ustxtxb_obs_1999_03_19_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

Gerald Goldstein, Honoree 7:00 PM, April 22, 1999 Old San Francisco Steak House San Antonio, Texas A AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION TEXAS Presents the John Henry Faulk Civil Libertarian of the Year Award Dinner *’kzs , ‘Cs It’s what’s lino 4jhat counts. out it the Observer. I want to subscribe to The Texas Observer. Check enclosed a *. vo, … .`A kv nrwonw imm.0.4 t e did you find this issue of the Bill me 1-3 –1 00 O tv O -F. ON 4. >4<, , MARCH 19, 1999 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 21 :e\\ \\, ,N,%., drugs; in another a band member alludes to a road-trip mnage a trois with two groupies. So that was, briefly, the new Levi's one short-lived version of the future for the jeans that had been adopted over the years by "Western pioneers, factory workers, hippies at Woodstock and Hollywood screen idols" \(as noted in Probably no product could better symbolize what Thomas Frank has called "the tradeoff between lifestyle and labor" than Levi's jeans, the worker pants that went to Woodstock. Only now the tradeoff has become more immediate. "It's hard not to imagine that these two features of contemporary American life one triumphant, one in total eclipse aren't connected in some cosmic fashion," Frank wrote. "It's as though the revolutionary legacy of the Sixties somehow effaced the revolutionary legacy of the Thirties; as though workers had to be put back in their place so that rebel lifestyles could take their pleasure properly." These days, you don't need too much imagination: workers are being put in their place in the hopes that teenagers will buy more SilverTabs and Hard Jeans. And the traditional idea of work itself, the identification between a person and his labor, is eroding in an economy defined by transience. Man becomes the sum of his brands, and inquiring as to "what's true" is as irrelevant as asking what someone happens to do for a living..You are what you consume: your car, your TV shows, your music, your books and magazines. Your drugs, your Tibetan friendship tattoos. Even your pants.