Fop aspic, fop lab
Feb. 13th, 2005 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusA town without pretension is a poor place indeed. I say this with some feeling, because I'm sitting in such a place right now, a town without arthouse cinemas, alternative music venues, trendy designer restaurants and bars or the ludicrously self-important, overwrought people required to populate them. A town like Hakodate is all traffic and food. It's a circulation system superimposed on a digestive system. It reminds me of David Byrne's song 'The Big Country', a song about a snobby, skinny, nervous, culture-crazy big city guy looking out of a plane window at 'flyover country':
Look at that kitchen and all of that food
Look at them eat it, I guess it tastes real good
They grow it in the farmlands and they bring it to the store
They put it in the car trunks and they bring it back home, and I say
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
Creative energy, cultural stimulation, the dense, uneasy co-existence of wildly different kinds of people, and, yes, preposterous preening pretension... these things are the true glories of big city life. I cannot tell you how many times, after seclusion in some dead provincial backwater, I've returned to a big city, seen my first preposterous human peacock, and almost wept with relief. Thank God, I have exclaimed, or Mammon, or Narcissus, or whoever has given these people the right, the license, the sheer gall to experiment! To wear flip flops over their ears! To ride micro-bicycles! To invent new and absurd catchphrases, to call ever-odder noises 'music' and nod along to it knowingly! Thank Christ we're back in civilisation!
Sitting in a small town in the middle of winter, you're grateful even for a satire on such metropolitan excesses, like Channel 4's Nathan Barley, the first part of which I watched yesterday. And watched again. And freeze-framed and watched in stop motion jittershots, picking up all the graphic design satire, the T shirts and magazine covers and typographic canards, shrieking and squirming with embarrassed recognition and, well, delight. Wait, why am I saying 'even a satire'? I was especially grateful for a satire. Because satire caricatures and exaggerates all it touches, fop satire is a double shot, an extra-jittery red-eye frappucino fix of foppery for the fop-starved. Bring it on! Hit me with that ludicrous big city pretension! More! More! More!
Because the satirist is above all a moralist, he fails to see the glamour of his subject, especially when the subject is a subculture defined, mainly, by aesthetics. By exaggerating its style and pushing it to new extremes of pretension, violence, and flamboyance, he unwittingly increases its glamour and charisma. Think of The Rake's Progress, or Hair, or A Clockwork Orange. They seem on one level to be dismissals of the subcultures they portray, but often end up preserving them more thoroughly than the subcultures can do themselves. They can even feed their 'victims' with fresh ideas. David Bowie has said that the look of Alex and his Droogs was a big influence on Ziggy Stardust. Burgess and Kubrick's dystopian nightmare scenario, a moralistic satire on ultraviolence, actually ended up on British streets in the early 70s as a new and much more extreme fashion look. Rather than making people recoil in horror, the extremism of Burgess' vision of delinquency gave everyone a hard-on and a yen to copy. It became part of the brainstorming, part of the Style Lab, a wind tunnel for tests that produced a harder, better, faster, stronger subculture.
Nathan Barley is intelligent enough to be entirely aware of the cockroach-like unkillability of fop subculture, its glorious or exasperating inescapability, and to incorporate it as its major theme. The show's Dan Ashcroft character, an ageing, disillusioned style journalist who writes an article entitled "The Idiots" about the scenesters who surround him, is appalled to find himself being worshipped by them like the second coming of Christ (or perhaps Brian). Ashcroft's big problem, rich in dramatic irony: how to hold up a mirror to The Idiots without them loving what they see? How to focus on attention-seeking narcissists without validating them beyond their wildest dreams? How to hold a magnifying glass up to their achievements without making them seem bigger? It's the writers' problem too. How to pump ludic and colourful innovations up into something absurdly ludicrous without making that bright and playful world seem very attractive indeed? In the opinion of this provincial, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker have failed. Fabulously.
(The rest of my thoughts about this wonderful show are stored up here. Part two of six airs on UK's Channel 4 next Friday at 10pm.)
Look at that kitchen and all of that food
Look at them eat it, I guess it tastes real good
They grow it in the farmlands and they bring it to the store
They put it in the car trunks and they bring it back home, and I say
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
Creative energy, cultural stimulation, the dense, uneasy co-existence of wildly different kinds of people, and, yes, preposterous preening pretension... these things are the true glories of big city life. I cannot tell you how many times, after seclusion in some dead provincial backwater, I've returned to a big city, seen my first preposterous human peacock, and almost wept with relief. Thank God, I have exclaimed, or Mammon, or Narcissus, or whoever has given these people the right, the license, the sheer gall to experiment! To wear flip flops over their ears! To ride micro-bicycles! To invent new and absurd catchphrases, to call ever-odder noises 'music' and nod along to it knowingly! Thank Christ we're back in civilisation!
