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 10:32 pm (UTC)Looking at one controversial institute within a capitalist society and finding faults with it is not the same as looking at the society as a whole. On the whole, people within captialist societies are much better off than people in communist societies.
"You gloss over a lot of important nuance here. Laws in the scientific sense aren't things one 'lives by', they're merely descriptions, as specific as possible, of the way things appear to usually work. "Survival of the fittest" isn't one of these; it's not specific enough and 'fittest' has incorrect connotations. "The creature which adapts best survives" is more accurate, but I don't think a single sentence can get the entire theory of natural selection across."
youre splitting hairs. We live by the laws of nature because we have no choice. "Survival of the fittest" = "the creature that adapts best survives". 'Fit', Noun.- To make suitable; adapt.
"This is no argument, as you unproblematically use many other terms which fit the same description--"communism" and "capitalism" for example. Philosophers of language from Quine to Derrida have argued that the same is true of every word. Yet we can still talk about capitalism and communism. Surely we can talk about fairness too."
When I say "capitalism", I can then go on to say "British model capitalism" or "American model capitalism" and a sociologist/economist could give you specific descriptions of the foundations of those societies. You cant give me a specific destription of "fair" thats gonna be agreed on by every member of humanity.
"What do you think about this statement: "no one deserves to be poor"?"
I dont agree with it. If you cant be bothered to work, you dont "deserve" to have wealth, thats one example where I think poverty is self inflicted and deserved. But that statement is too broad anyway.
" Britain and America as they are could not exist without the rest of the world. "
I never said they could survive without the rest of the world. They just survive.
"their economies rely too much on third world labor and economic agreements."
"too much" as in its immoral or inherantly destined to failed? The way I see it at the moment; if it works, dont fix it.
"there is still tremendous suffering within both of these countries."
"poverty" in the UK and the US is nothing compared to poverty seen in other part of the world. it's relative poverty.
"You may claim the existence of upper and middle classes as evidence that capitalism "works", but it's a poor sort of working."
thats your opinion. You will never create a classless society because you need people to govern the masses and control societies. Capitalism isnt a perfect system, but its the best we have.
"I'd suggest Bolivia as a country currently doing well under collectivist policy, and Venezuela as another."
Bolivia
"Political instability and difficult topography have constrained efforts to modernize the agricultural sector. Similarly, relatively low population growth coupled with low life expectancy has kept the labor supply in flux and prevented industries from flourishing. Rampant inflation and corruption also have thwarted development."
What a surprise.
"Bolivia’s energy sector changed significantly when the government allowed privatization in the mid-1990s."
Privitization of the energy sector? This must be like "Chinese communism" ie. not really communism.
"In April 2000, bolivia privitized it's water supply. Shortly thereafter, the water company tripled the water-rates in that city, an action which resulted in protests and rioting among those who could no longer afford clean water."
If Bolivia is the best example you can find of communism working youve just proved my point. And as for Venezuela, it isnt communist, its a Mixed economy. You can be capitalist with socialist policies, but you cant be communist with any capitalist policies.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-14 11:49 pm (UTC)These two instititutions, and others like them, for example the WTO and the Group of Eight, set the economic policies which define the flows of global capital, not only that spent by corporations but by governments as well. You may as well say that the Kremlin was only one institution; well yes, but it's the ruling institution.
I think that talking about societies as capitalist or communist is a little inaccurate. Economics and society are two different things. Also, by "capitalist societies", it sounds like you mean Europe and America again, and not the countries whose labor supports their standard of living. The two aren't separable.
youre splitting hairs. We live by the laws of nature because we have no choice. "Survival of the fittest" = "the creature that adapts best survives". 'Fit', Noun.- To make suitable; adapt
I think you're not nuanced enough, you think I'm splitting hairs--this may be a personal issue. I have to point out though that fit, as you've defined it, is a verb, not a noun; and that in "survival of the fittest", it's actually an adjective (a nominal relative). My problem with "survival of the fittest" is that the comparative form implies an absolute "most" of a quality which is polysemous. I tend to geek out about linguistic issues like this.
I don't want to argue the existence of choice, but I'll say that we at least perceive ourselves to be choosing, much as we perceive the world around us; and in my opinion doubting the perception of choice is as solipsistic as doubting the perception of soid matter.
You cant give me a specific destription of "fair" thats gonna be agreed on by every member of humanity.
Sure, but again I don't think this is a real problem. We can approximate economic fairness, with the GINI coefficient for example; we can simply ask people whether they think something is fair or unfair and go with the majority; or we can talk it over. And let me repeat that no word has an unimpeachable definition.
I dont agree with it. If you cant be bothered to work, you dont "deserve" to have wealth, thats one example where I think poverty is self inflicted and deserved. But that statement is too broad anyway.
Ok, maybe I went too far, how about this one: "No one deserves to suffer"?
"too much" as in its immoral or inherantly destined to failed? The way I see it at the moment; if it works, dont fix it.
"Too much" as in, you can't consider either of them separate from the countries which produce most of their goods and supply most of their raw materials. It's false or misleading to use them as examples of an economic system, as you did in your earlier comment, because they're only one part of it.
thats your opinion. You will never create a classless society because you need people to govern the masses and control societies. Capitalism isnt a perfect system, but its the best we have.
And that's your opinion.
Rather than quoting you on Bolivia, I'd suggest looking at what the country's been doing since 2003, after the water war, now that the utilities and natural gas have been nationalized again; I especially recommend Forrest Hylton's articles on the subject, as he was there during the revolution. I'd also like to say that modernization, development, and flourishing industry are not necessarily virtues, especially in the third world.