2016

Happy New Year everyone. I've never been keen on making New Year's resolutions and nothing has changed in that regard. But I am going to try and post something here on my blog at least once per week in 2016. Why? Because I miss my blog. I miss writing stories that begin with a pair of socks and somehow traverses my childhood, cars, b.b. guns and cocktails before concluding. My dashboard has been so cluttered with life stuff and my focus has been so compromised over the last year-and-half that there's not been the energy for randomanalia and impertinabula over here.

And of course, there's tumblr--the MSG of blogging. I can't prove it but I do think that tumblr poaches some of my juju that would otherwise be directed here. Plus it's just easy and mindless, like MSG. F.Scott Fitzgerald used to poach his novel caliber drafts and ideas and sell them to magazines as short stories when he was pressed for cash. Some argue that he might a had another novel in him had he not stolen from his own cash register of material. With that said, the main was still one hell of a conjugator.

But I do have things that I want to write about. Things like LFG and my missing Piggly Wiggly t-shirts. We had several versions of the iconic pig and they're currently AWOL. Damn.

And I am going to write about my buddy and surrogate father, "PoPo Baker" who landed on Omaha beach on D-Day plus one. 

And I've got at least two stories about Chelsea and my boy Jimmy Whistler whose infamous White House (the hansom is stopped in front of it) was the talk of Tite street and then some.

And then there's a story about small paintings. Like this one by a young whippersnapper originally from Northern California who made his way to London and Paris and the tutelage of Whistler. He died at age 37 from blood poisoning after being accidentally stuck by a hat pin at a dance. I kid you not. Damn I love sleuthing and uncovering the proverbial back story.

And our boy over at The Old Law is about to be the daddy of a little girl.

And I declared on tumblr that I had no additional advice for him after Tommy Tevlin et al showered him with great wisdom. But then I remembered Meg Meeker's book. It's a must read.

West Evans street in my hometown. I never wrote a proper story about the haberdashery that spawned my sartorial addiction. I was busting to write it not long after my mother died. The fact that Toad and I stood in the entryway of this hallowed spot one night was a key motivator. And by the way, where the hell IS Toad?

Ok. So sit tight and let's see if my once a week commitment is sustainable.

Onward.

ADG II

Flusser Apologetics and JMW Turner Unapologetically

I kinda miss ole Daddy. ‘specially now since I’m a full-fledged orphan. Daddy this time being God, aka Alan Flusser. God you say? Yep. He’s a reluctant owner of the moniker but not too reluctant. I mean really, it makes no difference if you are a nice Jewish boy turned Buddhist from the upper middle class enclaves of the Garden State and then four decades Gotham habitué or like me, a country-ass redneck from the Palmetto State. Everyone loves a bit of adulation.  But my life circumstances have had me missing Alan’s Washington visits and my scant Gotham sorties haven’t offered Flusser Fellowship in over a year.

I started it. I’m the one who first called Alan God. I’ve admired him since way before he ever befriended me and started taking a lot of my money. And I’ve said it a zillion times and I’ll say it again to you knuckleheads who say “Alan Flusser? What happened?” Nothing has happened, dumbasses. Alan’s riding the waves of time just like the rest of us. 

And the “What happened?” question seems always posited on those forums in context to thirty year old publicity/jacket cover photos of Alan. Unless you are splashing on embalming fluid every morning, I’d bet that a thirty year progression of your mug shots would show us a journey not dissimilar. So back off of Daddy.

I’ve aged ten years in eighteen months. Shut up.

I too used to hang on to the idea of Alan Flusser, circa 1984 just like I did with Ralph Lauren, circa 1978. These were my Ed Sullivan moments for both Beatles-esque sartorial acts. The moments when they not only forever installed themselves in my sartorial and aesthetic register, but when they were also both on f_cking fire. Shut up. These were Ralph’s horse blanket Shetland plaid sport jackets (made in the USA by Lanham) moments and Alan's horizontal dress shirted, gut end braces, chalk striped drapy trousered, double breasted days.

But things change—all life is transitory and that includes sartorial epochs. Bruce Springsteen said “every now and then you have to break your own narrative” and National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones said that “if we don’t question our patterns, they become our prisons”. Alan and Ralph have never strayed too far from their core strategies but for the sake of their own engagement, relevance, and perhaps amusement, they mix it up a bit.

Artistic licence (If he’s is anything, he’s an artist) and relaxation would be two characteristics of Alan that I’d use to distinguish the current state of his evolution.  Alan is a grandfather and is long past the need care too much about the opinions of the general public or investors or journalists. So what if most of the world thinks he needs a haircut? I hope he grows it down to his ass and then sells locks of it. I'll buy some and a make a bracelet. Shut up.

