Tartan Tuesday

Elegance In White

Source: Tommy Ton




 

c'était un rendezvous

Against Despair

"There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)

Tighten Up Takahashi !

Gentlemen Stand Up Please !

Old School Bold Style

Eton College, 1960s



Piano Concerto No 27 in B flat major (Mozart)

Special Viyella

Mountain Assault Course: Taking The High Peaks

“Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.”

Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses (1969)

Battle Cries & Champagne: A Society of Super-Freaks (Bowie)

 Passionate bright young thing
(1913-1938-201?)

David Bowie sat in an overstuffed armchair in his suite aboard the ship Ellinis, returning to London from his first triumphal tour of the States. His delicate brows knit in a look of perplexed recognition as he read Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies"--a 40 year-old, futuristic novel about a society of "bright young things" whirling through lavish parties in outlandish costumes, dancing, gossiping and sipping champagne. Suddenly David lowered the book to his lap, picked up the spiral notebook and pen sitting on the small mahogany table at his side, and began to write the words to the title song of his new LP, Aladdin Sane...

***

"The book dealt with London in the period just before a massive, imaginary war," David would later confide, touching one finger, with its green-painted nail, lightly to his chin. "People were frivolous, decadent and silly. And suddenly they were plunged into this horrendous holocaust. They were totally out of place, still thinking about champagne and parties and dressing up. Somehow it seemed to me that they were like people today." But who was the frivolous, romantic young man Aladdin Sane? At first David merely cupped his hands in a fragile cage and said "I don't really think he's me." Several days later, Bowie realised who - or rather what - the song, and in fact the entire album, were about. "It's my interpretation of what America means to me. It's like a summation of my first American tour."

***

A few days before he was scheduled to sail for London, David sat before a crowd of reporters in a futuristic looking RCA studio and admitted: "I feel the American is the loneliest person in the world. I get an awful feeling of insecurity and...a need for warmth in people here. It's very, very sad. So many people in America are unaware that they are living."

It is little wonder then, that when David sat in his stateroom aboard the ship Ellinis and began to read in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies about 20 year olds caught up in a "mad and illogical whirl of extravagant parties and other pointlessly important social affairs," he saw an image that summed up everything he had seen in North America...and everything he had written into his songs. It was the image of Aladdin Sane, the "passionate bright young thing" who would learn to really live only when the cataclysm of war forced him into it. And paradoxically, it was the image that would give an album life.

'Bowie Foresees the States In Flames-The Personal Story Behind "Aladdin Sane"', Circus (July 1973)

Major Hoad On Cologne

On Duelling

The Certainty Principle

'To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.'

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Quality Tweed

Mensur

100% Pure Cashmere

'Throughout history cashmere has been a luxury cloth, prized for its warmth, light weight, and sensation of softness against the skin. Rich Romans bought cashmere scarves of exotic and intricate design that had been handwoven in Srinagar, Kashmir (hence the name), and brought to Rome by merchant traders. In India the cashmere spinning industry was so extensive that by the fifteenth century nearly 60,000 people were directly employed in it. By the nineteenth century, the European aristocracy considered cashmere the most fashionable of fabrics. In England, George "Beau" Brummell and the Prince Regent started a vogue for white cashmere waistcoats.'

G. Bruce Boyer, Elegance: A Guide to Quality in Menswear (1985)

Dandy Clan

Talent For Invective

The other morning, entering an office building, I failed to hold open the door for a female coming up behind me. She emitted a tiny gasp when I did so.

She was a young professional female in professional clothing with a seriously professional look on her face, slender and attractive, most likely with a university degree, who probably holds herself in extremely high regard and assumes everyone else does as well. You know the type.

It is with a bit of uneasiness that I admit it to you. I am generally regarded as a gentleman, "one of Nature's gentlemen" in fact, although, as I have pointed out before, I do not consider myself as such. Still, I am considered a well-mannered sort. These are reflections no doubt of my priviliged upbringing and education, for which I am grateful and for which I make no apologies. After they get to know me, of course, the assessment is that I am an arsehole, a solitary, and a sexual pervert, albeit one with sweetness and charm. But the initial impression remains.

Everyone of us has a unique talent. Mine is invective. From a very early age my mouth has landed me in trouble. My contempt, it seems, has a mind all its own. As I matured I was able to back up my words with the threat of physical harm. And now, at my age, it is married to an increasingly brutal, bleak view of our situation.

Several months ago one of the portfolio assistants, a chubby twentysomething girl from Chicago, approached me with an odd smile on her face. "So, William, what does a girl like me have to do to get a guy like you?", she asked, her head cocked to the side, hand on generous hip. Typical snarkiness replaced for once by vulnerability.

