Great taste, less thrilling

Meanwhile, originality seems to be at an all-time low, while everyone scrambles to get their fingers in everyone else's pies. Suddenly everyone is in on every expensive and distracting trend, and the personal is abandoned in pursuit of a higher ideal of universal class. Lawyers bemoan other lawyers who dress like lawyers; tourists can be overheard discussing how touristy other tourists look. Everyone seems to have the same good taste in everything, from living rooms that look like they're ripped straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog to "eclectic" CD collections filled with the same standards: Portishead, Beastie Boys, Beck, Radiohead, classic Beatles, classic Stones. Meanwhile, Planet Hollywood just went bankrupt. What's the world coming to?

We're a country of social overachievers. We can't just dabble in those things that suit our interests, or dress in ways that make sense given our backgrounds, hobbies, income levels. We want to be all things to all people, and in so doing we're going to end up in a nowhere land of so-called tastefulness. In today's fast food fashion industry, where rapid trend turnover is seen as being as inevitable as the seasons, keeping up with the Joneses must be nearly instantaneous. Haste doesn't make waste, haste makes taste.

Meanwhile good taste today isn't taste at all, it's predigested and textureless and anything but personal. But what can you expect in a country where every single city has a street with a Starbuck's, a Barnes and Noble, a Banana Republic, a Gap and a Pottery Barn on it? Places like Planet Hollywood are denigrated as prefabricated, tacky imitations of the real thing, yet each town is slowly transformed into a cartoonish theme park of undifferentiated, overly "designed" mass consumerism.

Even if you honestly didn't care about personal style or originality before, it's hard not to long for an outrageously radical freak to shake things up. Someone with a bizarre eerie style that thumbs its nose at the current preoccupation with self-conscious uniformity and class. Cher or Cyndi Lauper or Madonna with those cheesy rubber bracelets -- give us goofy, strange, tacky, borderline ugly, just give us anything original and real. Anything's better than the Planet Good Taste.

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