Midnight Pub

Sacred Cows and Other Dangly Bits.

~peterhd

Is it time to reclaim valuable representation space from the style police?

Do you dare to dangle any of your personal bits from your car's rear view mirror?

Not the reluctantly approved crucifix or pine tree air freshener, nor the little bottle of holy water, what I am referring to is the garter belt, the g-string, the CD (remember those) or the dream catcher.

Alternatively, instead of the gold St Christopher stuck (and peeling) on the front dashboard, do you go for the head bobbing Elvis, the gold embellished tissue box on the rear dashboard or the nodding dog. The bountiful pile of soft toys skillfully rescued from their forecourt torture chamber. All true manifestations of personal ambition and style.

Aaah! I see the horror hipster twitch, the ‘I did not grow up in Parow’ flinch and the ironic eyebrow but wait, is there something to be discussed here? Are we being deprived of a personal representation space as vital as a tattoo? One we take with us or at least one which takes us with it into the public arena. Should we allow this platform to be shunned and driven underground? Is this not a chance to display our taste and style on our mobile sleeve as it were?

No one would dare prevent another from decorating the interior of their house as they see fit and one would assume most are proud of their choices, yet here we have a room, one in which some spend hours a day, left completely unadorned. Others are allowed to dictate the taste or style therein.

“Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same” referred to the cultural wastelands of modern suburbia, a place of hell or at least a place of imagined style and cultural death. Now self elected arbiters of taste would force that on us in our motorised white (because color is a vastly more expensive option here in ZA but black in the Netherlands) mobile presentation cases, our air conditioned, perfumed, HiFi and even television equipped home away from home.

Of late we have begun to notice the slow rise from the underground of just such a subculture. Bold pioneers breaking free from the terminally hip and the fascist fashion police with a chandelier here and a coloured plastic bauble there.

How long before something painfully ironic is noted and recorded.

Time to boldly break the bounds, to go forth and represent, be amongst the first or be stripped of those hipster shades.

Or will those stick figure stickers on the back be the avant guard of a zombie army coming forth to claim this space.

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