By Michael Mattis

The Affected Provincial’s Almanack
By Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy
Plankton Art Co. (self-published version)

There is something endearingly dandyish about self-published books. They recall a time when gentlemen-scholar-adventurers braved the noonday sun on the parched Serengeti to collect stamen samples in support of quasi-scientific theories resulting in weighty tomes full of Latinate terminology, which they knew from the outset no right-thinking human being would ever crack. There’s a hopeless romance to self-publishing, something very Enoch Soames about it.

There’s also something about the relationship between author and printer that is akin to that between beau and tailor. One can imagine the youthful aesthete-antiquarian T.E. Lawrence, years before his ascent to “of Arabia” fame, pouring over his illuminated galleys, demanding a comma here, taking one away there, adjusting the tint on this illustration, suggesting a touch of gold leaf to another, all with the same meticulous care that D’Orsay might have taken with the drape of jacket or the pull of a buttonhole. (more…)

My Dear Palmieri:

I am so glad to hear that your classmates and teachers consider you well dressed. It means that you have realized the first step in your dandiacal aspirations. If a dandy can be said to have any responsibilities, the first is to always be well dressed. The second is to be daring within the fluid limits of accepted taste. We will get to that in a moment. When last I wrote, we discussed the dandy in theory: what dandyism is and is not, the difference between the dandy and the various forms of aesthete and so forth. We determined that dandyism is, in short, the study and practice of personal elegance. Today we will explore dandyism in practice.
We left off last time with the question “What shall I wear?”

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My Dear Palmieri:

It is a rare and wonderful gift for a curmudgeon such as myself to  receive the praise of youth. It’s nice to know my little column is read  at all, but to be solicited for advice is a singular honor.

In your brief e-pistle you mentioned that you are about to start your studies at the University of Pennsylvania and that you will be studying English and perhaps taking a minor degree in psychology. Very well, a solid grounding in literature combined with some understanding of the motives that drive human behavior can be both enlightening and entertaining. Be sure not to take either too seriously, however, but treat each with the skepticism and humor it deserves. Besides, taking anything too seriously can lead to premature laugh lines, and those aren’t funny.

In anticipation of your arrival at university, you tell me that you have, “concocted a grand scheme with a dear Friend… that involves the introduction of the Dandy way of life to that of the University.” (more…)

Los Angeles is not a flaneur’s burg. A “walking city” it is not. That appellation belongs to places like Paris and Manhattan and Prague. LA has many boulevards, but few are suitable for the boulevardier’s voyeuristic stroll. Rather, it is a city of goals, of destination locales, between which the city’s denizens zip at high speed. Unlike other great cities, Los Angeles doesn’t live out its cultural life on its streets. It is a city of secrets that keeps its heart buried deep behind its smog-stained lapels.

One of the places in the city that does posses a flaneuresque feel to it is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA. Rising up along Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” next to the famed La Brea Tar Pits, the cluster of buildings looks more like a department store than one of the finest metropolitan museums west of the Hudson. (The museum is slated to undergo a facelift by architect Renzo Piano later this year.) Like other veiled places in LA, LACMA encloses within its salons a world of civility, culture and sophistication, plus an eclectic collection that spans more than 2500 years of exquisite taste. Better yet, the museum’s central court – which boasts a decent cafe with full bar – is among the best places in town for Angelenos to do what they like doing best: look at each other.

LACMA’s broad but idiosyncratic collection draws all kinds: Young painters in tempera-splattered jeans, little goth girls, winsome and pale, ladies who lunch, out to take in a little “culchuh” while what’s-his-name is on the links, and the odd professor looking natty in bow tie and blazer. It’s a place where bohemia and beau monde, and whatever it is that lies between, come together to be moved by Art.

Looking out behind the cool comfort of a martini upon this flotsam-and-jetsam crowd, the Dandyism.net reader is apt to ask himself, dreamily, “Can a dandy be a bohemian and a bohemian, a dandy?” (more…)

It’s one of those questions that occasionally gets academics, students of culture, and cocktail-party conversationalists in a lather. Indeed, merely asking the question can be enough to get you into hot water. Regardless what side you happen to lean toward, you’re likely find an index finger stabbed in your direction and palm slapped loudly against your Louis Quinze table. In all likelihood you will be pilloried as either a stuffy reactionary or fashionably intellectual provocateur.

The question, of course, is whether a woman can be a dandy.

Feminist intellectuals latch onto the dandy, citing what they see as his show-biz quality in order to substantiate their pet theses about the nature of gender — mainly that it is a social construct, an unending performance that has little to do with the performer’s genetic heritage, biological make-up, or the shape of his or her wedding tackle. As evidence, they cite long lists of “female dandies,” women who prefer trousers to skirts and bow ties to bustles — George Sand to Romaine Brooks — to illustrate their points about “transgression” and all that claptrap.

This naturally meets with some derision from strict dandiacal constructivists. “Bah!” they exclaim. “That’s not dandyism; that’s drag!”

