Reds Don't Surf !

Merry Christmas 2008

Truefitt & Hill 1805

The Australian

Imperial German Dueling Club

Today's university students, one might argue, are inveterate louts. Our ancestors were a sturdier breed. In the photo (above) note the horn-rimmed spectacles, repp tie, and the blood on the face of the chap at lower left.

First Love: A Tribute to Gin

For my 15th birthday in South Kensington, one of my neighbours surreptitiously gave me a bottle of Beefeater gin. My neighbour was a buxom French-Egyptian woman with blonde hair and green eyes and two children my age who attended Wellington College and the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle. The gin bottle was in a gift box. I hid it in my room upstairs. Over the course of a couple of months, I drank it straight. No tonic, no water, no lime. I had been drinking ale, bitter, and lager for almost a year. Even whisky and vodka. But the Beefeater was something new, my introduction to more sophisticated material, the beginning of a love affair. No other substance affected me the same way, except perhaps wine and whisky. I participated in messy pub brawls and snogged svelte public school girls. My first jail term was due to drinking too much gin. Over the years gin has served me extremely well, on the whole, and today I can attribute new horizons to drinking it. To gin, I raise my glass.

Black Shoes, Black Heart

As you may have heard, I have a new-found appreciation for my black shoes. And not just any old black shoes, such as those plastic, square-toed Kenneth Cole horrors that increasing numbers of chaps in the office seem to be wearing. I am referring to proper English shoes in an oxford, brogue, or tassel loafer style. These are the only shoes, in my opinion, that should be worn with a business suit. (I have specific views concerning dress boots, which I shall address in a later post).

My revived enthusiasm for black recently has led me to spend hours reassessing my footwear collection, much to the consternation of my new editor. I have even considered, in a phase of madness, liquidating all dress shoes in cabernet and oxblood colours; I rarely wear them to the office. I have worn black oxfords and loafers for ages. At school, convention required black loafers from New & Lingwood. Brown shoes, as everyone knew, are unsuitable for urban environments, solicitor's offices, and trading floors.

Black oxfords project an aura of professionalism and seriousness, which is especially helpful if these are qualities you yourself do not possess. Professional success is largely a result of dressing well and looking good, and wearing the right shoes to the office plays a large role in the equation.

Photo: Shipton & Heneage

Hergé in Tweed

From the top floor of my uncle's five-story townhouse opposite the Victoria & Albert Museum, I could see the sparkling traffic lights on Cromwell Road far below. It was there that I did my evening reading. Not all of it was academic work. I enjoyed, amongst other things, the works of Hergé, creator of the Tintin character. I had most of his books. A girlfriend gave me a Tintin keyring. I even wore on occasion a Tintin sweater that had been bought for me from the Tintin store in Covent Garden.

Around the top edge of the townhouses ran a narrow embankment enclosing a channel for rain water. It was possible to climb out of the windows on to this wall, and, if you wanted, walk completely around the rooftops of the square, stopping to peer in each window. Our next door neighbour's daughter, a lithe 15-year old blonde at the Royal School in Hampstead, crawled out on to this narrow walkway and one evening appeared at my window on hands and knees looking for a smoke and conversation.

On the top floor of my uncle's house we would lie together, with the windows open, having a cigarette or two and some cocktails, listening to CDs, talking and leafing through the Tintin books.

City Stripes Celebration

From my teenage years onward, I have had a thing for business shirts with narrow, evenly-spaced stripes. Today they are referred to as bengal, banker, or university stripes; but when I was young we called them City stripes.

One of my masters at school, Mr. Jessup, frequently wore City stripes. Jessup was a short, portly, shaven-headed gent with tortoise-shell specs (not unlike the American style expert G. Bruce Boyer) and a fondness for the poetry of Swinburne and Whitman, who wore cruddy cardigans or v-neck jumpers, stained charcoal trousers, knit ties, and black English loafers from New & Lingwood. His dress shirts invariably featured plum or purple City stripes. He wore these shirts so often that they smelled; the collar and cuffs were frayed. While he made us recite the poems of the English Romantics in a plummy accent, I made meticulous note of his City striped shirts.

At first I bought my shirts at Harvie & Hudson, where I would stand in front of the shop windows and study the brightly-coloured, striped configurations of the City shirts on display and dream of wearing them to a job in management consulting or investment banking. Later, I acquired shirts at Brooks Brothers, J.Crew, and JPress, usually with spread collar and double cuffs, wearing them on both business and informal occasions. Then as now I admired the clean look presented by the neat, even stripes. Like the colours on club or repp neck ties, City striped shirts can hint at membership of a club, college, or athletic team. Herein, I think, lies at least part of their appeal.

