The malevolent influence of trend tyranny can be blatant, as caricatures even, within fashion. Harder to notice in writing, or poetry though…

I had a particular nature sometimes during youth. I remember my father developing an interest in golf. It was because his knees became more and more unhappy with sandlot basketball. So I would watch once in awhile, with him, Sundays on TV.

But right from the start something vaguely irritated me about this ‘sport’. Was it even a sport? It was the pace partly. When you’re a kid you want action in your athletics. But mostly, I figured it out, it was the absurdly unsubtle and inartistic outfits they wore. Golf fashion. Late ’70s. Yellow shirts, checkered pants. There was a whole aesthetic to it. Except it was non-aesthetic.

I get a similar waft in my nostrils with some ‘poetry’ nowadays. As though depth is pretentious, or something to be suspicious of. But worst of all is the dreadfully-named content writing. That literally mindless filler functioning as clickbait on seemingly 90% of contemporary websites. Info. The art of clumping together uninformative info. Hospital food for the browser eager to waste empty time in between occasional commercial transactions.

This is what culture has degenerated into nowadays. Pre-digested colorless orthodoxy-mush. Conformity via exhaustion and laziness. In order to do anything even approaching substantial, or responsive to the actual needs of the times, one has to be outré. Bigly outré. God help us.

_______RS

[ Image : from a compilation of some fave looks out on the links of yesteryear. If you can stomach it, here’s some more. ]

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