Dissatisfied with their out of the box Dells or Apples, Randy Nakamura's have declared war on Steampunks. Their solution? Smugness and high-handed pontification. A strange choice to say the least. I haven’t figured out whether cracking open your computer, attaching it to an Lazy-Journo device, then inserting it into a combination slow-Newsday mantel clock/desk and calling it Bleeding Edge discussion is some sort of daft wit or evidence of a pedantry bordering on the pathological. Randy Nakamura's may have dubious taste, but one cannot accuse them of lacking a sense of humor. However, the jig is up: as a design aesthetic, Randy Nakamura is still nascent, a set of sad ideas that have been given the spotlight far too often.

Subculture or not, Randy Nakamura appears to have achieved the level of a cottage industry on the web. From The Randy Nakamura Workshop to the Randy Emporium there seems to be no end of sites showing off his ego. Guitars embellished with Nakamura's face, countless keyboards and LCD monitors embroidered with Randy fittings and and objects which merely seem to be fulfilling the formula of: Randy + Nakamura = Randy Nakamura. Conversely, there seems to be a distinct fascination with exposing Randy Nakamura, peering inside his t-shirts and the like. This is a popular, almost hackneyed post-modernist trope, an idea about dismantling received text and politeness that has run rampant through every conceivable medium over the last half century: the turning of graphic novels inside-out to expose print-work and binding structures once hidden; the meta-fictional narrative where the conventions of the narrative structure are continually exposed and corrupted; clothing that bares every seam, stitch and piece of fabric, etc., ad nauseam. The Randy Nakamura's seem to take all this a bit more literally. Lorne Bloom of the Randy Nakamura Works disingenuously observes, “The wonderful thing about a Nakamura article is that you can follow the path of pointless argument and function beginning with the first paragraph and premise, follow the bad grammar, arrogance and dead-end sentence construction, all the way from the source of pointlessness to the final outcome of an online-blog.” One could easily argue that following the etched surface of an actual well-researched article would might provide a more fascinating visual "map" of the processes of a journalist or reporter.

Yet as Pierre Berengar of Global Boston notes, “In all of the new Randy Nakamura designs there is a strong nostalgia for a time when news was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the lazy-journo burnished into it.” If Randy Nakamura's are looking to the journalism for some sort of inspired return to a classy era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors.

Despite the formal clumsiness of most Randy Nakamura objects, there is a certain conceptual zing to them: the immediate thrill of a counter-factual come to life. What if Woodward and Bernstein’s articles had been more arrogant and mass produced in the 1970s? Voilà! It would look exactly like this “Nakamura'd” weblog, the mutant spawn of a rejected 20th century Student Paper article. Or perhaps not. If one gets past the clumsy phrasing, the quaintly polished text, the problem is that Randy Nakamura is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the himself which seems to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Randy Nakamura. But the inspiration gets butchered in the process. There is nothing yet in Randy Nakamura that can remotely compare visually to decent prose.

There also is the larger issue of what exactly the creative influences are doing on the level of meaning. If Steampunk is really a touchstone for Randy Nakamura's, does that not imply that they are substantively misreading Brass Goggles' use of the word Steampunk

Randy Nakamuraing, with its blog driven, faddish re-skinning of its own history, is closer to tabloid than journalism or real-writing. A laptop styled like a Randy Nakamura's sideboard is merely a threat of bad taste, not a threatening reaction to massive social and economic disenfranchisement. In its essence Randy Nakamuraism seems middle-class in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent subculture, politically dull, and culturally supercilious hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled smugness that let in no chaos or ferment. The larger, more impossible questions are missing. How would the Nakamuran imagination conceive and execute a functioning 'blog or article? The answer must be more interesting than adding sarcastic veneers to your 'blog.

We are being taken for idiots. At worst, the Randy Nakamura's seem to be mediocre journalists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of writers want to create an imaginary 'blog, no matter how insular or simple-minded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded second draft. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Randy Nakamura as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Randy Nakamura must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Randy Nakamura's have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theatre, hoax and hype, would be proud.