'Heroes' (Bowie)

V-2 Schneider (Bowie)

Arcadia Of My Youth

"I fight for no one's sake...only for something deep in my heart."

Russian Gulag Tattoos

British Style Genius- The Street Look (BBC)

c'est par-delà la mort

"Le combat de la vie, le fardeau de l'individualité. A l'opposé, l'indivis et ses tourbillons toujours plus profonds. Aux instants de l'étreinte, nous y plongeons, nous nous abîmons dans des zones où gîtent les racines de l'arbre de vie. Il y a aussi la volupté légère, fugitive, pareille au combustible qui flambe, et tout aussi volatile. Au-delà, au-dessus de tout cela, le mariage. "Vous serez une seule chair." Son sacrement ; le fardeau est désormais partagé. Enfin, la mort. Elle abat les murailles de la vie individuelle. Elle sera l'instant de l'accomplissement suprême. (Matthieu XXII, v. 30.) C'est par-delà la mort, et là seulement, où le temps n'est plus, que nos véritables liens ont formé le noeud mystique. Il nous sera donné de voir, quand la lumière s'éteindra."

Premier journal parisien, Ernst Jünger

Undying WASPs

Joseph Palmi: "We Italians have family. The Jews have tradition. What do you people have?"

Edward Wilson: "We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting."

The Good Shepherd (2006)

Born To Lose (Johnny Thunders)

Southwick Suit and Alden Tassel Loafers

This morning I met with a local chap to discuss the market. He makes infrequent appearances on CNBC. In the rare candid photo (above), I am wearing a two-button, undarted navy flannel chalk stripe suit from Southwick and a pair of black Alden tassel loafers.

The Last Days of South Africa, With Pints of Bitter at Kavanagh's Afterwards

Following my career as a quasi-mercenary in South Africa in the late 1990s (about which I will write more later), I ended up back in London, where I obtained a one-bedroom flat on Queen's Gate in South Kensington. It was within crawling distance, I happily discovered, of Kavanagh's, a dark Irish pub under the hotel across the street.

In it worked a beautiful Mexican woman, Carmena, a graphic artist for a Mexican newspaper who was travelling around the world with her husband, who also worked in the pub. Carmena's aquiline nose, noble face, and long flowing black hair immediately attracted my notice. Every night, whilst I sipped my pints of bitter, I looked for her nose plowing through the cigarette smoke and crowd like a ship's bow. She made fun of the accents of the Spanish people working there.

Also working in the pub was Dermiod, an Irishman, a tall, thin, balding figure, with a crimson face the colour of the insoles of my Grenson brogues. He was 35 and claimed to have been born in Queens, but his family returned to Ireland when he was small. His sudden absence from the pub one day, he later confided to me, was due to his appearance in Portsmouth on charges of hitting a woman. He told us he was bisexual. He was caught drinking behind the bar. We never saw him again.

Another worker was a small Spanish girl with a slim, boyish figure and a freckled, upturned nose, not at all like the aristocratic Spanish, Mexican, and Brazilian women I had met. When I mentioned my interest in Franco, she mock spit on the floor in disgust. She told me she wanted to work in America. Her English professor at university in Spain told her she didn't have to know English to work in America, because the USA would soon be a Spanish-speaking country.

Alden Tassel Loafer

contre le monde moderne

Tassel Loafers: Shoes of the Counter-Revolution

"In France, the tasseled loafer makes its own peculiar political statement. John Vinocur, the executive editor of The International Herald Tribune, said that the shoes were worn, actually flaunted, by young rightists in the mid-1980's who wished to demonstrate their distaste for the Socialist Government...To them, the preppiness of the shoe represented American prosperity and free-market conservatism. Thus, it became part of the battle uniform of the young soldier of la contre-revolution."

The Politicization of Tassel Loafers, Neil A. Lewis, New York Times, 03/11/93

Inner Emigration

"Whenever you experience mental vacillation, cast your mind back to the Greco-Roman mentality as it was before the second century."

Henry de Montherlant

Platform Tennis Hall of Famers

The Chronicles of Argyle

The day is late and the storm clouds gather, but it is imperative we persist in style. This is no time to lower standards.

In these cooler days, break out the corduroy, flannel, and tweed. The autumn clime begs for muted colours: brown, chestnut, red, orange, hunter green, burgundy. Tweed in a tan or chestnut hue is a favourite. Last week I attended a dinner with local investors, where the topic of conversation was the economy. I wore a Brooks Brothers brown herringbone tweed jacket in a 3/2 roll, medium grey flannels, and Alden chestnut tassel loafers. The subtle charm of my attire helped moderate the effects of my harsh prescriptions, I'm sure.

