looked good to me, in a tastefully boring sort of way. Like the clothes at Banana Republic or the coffee at Starbucks, the stuff seemed so familiar, even on the first encounter. I suppose I like these things because they are made for people just like me, I mused, inspecting a wengewood salad bowl. These inoffensively stylish, moderately priced goods are the comfort food of consumer culture.

But instead of bringing a fuzzy feeling of satisfaction, this realization -- that I felt at home in this lifestyle emporium -- triggered a silent identity crisis.

I took a seat on the nearest pleather ottoman. Who are these Caban people and where are they getting their information, anyway? How did they know that I really, really needed a charcoal-grey jersey robe? Where did they get off, pushing my nostalgia button by reissuing, in affordable stainless steel, the same tiny silver salt-seller set my grandmother has in sterling?

If these people know me so well, who am I? Burying my face in a linen shower curtain (dry-clean only), I was forced to admit something truly terrible. Worse than just being lumped into a consumer target market, I realized I typify my particular consumer target market. I am a flagship model consumer.

My taste was probably designed for me by a bunch of chortling market researchers in an office-tower boardroom somewhere in Dallas. They were chortling because they knew me. They had always known me. From my first pair of Osh Kosh's overalls to my treasured adolescent cassette copy of Nirvana's Nevermind to the stainless-steel toothbrush holder in my bathroom today. These people own me through the stuff I own.

I considered dropping everything, running out of the store and throwing myself at the mercy of the first underground-record store I could find, before I realized that the crisis I was having was, in itself, the most yuppieish behavior I'd ever exhibited. To show signs of a premature midlife crisis by developing a sudden obsessive interest in obscure Bristol jungle recordings would be a dead giveaway. Worse than that, it would seal my fate.

Breathing from my diaphragm, I went to the checkout line and purchased a merlot silk blanket (a wedding present). Then I walked home, comtemplating my yuppiedom.

I figure the difference between new yuppies and the original yuppies (of the early 1980s) is that we are in a collective state of denial. Somehow we grew up with a notion that we were all deeply unconventional people. The irony of this collective self-delusion was sold to us by the very conglomerates who bought our souls in the first place.

We grew up participating in trends that convinced us we were doing anything but participating in a trend. We listened to "alternative" rock en masse. We just did it. We asked where the beef was. We weren't afraid to be different.

As we churned through bands and television shows and movies, discarding cultural products as easily as we had taken them up, we convinced ourselves that it had all been our own decision. That Pearl Jam or Ice-T had sold out, and that was why we didn't listen to them anymore. That discarding an old thing in favour of a new thing had actually been an informed choice, an excercise of principle and good taste, rather than what it actually was, an act of cowardice and blind consumerism.

More so than any other generation, stuff dominates our lives, and we are loath to admit it. When we talk about "keeping things real," we are either stupid or insane. We doth protest way too much, dude.

A couple of weekends ago I met a guy at a bar who was a marketing rep for some cool independent record label in New York I'd never heard of. (An aside: A surefire way to measure what's cool and what's not in today's world is to consider whether or not you've ever heard of the artist/designer/DJ in question. If you have, it's probably not cool.) Anyway, I asked this guy how he liked New York.

He shrugged and said, "I thought it would be more exciting. I moved there from London, which was, like, I'd say about a 4 on the excitement scale, and I thought New York would be a solid 10, when in fact it's really only a 6 or a 7. The only time I feel like New York is exciting is when I come back to Toronto and realize how boring everything is. Toronto would be about a 2. I'm from Montreal originally; that city is pretty much a 0."

Here was a guy who was so cool he felt he was entitled to constant consumer amusement. As though the world was one big arcade and all its cities were video games waiting to be played and rated.

I asked him if, maybe, he thought his experiences in these places had anything to do with him personally. He looked at me like I was nuts. "Nah," he said, "I really don't think so."

Let me be the first to admit my own uncoolness. I am a yuppie. I wear pashmina and Gap denim and listen to Moby while sipping the cheapest Burgundy I could find in the Vintages section. For this I loathe myself, I really do. My only comfort is this: I figure I can't sell out if I was never actually trying to keep it real in the first place.

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lmclaren@globeandmail.ca

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