It’s always such an interesting term to me. Mostly because I am not. I am, in no uncertain term, a classic OTHER hating homosexual. This really is kind of strange, because I am not really a hate-y person, as a rule.
It has been commented upon by scores of friends that I let people get away with incredible amounts of truly horrendous things. A Mormon mother disowning her son because he is gay? I understand that it doesn’t mesh with her world-view. It’s not that she is a bad mother, it’s just that her being a good mother means she has a splendid chance to seriously fuck up her kid, but that doesn’t mean it makes her a bad person.An older man being afraid and therefore abusive to his timid foreign neighbor? He’s not a bad person, he is just scared, and fear makes us do strange things. He’s not a bad person either. Priests who refuse to marry same-sex couples? Fine by me, nobody should force a religion in a different direction then it wants to go. Using that as a reason for gay-bashing and discrimination of course is also wrong, because really nobody should be forced into a direction they don’t want to go.
So effectively I don’t blame people for their world-view, and I certainly would not hate anybody very swiftly either. Hate is destructive, and without any object to aim it at effectively it will destroy what is near, which is in almost all cases of my personal peeves me, and since I don’t want to be destroyed, I avoid large scale hate. But I don’t avoid large scale annoyance paired with the vocabulary of hate. In a way I sometimes think of myself as the Hannibal Lecter of annoyance. I wouldn’t really sauté somebody’s liver with nice Chianti just because they are bad violinists, but I will consider the option and then discuss how I would prepare a better dish with it. (wrap in bacon, flash fry and serve with a cool but fruity white)Effectively this means on the whole I am about as dangerous as a cricket, but sound very aggressive and hate filled. Besides, Crickets get up peoples noses.
But there are instances that really fire up my mostly dormant capacity for pure, unadulterated, screw-of-his-head-and-gleefully-drink-from-the-blood-spouting-stump hatred. Strangely enough, a large percentage of my classic a-little-more-than-pet peeves seem to tie rather beautifully into both my classicly stereotypes sexuality and my well known position as a know it all, pedantic gay man. As a rule, this gets me typified as “So Gay” and as a rule, this stereotyping is “So Wrong”.
I dislike flamingly queer people as a rule not because “they exhibit something I cannot accept inside myself” but because being flamingly queer is just plain annoying in its own right. NOBODY likes a squadron of teased-haired, badly mascara wearing guys in tank-tops strutting around like they have the best tits EVAH warbling around them while they are trying to enjoy an end-of-the-work-week-soft drink. So they effectively exhibit something I know lies inside myself (everybody has an inner queen) but cannot abide ANYWHERE apart from a good pride parade or a venue suited for queening. Of course, voicing this opinion as a straight men will get you called a homophobe, as a gay man it’s self hating. In my mind it would get you pegged as a well thinking human being.
I dislike people who ride their cards in the “saddest stories” poker-game of life to their very, very end. Yes, maybe your parents died, maybe you lost a sister, maybe your husband committed suicide. These things happen, and they are horrible. I’ve not had a wonderfully stabilizing child- and young adulthood, and nine times out of ten I can royal flush the sad pairs of these stories if it really comes down to it. But I dislike dwelling on it because it makes you a victim of circumstance. I had bad things happen to me, but whenever somebody in a conversation starts going “you wouldn’t say that if you knew that I …” I just really, really want to smash their head in. Whenever I say things to this extent in mixed company about not dwelling on situations of the past, learning and moving on without becoming a victim of circumstance I get roughly three reactions. The main one is usually good. “yes, good point”. The second one runs along the lines of “you gay people are always so strident” (no kidding). The third? “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how it felt to…” *cue batman montage of POW and WHACK*
I really, really dislike it if people are rude or inconsiderate towards wait-staff and store-clerks. These people are just doing their job, and as such do not deserve it to have you snapping your fingers, warbling “helllooohhooo” or otherwise making a nuisance of yourself. If you do this at my table or within direct conversational space thereof, I WILL ask you to please, please behave. On more than one occasion I was greeted in this request with a knowing wink and a comment along the lines of “I understand, I won’t stand in your way to get to this nice waiter” NO! NO! BAD RESTARANT PATRON, NO! This is not a cruising thing, this is a basic decent human being thing. Being excessively polite after this is just taking the piss, NOT making up for it.