Sitting in a small town in the middle of winter, you're grateful even for a satire on such metropolitan excesses, like Channel 4's Nathan Barley, the first part of which I watched yesterday. And watched again. And freeze-framed and watched in stop motion jittershots, picking up all the graphic design satire, the T shirts and magazine covers and typographic canards, shrieking and squirming with embarrassed recognition and, well, delight. Wait, why am I saying 'even a satire'? I was especially grateful for a satire. Because satire caricatures and exaggerates all it touches, fop satire is a double shot, an extra-jittery red-eye frappucino fix of foppery for the fop-starved. Bring it on! Hit me with that ludicrous big city pretension! More! More! More!
Because the satirist is above all a moralist, he fails to see the glamour of his subject, especially when the subject is a subculture defined, mainly, by aesthetics. By exaggerating its style and pushing it to new extremes of pretension, violence, and flamboyance, he unwittingly increases its glamour and charisma. Think of The Rake's Progress, or Hair, or A Clockwork Orange. They seem on one level to be dismissals of the subcultures they portray, but often end up preserving them more thoroughly than the subcultures can do themselves. They can even feed their 'victims' with fresh ideas. David Bowie has said that the look of Alex and his Droogs was a big influence on Ziggy Stardust. Burgess and Kubrick's dystopian nightmare scenario, a moralistic satire on ultraviolence, actually ended up on British streets in the early 70s as a new and much more extreme fashion look. Rather than making people recoil in horror, the extremism of Burgess' vision of delinquency gave everyone a hard-on and a yen to copy. It became part of the brainstorming, part of the Style Lab, a wind tunnel for tests that produced a harder, better, faster, stronger subculture.
Nathan Barley is intelligent enough to be entirely aware of the cockroach-like unkillability of fop subculture, its glorious or exasperating inescapability, and to incorporate it as its major theme. The show's Dan Ashcroft character, an ageing, disillusioned style journalist who writes an article entitled "The Idiots" about the scenesters who surround him, is appalled to find himself being worshipped by them like the second coming of Christ (or perhaps Brian). Ashcroft's big problem, rich in dramatic irony: how to hold up a mirror to The Idiots without them loving what they see? How to focus on attention-seeking narcissists without validating them beyond their wildest dreams? How to hold a magnifying glass up to their achievements without making them seem bigger? It's the writers' problem too. How to pump ludic and colourful innovations up into something absurdly ludicrous without making that bright and playful world seem very attractive indeed? In the opinion of this provincial, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker have failed. Fabulously.
(The rest of my thoughts about this wonderful show are stored up here. Part two of six airs on UK's Channel 4 next Friday at 10pm.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 04:32 am (UTC)Size doesn't count
Date: 2005-02-13 05:07 am (UTC)Otherwise, some remarkably astute observations here; understanding that the satirist-as-moralist often fails as much as the moralist-as-moralist is important. I was thinking of this yesterday as I finished off another Waugh novel--there's something beneath his sparkling and acidic prose that truly disturbs me with its Roman Catholic condemnation of any pleasures of the flesh and revulsion toward anything not truly British and white and unsullied by other tribes. Nevertheless, the divine artistry draws me back and allows me to forgive.
"By exaggerating its style and pushing it to new extremes of pretension, violence, and flamboyance, [the satirist] unwittingly increases its glamour and charisma." Worthy of repeating.
Those screen captures are funny but make we wonder if the humor here isn't a little heavy-handed--though I'll take it, anyway! Somehow I am remotely reminded of the biting satire of Moore and Cooke's original "Bedazzled." If you've seen it, you'll remember the brilliant song parodies: Moore's character, fulfilling his wish to become a pop star, oozing a love song with passionate sincerity, only to be trumped by Cooke's Lucifer, whose ice-cold, emotionless emoting is what truly sets hearts afire.
One thing I'll grant the British: they can do satire even better than the ancient Greeks.
Constant Reader
Re: Size doesn't count
Date: 2005-02-13 05:18 am (UTC)Re: Size doesn't count
Date: 2005-02-13 05:42 am (UTC)Re: Size doesn't count
Date: 2005-02-13 05:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 06:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 07:17 am (UTC)With your kind permission, I will snatch this bit, along with "Scratch a provocateur and you tend to find a closet moralist", credit you, and use them as quotations in various places, wherever applicable. Even if they should properly be in context to be fully appreciated, they're just too acute not to share with the world.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 07:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 07:54 am (UTC)Item 4 on Prof. Abraham's list reads:
4) Employ media consultants to improve the public image of the university throughout Japan.
