Of Faux Avant-Garde

I just flipped me a hamburger for dinner and now I’m drinking coffee in a Christmas cup while wearing some clothes I wear indoors home because too ruined to wear outside (also because I don’t give a damn for pajamas). Aside from the coffee I usually don’t drink this late at night, no one would have even the slightest suspect that right now I’m engaged in such an ambitious project.

It’s amusing to think how some people fancy this idea of following certain habits in order to feel intellectual. Alright, playing a badly-dressed hobo as a form of subversion can count on that too, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the shallow intentions. As I drink coffee here with the lights off and write in my outdated notebook, I can understand the comforting sensation that it is to engage in intellectual efforts, so I understand how appealing it must be to repeat lifestyles of old thinkers, because this is how they got where they got, right?

But this is a feeling of false intellectuality, as it deals with looks and appearances more than actual intellectual struggles. It’s a false progressiveness, just as this pattern can be seen in current progressive music scenario. Music called progressive now is just repetitions of some musical attitude that, in their time, was a bold turn. But as charming as being rebellious and subversive can be, there will always be those who will simply tread these conveniently opened paths believing themselves to be as revolutionary as the pioneers.

This is the sort of behavior that makes me see academy with such bad eyes. It looks rubbish to me to see the intellectual elite emulating behaviors of avant-garde thinkers. Just imagine how silly it is to find, here in a tropical city, professors wearing cloaks in high summer like they’re in autumnal Vienna. There’s nothing to convince me it was the clothing or the fancy talking that made illuminists the geniuses they were.

For me intellectual efforts are to be judged basically on the grounds of intellectual prowess. And whatever comfort should come from that alone. Otherwise, if I was still to follow some thinking standards, I would still feel like a retard for enjoying my Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack instead of some Chopin (I’ve got nearly not as many crests to explore in Chopin’s music, I’m sorry). Also because it’s worth mentioning, as a mindtrap, this false sense of caring for intellectuality is to include some heart-wrenching closed-mindedness.