Thank You, Lauren Levin

“To draw an arrant fop from top to toe,
Whose very looks at first clash shew him so;
Give him a mean, proud garb, a dapper grace,
A pert dull grin, a black patch cross his face.”

Pepys’s Patches

Not Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but help me out people with a little Pepys. In his diary entry for 14 May 1660, he notes Dutch ladies of fashion wearing “black patches.” By August, he’s pleased to see his wife with them; in November he writes:

“The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her hair frizzed short up to her ears, did make her seem so much the less to me. But my wife standing near her with two or three black patches on, and well dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she.”

This helpful site explains that the patches “are not eye-patches, but the black (occasionally red) patches cut from paper, cloth or even fine leather in the shape of stars, crescent moon, even a coach and six horses that were stuck upon the face as ‘beauty spots’ and which remained in fashion for many years. They could, of course, have been put to practical use in covering a blemish but a significant part of their function was to emphasize the fashionable whiteness of a lady’s complexion.”

Does anyone know where to find pictures of these, or some approximate modern version? I came up empty on Google Images. Sounds sexy (esp. that coach and six), but I’m having trouble imagining what they looked like in situ. Ripe for a comeback?

For men on fashion, you can’t top Pepys. He frets about his spending on clothes, goes fabric shopping with his wife, takes huge delight in new outfits, and signs himself “Dapper Dickey” in letters to the ladies. No kids, a heavy purse, and the whole of Restoration London to parade in, but still, impressive commitment to adornment.

Music or Fashion?

Though I missed the chance to track her down and say so, Laura Moriarty rocked some seriously fashionable threads at the Verdi Club this weekend. The whole event was fashion-forward, if by “forward” you mean accessorized with white autoharps. That room hasn’t held so many hat brims since the Great War.

Thanks to Brandon Downing, I felt “with it” for a full five seconds, buying the new WAVVES record just after news of Nathan Williams’s Barcelona meltdown hit Pitchfork. So everyone I was talking it up to (O.K., John Sakkis and my brother) had the incident fresh in mind. It was Brandon’s promotional clip for the Movie Nite event in NYC, which uses Wavves’s “California Goths,” that first hooked me; the “So Bored” video did the rest. (Nada, you especially have to see this.)

Thinking about Wavves and the fashion thread Laura started, I realize that music trumps clothing in my own halfhearted stabs at self-fashioning. What I listen to usually dictates what I wear when I feel like dressing up, and new bands shape my sense of self more forcefully than new clothes. Is that a guy thing? More often now though, I just dress to the stereotype appropriate for the social context. Is that a guy thing, too? More stereotypes available for men to disappear into when they want to? Time of life also does damage—short of time/money to shop, and who’s going to check my display, anyway? Not that I really mind; the preening’s in the poetry. Still, it’d be good to find a style that isn’t ambered in the last thing I was listening to before parenthood. Maybe Beach Goth?

Post-Avant

Avant

Dryden's Coach (Restoration Snap)

“And so much for Mr. Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life, variety and not of a piece: the quality and mob, farce and heroics: the sublime and ridiculous mixed in a piece; great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.”

—George Farquhar

Dept. of Monday: The Saunter

“A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another.”

Finance from the Oracle at Delphi

Economy is Yahweh.

Mosses to a New Manse (Peter Culley in Portland TONIGHT)

Poet Peter Culley’s in Portland tonight, appearing in conversation with local “Eco-Baroque” artists Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas. The event is hosted by the back room; if you haven’t been to one of their unique shindigs before, this is a good one to explore, with a special “pay for whatever you eat and drink” rate.

the back room hosts a conversation with
PETER CULLEY, BRUCE CONKLE & MARNE LUCAS
*TONIGHT* JULY 21, 7 PM
Mandarin House, 120 SW Ankeny, 2nd floor (the atrium space across from the Skidmore Fountain, home to “famous hand-strung noodles” and excellent food and cocktails)

Seating is limited; email thebackroompdx_at_gmail_dot_com to reserve a seat.

12 or 20 kevins

“But good and bad are terms I pretty much grew out of once I moved to San Francisco, the birthplace of the provisional and the contingent.” “I think it was 1991 when I realized that the writer has no role in the larger culture. Succeeding developments have only hardened this condition, but it is still something of a surprise, rather like the man who can’t remember he has now only one hand.” “I lack discipline and yet, I don’t believe in it much.”

Status Update

Sort of like this.

Summery Metempsycosis

“And therefore though this soule could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell mee, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d.”

Doubled Whisper

“It will be seen eventually that this whole memoir, with its talk of Communes and revolutions, will be about integrity: that is, political, philosophical, social, poetic and spiritual integrity, for they are all intertwined, and all will have to incorporate a vivid sense of what our own death will mean to our ideals—how rich a story it makes.”

—Douglas Oliver, Whisper ‘Louise’

Word of the Day

“prepone.”

Ron links to news about the world shedding 6.4 languages every hour, but we’ve got “prepone.” Almost.

Poets in Contest

What poetry needs is its own game show. A show staged like a cage match, where two prominent poets face off with their best material. It should open with a Baroque quartet, be hosted by a suave & brainy “cool professor” type with good hair, and include a slinky Vanna White who draws alphabet blocks from a velvet bag to see who goes first. The poets should sit in puffy chairs, wear vivid colors and glasses on neck chains, and look indifferent to the air time. Wait …

Distinguishing the Boroughs

Kevin Killian on Charles Bernstein, Frank O’Hara & Brion Gysin.

"Dark Brandon" on YouTube

If you haven’t spent time inside the structured intensities of Brandon Downing’s incomparable film collages, do yourself a favor this Fourth and see how much America has to be thankful for. Start with “The Ship (I)” and cruise into the sun from there.

Tangent Intro for Cynthia Sailers, Portland, 6/27/09

Some poets are sitars, others are symphonies. The sitar poets push lines out into time at varying speeds, shaping attention into pattern through flying scales and overtone clouds. The symphonic poets tend to build their effects through counterpoint and harmony, arranging diverse notes and ideas into chords. Tonight let’s recruit Cynthia Sailers for the symphony. The home tone in Cynthia’s poetry might be the rub between individuals and the groups they belong to. Her writing sounds the fraught process of what she calls “self fashioning modern languages to a private life,” working to tune the collective’s demands to the music of inner desire. The dominant note would be aggression—the group’s favorite tool—and the subdominant a saving hedonism that turns pleasure and perversion into improvised means of resistance, the tyranny of mundanity “… held under the teeth of a nourished abandon.” Please pick up a drink, put down the groupthink, and abandon yourself to the sounds of Cynthia Sailers.