POSTMODERN MUD
by Iggy J. Louis   

In Lieu Introductions and Frontiers

A perfect ideology is as rare as common sense. There are near a billion perspectives when looking at what’s wrong with the current station of society. And that’s without upending widely scattered foot-holds comprising the frame—the language and the logarithms (as when scrutinising and reforming our interpretive fiscal-skeleton and its meat)—and what post-modernism comes to try to portray is a penultimate subjectivity and the plastic nature toward reality. Kinda like the obsidian of the Western World as nothing but false impressions, by dialogue and established conventions and misguided inferences, all stemming from modernism.

The movement has gained a fair wack of traction recently for anyone paying attention. Where this writer can’t help thinking about it in curiosity and faint interest. But yet now, leads me to be conveying a few points’ query in so far as its efficacy. First lets touch on its owndefinition and late antiquity.

Postmodernism originated sometime in the late 20th century in response to literary studies (things like philosophy, the arts, architecture and even criticism itself) however, due to its widespread shell-fire, the sanctity of universalist notions of reality’s objectivity, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language and advance, all became prey to (what is in this writer’s opinion) the chemical-weaponry of its own caustic countenance. To go deeper: isn’t the existence of postmodernism that’s corrosive and poison, it is individuals blinded by hazy emotions and ignorance and, in many cases, flatly fanatical corruption. That that leads you to question your own sanctity, along with those you’re subjected to interact with in such ways, by and by.

See, these new-age, bite-size stanza’s you will have caught popping up as memes in the newsfeed—you know the type: purple-haired girl shares, acquires nominal and ubiquitous heart-reacts, her content just as radical as reciting the anarchist cookbook on a phone-line in the 1990s—albeit emotionally stirring, altogether seems to forget the very mettle in each transient layers’ singing history, to idly disregard the proto-conglomerate arrow-body. I can’t help think it’s an awful namesake for ourselves in this Age of Information.

(What? In where education is deemed redundant to now technologically-swayed low-frame-rate attention spans, the vastdownsizing of interpretive toleranceand cerebral capacity; the heavy flowing torrents of disenchantment and disillusion cast with each news scandal, centred over them that were propagated [vis. puppeteer-ed] by overseeing corporate conglomerates, or the elite’s ambiguity. . . furthering decay and mistrust; then the so-called “silent majority” populating with such variety against mainstream media and reflective population idiosyncrasies; you may just get the USA electing Donald Trump, conspiracy media, and a census’s bleeding-heart renaissance for devious political gain [the reactionary-arsonists’ flames popping up countless Earth’s corners]).

People are looking for emotional nurturing in a cold dystopia, down in their own subjectivity. Insecure and hate-filled. They claw at blank canvases, creating—and its no wonder people lap it up like last night’s dinner—maybe they can pin the precise culinary definition that was lulling their tongues the first time around.
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                        Quid Pro Status-Quo

Back in Terra Firma, it is a slightly differing narrative. A majority-milieu of conservative effulgence and other shit-eating physiognomy, where characters’ attitudes are even lesslikely to be expressed in the online vacuum; I won’t bother naming the peak newsfeed oligarchs’ present on Facebook or Instagram, with their tendency to snuff out peculiar (cough) self-expression and realising and liberty . . . proto-subjectivity shunned, through hashtags and reams of comments’ sniggers (including mine, but sure, I’ll say it clear, including mine,) so.

So several mates and I delude each other to the point of a naive kind-a fanaticism: a crescendo of glamour and creativity staining the retinae, like a wide-eyed artsy child stepping off colouring books into the blank canvas world, a fresh palette on the lee side of their naive mind.

I tell Brek things I tell anybody (I mean my associate Brekan upcoming Sydney rap artist). And one of my comments I made is how when somebody feels the rub against community dialogue’s most heart-felt currency as being mostly shit, it is easy for said-somebody to radicalise and become a writer. Or, at least, it is what was the efforts of past generations’ creatives did. So maybe the more experimental and business-minded become typed artists.

These days the comedians are artists of the online era; memers and admins the unsung heroes of apathy, community, even progress. This evolution is perhaps harmless in its pissy synergy . . . So (me and Brek—for the sake of continuity and brevity)have however unknown to us, a kind-a malnutrition around pragmatic action. We identify as professionals and artists for all the curious reasons cognitive dissonance evokes, lapelled onto our filmy identities’ rebellion to the status quo.

Brek has always been the kind of individual that completely understands commonality and normalcy but has always preferred pioneering his own flavour—in response to the internet’s easy access and popularity for journalists’ publishing, swaying outrage, he has enough sense (like most Australians) to fall in-line. His (now, more) private-circle humour, is random-spat nouns, made articulate with weird vocal intonations to provoke erratic loss of composure between audience and him. It’s similar to predictive text from a future AI algorithm’s proclivity to just take you for a spin. He calls the language ‘vision,’ which I think is candid (and maybe even a bit genius regarding its grande overstatement).

