The Attraction of Kitsch
I’m wondering about why we’re so into trash, kitsch, dreck….
It’s catching on everywhere, supplanting the authentic. It’s related to the
love of shock and violence, I think. I wonder if it’s related to guilt.
We know we’re bad. We know what we’ve done.
Bosses put one employee on the
graveyard shift at the 7-11 knowing they might get shot.
And it takes work to know the good. It creates change. We’re tired
from striving, straining, shopping, no time for quality, no time
to grow. We’ve let ourselves become products with product
cycles. Lifestyles. Burn em down!
Beauty, growth threatens us. So we wallow in trash instead. No willingness
to move on, to move up. Maybe it’s an ego thing, too.
Quality, beauty is perhaps corrosive to ego. It reminds
us how we leave it behind to move up. How can you laugh
and party and do that at the same time? Where would fun
fit in? Shopping? Gossip?
I got to feeling funny reading and watching kitsch. About my
media habits. Why was I
doing it, where was it going, what part did I like, what part
didn’t I need. So I found that I left most of it behind. That the good
part of it was worked on sincerely, better, elsewhere. With all the
attendant risks and dangers and boring reward. Sometimes
I feel like the Beatles when they quit the revolution and
started meditating. I haven’t published my zine in awhile.
I’m reading spiritual stuff. But there has to be a return
to the world.
I think I’ll keep my books and the zine going: keep telling
people that the best and coolest biker is the one who walks
to the store. That you’re the best everything when you’re integrated
in your life, that then you contain everything, nothing’s a stranger.
I’ll show it in practical examples. Once you know what to look
for you see it everywhere.
I haven’t left cycling behind now that I don’t ride much;
it’s now fully built in. I ride for errands, when I don’t
have errands I don’t ride as much. I eat less. That’s
the victory of cycling for me. To not need cycling.
It seems like anything else is a betrayal of cycling.
To take it as an ends instead of a means makes cycling
scream in agony, as the middlemen manipulating you
laugh all the way to the bank, as your ego jones on its
‘achievement’. I’m really traveling now that I don’t feel the
need to even leave my yard. World traveler. Like any Buddhist
paddy worker. Give it up and it comes back as it really is.
Or it doesn’t. No lies, no cover. No hold over you.
Man, I went mt-biking the other day and
in the parking lot at the trailhead I saw 100 new jeeps with
200 fullydressed clone robo-biker dudes with their new
superbikes. They seemed like a bunch of heroin addict cops.
