People Seeking People
Reading personals columns is extremely addictive. I read the local personals, internet personals, music magazine personals, anything. I think the personals should become a new genre, as in, read for their own sake, studied, documented, catalogued, themes and movements identified and codified. There should be awards for the best and worst written personal advertisement of the year. Tell me you do not secretely wonder what you would write about yourself were you to write a personal. Tell me you wouldn’t yearn to stand out, to appear witty and self-assured, to deconstruct the genre, to transcend the limitations of the form. Tell me you wouldn’t make an injoke about the fact that you are writing a personal. Tell me you wouldn’t try to cram as many sneaky allusions to your favourite obscure likes into the text. Ah, but it’s all been done. And when it’s all been done, what do you write? Do you return to the traditional sincere personal, rendered phony by your knowledge of the personal tradition? Do you push the boundaries ever further, somehow developing a new innovation that only personal column junkies like myself will cotton on to, risking the fact that most will also be, like myself, not actually seeking a real life encounter, but merely seeking the more voyeuristic thrill of the text itself? Should I write a personal seeking personal junkies? Has this too been done before?
THE PERFECT WORK OF ART IS THE PERFECT WORK OF CRIME.
”[D]on’t get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.” [Hakim Bey, concluding words of Poetic Terrorism]
“It [photography] is an almost perfect crime” [Jean Baudrillard, emphasis mine]
“The town square is a nostalgia never to be regained” [Milou Allerholm, “Who’s that peeking in my window…”]