He meets the pressures of industry standards at eye level, saves the blind jest for his weekend’s off. His beats and music videos are inspired by legendary greats, Travis Scott and Kanye West and Drake, yet this Americanisation of the sound is mixed with the local bottle-o vodka-soaked talking and rhymes, the half-drunk accent of Australians. What it seems like,is Brek is reconfiguring the proponents flecked in the skin patterns of culture’s design, on the frontier of the Australian music direction for those unsullied by conventionality (lack of industry framework, neuroticism in critics to boot), he writes his lyrics spontaneously and with near professional ease, only his stories are rooted in a very subjective and personal scope. He diarises with intimacy, drawing some of the hardest pressures of his developing manhood public.

This bold experimentation is only “truly” found in established artists hoping to air their dirty laundry—now you’re with them you may as well hate them—but this presupposition may not necessarily be naive; the rap consulate feeds just as much grand-standing and egoism as you’ll find Western media gutting and bleeding with new-faces in front of crowds, contestants and unknown artists, for money and ratings, and more money. Each with their own simple and common vagaries. The main aim is pulling anyone led sympathetic’s heartstrings for ratings. And everybody and their mother know the game these days.

Contemporary Society, with all outlined decay and postmodern media, has this ability to alienate the weak believers of postmodern cause until they radicalise; yet a sort of entrepreneurial schtick by Brek is just the kinda provocation to the more creative audience (with their subsequent open minds) to gel–how tragic does one’s cliche have to be to stick? It’s just that. His musical successechoes tell-tale attributes of something that’d never of existed some years prior. The by-gone modernity, lost holiday luggage’s depression; start new and start fast; but fuck the effects, gung-ho son.

Perhaps the personal style of Brek’s more heartfelt tracks is his nod to the reminiscent faculty of postmodernism’s grande, mud-stained and driving epiphany force: we as humans are pulchritudinous, hard-wired to search for meaning in a sea of information’s murk. We hope somehow the pressing boot will lift off our proverbial necks—but maybe with the milieu surrounding oppressive notions, we can recycle data and dialogue, escape.

Maybe, in a postmodern community’s widespread reworking, it is your timeline articles protagonist that you can grow to recognise yourself in. You would today, need to forget the established judgement which comes with adulthood’s suppression of widely accepted tropes, everything you now identify with as instead and established, collating the open-minded congress and kin where the irony and sympathy and networking are all advocated existentially—a universality fed by audiences engaging.

What a fucking lucky guy you are, your circle sharing theories, as such—it might just make publish; sway harrumph sized census.

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                        P. S Fiscal Finishes

They say the best creative inspiration strikes in the midnight hours. The half-borne dream-time reveries, which is why I always take time to re-read my writing the following day with a freshly washed palette’s clarity. On an essay topic of postmodern thought, maybe the social influence (as outlined in the early-presented definition) suggests it is this very “solitude” I should be salving. Growing this essay’s merit in itself: a subject reading this very essay may enjoy its analysis of entrepreneurial idealism towering over the boredom of conservative notions, the now-vacuous fluidity in common-sense. And an ulterior subject may despise its fanaticism and inability to transfigure much other than the explicitly stated faculty, the far-flung impalpability. So.

I sit writing at the industrial-style IKEA table overlooking an under-watered and meekly flowering frangipani lit by pale moonlight, in the late Wednesday midnight-hours. I feel the grit and ugly hope running out my fingers for the original draft, and think a truer thing could not be said for postmodernism’s cynicism and novice mode . . . the wind of these memories’ comforting me, laid in print. With nothing to do for Brek and me but release our art, hoping it strikes true, and inventive and plentiful, prior to the establishment of an audience’s mud-spattered subjectivity. Which, all in all, is a root cause of the irony. An ensuing smirk.

As I reflect back over this, the ultimate dishwater in this essay’s crux is its personal interpretation, with little to no direction for the two figurehead characters other than straying from the convoy-wagons’ back-seat Navman, to figure out how to make Boulevard’s West by their own accord . . .

To dare to be different is a lost art in most popular circles in post-modern Australia, nobody wants to be the guy with a few crazy beliefs. To flunk creative, miss the fiscal finishing in lieuMaybe adopting a more rational attitude from this conversation’s roots allowsthe slipstream for creatives, perhaps a flung Molotov to the frontier of new-age fascism–a system’s defunct depot–a renaissance of serious synergy, of being. Note: good art is the very individual’s totality remodelling as either new or affirming objective truth, so perhaps the taboo is the salvation in itself for us as Contemporary Australians.

My good friend, who we’ll refer to as Garry, believes in all sorts of greater-picture criticisms of our established society’s framework. He and I are very opinionated, where they, extraverted and drunk, espouse anti-system cynicism and extremism to my wavering understanding, or my dismissal. So. Sometimes biting back with my own loose-tongued intoxication, one point of bitter difference is ‘the free-spirited and ill-defined individuality with harrumph queer attributes,’ is in itself is maybe too rickety and mapped with a shaky, unfeasible charter for the career prosperity, the community values of said person too alien to congeal. How straying far from normality is a filmy poise; the atypical beings’ chaos, in the face of . . . Yes?

‘Who is left to trust then,’ I ask. The air of the lounge-room snaps still and in the bleak and tightness, as their face falls bleak. A second passes while unidentified bird coo with a late-afternoon soliloquy.
‘Yourself,’ they say, mocking pep and zeal. ‘Just yourself.’

About the Author:

Iggy J. Louis is a short story and narrative essay writer and a poet, hailing from Sydney, Australia. His work has so far appeared in Southerly and Independent Australia.