On his 30th birthday, Toronto writer and fringe culture chronicler Hal Niedzviecki received a birthday card from his parents, depicting stiff-looking men in gray suits and overcoats. Inside the card read, “Happy birthday to a nonconformist.” It sent his mind off on a tangent. “If I’m a rebel sanctioned by society, encouraged by my parents, and cheered on by Hallmark, what is left to rebel against?” The author sets out to investigate in Hello, I’m Special – with mixed results.
Being a nonconformist in a time when nonconformity is all the rage is a tough gig. The paradoxical desire to stand apart while adopting the poses of others is hardly a new phenomenon, as Niedzviecki seems to suggest. It’s been part of every teenager’s mythic quest from the fifties on. The only significant difference today is our culture of instant celebrity and assembly-line stardom. On this topic the author scores a few good observations. He indicates the new trend of the celebrity bartender, who “will soon, no doubt, be mixing their own Food Network specials, flying off to the hands of the world to dilute absinthe with crocodile blood in a coconut shaker, memento from a previous adventure tending bar for tribe in the Amazon rainforests.”
Hello, I’m Special addresses the marketing problems created by a youthful demographic that has no desire to function as walking billboards for megacorporate labels. Niedzviecki cites the recent success of low-end beer brands such as Labatt’s 50 and Pabst’s Blue Ribbon with the underemployed hipsters. In finding identification with blue-collar products that aren’t hyped by the marketing machinery, consumers have pushed Pabst’s sales by 15 percent in a two-year period. “Pabst, desperate not to screw up the revival, is now struggling to figure out how to market to this disparate hipster generation without actually appearing to be marketing.”
Where Niedzviecki shines is when he hobnobs with the eccentrics attempting to find some fringe identity through the new media. He visits the headquarters of The World Backyard Wrestling Federation (with its poolside punchups viewable on line) and the trailer park stars of the indy film Mule Skinner Blues, people well past middle age hanging on to their dreams of making it big. The scenes from auditions of Canadian Idol are instructive; although only a very small percentage of the thousands auditioning have a chance for a ticket on the fame train, many of the suburban divas and rappers are anticipating a window seat in first class. He’s also very good at nailing some of the creepier practitioners of the self-esteem industry, and a feel-goodism that teaches young people to internalize failure as much as success (the limits aren’t outside in the world, but inside you).
It’s odd that a book purporting to address identity in an era of mass persuasion makes no mention of the work of Jacques Lacan, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, or the early 20th century public relations guru Edward Bernays. The author seems to have little knowledge of sociological currents deeper than Brady Bunch reruns. So not surprisingly, no major thesis emerges from Hello, I’m Special. In fact some of the book’s claims seem either all-too-obvious or just plain wrong. Niedzviescki refers to a web site were fellow female anorexics spur each other on to greater heights of self-denial and weight loss.
“The clubby aspect makes me wonder how much of this activity is, again, about a certain one’s individuality, conforming to the idea that “I’m special.” “It seems far more likely most, if not all, of these women have fallen prey to the advertising industry’s imagery of skeletal supermodels. In other words, overshot conformity to a standardized ideal.
The problem is that while the author casts a very wide net, he only skims the frothy surface of popular culture. The main point of his book was summed up with greater economy in the Pixar film The Incredibles, when Elastigirl tells her son Dash that “everybody is special.”
“That’s just another way of saying no one is,” he morosely replies.
Conformity and nonconformity, while polar opposites, are on the same axis. There are gradations of both in everyone’s life, and while most people desire to be special, I’ll bet few of us would want to think outside the box as much as a Van Gogh or a Galileo if it meant a real loss in social stature or income. Niedzviecki’s zinesters and scensters are not so different from everyone else in desiring acceptance and a paycheque; hence their dilemma as iconoclasts. Using the rubbery term “nonconforming conformists” to address a multidimensional human experience means that Niedzviecki ends up describing everything while explaining nothing.
Hello, I’m Special is more of a snack than a meal – a Hostess Twinkie of a trade paperback. For all its tasty anecdotes and tart observations, it leaves you hungry for something more substantial.

Hello, I’m Special by Hal Niedzviecki, Penguin Canada, $25. Geoff Olson can be reached at gefo@telus.net