Courtesy of Gentleman's Gazette

Look at the sockless daddy...with kick ass Gucci Deal Sleds on. Stronger than wolf nooky. Yep.The one-time arbiter of beltless, Thurston braced drapy trousers and made by Old Man Cleverley himself, buckled or laced shoes, now wears slip ons and flat front belted trousers almost exclusively. His two daughters flipped out when they discovered that he actually bought a pair of jeans. 

And the man is obsessed with comfort. Lora Piana drawstring lounge togs? If they exist, I bet Daddy Fluss has them on right now. Me? I’m in a dirty, terrycloth zebra print robe that I stole from the Hotel Monaco. 

Photo from The Trad

When scores of you suggested that I remove of couple of the dingy-ass cotton bracelets from my left wrist, I added three more. I only thinned out my circular fellowship of bracelets for my mamma’s funeral last week and I hope that Alan only grooms differently for such rare situations. I walked my sister down the marital aisle twice. I don’t think I’ll have to attend a re-do of my mamma’s send off so I’m going to reload my wrist. GTH.

And speaking of “GTH devotees”, I just saw the JMW Turner Late Pictures exhibition at the Tate Britain and was blown away. Every picture in this show was Turner aged sixty-five to his death at seventy-six. Nothing earlier. Radical. Mind bending. And imagine how imposing his pictures were to the aesthetic sensibilities of the Art Establishment of the time. Oh and here's a Turner self portrait as a young man. Probably idealized a bit but still, he was a young shaver when he painted it.

“The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free is the first exhibition devoted to the extraordinary work J.M.W. Turner created between 1835 and his death in 1851. Bringing together spectacular works from the UK and abroad, this exhibition celebrates Turner’s astonishing creative flowering in these later years when he produced many of his finest pictures but was also controversial and unjustly misunderstood”.

Turner even as a young man was always an incredible capturer of water and clouds. Water and air’s movement, energy and emotion are difficult to memorialize in any medium; watercolor, pastel, drypoint, tempera, or oil. And an artist’s attempt to convey it tests greatly their mechanical skill and even more so their talent for finding and then really, really seeing these magical properties.

Whistler had the same talent for seeing and conveying dawn, dusk and midnight. Anyone with basic artistic skill could capture a lush, painterly image of the old Battersea Bridge. But Whistler shrouded it in atmospherics. Twilights and dawn peeks, mists and vapors. He and Turner saw what others didn’t but that’s only one part of the gift. The artist must then transfer it. And this is the moment when talent and skill must congregate. Ralph and Alan. Congregationalists.

The volume of Whistler’s Venice pastels exist mainly because of chilly mornings and early evenings.  When he deemed it too cold to transfer artfully his mind’s eye capture on to an etching plate with a needle, he would bide his time drawing, courtesy of a little box of pastels and light brown cards that he kept in his pocket. 

When his hands warmed up, he’d tuck away his pastel kit and commence etching. I'm just happy that there were days when his hands were cold.

Photo Courtesy of My Damn Self

Folks, to be able to do that is talent and skill combined and Flusser has it out the ass. Still does. His eye remains unrivaled and his skill for conveying it courtesy of colors, textures, and mediums is as Turner-esque as ever. I deemed Flusser “God” long ago after manifold moments of him gently pulling me back from the crag where I’d unwittingly almost fall into the Canyon of Clowndom. Had Alan not steered me to this heathery green cashmere and wool option, surely I'd have ended up with some kind of bright green hootchie cootchie coat.

Photo from Off The Cuff DC

And I'd ape the hell out of Alan. There was a time when I’d simply see what Alan was wearing at the opening of a season or a trunk show and just say, “I’ll have that.” And that was always a good decision. Why try to knock off Turner and Whistler when you can simply have the Master create one for you?

Turner was sixty-five when he threw into overdrive his slaying  of the staid opinions and calcified mores of London’s Art Establishment. And he didn’t let up until he died eleven years later.  They literally thought Turner was demented. Maybe he was and thanks be to the neurosynaptic gods for it. Look at this picture. You almost need to dress for it. Barbour at minimum. Maybe a crash helmet too. 

Turner looked like this when he opened his final can of whoop ass, punching the Establishment right in the nose. Not quite the dashing fella of previous decades but still loaded with juice.

And how could I have rambled on about all this without including my friend and soothsayer of balance and restrained playfulness, the mighty eruditey, G. The Bruce. Boyer.  Bruce’s  afterburners didn’t even feel the need to kick in till he was into his fifth decade of extolling on things sartorial.  I know of no one who has more thoroughly enjoyed…reveled practically, in the digital age of sartorial expression. Like I’ve said before, nobody shit-talks Bruce Boyer.

