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!
