I realize that I don't have time to write Mad North-Northwest anymore. It was conceived in secondary school, when I had comparatively little to do with my life and wanted an outlet for my creative energies. I had the time to try to formulate an opinion - read this book. Look at this photographer. Listen to this song. This is what I think, this is what I find cool. I realize now that as time goes on this blog gets less poetic and more prosaic. It's lacking in mystique, these days.
Especially in University, young, beautiful people specialize in pose. We are a thousand weeks old, you know, but from the way we talk about Derrida and the Middle Eastern Conflict and Andy Warhol (oh, especially Andy Warhol!) we could be a thousand. I guess my fifteen and sixteen year-old anarchopoetic self (indirectly, subconsciously) looked up to these people who could talk eloquently, who could wear their interesting blouse and boots and hat just so, who could sneer with debonair and "seek the essence of art."
They came in all different stripes, because they prized the semblance of individuality above all. They took artsy-looking photographs. They wrote poems. They smoked (sometimes), the boys played guitar (often) and they all pretended to maintain a sort of down-to-earth attitude because of course a balance must be struck between seeming too pretentious and seeming too pedestrian.
I'm kind of done with that. Artsy-looking photos aren't that hard to take with a good enough camera. For someone with even a modicum of talent, some amount of a vocabulary and twelve years of anglophone schooling, it is not very difficult to turn a phrase, to make a sentence beautiful. Coloured tights can be bought from H&M for $3.50, and these days, one doesn't even have to go into one's mother's closet to look for vintage-looking vestments- they're sold at your local department store, looking pretty but really completely defeating the purpose.
It's a beautiful pose. Really it is. But that's all it is - a pose. It's cool to appreciate art, but don't count your appreciation to your credit. The world has got enough of intellectual poseurs mumbling beautiful, empty phrases and extolling the beauty of Edie Sedgwick. Please. Edie Sedgwick was a speed addict who posed for photographs and slept with men for money to buy more speed. Merit? Really? Tights and chandelier earrings do not a worthwhile person make. Let's do something real.
I tried to keep Mad North-Northwest from ever being too pretentious. As a result I think it's objectively boring. Thus, though my readers can be counted on one hand, I 'd like to explain its relative absence of late. It will be back, eventually, and I will keep posting when I find something worth talking about.
In the meantime, kick out the jams!
2.4.09
Here's to you, Japhy Ryder!
I grew up in suburbia. I hated it.
This is not entirely true. I eventually made awesome friends in suburbia, the sun shone brightly, Dorian and I roamed the streets in the face of the SUVs, and school was easy so I was free to read and write idealistic poems and make tea and go to Trader Joe's. I was happy, but the environment was limited. The social ideal was the little Abercrombie moose and a denim miniskirt and Rainbow flipflops for fifty dollars and the biggest, best limousine for prom. When spring came and I disappeared every weekend to go paddle in West Virginia and came back having slept in a pipe, the skinny blonde-with-dark-roots Miss Hollister who sat behind me in U.S. history gaped openly. Almost everyone in my graduating class went to a school somewhere in the area, Naty Ice, fake tans and stripmall trips included. I moved to another country and have yet to look back.
When I came to McGill, this changed. I finally met the people who I knew were out there - people who hitchhiked across countries, who climbed, who planted trees, who took a year off and disappeared into East Asia, who loved the tattered t-shirt and broken-in backpack, who never bought things, who hitchhiked to Mardi Gras, who brewed their own beer, who ice-climbed and rock-climbed and slack-lined, who never seemed to have any money but had everything else in the world in a sun-tanned palm, who carried it easily, knowing they weren't special but that they were lucky. For the first time in my life, I looked up to my peers and tried not to idolize them.
When my mom was twenty or so, she forged her papers and took a broken-down helicopter to climb 7000 metre peaks in Central Asia. I am running out of time and so I'll take the Greyhound trips to everywhere and nowhere and anywhere. They're worth it all.
Spring is here and summer is unfolding and life is and will be fantastic I believe it will.
And then, you know Jack Kerouac somehow somewhere unsustainably crazily was right:
See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
This is not entirely true. I eventually made awesome friends in suburbia, the sun shone brightly, Dorian and I roamed the streets in the face of the SUVs, and school was easy so I was free to read and write idealistic poems and make tea and go to Trader Joe's. I was happy, but the environment was limited. The social ideal was the little Abercrombie moose and a denim miniskirt and Rainbow flipflops for fifty dollars and the biggest, best limousine for prom. When spring came and I disappeared every weekend to go paddle in West Virginia and came back having slept in a pipe, the skinny blonde-with-dark-roots Miss Hollister who sat behind me in U.S. history gaped openly. Almost everyone in my graduating class went to a school somewhere in the area, Naty Ice, fake tans and stripmall trips included. I moved to another country and have yet to look back.
When I came to McGill, this changed. I finally met the people who I knew were out there - people who hitchhiked across countries, who climbed, who planted trees, who took a year off and disappeared into East Asia, who loved the tattered t-shirt and broken-in backpack, who never bought things, who hitchhiked to Mardi Gras, who brewed their own beer, who ice-climbed and rock-climbed and slack-lined, who never seemed to have any money but had everything else in the world in a sun-tanned palm, who carried it easily, knowing they weren't special but that they were lucky. For the first time in my life, I looked up to my peers and tried not to idolize them.
When my mom was twenty or so, she forged her papers and took a broken-down helicopter to climb 7000 metre peaks in Central Asia. I am running out of time and so I'll take the Greyhound trips to everywhere and nowhere and anywhere. They're worth it all.
Spring is here and summer is unfolding and life is and will be fantastic I believe it will.
And then, you know Jack Kerouac somehow somewhere unsustainably crazily was right:
See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
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