Freedom Is In Peril

Delusion

masque mortuaire de Chopin

Bateman on Style

"Now, John, you have to wear clothes in proportion to your physique. There are definite dos and don'ts, good buddy, of wearing a bold striped shirt. A bold striped shirt calls for solid colored or discreetly patterned suits and ties."

American Psycho (2000)

Peter Beard at Montauk

Hendrick's: Afternoon Gin

Royall Rugby

You might have the impression my medicine chest is beginning to resemble a drinks cabinet. You would not be far off. I should probably bring in the contractors to build an extension. Or, I could just convert Frisby's room into a cocktail-and-fragrances den. The thing is, I enjoy trying on new scents. The Royall line is one of my favourites, and, as you know, I am already a firm fan of Royall Musk and Royall Lyme. I find the packaging itself has a satisfyingly vintage, old-fashioned feel to it. Now there is a new one: Royall Rugby. A Brooks Brothers exclusive. I fail to see how I missed it when it was first introduced. I vaguely remember seeing a bottle in a Brooks Brothers store, but it was not until quite recently that I decided to take the plunge. The description reads:

A truly masculine fragrance that opens with a refreshing and aromatic touch of exotic dry wood. Geranium leaves and black currant unveil an earthy voyage with rugged notes of patchouli and vetiver which fuse with warm under laying nuances of incense suede.

Masculine, woody, rugged, warm, incensed: these are all perfectly apt descriptions of yours truly. Royall Rugby has quickly become my daily go-to scent, beating out even my collection of Creed, including Royal English Leather. Which is really saying something. Stay tuned.

Duke of Windsor in the Bahamas

Adèle Blanc-Sec





British East Africa

Funtime (Iggy Pop)

Tennis Trousers

Hey baby we like your pants

One sometimes finds the oddest things in the boot of one's Benz motor car. Take, for instance, a charming pair of tennis racquet motif trousers from Brooks Brothers (at port). I must have picked them up two or three years ago and completely forgotten about them during the chaos of the subsequent immolations (at which I have hinted elsewhere). Roughly the same colour as the interior of the compartment, the trousers had been folded into a small package and stuffed into a nook where they lay under tennis and squash racquets, an old duffle bag, and a rare Persian rug that I was supposed to have delivered for repair last year (oops!). Until this morning, that is, when I decided at last to restore order. Like most chaps I don't mind a bit of junk in the trunk, but now and again it should submit to a cleansing purge. Do you wear clothing items with a motif on them? I certainly do, but not to the orifice.

City Stockbrokers

Note the knowing smiles and moderate sideburns

Tailgating

Anglo-Catholics

A View of the Altar

The Beginnings (Kipling)

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy -- willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddently bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

The Beginnings, Rudyard Kipling

Teutonic Order 1260

The Old Limey (H.W. Crocker)

Hackett Summer Kit

© Garda Tano

Bolingbroke

"I have observed, that in Comedy, the best actor plays the part of the droll, while some scrub rogue is made the hero, or fine gentleman. So, in this Farce of Life, wise men pass their time in mirth, whilst fools only are serious."

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Take The World (She Wants Revenge)

Geo. F. Trumper Extract of West Indian Limes

When trusted colleagues tell me I smell like a G&T, it is usually because I injested a dozen of the bloody things the night before. Now I have an entirely different excuse.

At the suggestion of some Interweb colleagues, and that of my good friend Sefton who knows about these things, I recently took receipt from a New York City establishment of a bottle of Trumper West Indian Extract of Limes fragrance. Pictured (above) is the same bottle together with a pair of Brooks Brothers bathing shorts in Harbour Island Blue and Palm Beach Green.

Note the charming pink colour of the Trumper box. Here is the story:

The story behind the famous 'PINK LABEL'

It has been asked so often, "why does Trumpers Extract of Limes have a pink label, surely it should be green?"

We have to relate that once it was but during the Great War (1914-1918) supplies of the correct paper dried up and the only alternative available to Trumpers was pink, so pink it became and has remained so ever since. When a tradition stretches back so far it seems a pity to change it so when we decided to introduce a bath soap perfume with Extract of Limes we had no hesitation concerning the colour of the carton--pink.

I lack the language to describe fragrances, so I will leave it to Trumper themselves. The advertising copy proceeds thus:

Bright green bursts of life-force charge from the tangy sharpness of tropical Limes, while vibrant citrus flashes allow a gentleman's mind to surge with the majesty of life. And as every pore is infused with the zing and zest of freshly squeezed West Indian Limes, so an exhilarating thrill is marvelously bestowed.

Extract of Limes, first introduced in 1880, is a pleasant enough scent, cool and refreshing, ideal for breezy summer conditions. It does indeed smell of limes, as you would expect. However, you may also notice that it simply does not persist long enough on the skin. Like an orgasm, the initial burst of explosive pleasure is over in mere seconds.

City Break

The Final Curtsey (Margaret Rhodes)

"My father, the 16th Baron Elphinstone, was born in 1869. He travelled all over the world, big game hunting and exploring. His philosophy seemed to be ‘have gun, will travel’. He potted grizzly bears in Alaska and Canada and I grew up with a stuffed 8ft-high grizzly standing on its hind legs in the hall at Carberry.