Flussdaddy remains the go-to man, the unimpeachable control tower for the sartorial takeoffs and landings of stick and rudder Cessna guys like me who think they are the lead solo jet on the sartorial Thunderbirds.

Now get your b_tch ass in the kitchen and make me some pie.

Onward. Going home this week to mamma’s for Thanksgiving.

ADG2. Thankful. 

Better Days: Tom Wolfe on Richard Merkin—1992

It’s no secret that I love Tom Wolfe and loved Richard Merkin. Well, actually, I still love Richard Merkin. There’s enough of Richard on my walls and in my sartorial literature files for me to consider him still here.

I love Tom Wolfe’s dandified cocksurety – his Southern lilted verbal aplomb when gracefully responding to such charges as his novels aren't really novels and indictments that cry "for God’s sake man, get a better f_cking editor." I won’t characterize Wolfe’s posture and conversation as self-deprecating because it isn't  Here’s my take—Wolfe has an ivory, tight-twist gabardine swathed, steely, courteous elegance. With a scant lisp.

And then we have Wolfe’s  great personal friend, Merkin. If I was ever limited to one depiction of Merkin, it would be Alan Flusser’s take on the multifaceted flâneur…and I paraphrase loosely here because I’m too lazy to walk across the room and pull the reference. But Alan said that “coming upon Merkin on the street is like walking through a Bazaar in Marrakesh. You don’t know what to look at first!” Bam. I mean really. Merkin was Brooklyn and Coney Island to Wolfe’s Richmond and Yes Ma’am No Ma’am.

Both may be assigned to the Sartorial Dandy Pantheon but their nomination dossiers, while equal in content, would be thematically opposite. The case for Wolfe’s membership would be firmly affixed to an unwavering, off-white, monochromatic gaggle of forensics. 

Merkin’s on the other hand, wouldn’t be firmly affixed to a damn thing – At least not one singularly thematic thing. His bipolar variance in color, texture, epoch and melody made my fuzzy-ass closet look like a storage rack of  identical burgundy choir robes. I’d reckon that Merkin’s folder would surely contain his own words when he posited that his sartorial style was “somewhere between the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Ellington.”  

Photo from Rose Callahan's Dandy Portraits

And I just think it’s cool as hell to have friends—true friends—those anything but Facebook defined friends—you know—the ones who would come get you at three in the morning. Well that was Merkin and Wolfe. I borrowed from Rose Callahan, this photo of Merkin, Wolfe and their other great friend, lawyer Eddie Hayes.

I’m always on the lookout for Merkin ephemera...having all of his GQ columns that he wrote over twenty years ago and of course, the treasures that his widow, Heather, sent me after Merkin died. And recently I came across a few  exhibition catalogues from Merkin's gallery shows back in the early 1990’s. And much to my delight, Tom Wolfe wrote the introduction to the Helander Galleries’ 1992 Merkin show, Better Days. Unlike you high-minded, copy editors-in-another-life, critics of Wolfe’s words,I, the verbose lexiconical rambler my-damn-self, would read Wolfe’s grocery lists if they were availed to me. So reading his Helander-Merkin treatise was great fun. Shut the ___ up. 

 So this morning, with reverence but without permission from Bruce Helander or others who might have copy rights and prefer that I not transcribe Wolfe’s essay, I typed from the exhibition catalogue, one friend’s erudite commentary on contemporary art in general, in tandem with his more specific efforts to convey and characterize the other friend’s art.  For those who, like me, love art and Wolfe and Merkin, I hope you enjoy reading it.

 “The paintings and pastels of Richard Merkin are part of a strain of Modernism that is well established in England, the home of his natural brethren, R.B. Kitaj, FrancisBacon, Peter Blake Lucien Freud, Ronald Searle, Henry Lamb, Michael Andrews, StanleySpencer, and David Hockney. They are what might be called the Modernist Wits. This creates a problem – even for Bacon – since within the art world, and especially the American art world, Modernism and Wit are a contradiction in terms.

Merkin like his confreres, uses various stylistic devices of Modernism; in his case, two-dimensional pictures, solid blocks of color, abstracted shapes, conventional contours, unshaded forms, and so-called all-over design, in which no part of a picture has any greater weight than any other, All that is on the credit side of the ledger up in Art Heaven, of course. But Merkin, like the other wits, presents subject matter that violates one Modernist taboo after another. As tout le monde, or tout lemonade d’art, knows, a picture is not supposed to tell a little story, suggest an anecdote, be funny, make you cry or get angry, tune up the sentimental side of your nature, illustrate the world around you, dwell upon historical details for their journalistic or historic value, or present likenesses for their own sake. Alas, these are sins that Wits wallow in.

