Dandies skull-to-skull
Nov. 13th, 2007 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus"I've concluded that it is far better to borrow elements of dandyism rather than merely trying to actually become one. It's far less predictable and far more interesting. Better dandyish than dandy," says Lord Whimsy, very sensibly, in his entry today about London self-promoter Sebastian Horsley.
Horsley, oddly enough, agrees. "Dandyism" completely fails as an idea," he wrote in his New Statesman pan of Whimsy's book. "How can originality replicate to create a whole movement? How can you dress alike to assert your individuality? How, on the one perfumed hand, can you talk about freedom when you willingly give it up with the other ungloved mitt? How can you be unique and yet part of the gang? ...Clownish eccentricity is often a mask for nonentity."
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Since there are none in the room, let's make no bones about dandyism. Dandies -- rather than people who are merely elegant and poised, like Whimsy -- are tiring to spend time with, because they really are larger than life. They glaze over when they aren't talking about themselves. They've arranged everything in their lives (except possibly their accommodation: Horsley lives in a tiny flat in Soho) to be bigger than yours, so the casual trading of anecdotes that happens in any normal conversation becomes a contest in which the dandy trumps you time after time. Eventually you just shut up and let them speak, and it's entertaining for a while because they've collected a lifetime's-worth of Wildean one-liners (common sense turned through 180 degrees to make it "interesting") and insist on repeating them to anyone who'll listen. (This, by the way, is why you should never, ever become a dandy's girlfriend. The repetition will drive you insane.)
Soon, though, you feel energy draining away from you. You start to feel the weight of your own skeleton. You'd rather take a walk through the dusky streets with the waitress, the cashier, the Filippino chef. You'd rather have someone say "I don't really know," and proceed to think things through in real time rather than tug an endless supply of handy, witty, polished me-axioms from their frilly me-sleeve.
That's not to say Horsley doesn't have some good riffs up his ruffs. The strongest are about the universality of artifice, the unavoidability of performance, and the realness of fakery. "Show me a man who doesn't paint himself a face," he says in the video below. "We all perform our lives. Look at the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, the artists. They think they're real people. They're not, they're just face paint. The reason that I piss people off is that I make the joke explicit.... Because everybody else is just as phoney as I am. I'm just a real fake."
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Like all 180-degree inversions of common sense that depend on the very logic they seem to deny ("property is theft" is another example), this one self-destructs if examined too closely. But never mind, it entertains for seconds before dissolving in the mist.
What's -- for me, anyway -- most interesting about Horsley is his face. Turn the sound down and watch it. Somehow, his face in motion has inscribed in it the entire history of British dandyism, post-punk. He's every sacrificial dandy the British have ever ushered toward the pyre of destruction-for-amusement.
There are wide-stare flashes of his hero Johnny Rotten, and of Rotten's pantomime villain svengali Malcolm McLaren. That takes us neatly to the era of New Romanticism, in which Horsley is Adam Ant without the songs. Then there's the decline and fall of New Romanticism, hastened by Bowie as Screaming Lord Byron, Brideshead Revisited on TV, and Rupert Everett as, well, every English male lead that isn't Hugh Grant. And Horsley looks like Rupert Everett gone slightly Cro-Magnon, or a degraded Peter York drinking at the Coach and Horses with a permanently-queasy Jeffrey Bernard. Then Goth takes over, and you can see it all in Horsley's face, and explicitly in the snapshot of Nick Cave and Horsley in the desert, trying to get off drugs. Then of course Morrissey becomes the big star and Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp are everyone's heroes, including Horsley's.
In the 90s he fossilizes into a Dickens character just in time for BritPop, also headed by two fossilized Dickens characters called Liam and Noel. Then, for a blink, new Romanticism is back -- it's called Romo, it happens in the Melody Make for a few months in 1995, and it gives the world Dickon Edwards -- and Horsley can ride that wave too, before jumping off when he discovers Johnny Depp's belated discovery of Goth. By mid-decade, though, he's more interested in being a confessedly-crap YBA artist, collecting Damian Hirst-style skulls and sharks and staging self-crucifixions. As the millennium approaches he becomes a too-old Nathan Barley. Now, just in time for Retro Necro (and to go skull-to-skull with our own Lord Whimsy's Bloomsbury book), Horsley has published a memoir, "Dandy in the Underworld: an unauthorised autobiography" (Sceptre). And for this period, sinking elegantly into middle age, Horsley looks a bit like Retro Necro figurehead Jools Holland.