I have his game book from three big game-hunting trips in 1895 and 1896 in the foothills of the Himalayas, Bengal and Assam, in which he precisely recorded for the three visits a bag of 13 tigers, three leopards, 21 rhino, 39 buffalo, ten bison, three python and many deer, pig, quail and peacock.

When he wasn’t doing that he was shooting pheasant, partridge and grouse in Scotland and England. How the Animal Liberation Front would have loved him. After he settled down, he became Governor of the Bank of Scotland and Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers, the Sovereign’s bodyguard north of the border.

As Captain-General he marched behind the coffin at the funeral of King George V in 1936. There was a strong wind and my father thought the long eagles’ feathers in his cap were going to blow away. He lifted his arms to secure them and his braces snapped. He had to walk four-and-a-half miles desperately holding his trousers up with his elbows."

The Final Curtsey, Margaret Rhodes (2011)

Yachting Days

Let's drag a black ship down to the sacred sea, select a crew, load oxen on for sacrifice, and Chryseis, that fair-complexioned girl. Let's have as leader some wise counselor—Idomeneus, Ajax, godlike Odysseus, or you, Peleus's son, most eminent of all, so that with sacrifice we may appease the god who shoots from far away.

The Iliad, Bk. I

Do you mess about in boats? I do on occasion. I grew up around boats in New York and Connecticut and am at home on, in, and under the water. Come to think of it, I've spent the vast majority of my life near a coast of some kind. I'm a particularly strong swimmer and enjoy spearfishing, angling, and surfing. I rowed at university. I love spending time in the water, whether it's skindiving off Kauai, hunting grouper in the Bahamas, or showering with a couple of young brunette surf hotties back at my place.

But sailing? I've never had a particular interest in sailing as a calling or way of life. It's just something one does. I'm afraid I find it rather boring. Some sailors go on about sailing the same way wine enthusiasts talk about wine. No reason to get pedantic about it. It's highly irritating. Ruins the mood. But that's just me. I prefer motor boats. Thames launches and Adirondack wooden boats are more my thing. I am, however, still able to admire as objects of beauty the sweeping lines and majestic configurations of classic yachts.

I'm surrounded by classic yachts. Southern California, as you well know, is a sailor's paradise. For several years my late father owned a sailboat, a 47' beauty stabled in Newport Beach and La Paz, Baja. He couldn't sail, at least not very well, so he hired a crew to handle the sailing side of things. With friends he accompanied it down to Baja and up the coast to the San Juan islands in Washington. When he died, an event I wrote about here two years ago, the boat more or less disappeared. The case is ongoing.

I belong to a yacht club. Which reminds me: I need to cancel my membership. The other members are an awfully nice crowd, don't get me wrong, but they drink cocktails at levels that provoke my competitive drive. That's not a good thing when my goal is to unwind. And anyway, I don't need to belong to a yacht club in order to enjoy some cocktails and chase tail. If you still want to run in yachting circles, you would do well to befriend generous chaps who own yachts and love to party. Why buy the yacht when you can get the Veuve Clicquot and girls for free?

English Summer

Archeofuturism

Horn Concerto No. 1 in D major (Mozart)

Space Pirate Captain Harlock: Believe In Our Tomorrow

"This is the Voice of Free Arcadia. The sun sets, and rises again. The future does not come to those who don't believe in it. All who believe have endured for long, and will someday meet up with you. Someday we will combine our forces and live the future with you. No matter how small a flame there may be, do not let it go out. Believe in our tomorrow..."

Captain Harlock, Arcadia Of My Youth (1982)

WASPs: People of Plenty

For more than two centuries, Americans were a people of plenty. They cast off the corruption of the Old World for a future of boundless abundance. That future is now receding into the past. The American Dream is fast becoming an air-conditioned nightmare complete with power outages. The long boom is over, America is browning, and the long emergency is unfolding. Dazed, disoriented, and increasingly despondent, homo Americanus now represents the senile face of defeat and decay. Americans who trace their bloodlines back to Britain now walk with the living dead, stranded in an alien nation far removed from their ancestral homeland.

The power and prestige once attached to old-stock Americans as the founding race of the Constitutional Republic ebbed away, leaving behind little more than an acronym conceived in acrimony, then sugar-coated and dressed as an empty Brooks Brothers suit--the WASP. Coined sometime in the 1950s as a snide epithet aimed at the patrician products of Ivy League colleges, the term can be stretched to include anyone anywhere descended from the indigenous peoples of Britain. As a collective noun, WASP refers to a mechanical aggregation of individuals rather than an organic social whole; ethnic solidarity is all but unknown among WASPs, especially those safely ensconced in the upper reaches of the mangerial-professional class. Not even the most highly-educated WASPs care that their own children remain ignorant of Anglo-Saxon ethnohistory. At best, the epigonal snobbery sustains the infant ethnoancestry industry tracking Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA back to the British Isles and beyond. Upper-class WASPs in America have presided "over the dissolution of their own dominion," leaving their less priviliged co-ethnics to face a future of public denigration and deliberate degredation. The language and institutions of the merely middle class WASP--his biocultural capital, indeed, the whole set of what a biologist might call his extended phenotype, a patriot his country, or a priest his faith--was socialized, commercialized and not infrequently vandalized by free riders of all colors and creeds.

The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race, Andrew Fraser (2011)