For these and other reasons I have been called a CSHH. Which is blatantly wrong. I am not a CSHH. I barely hate anybody, let alone me. I am a classic humanity disliking person. As such, I am imminently suited for an online community, I say, where my hate as well as it’s more tender counterpart is fuelled on such a constant basis my aura has recently been sold of to sit on top of a tall building to alert planes.
Grtz,
K.
PS. This blog was posted as it appears here also on my journal on the site OkCupid.com, part of my ongoing attempt to get more readers on here, and fuel my fragile ego. If you found this through my journal, please browse some other entries, most are better than this one ;)
Friday, December 14, 2007
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Style: Prestige, predilection, provenance.
Apocryphal history has a Japanese connoisseur of kimono commenting on the fact that no more than 50 years ago, one could show him a picture of a woman in kimono, standing in a hotel lobby with her face away from the camera, and he would be able to estimate to an astounding degree her age, social status, family heritage, her husbands profession and the season and time of day the picture was taken. This is a far cry from the European fashionist(a) that can from a picture of a women roughly ascribe her to a certain decade (That’s eighties) but then again, there are experts that can attribute sartorial appropriations to incredibly specific measurements in time (that is so 5 minutes ago). But that said, apart from the intricately elegant closed system of Japanese culture, very few systems of fashion or style can base snobbism on the complexity of their rules.
Once upon a time, in a town far away, a cotton manufacturer stumbled on the fact that when cotton is bathed in a bath of caustic soda, and then bathed again in acid, it becomes long, lustrous and a lot more durable. The birth of mercerized cotton might not interest a great amount of people in our current hustle-and-bustle “I-don’t-care-what-it-is-as-long-as-it’s-stylish” world, but widely available cotton certainly has improved over the years. And not only cotton, materials, patterns and logistical solutions have evolved in quality and availability to an extent that there is no longer anything like different markets in clothing, and everything is, in theory, available anywhere.
Not even very long ago, and certainly for Europeans not very far away, what you wore and how it was worn was for a great deal based on two very simple variables of the human condition: Where are you from, and how much do you make when you are there?
Certain local patterns in weaving, embroidery, fabrics and colour were not copied, or very faintly copied, at any great distance from the town of their origin, and as a result, the standard man or woman in the street could be absolutely identified as being on the right street simply by the cut, colour and quality (I so craved a third “c”, but condition just doesn’t cut it, compunctiously) of their clothes. Only the rich or traveled wore materials or styles markedly different from their local counterparts to an identifiable extent.
A stylish lady in the 1800’s might deck herself out in Antwerp Lace or adopt a penchant for a particular style of bohemian embroidery, but these style-choices would seem crude compared to today’s possibilities of refinement. That said, today’s choices would seems indefinable to her, and to an extent too fiddly for absolute comprehension. And again, the possibility of refinement on offer today does in no way mean that people are more refined, and (regretfully) it certainly doesn’t mean people put more care and attention into their apparel as our ante-generational-friend.
Examples of this one still finds, if so interested, in the names and descriptions of clothing and material. Egyptian cotton, Irish Linen and Belgian lace or French embroidery might no longer hold as much captivating information as they did in days of yore, and certainly not as much information nowadays as Dior, Zegna or Chloe, but they certainly tell us a lot about their origins and ambitions.
Fashion-, or better yet style-, wise, the world has not gotten any bigger than it was in days past. In fact, it has gotten a lot smaller, and a whole lot easier to travel around. International trade agreements on fabrics, the world-wide availability of information and the multi-national identity of designers and stores ensure together that the cotton t-shirt I buy in my local store differs in no material way from the t-shirt my American pals buy in their local emporium, which in itself does not differ immensely from the one bought by my moscowegian counterpart in Russia.
A shame? Yes, in some cases. I certainly lament the fact it is nigh useless to travel to London for the fashion because the fashion in London is the same as it is here in Amsterdam (except for the Thomas Pink stores, off course, which are still a good reason to get on a plane), but at the same time the availability of many styles and materials makes it possible for me to look my best in whatever situation (or markedly less “my best” but I can’t blame the clothes for that).