I was half expecting him to add, chaotically, '5) Pay me $100,000 in cash to stop diminishing the university on the world wide web. Or appoint me Principal and let me turn the place into a mountaintop cathedral to Gaia, the Earth Spirit.'
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 08:02 am (UTC)Amen! AMEN! The Church of Momus sounds like great idea right now. Will you give a sermon on Sunday? Can we bring some booze?
Gonna buy my very own copy of Otto Spooky. For the sheer adventure of it! Cheers to you!
Logan's Run syndrome
Date: 2005-02-13 08:02 am (UTC)Woman: "Oh, I've lived in Hollywood, New York and Paris..."
Man: "...so you've never lived in the world, then?"
I think people need a balance between the provincial and urbane, taking the best aspects of both--the poise and sophistication of one, the civility and humility of the other. I think it's a mistake to think one has nothing to learn from those who do not live in wealthy, metropolitan cities.
Besides: aren't you there to listen?
W
Re: Logan's Run syndrome
Date: 2005-02-13 08:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 09:10 am (UTC)As a fan of both Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris who works for a dotcom just off Hoxton Square, I had expected something a lot funnier and a lot more familiar than I got. The only part that really made me say "spot on!" was the way that the characters thought constant reference to atrocities, rape etc made them edgy. The only time I wanted to punch someone because they represented a familiar idiot was the character who says "I like it because it'll piss people off... because they think it says 'rape' ... but really, it says 'ape'!"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 09:30 am (UTC)I agree that pretension is basically a good thing. I mean, everyone who thinks pretension is bad should stop wearing clothes, for one thing, because human pretension starts here.
Having said that, I don't think cities are as great as city folks always seem to think they are. It's true that people tend to be more tolerant of difference, and that's good. But just personally, if I lived in a beautiful place in the country surrounded by trees, I wouldn't care too much about the lack of cosmopolitan pretension.
I am saying this as someone who is often abused on the street because of his appearance (yes, even in the city). I am a born fop. I suppose it must be fate that gave me this name.
Anyway, it's just interesting the things that different people can't live without. When I was in Japan, I had a friend (also British) who could not really bear to live anywhere outside of Tokyo because he needed decent clubs. They were the focal point of his existence. Personally, I just don't like clubs at all. But I could see that from his point of view it was very strange that I lived my life without them. Similarly, he used to speak about how the countryside is 'all wrong', because it's full of strange noises like frogs croaking. I love the noise of frogs croaking, and it's much more indispensible to me that I have a leafy place to go for walks than it ever is to have decent clubs, or even art galleries.
However, midsized towns are usually the worst of both worlds.
I remember a trip to a tiny village in Wales last year. Myself and some friends were invited to a lock-in at a pub. The whole evening was spent with all the different people in the pub singing to each other. For me it was a fantastic evening/morning. A young man who worked in the pub, however, was obviously unhappy there. He was hankering for change. He sat down at our table and tried to establish if we knew any of the songs he wanted to sing, like Nickelback(!). He was tired of them singing the same old songs.
So it goes.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 09:39 am (UTC)Exactly! I meant to say that before, but I forgot.
Well, the fireman has stopped playing the tuba and started the alarm on the fire engine. Some very old lady has probably knocked her kerosene heater over. A real blizzard is whiting the streets out, the fire engine will certainly slither and perhaps even crash. My fingers are so cold in this wooden house that I'm going to have to retreat back to the bathroom (the only room that retains heat) to stop them falling off. Car headlights assault me one after the other as the cars approach the corner and turn.
Starved of Pretension? Brother, you have no idea....
Date: 2005-02-13 10:34 am (UTC)Imomus.com is a bolt-hole, a little dandy door I can pop through for a few stolen minutes per day.
So Hakodate is little bit arid? I spend half of my life inside an offshore installation that looks like a bad set from an Alien movie, and the rest on a sea-cliff, surrounded by sheep. Shrivelled deep inside me is a young poet who once wore eye-liner. Somehow I suspect the rest of the posters today are not dressed in flame-retardant coveralls, wearing a hard hat and carrying a radiation monitor. Foppery here is using last year's Wave Leatherman multi-tool instead of the new titanium-handled jobs, because the name is too prominent on the new design.
Every posting is a little cup of cool water, handed through the ventilation slit on an over-heated cattle truck. You've gone to bed, haven't you, and you wont read this in the morning, but may a flock of tuba-playing firemen watch over you as you sleep.
Rise and refresh us again tomorrow, oh mighty fop-warrior.....
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 10:40 am (UTC)Re: Starved of Pretension? Brother, you have no idea....
Date: 2005-02-13 10:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 11:05 am (UTC)Re: Size doesn't count
Date: 2005-02-13 12:39 pm (UTC)http://chilled.cream.org/forums/portal.php
Are you saying that "Decline and Fall" is a book meant for 12-year-olds? Obviously, we should have all read it at that tender age, when I was still struggling with Dr. Seuss.