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The truth is that we British and Americans can't really do dandyism. We're too cuddly, too eager to please, too unscary, too self-deprecating. Our dandyism, as a result, becomes self-sacrificial. We mount the cross before we're asked.
When the British dress up in old clothes they look like genteel imperialists, and when Americans do it they look like traitors to a republic which broke away from Britain's genteel empire. The people who do dandyism best are the Germans. Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria is the perfect dandy, because to be a real dandy you need unlimited power and wealth, unbridled egomania and bad craziness. Recent German dandies include Klaus Kinski and Jonathan Meese. Oh, and mustn't forget that wretch Adolf Hitler. Lots of skulls on his mantelpiece too.
Horsley, oddly enough, agrees. "Dandyism" completely fails as an idea," he wrote in his New Statesman pan of Whimsy's book. "How can originality replicate to create a whole movement? How can you dress alike to assert your individuality? How, on the one perfumed hand, can you talk about freedom when you willingly give it up with the other ungloved mitt? How can you be unique and yet part of the gang? ...Clownish eccentricity is often a mask for nonentity."
[Error: unknown template video]
Since there are none in the room, let's make no bones about dandyism. Dandies -- rather than people who are merely elegant and poised, like Whimsy -- are tiring to spend time with, because they really are larger than life. They glaze over when they aren't talking about themselves. They've arranged everything in their lives (except possibly their accommodation: Horsley lives in a tiny flat in Soho) to be bigger than yours, so the casual trading of anecdotes that happens in any normal conversation becomes a contest in which the dandy trumps you time after time. Eventually you just shut up and let them speak, and it's entertaining for a while because they've collected a lifetime's-worth of Wildean one-liners (common sense turned through 180 degrees to make it "interesting") and insist on repeating them to anyone who'll listen. (This, by the way, is why you should never, ever become a dandy's girlfriend. The repetition will drive you insane.)
Soon, though, you feel energy draining away from you. You start to feel the weight of your own skeleton. You'd rather take a walk through the dusky streets with the waitress, the cashier, the Filippino chef. You'd rather have someone say "I don't really know," and proceed to think things through in real time rather than tug an endless supply of handy, witty, polished me-axioms from their frilly me-sleeve.
That's not to say Horsley doesn't have some good riffs up his ruffs. The strongest are about the universality of artifice, the unavoidability of performance, and the realness of fakery. "Show me a man who doesn't paint himself a face," he says in the video below. "We all perform our lives. Look at the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, the artists. They think they're real people. They're not, they're just face paint. The reason that I piss people off is that I make the joke explicit.... Because everybody else is just as phoney as I am. I'm just a real fake."
[Error: unknown template video]
Like all 180-degree inversions of common sense that depend on the very logic they seem to deny ("property is theft" is another example), this one self-destructs if examined too closely. But never mind, it entertains for seconds before dissolving in the mist.
What's -- for me, anyway -- most interesting about Horsley is his face. Turn the sound down and watch it. Somehow, his face in motion has inscribed in it the entire history of British dandyism, post-punk. He's every sacrificial dandy the British have ever ushered toward the pyre of destruction-for-amusement.
There are wide-stare flashes of his hero Johnny Rotten, and of Rotten's pantomime villain svengali Malcolm McLaren. That takes us neatly to the era of New Romanticism, in which Horsley is Adam Ant without the songs. Then there's the decline and fall of New Romanticism, hastened by Bowie as Screaming Lord Byron, Brideshead Revisited on TV, and Rupert Everett as, well, every English male lead that isn't Hugh Grant. And Horsley looks like Rupert Everett gone slightly Cro-Magnon, or a degraded Peter York drinking at the Coach and Horses with a permanently-queasy Jeffrey Bernard. Then Goth takes over, and you can see it all in Horsley's face, and explicitly in the snapshot of Nick Cave and Horsley in the desert, trying to get off drugs. Then of course Morrissey becomes the big star and Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp are everyone's heroes, including Horsley's.