About this time the finger-pointing and table-slapping starts, and the next thing you know you find yourself taking sides over less theoretical issues, such as women’s membership at Augusta National Golf Club and executive pay parity. It only goes downhill from there.

So I have good reason for doing what I am about to do, which is avoid this argument as if it were a colony of badly tailored lepers. I live a comfortable and quiet life married to a beautiful young woman who loves me, and I will be damned if I’m going to spoil it now by getting into an argument over just who wears the dandy pants in the family. In fact, I would not touch that valise full of rattlesnakes with a ten-foot cigarette holder.

What I am going to do instead is tell the story of a remarkable woman, one who has been called a “dandy” by some very important persons, including Quentin Crisp.

Perhaps the only thing that can be certain about the Marchesa Luisa Casati, 48 years after her death in 1957, is that she was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde. They simply don’t make her kind anymore: richer than God, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous taste in friends, art, décor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. Guests of Casati’s boudoir were a veritable who’s who of the aristos, aesthetes, artists, bons vivants, poets, dancers and dandies that made the early 20th century’s art scene what it was: totally, utterly, and delightfully mad.

In fact, Casati made Peggy Guggenheim look like an ariviste Midwestern hausfrau by comparison. No doubt Casati served as the inspiration for the crazy aunt archetype later celebrated in books such as Partick Dennis’s “Auntie Mame.”

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“The smack of Californian earth shall linger upon the palate of your grandson.” The quote comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s California travelogue The Silverado Squatters, from a chapter entitled “Napa Wine.” It is one of my favorite quotes about wine and very prescient, since in the 1880s when it was written, California wine was all but unknown to anyone other than those who made it. Last year, the state exported more than 400 million gallons totaling $14 billion, some of which is quite passable.

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Taste in poetry is akin to taste in food and drink. Some like the floral emotion in Shakespeare’s sonnets, others the disturbed modernism of T.S. Eliot. Some take pleasure from the stolid and heroic verses of Homer, while others prefer the alcoholic ramblings of Bukowski or the dharma-laced peregrinations of Kerouac.

Over time some tastes are acquired while others are let go of, but in the end you either like a thing or you don’t.

Me, I like my poetry three ways: short, saucy and funny. Call me shallow (it won’t hurt), but my favorite poet is Dorothy Parker, and my favorite poem “Martini Glasses:”

I like to have a martini;
Two at the very most,
Three I’m under the table,
Four, I’m under my host.

I acquired my taste for Parker one day when a friend, who wanted to make sure I had something to read during a long flight to the Yucatan, loaned me a volume of her selected works. It was a testament to the effect that time, place and circumstance have on one’s taste that I happened to first crack the book in the airport bar, that it opened as if by magic to the appropriate page; that there was already a half-empty martini at my elbow, and that I had just been forced into ignominious retreat after clumsily attempting to convince the young lady next to me that it would be best for both of us if she threw over her fiancé in Chicago and flew to Isla Mujeres with me right then.

Both Parker and the cocktail have sustained me all these years, through that defeat and many similar ones, with a wisecracking directness. Like Parker, the martini employs many the same stratagem: Economy, sustainability and power selectively applied in overwhelming quantities at the most vulnerable points, rather like Napoleon in his gloire days.

The martini is, of course, a historical phenomenon. I shan’t overburden you with details you’ve probably already read in Barnaby Conrad III’s magnificent history, “The Martini,” but I will give you the facts as I know them. The martini is not the earliest known cocktail. That honor belongs to the sidecar, which I may address at a later date. The martini either was or was not named after the San Francisco Bay Area town of Martinez. It either was or was not invented by an Italian immigrant bartender by the name of Martini at the Knickerbocker hotel in NYC. It either was or was not named after the fast-firing British rifle, the Henri-Martini. And it either was or was not named for Martini & Rossi vermouth. That pretty much covers the cocktail’s cloudy origins.

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Oscar Wilde was controversial almost from the start. The languid pose he struck during his days at Magdelen College, Oxford in the 1870s would become the foundation for a quintessential outré type. The aesthete, that longhaired, beret-wearing lover of art and adorer of things beautiful, is even today the ubiquitous tenant of college campus coffee houses, gallery openings and cafes from Prague to San Francisco.

We’ve grown used to him. But in the straight-laced atmosphere of Victorian London, the aesthete produced shock and dismay in some, awe and fascination in others.The press of the time, particularly popular middles-class periodicals like Punch, was quick to note the trend, publishing satirical cartoons that poked fun at the aesthetes’ wan-and-drawn pose. These usually featured some droopy young man in Little Lord Fauntleroy costume rhapsodizing over the perfection of a lily to his muse, usually a droopy young woman.

By the time Wilde left Magdelen he was already a celebrity, although he had done little in terms of literary production. To his credit he had won the Newdigate Prize for his poem “Ravenna,” and published a slim volume of mostly forgettable verses under the clever title of “Poems” in 1877. But Wilde’s real medium was not, in his youthful days, the written word but the spoken. His venue was the dinner table and drawing room of fashionable London. His weapons of choice were the epigram and the aphorism, exquisitely worded and skillfully placed.

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