The art world will allow exceptions from time to time, the most notable being Picasso’s large cartoon comment on the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, painting at a moment when anti-Fascist feeling and Left sentiment had reached their apogee among European and American intellectuals. Guernica was expressly designed to make the viewer weep and get angry over Francisco Franco’s bombing of civilians(and will probably be viewed by art students in the 21^st century, with their damnable detachments from the problems of our epoch, as a howler, one of the most ludicrous pictures ever taken seriously by well-educated people). It is worth noting that Picasso never attempted such pictorial comment again, returning forever after to the safe and fashionable imagery of classical mythology.

Pop Art wasn’t even an exception. The Pop artists never illustrated the world around them or even created their own images from it. Pop was a studio game played within a tight set of Modernist rules, eventually codified by the Pop Apollinaire, Lawrence Alloway. The Pop artists took their images not from life but from art created by anonymous graphic artists and industrial designers including flags and numbers and letters found in commercial printing fonts. Some, such as Warhol, never did anything other than lift images directly from existing commercial art or photographs, altering only the size and coloring, if that much. Others did near-copies. The game, said Alloway, consisted of producing pictures that were neither abstract nor realistic but rather had to do with “sign systems.” There is not a single painting within the canon of Pop in which an artist attempts his own depiction of life in the extraordinary decade in which Pop grew up, the 1960’s.

Underlying the Modernist stance, whether one is talking about style, content or theory, is the belief that the great artist is a holy beast , a natural who receives flashes, known as inspiration, straight from the godhead which is known as Creativity. A holy beast is not a rational, calculating, analytical, and intellectually detached person. In fact, in the Modernist view, rationality, calculation, analysis, and detachment are detritus, impediments to creativity. The Modernist artist is supposed to be like the Gnostic Christian, who sought to get rid of the detritus of civilization in order to reveal the light of God that exists at the apex of every human soul. Draftsmanship, true rendering, perspective, and shading are all analytical undertakings. So are wit, satire and commentary. In the Modern view these are all pieces of age-old junk that must be thrown out.

In England the art world – which consists of about five hundred dealers, curators, professors, critics and artists in London, Oxford and Cambridge who determine all matters of taste – has never been completely dominated by orthodox Modernism. There has remained some room in which the mavericks such as Kitaj and Bacon could cut up. But in the American art world, which consists of about 300 similar souls (some 300 of whom do not live in the New York City area) orthodoxy is a far more solemn business.

Merkin’s very picture titles, Van Lingle Mungo’s Havana, Our First Detective of the Broken Heart are a gob of spit in the face of Modernist taste, since they actually describe the pictures, which are loaded with specific historic references, and are shamelessly entertaining. Stylistically, Merkin has been as Modern as any of the Wits. Particularly in his Van Lingle Mungo period, the mid-1970’s, his work was rigorously two-dimensional, his contours were highly conventionalized, his canvases were covered edge to edge and corner to corner, with solid color shapes of equal density, field and figure were given equal emphasis, no matter how amusing the figures – and the figures tended, like Mungo, a one-time pitcher for theBrooklyn Dodgers, to be long gone down Funny Street. The typical Merkin picture takes legendary American images – from baseball, the movies, fashion, Society, tabloid crime and scandal – and mixes them with his own autobiography, often with dream-style juxtapositions. Merkin himself is always recognizable as the toff with the Cold Stream Guards mustache, popping up amid the romp.

In the past he has been as much a colorist and all over designer as,  say, Matisse or, to bring the matter closer to home, Malcolm Morley, an Australian now living in the United States (who could perhaps be included in the ranks of Modernist Wits). In his most recent work, however, Merkin has begun to violate even the stylistic taboos. In 1990, in paintings such as Re: Joe Stern #2, he began to use a draftsmanship more sophisticated, more in the vein of 1920s European satirical art, than anything allowed in the Modernist canon. In the current show, he gives us graphic focal points such as the white figure in pith helmet against a swath of black in Our First Detective of the Broken Heart. The focus is re-emphasized by the use of lines of perspective in the roof above. This is not the Modernist way.

The truth may well be the Merkin is impossible to characterize even with a grouping such as the Modernist Wits. The fascinating thing, in the last analysis, is not that he is in some way like Kitaj or Bacon or Searle or Spencer of Hockney or that the whole crowd has swum upstream – but, rather that he, like them, his kinfolk, has managed in an age of High Orthodoxy to become that rarest of creatures, the artist who is sui generis.”