If the range of options seems dull or limited, one can always add a pinch of colour to one's choice of accessories. My favourite in this regard is argyle hosiery. In fact I recently took delivery of a package of argyle socks from Marcoliani in lime green, pink, lavender, and cherry. Argyle socks are a staple of prep, YF, and Ivy wardrobes and require minimal explanation here. Suffice to say they are a superb way to break up the visual monotony.

This autumn, fill the unforgiving gap between trouser cuff and brogue with several inches' worth of colourful argyle hosiery. Beneath the corduroy and tweed, there no doubt lurks the heart of a true rebel.

Austrian Nationalist Style

Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPO), which recently received over 18% of the vote in the Austrian elections. Note the corduroy jacket, white dress shirt, and crew-neck sweater. And beer.

Credo (Arvo Pärt)

Interview: Trevor Myburgh

Trevor Myburgh is author of the forthcoming The Hotchkiss Quandary (Castelmann, 2017) and a co-founder of the Tradpunk literary movement. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a free lance writer.

Q: Please tell my readers a little about yourself. What experiences have shaped your outlook on literature and life in general? When did you first become interested in writing?

A: I grew up in the Northeast, where literature was part of family life. I attended boarding school and obtained my B.A. in English literature in 1994. I have been influenced by my father, an attorney and a former political prisoner whose access to American and European authors sustained him in captivity. Being reared on books in several languages helped me to complete my university degree and put myself into a wider perspective. For example, I like to speculate as to how my interlocutor or enemy perceives me. This requires a great deal of intellectual effort and emotional detachment. I think that never during my formal educational period did I take anything for granted: no ideology, no system, no belief, no sense of group victimhood. One needs not just to reexamine history; one must first reexamine his often self-serving assumptions. To be honest, my curricular period at college was largely a waste of time. What I was taught was mostly ideologically based drivel delivered by mediocre academics, with remarkably similar freudo-marxophile affinities.

Q: Your new book, The Hotchkiss Quandary, is set in the glittering world of America’s privileged elite, a world of prep schools, Ivy League colleges, country clubs, and wood-panelled banking offices. What are the basic ideas of this book? What was your motivation for writing it?

A: This book is a fictional exploration of a group of young Americans, following their progression through prep school, college, and the Manhattan world of publishing and banking. I am appalled by the dogmatic spirit and bias in higher education, which has for decades been subject to fraudulent scholasticism. I am also shocked by the false meritocracy in the American establishment and by the quota system, which definitely reminds me of the quota system in hiring that was in place in the ex-Soviet Union. The best and the brightest are, as a rule, shoved aside. The modern ideology of the big buck, the dictatorship of well-being, coupled with the false misnomer of "consumerism," destroys all values and all cultures, including our own. I do not blame Europeans, and I reject conspiracy theories. I primarily hold responsible lazy and corrupted academics, the modern media, and politicians who are mortgaging the American future. However, most likely, we need more chaos in our polity, because only out of chaos new literature and a new value system can emerge.

Q: In your book you also paint a grim and gloomy portrait of the future for America and American culture. What are the causes of this catastrophic situation, and what, if anything, can be done to reverse the trend?

A: Unlike many writers, I tend to look critically at the root causes of our approaching death. Was it not the millennium-long belief in one bizarre form of Oriental monotheism, that is, Christianity, along with its modern egalitarian derivatives, that have brought us today to our modern “love thy exotic neighbor” entropy, and self-hate? It seems to me that the only way to stop the process of collective suicide is by discarding the ideology of progress, the myth of egalitarianism, and the theology of market democracy.

Q: Readers may find that hard to digest. How much do readers really “learn” from literature?

A: They never do, because they never bother to learn in the first place. The linear concept of fiction, a currently fashionable notion in post-post-modern academic circles, is a willful act of intellectual stupidity. Literature is always open to new deliriums and hoaxes, but it is also open to new rebirth. The great problem is that many fine people are damaged in the process. I have no illusions about a static genre. After all who says that even in a static paradise we would not experience, after a prolonged bliss, periods of intense boredom?

Q: Do writers no longer play a significant role in American society?

