Hawleywood's Barber Shop & Shaving Parlor

Schloß Design

Limitless

Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram’s Parzifal. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakenness--it is all Faustian and only Faustian. Every one of us knows it.

 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918)

Ready To Die

No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (at Harvard University in Boston, USA), 1978

Hemingway On Drinking

Mountain of Destiny

Books & Bullets

Reconquista: Archeofuturistic Style

Vile Bodies

The Prussian Touch

Royal Ink

Nice Guys

We Are Motörhead (Motörhead)

John Randolph of Roanoke

"I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality."

- John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833)

Bowie-esque

So, I'm A Player

"You're a player," she sneered.

That was the accusation a young female co-worker made about me in mixed company a few weeks ago. Picture her: a snarky, loud-mouthed, fat-arsed little slapper, with bloated self-regard and Bolshevik self-righteousness, a veritable warthog in heels. In other words, a typical American girl.

"Moi?!," I replied in mock indignation. I hadn't considered it before. But I suppose it was true, if by player she meant a chap who likes the company of women. A lot. If so, guilty as charged.

But she explained that by player she meant that I see a lot of women and--here's the rub--that I talk about it. I don't hide the fact I have at times a rather full social calendar. I'm quite open about it, particularly when asked. Which I am, often, usually by ladies themselves. "How was your weekend?" I've nothing to hide.

I'm proud of the women I've managed to drag into my life then and now. Recall my marriage to a Middle Eastern hottie a few years ago, from a wealthy Levantine clan, whose patriarch escaped Germany after the war not because he was Bolshevik but because he was on the losing side. And take my most recent serious girlfriend: a beautiful California beach blonde who turned heads everywhere we went. And don't even get me started on the young Russian beauty straight out of that book by Lermontov.

No, what bothers my co-worker and other young women like her is that chaps can talk about it without stigma. And we do. Calling a man a player is a shaming tactic. For a man with choices, and who happily acts on those choices, is a threat to single women seeking commitment, and an example to young men. That's the danger they see. I get it.

Just the other day, as I strode past a group of senior bankers in conversation, one of the SVPs smiled and gestured towards me. "William, you walk around here like a fucking 27-year old stud."

Indeed.

Northern Tresses

Get Drunk !

contre le monde moderne

Hemingway's Fish

Rebel Style

The Honourable Arbuthnot

'I have chosen my colleague,' I said.

'Billy Arbuthnot's boy? His father was at Harrow with me. I know the fellow - Harry used to bring him down to fish - tallish, with a lean, high-boned face and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's. I know his record, too. There's a good deal about him in this office. He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was heavy enough on him without their efforts. He's blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit. Also he used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation. Some Englishman was once complaining to old Mahmoud Shevkat about the scarcity of statesmen in Western Europe, and Mahmoud broke in with, "Have you not the Honourable Arbuthnot?" You say he's in your battalion. I was wondering what had become of him, for we tried to get hold of him here, but he had left no address. Ludovick Arbuthnot - yes, that's the man. Buried deep in the commissioned ranks of the New Army? Well, we'll get him out pretty quick!'

* * *

I must spare a moment to introduce Sandy to the reader, for he cannot be allowed to slip into this tale by a side-door. If you will consult the Peerage you will find that to Edward Cospatrick, fifteenth Baron Clanroyden, there was born in the year 1882, as his second son, Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot, commonly called the Honourable, etc. The said son was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, was a captain in the Tweeddale Yeomanry, and served for some years as honorary attache at various embassies. The Peerage will stop short at this point, but that is by no means the end of the story. For the rest you must consult very different authorities. Lean brown men from the ends of the earth may be seen on the London pavements now and then in creased clothes, walking with the light outland step, slinking into clubs as if they could not remember whether or not they belonged to them. From them you may get news of Sandy. Better still, you will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Mecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy's friends in it. In shepherds' huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast-off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes. In the caravanserais of Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires. If you were going to visit Petrograd or Rome or Cairo it would be no use asking him for introductions; if he gave them, they would lead you into strange haunts. But if Fate compelled you to go to Llasa or Yarkand or Seistan he could map out your road for you and pass the word to potent friends. We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else. Sandy was the wandering Scot carried to the pitch of genius. In old days he would have led a crusade or discovered a new road to the Indies. Today he merely roamed as the spirit moved him, till the war swept him up and dumped him down in my battalion.

John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916)

Thermopylae

Starlight Reveries

How curious to strike a sour note in such a sublime melody! What follows is a cell block field description. Either I am getting even more curmudgeonly in the run-up to middle age, or people really have become uglier. I think it is the latter. Ugliness offends me; I want to destroy it. Modern humans disgust me. I see fat faces reflecting the American man-child ideal and I want to strike them. Wide-set eyes and pug noses. Distended bellies full of junk. And minds full of lies. Deadbeats, addicts, and fucking incompetents. Prancing bimbos, little toads full of pathetic hipster excuses. The Post-American dystopia, as I keep telling you, is ripe for subversion. But for now I turn away. Fogey routines provide an order unattainable in civilian life. One surfs the Kali Yuga and moves to bio-genetic harmonies. Initiating binary commands.

Cool Treats

Under The Black Flag

Punting