In the 90s he fossilizes into a Dickens character just in time for BritPop, also headed by two fossilized Dickens characters called Liam and Noel. Then, for a blink, new Romanticism is back -- it's called Romo, it happens in the Melody Make for a few months in 1995, and it gives the world Dickon Edwards -- and Horsley can ride that wave too, before jumping off when he discovers Johnny Depp's belated discovery of Goth. By mid-decade, though, he's more interested in being a confessedly-crap YBA artist, collecting Damian Hirst-style skulls and sharks and staging self-crucifixions. As the millennium approaches he becomes a too-old Nathan Barley. Now, just in time for Retro Necro (and to go skull-to-skull with our own Lord Whimsy's Bloomsbury book), Horsley has published a memoir, "Dandy in the Underworld: an unauthorised autobiography" (Sceptre). And for this period, sinking elegantly into middle age, Horsley looks a bit like Retro Necro figurehead Jools Holland.
[Error: unknown template video]
The truth is that we British and Americans can't really do dandyism. We're too cuddly, too eager to please, too unscary, too self-deprecating. Our dandyism, as a result, becomes self-sacrificial. We mount the cross before we're asked.
When the British dress up in old clothes they look like genteel imperialists, and when Americans do it they look like traitors to a republic which broke away from Britain's genteel empire. The people who do dandyism best are the Germans. Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria is the perfect dandy, because to be a real dandy you need unlimited power and wealth, unbridled egomania and bad craziness. Recent German dandies include Klaus Kinski and Jonathan Meese. Oh, and mustn't forget that wretch Adolf Hitler. Lots of skulls on his mantelpiece too.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 11:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 11:29 am (UTC)The other day I had to convince Hisae to wear the red earwarmers herself. She gets cold ears, but she still wouldn't wear them! "This is Berlin, you can wear anything here! You can walk down the street with a teacup on your head! Of course you can wear earwarmers on a cold day!" So she put them on, and her ears did indeed stay warm.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 04:53 pm (UTC)As we all know, dandyism is the invention of the English. The great dandies started out with a bit of money, but in general were a middle-class lot that turned aristocratic values on their head to suit their ends. Declining gentry is fertile ground as well (des Essientes, Roussel, Proust, et al.)
I've been to a million apartments like Horsleys--veritable live-in closets lined with reefs of finery (of varying qualities). My own life is similar to Horsley's in that I do employ artifice, am an artist, haven't had a day job in almost a decade, and I do appearances and interviews with some regularity (Time Out NY and Men's Vogue in the past week). Our wardrobe situation is similar, although with vastly different contents, which also reflects our very different outlooks. Growing up, the idea that someone could live a genteel life surrounded by beautiful things was exotic, and very appealing. It still is. But when I say genteel, I don't mean opulent--I mean modest, considered, humane, playful, and stylish. I have a couple bespoke suits, but most of my clothes are still thrift finds or off the rack. The biggest extravagance I own are my plants.
I could go on for veritable threads about the subject of dandyism, but I'll keep it brief. Suffice it to say that I write and talk about it, but I'm more interested in its hybrids than those trying to fit into its original archetype, which is silly--that's more reenactment than dandyism. If people look back a century from now to find dandies, they will not be looking to the poor saps who were aping Alan Flusser and prattling on about "timeless style": they will be looking at the dandy heretics like Horsley--just like we now look to a plagarist poseur like Oscar. (Always been more of a Beerbohm man, though.)
I think our man Horsley is indeed cunning and clever, but I stop short of calling it 'courageous', because then I would have to say the same about Johnny Knoxville and his Jackass Crew. Perhaps it might be said he has the courage of his compulsions.
That said, I do agree wholeheartedly with his take on artifice; as I've said before, one can be both inauthentic and sincere--a real phony, as Sebastian succinctly puts it. The themes of self-editing, mediation, etc. all started with the likes of Wilde, and so the dandy was a prescient figure, and still very relevant today, in all its forms.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 05:35 pm (UTC)Ha ha, phrase of the day! You may deny having a dandy pose, but you have dandy prose! (Which is to say, the opposite of prosaic.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 06:22 pm (UTC)...
I refer to myself as such on occasion, but I assume people realize that I'm using the term broadly and with a tub of salt, as a kind of shorthand so that civilians get an idea what I'm talking about. Obviously I have more in common with this guy than I do the likes of Noel Coward:
Which of course suits me fine.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-13 06:40 pm (UTC)So, by showcasing my failure as a dandy, I become one, albeit a new kind. All true dandies are aesthetic heretics--hero and pariah.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-14 10:09 am (UTC)--Baron Felix de Montague von Keyserlink IV