A: They do, but not in the way people assume. I am fascinated by the current disintegration of critical thought. Yesterday writers were the bad conscience of the existing order. Many today have become the good conscience of the established disorder. Prepared to do anything to get some crumbs from the media's cake, they do not realize that they are cutting the branch on which they sit. One should also take into account the divorce between intellectual families and political families. Ideological differences are no longer pertinent when it is a question of describing the content of major books appearing today in The New York Times Book Review. As far as the realm of ideas and the work of thought go, the ideological paradigm seems increasingly to have been replaced by a break between the "center" and the "periphery." The former corresponds to a dominant ideology which is to legitimate the system and the latter includes all those who, no matter what their own itinerary, challenge the axiomatic content of interest and blend of economism, productivism and utilitarianism to which society has led. Fruitful dialogues are possible in this "periphery."

Q: In your writing you tend to place emphasis on what your characters are wearing. How does this reflect your own interest in clothing, and in classic style? Who are your favourite designers?

A: It is acceptable now to be refined. It is acceptable to wear a well-tailored suit again in the evening and in your spare time. The vast movement of techno-economic homogenization, which is eroding individual identities nearly everywhere and is producing a new form of sartorial distress, is fading. Classic style is a principle and has value only as a principle. The cult of fashion is not a response to the real problems of the world but an escape, a mystifying effusion or, worse still, a fearful diversion to internal deficiencies. In which case, the metaphysics of subjectivity remains and it is often only the windbreaker for social egoism. My own style tends towards oblique tailoring.

Q: Your writing is often accused of being derivative of authors as diverse as Fitzgerald, Wodehouse, and Bret Easton Ellis. How valid are these accusations?

A: Facts and fiction are often intertwined in modern writing. And this is likewise true of every writer’s personal mythology. To endure and survive, every writer resorts to his own mythical narrative, no matter how aberrant it may seem to critics and even future generations. Georges Sorel, the French thinker, understood and described that human trait.

Q: To what extent has your response to these critics fostered an interest in the larger issues raised by your books, including the origins and outcome of society, the Ivy League question, and so forth?

A: Throughout the American literary world, the term “literature,” due in part to its semantic imprecision, has now acquired a pejorative meaning, with an undertone of criminality. Many writers refrain from open debate for fear of having their reputations attacked, including seeing their ideas disparaged in quotation marks in hostile reviews, or ignored altogether. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with what certain writers publish, when a country’s judiciary—that is, its thought police—step in, then freedom of speech becomes an empty phrase. What we see is a form of judicial mind control. I do not think that any freedom loving and tolerant man or woman is a priori trying to “deny” or “assert” anything. With the passage of time, some of our ardently held beliefs or conventional platitudes must inevitably be discarded. Fictional events are inevitably bound to be reexamined within new time frames, and in perpetually new causal relationships.

Trevor, thank you very much for the interview! It was very informative.

On Sideburns

Never trust a man with sideburns. It is a motto by which I have lived my life, and I think you should too. I think sideburns are repulsive and unsightly. They should be moderately short, as in the diagram (at left). Moderation is the key. Neither freakishly short, nor offensively long. Sideburns should not be allowed or encouraged to creep past the tragus, and they should be kept trimmed at all times. If you possess a set of sideburns, would you be so kind as to remove them immediately? I don't know about you, but there is something about sideburns on a chap that makes me instinctively reach for a disposable razor.

Confessions of a Beach Banker

I used to work for a European-based private bank in Southern California. My clients were successful, educated professionals looking for investment management, second loans, and lines of credit.

A typical client of mine was a high-level executive or entrepreneur from the East Coast, Europe, or the Middle East. Many of them owned several properties. Their primary residence was in, say, Corona del Mar, but they often owned condos or duplexes in less affluent areas nearby rented to Hispanics, Asians, and other immigrants. In fact, not a few of them told me they wanted to snap up more properties to take advantage of all the immigrants coming in. They were aspiring to be slumlords.

Almost all of these high net worth clients had a belief that the housing boom in Southern California would never end. It simply did not figure into their anlaysis. And it showed. Their mortgages were mostly ARMs, with little to no documentation required. Sometimes a quick 'phone call would suffice. The falsification of income and assets was commonplace, but at the bank we were encouraged to turn a blind eye. Of course, many of the loans and lines we extended to these clients were secured by investment portfolios.

Consumption was out of control. Good taste was rarely if ever noted. My associates were decked out in the latest from Armani, Patek Philippe, and Gucci. Square-toed shoes and loafers were the norm, even amongst people who should have known better. In my Brooks Brothers suits, black half brogues, and repp ties, I stood out from the sartorial crowd.

I was regularly invited to parties in Los Angeles, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach, at which could be found an unremitting supply of girls and drugs. I recall going to a party at a beach front house in Laguna Beach. Piles of cocaine dotted a glass table in front of a large window overlooking the beach. People were having sex in the jacuzzi outside. I am too young to have experienced the excesses of the 1980s, but I imagine it was similar.