A few months back i asked a friend to write on my website. we share similar sentiments and values.
This isn’t some year in review or any of that, although we are at the cusp of what we can collectively consider a new year, and so, in the final days of 2010, spaceship earth continues to rotate around a massive ball of photons, hence, life goes on, and it’s strange inhabitants scurry along the surface of the giant rock benevolently floating in ether, in search of purpose, meaning and maybe some cut of celebrity-ism, bombarded with imagery, subsequently illusion, creating a landscape that is now a place in which “fashion”, is almost, all there is. In the spirit of keeping up with the times and staying in fashion, we could also collectively consider this site a “fashion blog” as the presentation reflects that of other popular media formatted in this way, we all have our limitations I suppose, but what’s exceptional about Mister Mort, is that, the subjects are often of an idiosyncratic nature, and the selections have the brevity and candor akin to that of journalistic photography. I would say that, this site is less about fashion and more about the mantra; “The clothes don’t make the man, but the man makes the clothes”, which leads us to my next inquiry; how does one make his or her own clothes? Figuratively speaking, of course, unless you are in fact, literally making, tailoring, designing, creating clothes as a craft and that is what you do. I suppose the real question is then; what is it, YOU do? Where in a society of spectacle, the commodity completes its colonization of social life and human beings, have gone from human being, to human doing, to merely just, human appearing, as an image, just an image, posing, fronting, or however you’d like to characterize it…which leads me to think that the resurgence of “work wear” and other industrial age trends, from steam punk to sailor, dream hunk to player, and the myriads of blue collar themes, of the recent past, like that of fashions longtime Kierkegaardian love affair with military uniforms, was only a didactic longing for actually “working” or to take on the appearance of having done work, the appearance of “doing” or having all the indicators of belonging to a unit that does something, which is worn like a prosthetic limb and that suffers from ghost sensations of a now amputated existence. Where masculine motifs are worn like dad’s old moth eaten chesterfield, out of place, oversized and useless. Mister Mort has informed me that this site has near 10,000 visits a day and I can only imagine how many other blogs you loyal viewers must visit and how all these sites operate a lot like corporate entities, that are pipelining product through Edward Beranays-ian propaganda and mass media manipulation tactics, that wave slogans with oxymoronic messages of individualism achieved through consumption, paradoxically, pushing a product, that’s very existence depends on millions, to join the herd and buy in. In an environment where culture is god and fashion, one of it’s many equalizers, blogs operate like cultish paganism in the midst of a collapsing Rome, complete with idols and slightly mutating iconography, all just bastardizations of the descending inherent hierarchy. Instructions by plebes on how to better serve the court, these bloggers and their blogs are set up like gypsy merchant tents littered outside the Vatican, in a cacophony of chaotic chatter, peddling ideas about what to look for, where to find it, what to stay away from, what could cause you social castration or elicit the praise of your peers, and all for a little social currency in hopes of being plucked from their own anonymity and placed within the colossal churning wheel of celebrity, however meager it may be. There aren’t any distilling trends, just ever more confusion in a sea of information. In the words of the late great Terence McKenna, “culture is not your friend” and I would suggest as a New Year’s resolution, if being resolute is what you’re after, I urge you to dead your engagement with blogs, especially the fashion ones and mass media culture in general for that matter, create your own culture, and if work and the satisfaction of having done work is what you really desire, not the short-cut crack sublimation, through only appearing as if having done something; work, I say, actually “do” something, besides hold a wage job that confines you to a station of vicarious individualism achieved through consumerism, becoming ever more apart of the very fabric that you’re trying to cut away from. Don’t obsess over getting the right boots, but make the boots you have on right. As a true act of individualism, be an individual and stop following the pack. Wear the clothes, don't let them wear you.
Lex Neville