Fuzzy Diced Loafers, Toy Soldiers and Good Music

It was suggested a moment ago by a well-meaning and certainly bright young gentleman, that I go back to what this superficial weigh-station of drivel is best suited. He said..."As a "fan," I'm asking you to return to your old posts about fuzzy diced loafers, toy soldiers, and good music. If I wanted politically correct drivel I would watch TV instead."  This might be the best advice I've received all year. And my year--because I live off of the Druid calendar, is almost over. 

But it was also stated that the current level of dismay wasn't limited to just my last post but the one preceding it as well. I suspect that would be the Thomas Kinkade story. Folks, I am not some kind of high-minded art snob. You can find my kinfolk on the People of Walmart website as well as Mugshots.com--I wish I was kidding. And I'm not piling on with those who have used Kinkade as a punching bag for years. I reckon that a lot of that kind of thing had to do with jealousy. The man was wildly successful commercially and I begrudge no one their rewards. All I was saying--and it's been pointed out to me that I'm "no Jonathan Swift"--but what was lost in my hyperbole--was that the man lost his way. It happens. 


And you can believe what you want to believe about the symbolism manifest in those energy inefficient cottages through which every window, a Seasonal Affective Disorder Light Box bolus of illumination radiated. And so can I. While you may see goodness therein, I see a Hansel-Gretel-Hitchcock oeuvre with a bad ending. The light looks too inviting...too good to be true. Someone's in there. Waiting for you. With lubricant.

Ok, so enough of my preamble. I decided to take a moment out of my crazy—allergy sequelae shrouded week and do just what my fan asked me to do. You might wanna go ahead and get a box of tissues before beginning this. For this one my friends, is gonna be a bell-ringer. Or it might just make you a little gassy.

The photo above isn’t exactly representative of “fuzzy diced loafers” but it indeed caused me some horror when I stumbled upon it the other day. The picture is from a 1970 edition of Esquire magazine. My foot wasn’t big enough to wear men’s shoes in 1970 but I recall the pediatric versions of similar aberrations. 1970 kicked off a horrifying sartorial run and I’d say that what men were offered, Corfam and Naugahyde shodding-wise might be considered Exhibit One in the “The Seventies—A Decade of Menswear Poo” trial.

On the other hand, Ralph’s Spring 2012 Spectator offering appeals to me. In a “may I restrain you?” kind of way. May I?

 Toy soldiers you say? I’m on spending lock-down for the balance of 2012 and it’s a blessed dilemma. I underpaid your Federal Government in 2011. It happens sometimes in small entrepreneurial little shops like mine. What also happens includes phone calls with accountants that induce a phenomenon I refer to as the “pucker factor”. Proof of “pucker” manifests when after hanging up with the CPA, you walk across the room and realize that your one hundred and fifty pound Naugahyde with Corfam piping office chair is stuck to your butt.

Oh, this was the paragraph about toy soldiers. Right. Even amidst spending lock-down, I HAD to pounce on this set of almost one hundred year old Heyde bandsmen. They just don’t come up for offer at a reasonable price very often. Not that the price of these was exactly reasonable. 

So how do you pounce amidst lock-down? You sell some stuff and you trade some stuff.

The suggestion for drivel resumption was limited to loafers, soldiers and music but may I add another category? Of course I can. I kid you not; I think I might have a preparatory, preliminary oil on canvas study of Sir William Orpen’s Jockey self-portrait. I’ve had it forever—having paid relatively nothing for it at an estate sale here in Old Town almost twenty years ago. I love the sleuthing associated with collecting but I long ago gave up on attributing this thing to anyone of repute. I kinda wanted it to be by Sir John Lavery but that was a stretch.  

Then recently, I stumbled upon an online image of Orpen’s Jockey self-portrait and the accompanying story about it. I was blown away. Suffice it to say that I’m currently obsessed with getting some kind of authentication—attribution for my little version. Stay tuned. Or not. I don't care.

And finally, you wanted me to posit something about good music? Even LFG, the young lady who only grunts at me these days, admitted that one of the little ditties by these cats above was a good one. It’s one of those songs that was on the jukebox at the fratty house and one that I, delusional and in love beer at three in the morning, thought I sounded good singing…at the top of my lungs…to my date who was cooing back to me. 


Cooing and wooing. At least I think my date was cooing. At least I think it was my date. Might a been cooing and spewing. We did a lot of that at the fratty house. Beer foam throw-up on hardwood floors. Makes the shagging a lot slicker. Here’s The Main Ingredient doing Just Don't Want to Be Lonely. In 1974—early into the decade of bad shoes and even worse suits and sportcoats.

Onward. Flonase—Claritin—Stoli

ADG, II