Dear Generation X: Don’t believe the Marco Rubio hype

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

At least since he officially announced his race for the presidency in April, Marco Rubio has been playing himself up as the young guy in the mix.

“The time has come for our generation to lead the way towards a new American century,” he said at Miami’s Freedom Tower. “Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. But we can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past.”

Referring to Hillary Clinton, he continued: “Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday. Yesterday is over, and we are never going back.”

The myth of the quiet Beatle: Time for Gen X to ease up on the George Harrison hype

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

The quiet Beatle has been less quiet lately – even more than a decade after his death. Martin Scorsese’s “Living in the Material World,” from 2011, made a strong case for George Harrison as a major player in the Beatles and as a deeply soulful figure who never quite got his due. “The basic purpose of this movie is to stick up for Harrison,” The Guardian wrote, “and for his unfashionable, unpretentious need for a spiritual purpose in his music and his life: and Scorsese’s film suggests that alone in the Beatles, and perhaps alone in pop’s premier league, Harrison was an authentic spiritual figure.”

And now a concert film – from a 2014 tribute show at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles – and accompanying album has been announced for February. Brian Wilson, Spoon’s Britt Daniels, Perry Farrell, Norah Jones, and others will be involved. (Even, oddly, Conan O’Brien, who plays “Old Brown Shoe.”)

Gen X vs. Bill Clinton: Cobain and Clinton, “Seinfeld” and “Simpsons,” and the ’90s fight for America’s soul

www.salon.com|Gil Troy

On April 8, 1994 an electrician named Gary Smith, dispatched to install a security system at a four-bedroom, five-bathroom turn-of-the-century mansion in Seattle, found no one home. Peering through a window, he thought he saw a fallen mannequin. Once he realized it was the corpse of Kurt Cobain, the twenty-seven-year-old lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana, Smith called a local Seattle radio station before calling the police.

Three days earlier, Cobain, fleeing drug treatment, binging on heroin and valium, had shot himself in the head. The troubadour of trauma for the twentysomethings’ recently christened “Generation X,” Cobain felt crushed between the edginess of his art and the machinery marketing his music. Modern popular culture now specialized in domesticating musical outlaws so they could afford luxuries like the $1.5 million home Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, had purchased that January. “The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun,” Cobain wrote in his suicide note.

That magical generation called the millennials has been a source of fascination and frustration for Xers for a long time. Gen Xers — who were born during the breakdown of the family, raised during crumbling faith in government, and saw many of their rites of passage marked by economic collapses — see the younger generation as entitled narcissists. (They are the offspring of the Boomers, after all.) And millennials, like everyone else, write off Xers as slackers, cynics, pessimists, and so on.

One summer when I was 10 or 11, a boy I’ll call Jackson befriended my brother and came over to our house frequently to play in our pond. After a few hours of splashing around, naked as usual, we went up to the house to dry off and have something to eat. Jackson plopped down on my mom’s platform rocker, grabbed his penis and started to masturbate.