Photo: Jordan Manley
By The Jaded Local1
Hi! Welcome to the inaugural voyage of Jaded Rejects. Go ahead and make yourself comfortablejust, um, clear the empties off the couch over there. Sorry the place is such a junkshow, but it’s been one long-ass winter here in Mt. Shredly.
Some background: For every Jaded Local column that has been published in Powder, there are at least two that have been rejected by the editorial staff. Over the years they’ve run columns about using (organic, renewable) adopted pound dogs to “stability test” potential avalanche terrain, great moments in the history of hot-tubbing, even the one that was written entirely in a French accent. But apparently some were just too “edgy” for a stale corporate product on a dead media platform.
Like the column recommending that urban skiers should have to smoke crack. Or the one that waxes (ha!) nostalgic about ’70s bush and makes a lot more hi-larious double-entendres about waxing. And then there was the gritty investigative piece that revealed all the skeletons in the sport’s closet: ski boots frickin’ hurt, lift tickets cost too much, and backcountry skiing is hard work that will never, ever get you laid. Apparently there were “space issues” that month.
Sure, Misery Sticks might not have been the best title for an AT ski review, but sometimes, as in Mustache Squad: Alpine Gladiators For Inner Peace, it’s obvious that The Editors probably didn’t even get past the title and actually read the piece. How could you not get pulled in by the visceral, there-you-are immediacy of the opener to Tijuana Descents?: “Day forty-three, Camp IV: Dear God, not another donkey show.”
I even tried to write what media geeks like to call “service-y” piecesuseful info for the average reader. Like the one that explains step-by-step how to poach every major resort in the country, or how a secret cabal of knee surgeons have conspired with major binding manufacturers to sell products specifically designed to blow your ACL, maybe. And my revolutionary instructional method, Stop Sucking Now,2 was somehow “lost” by Editor Derek Taylor’s smartphone.
Of course they turned down the proposal to do a comparative study of every panty tree in North America, and whenever I try to get budget for the big Skiing On Acid piece there’s always some sob story about how “Corporate is really tightening the belt around here.” Yeah, right. Way to support Ski Journalism, guys. Like a couple of tabs of blotter and few hours of full-moon heli time in Narvik is a big price to pay for progressing the sport. Meanwhile, Freeskier will probably drop a Special Psychedelic Issue and Powder will look totally out of touch with the emerging new progressive hallucinatory freeskiing scene.
But the shoe is on the other foot now. Because word has come down from SourceInterlink Action Sports Group Headquarters.3 It’s all about the web these days, social media, keeping everyone on Facebook entertained out there in cubicle land while you pretend to work on a spreadsheet or something.
Hence the Grand Opening of Jaded Rejects: Now you’ve got something better to do at work than cyber-stalking some chick/dude that dumped you in high school or watching that video of an idiot and his snowmobile falling down a couloir.
This is Original Content here, people. If the Jaded Local column is skiing’s gritty underbelly, this is the Jaded Local’s gritty underbelly. No marketing departments were consulted. Red Bull’s ass was not kissed. There are no space considerations, or for that matter, taste considerations. The DIN is cranked up to 22. There may be boobs. I’m so committed to this project that I’m actually going to let Modern Viking Monthly, my personal labor of love, go dormant.
Anyway, we’ll be dropping (text) edits straight from Mt. Shredly right here every Tuesday this summeractual rejected Jaded Local columns, rejected Jaded Local columns that I haven’t written yet, like Mustache Squad,4 or maybe just random multi-media rambles.
So feel free to send in ideas for Rejects, requests for advice, or just deep thoughts. Or better yet, don’t read it, don’t send in any ideas, just e-mail The Editors about how the Jaded Local is better than stable blower pow and they should cover his bar tab and send a hot intern to Shredly, stat.
1 Hans Ludwig is The Jaded Local.
2 Step One: In order to ski well, you have to feel good, so do whatever you need to do to feel good (this is also pretty much the gist of my revolutionary new sex manual, F*ck Yeah!.)
3 Ed’s note to the JL: Source Interlink Media’s Action Sports Group (ASG) is now known as GrindMedia.
4 Which is going to be totally frickin’ awesome.
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