I wanted to tell her: "Stop stuffing your pretty mouth with fast food, you fat little pig". But instead I suggested she start attending a local gym (which, around here, function as a sort of singles club), or head to the beach, or take up kite-surfing.

"I can't help it that I'm overweight", another chapette with a hankering for yours truly recently explained. "It's in my genes".

"Indeed", I replied. I wanted to add: "I'm similarly genetically programmed to avoid fatties such as yourself, apart from procuring an occasional drunken blowjob in the bog. Your rolls of fat betray a defect of character and an insolent attitude. Now go eat a Twinkie".

But, I said nothing.

Progress, one might say, not perfection.

Sent from my iPhone

Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War

From the publisher:

'Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists, and Catholic crusaders were on the winning side, but their role has remained strangely hidden until now. Men from Portugal and Morocco signed on for money and adventure. General Eoin O'Duffy organised 700 Irishmen in a modern Crusade; 500 Catholic Frenchmen fought in the 'Jeanne D'Arc' unit; and thirty British volunteers, including aristocrats and working-class fascists, also took up arms. Romanian Iron Guard extremists died at Majadahonda and an Indian volunteer fought in the fascist militia. There were Russians, Americans, Finns, Belgians, Greeks, Cubans, and many more. Goose-stepping alongside the volunteers were fascist conscripts from Germany and Italy, in training for the next world war. Foreigners, whether unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to Franco's victory. Without Bebb who flew General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to precipitate the onset of the Spanish Civil War the war would never have started; without Hitler, Franco would never have won.'

la vénerie française

For Your Pleasure

Campfire Cologne

Thank You, Christian Grey !

One you lock the target
Two you bait the line
Three you slowly spread the net
And four you catch the man
- 'Headhunter', Front 242 (1988)

Dating a 20-year old woman, as I am, is, I imagine, rather like romancing a retard. Then again American women of all ages exhibit similar stunted levels of intelligence, emotional shallowness, and cultural ignorance. There are exceptions, of course, and I reckon their names could fit on a single 3x5 index card.

The 20-year old? Well, to say I am dating her in this case is perhaps too strong a term; banging would be more accurate. I met her at a restaurant in Laguna Beach, where she works. She displays a mix of faux-innocence and eager horniness entirely befitting a hot 20-year old blonde female. She has the requisite 'daddy issues', of course, as one might expect, which she expresses most graphically during our epic romps together. (If my queen-sized ornate Indonesian bed could talk, there would be tales to tell). Alarm bells rang this past weekend, however, when, after a session, she spotted me putting the loaded Magnum condom into the toilet. She looked at me with pained eyes: "Why are you doing that? Do you think I'll take it and put it back inside me?" I sent her home. For an hour she sat in her car outside my house, texting me, pleading with me to let her back in. Tragedy for her.

Of the five (5) women I have slept with since breaking up with my hot blonde girlfriend in early August, I still don't know a single surname. The common thread amongst these women, I have noticed, is their enthusiasm for the Fifty Shades of Grey books, which are proving enormously popular with the female population in industrialised countries. My understanding is that they are full of scenes of personal degradation, sado-masochistic practises, and brutal sex. It is inadvertent testament, I think, to the female need to submit and to be dominated, a need generally unmet due to the unrelenting decades-long pussification of Western men. The natural role of woman, after all, is one of submission. My girlfriends beg to be pinned down onto the bed, their neck choked and shoulders held firmly in place, slapped and spanked, their hair pulled hard, as I pummel their cervix with deep assaults, producing an ecstatic response that would have shocked me twenty years ago. These days, with an accurate understanding of things, I am more than happy to oblige. To say I do not enjoy this state of affairs would be a lie.

Revelations such as Fifty Shades of Grey are a gift. It is up to the perceptive man to take full advantage of the feminist ascendancy, to take what he needs and what he wants. It is too easy. Modern humans, I have found, are hopelessly vulnerable, like villagers on the exposed coast of post-modernity, ripe for pillage and destruction by Viking adventurers. If you have not yet done so, adopt the corsair mindset and proceed from there.

Modern life, as I have said before, can be a sordid thing and is not without great cost to both sides. In my own case, I can confess to you here, what passes through my heart is a wash of unfeeling, a red-raw void, a sense of dislocated love and longing for something higher, from man or from God. And still, I hear the forest refrain, and the call of the attack-ships from Eleven Threshold. It will have to do for now.

Sent from my iPhone

White Elephant (Ladytron)

Fate: An Encouraging Thought

Frodo: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."

Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

bottes de cheval

An American Tale