Autumn from Toronto out to York University. by neil
Or: It’s a Question of Vectors.
by Neil Balan
Here, with the slightest hint of cold (9 degrees?), the simultaneous and mass deployment of gear and ornaments that intersect in a fashion-pragmatism-use assembly is overwhelming me. Folks have busted out whole alternate sets of clothing configurations to address the aesthetic demands of weather in productive ways. Weather prioritizes a whole other mode of not only sign-value but also of habit and gesture as
expressed by the walking semiotic relays around me. The coolness is too much.
I am petty, yes, but this is how I spend my commute to York. I do revel in it; affirmation in critique! instead of an ipod to wash out the incursions, I may follow my friend’s advice and invest in a set of industrial earplugs. The tactic would not be an effort to negate the sonorized environment; instead, it’d enable and enhance touch and sight and smell and taste… Or not – but it’ll be cool either way.
I just hope i’m not blazed by a car while crossing a street with ears closed, though I did once fight the front end of a cab doing 55 with my drunken carapace and I still maintain it bent around me rather than I around it…a negotiation of asymmetrical vectors.
anyway, i work overnight at the shelter so i digress. gonna grab a few winks.
Neil.
October 21st, 2005 at 6:19 pm
just a brief follow-up…recommend: take with one cup of chortle. this is ham handed and i am tired but so be it…
i could make a living out of trashing the cool-kids, especially the ones on queen street. you should know that the shelter to which i am affiliated is located right on the queen west strip. know also that there is now queen, queen west, and queen west west (this is to say nothing of queen east of university, queen past young to parliament and into ‘queen east’, nor queen in its beaches incarnation…sweet geography.)
we’re firmly on the east end of the newest west-sliding boundary of queen west, two doors down from the queen street detox (known as “501 queen west”), which is itself beside an american apparel. fear not: the lululemon is a mere five blocks down the way, west toward trinity-bellwoods park.
as queen west has been compromised (barometer: ‘rotate this’, that divine store of music has been swallowed), the “serious” cool-kids now circulate farther west in the emerging gallery district and artist-run centres, which surely have value but also provide for tiring eavesdropping as all one hears is mumbling about this gallery and that bar and whatnot, tiring because as one attempts to make a mental map of connections and hierarchies, one realizes how many different kinds of symbolic power are in circulation and how many articulations of style, cool, and (sub)cultural capital are being rendered. i could NOT, in fact, draw you a map.
know also that the queen west west strip essentailly begins at 1001 queen west, that veritable complex known as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. queen west west continues into once-sleazy but know-increasingly hip and liveable (as if the uncool, unstable inhabittants on the corners made the place ‘unlive-able’) parkdale, where the poor and crazy people are beingdriven into pockets by well-intentioned artists, hipsters, scensters, overage indie-rock kids, craft store proprietors, free-trade coffee advocates, “green” realtors, etc.
i am uncertain as to whether i should be cynical or not; certainly, the neighbourhood can exist outside of the binaries i am activating (colonizer/colonized) and some good things are coming out of the flow of bodies and goods and cash into the area. there’s just a lot of incommensurable things that are immanent and complimentary, that seem to be outside any kind of possible resolution. i don’t advocate a final arrival anywhere but…
anyway, the point to this whole thing is to say simply that i am repeatedly struck by a paradox, especially when i cruise through parkdale or am at the shelter: on one hand, the proximity of fashionable to the unfashionable; and on another, the feedback of the unfashionable in body and gesture and adornment to the realm of the fashionable. fashion, said walter benjamin, is hell, but the fashion on queen west and queen west west derives much of its efficacy from mimetic approaches to hellish things vagabond, derelict, and decrepit. the unkempt, inexhaustible, village valeur-looking duds and their wearers owe their inception to the shaty-lifestyle of crackheads, whores, “mental health” folks, squiggy kids and others who thrive in what i consider to be a very econimic and ecological relation with the limited but intense environments they inhabbit. the scale of these environments (a corridor, a few square blocks, six alleyways) is remarkable; they’re not amusement park passage-ways but ecosystems of survival. the aesthetes, with true ornamental and appendage atheleticism, though perhaps visually similar, cannot mask the disparity between the air of polish and refined finish they emit and the dirty nails and open sores coexisting beside them in different universes. in this case, proximity doesn’t produce any recognition; it becomes a way of creating an index for some romantic shanty-lifestyle.
following our favourite wandering homme moderne, baudlaire, i have no right to dispise the present. so, why give a shit? well, i think there’s something here about that slippage between politics and aesthetics, if i may be permitted to suggest something that sounds so lame and anachronistic. baudlaire, like the stoics before him, advocated that defiance could be had in moments of controlling one’s own the body, in the defiant acts of dis-comportment at the level of the body. his flaneur was actually a figure to which he directed a fair bit of contempt. contra the flaneur, we all know this once-radical dandysme he expounded. mr. michel foucault later and more recently reminded us of this fact, that we could bulge and squirm in immanent power relations that are always directed by violent and forceful discourses but expressed in soft and subtle and normalizing techniques, imprinted on bodies so as to regulate gestures and habits and routines – in a sense, dictating how we live, or rather, how life becomes a set of subjectivities constituted in power relations.
the cool kids need the delinquents to establish a style that is self-affirming. the delinquents inversely establish what is normal: everything that is not partcular to delinquency (like ‘crazy people’ or smoking crack in alley-ways or living in a shelter) enables anything prior to that threshold to become the norm (like tastefully cruising queen west west daily or putting your cafe across the street from the looney bin because its cheap but also because, man, its edgy).
yet, further, the normative cool kids appropriate the mismatched styles and socks and sweater of the derelicts to continue their self-affirmation; they are style-stealers, relying doubly on those who are outside the fasionable semiotic economy of the queen west (west) but firmly inside the political economy of a very tenuous local environment. the images are winning, the flaneurs triumph, annd the dirt-bags continue to be productive in generating insights for others into what may in fact become next month’s trendiest tops or the best places to “squat” for five thousand dollars down.
“deregulated flows”, floating signifiers, “entanglements” – these things do little to express the frustration these things cause me. i am no better, i am inside, and i surely overstate the problem…but it disturbs me. the dandysme is merely fashionable and without any of the punch it may well have…it’s a technique that is legible, that i can see daily, that is offering little in the way of things productive outside the bounds of coolness on queen. we should affirm the practices of our daily lives but this confuses me as it seems to be leaking everywhere.
you may want that cup of chortle now…
October 1st, 2007 at 3:05 am
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