I was distinctly reminded of Momus near the end of Waugh's "Black Mischief," when the closest thing which passes for a hero in the novel unwittingly eats his girlfriend in the company of cannibal chiefs. One of the funniest things I've ever read, far "edgier" even than these upstart satirists today.
Not surprising design-minded Momus remembered the architecture in "Decline and Fall;" he's thinking of Margot's country house, "King's Thursday," recently renovated by the young ultramodern German architect, Prof. Silenus. Allow me to tax your patience and quote a few lines. You can stop reading now if you like:
"He admired the luminous ceiling in [the] study and the indiarubber fungi in the recessed conservatory and the little drawing room, of which the floor was a large kaleidoscope, set in motion with an electric button. They took him up in the lift to the top of the great pyramidical tower, from which he could look down on the roofs and domes of glass and aluminium which glittered like Chanel diamonds in the afternoon sun."
A few chapters on Margot tears the whole thing down.
Constant Reader
The Foppiest Fop Who Ever Flopped a Fob
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 01:06 pm (UTC)is satire moralistic, and is that a sufficient response to the satirsts's intent?
Date: 2005-02-13 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 01:37 pm (UTC)Re: is satire moralistic, and is that a sufficient response to the satirsts's intent?
Date: 2005-02-13 01:48 pm (UTC)"A way to have your cake and eat it is at hand. It's called satire. Satire allows you to put incongruous stuff together and still make it work, because it allows you the distance of irony. In satire, the status of each object is fuzzy. It's unclear whether you're putting something in your song -- a national anthem, a criminal confession -- to salvage or to savage it. You may approve, you may disapprove. Nobody really knows. You probably have mixed feelings. The fuzzy status of cultural objects in satire forces people to suspend their usual category-mindedness and just enjoy the incongruity and strangeness and bastardisation for its own sake, without reflex judgements. (I may be talking about a particular kind of satire here, the kind I favour: satire delivered by an unreliable narrator.) It's a bit like walking around in a big, pluralistic modern city."
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 02:20 pm (UTC)Anyone got a torrent?
Dispatch from the hinterlands
Date: 2005-02-13 07:11 pm (UTC)During the shooting of my videos about town--in full regalia--I was often chatted up by local farmers and everyday people who were merely curious and amused by my person. All were friendly (In contrast, I am sometimes snorted and sneered at when in urban hipster enclaves). To be fair, I'm probably tolerated, even liked, because I am not an overtly effeminate man, merely a touch eccentric--and as such, I am in good company here.
I have indeed made an intentional effort to live in a place where the automobile's role is limited. The tin-roofed hamlet in which I live is easily traversed in less than five minutes by bicycle, and is surrounded by a ring of farms and horse paddocks. It is also a little over an hour away from New York, but is only directly accessible by two-lane county roads. I have noticed an increase in traffic in recent years, thanks to the encroaching wealthy urbanites, who, seeing the area as one big condominium, are arrogantly trying to tell everyone else how to live by proposing frivolous, intrusive municipal codes, which is a cause of conflict with the locals.
With a few exceptions, I don't find the urban environment a refuge from the car at all, being confronted by them every 300 yards on every single corner. Furthermore, I do not find such environments entirely free of prejudice and cant. I would suggest that when one goes from a provincial area to an urban one, one is merely trading one set of narrow restrictions for another--neither of which I find to be entirely amenable, so I find myself continually traversing between the two.
I think it must be said that I find dandyism and foppery to be distinct pursuits: while the overstated, peacock ethic of foppery is indeed a mostly urban phenomenon (that is to say, more dependent upon its setting), dandyism is a bit more understated, nuanced and robust, and thus can withstand a wider range of environs (I've encountered glorious dandies in places like the American South, the Yucatan, Zululand, and the Australian Outback--but not in forms the average hipster in Williamsburg could begin to conceive). I would even go so far as to say that when removed from the sometimes narrow constraints of the cosmopolitan monocultures, dandyism is free to 'get it wrong' in wonderful ways, taking on a wider palette, beyond what is currently considered hip or 'cool'.
As Logan Pearsall Smith once said, "One cannot be both fashionable and first rate."
W
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-13 10:18 pm (UTC)Is that David Byrne song from his movie, "True Stories"? We studied that film in art class, I found it pretty entertaining and visually exceptionally well done.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-14 12:53 am (UTC)Also, I agree with some of the fellows here. There's nothing with mediocrity. (Which is probably why you think there's everything wrong with it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-14 04:05 am (UTC)halloo
Date: 2005-02-15 05:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:23 pm (UTC)