But when it comes to status, clothing has lost a good deal of it’s impact in the apparent eye of the beholder, and only those detail- and label-minded among us will see on first glance what status and/or position your clothing is supposed to project. Where clothing used to make the man all in its own right, nowadays the perception of clothing by others goes a lot farther in determining the make of a man.
Where in days past a different style or material would set you apart as wealthy, or a fashionist(a), today anybody with enough determination to save up for it can deck him- or herself out in Vuitton-styled atrocities, or Chanel based bad choices, and if one is lacking this determination or funding, one can buy generic look-a-likes in the closest low street store. To a certain extent this is a logical by-product of the circle of faddish live (which really does move us all) where high end avant-garde designs are turned into prêt-a-porter concepts and then through generic easiness into bargain basement grabability. Anything that is worn enough will be watered down and copied, and so on ad infinitum. And ad nauseam, in some cases, off course.
So what is one to do if one wants to set oneself apart from the general population, but without the option of taking a train to Berlin for their spring ideas or sending your tailor to Florence for their needlework? Well, those options are off course still open, only much less useful nowadays. Vintage-clothing is always an option, but then again, it can all of a sudden become tres hip, and then where are you?
That said, it is only bad to be avant-garde if it turns out there is no garde, so a little bit of dare and originality is absolutely not frowned upon by the writer of this little piece. And if the followers never appear, simply discard and try again. Nobody achieved elegance and refinement first of without stumbling headlong in the wall of faux pas at their first tries.
Grtz,
Kevin
Once upon a time, in a town far away, a cotton manufacturer stumbled on the fact that when cotton is bathed in a bath of caustic soda, and then bathed again in acid, it becomes long, lustrous and a lot more durable. The birth of mercerized cotton might not interest a great amount of people in our current hustle-and-bustle “I-don’t-care-what-it-is-as-long-as-it’s-stylish” world, but widely available cotton certainly has improved over the years. And not only cotton, materials, patterns and logistical solutions have evolved in quality and availability to an extent that there is no longer anything like different markets in clothing, and everything is, in theory, available anywhere.
Not even very long ago, and certainly for Europeans not very far away, what you wore and how it was worn was for a great deal based on two very simple variables of the human condition: Where are you from, and how much do you make when you are there?
Certain local patterns in weaving, embroidery, fabrics and colour were not copied, or very faintly copied, at any great distance from the town of their origin, and as a result, the standard man or woman in the street could be absolutely identified as being on the right street simply by the cut, colour and quality (I so craved a third “c”, but condition just doesn’t cut it, compunctiously) of their clothes. Only the rich or traveled wore materials or styles markedly different from their local counterparts to an identifiable extent.
A stylish lady in the 1800’s might deck herself out in Antwerp Lace or adopt a penchant for a particular style of bohemian embroidery, but these style-choices would seem crude compared to today’s possibilities of refinement. That said, today’s choices would seems indefinable to her, and to an extent too fiddly for absolute comprehension. And again, the possibility of refinement on offer today does in no way mean that people are more refined, and (regretfully) it certainly doesn’t mean people put more care and attention into their apparel as our ante-generational-friend.
Examples of this one still finds, if so interested, in the names and descriptions of clothing and material. Egyptian cotton, Irish Linen and Belgian lace or French embroidery might no longer hold as much captivating information as they did in days of yore, and certainly not as much information nowadays as Dior, Zegna or Chloe, but they certainly tell us a lot about their origins and ambitions.
Fashion-, or better yet style-, wise, the world has not gotten any bigger than it was in days past. In fact, it has gotten a lot smaller, and a whole lot easier to travel around. International trade agreements on fabrics, the world-wide availability of information and the multi-national identity of designers and stores ensure together that the cotton t-shirt I buy in my local store differs in no material way from the t-shirt my American pals buy in their local emporium, which in itself does not differ immensely from the one bought by my moscowegian counterpart in Russia.
A shame? Yes, in some cases. I certainly lament the fact it is nigh useless to travel to London for the fashion because the fashion in London is the same as it is here in Amsterdam (except for the Thomas Pink stores, off course, which are still a good reason to get on a plane), but at the same time the availability of many styles and materials makes it possible for me to look my best in whatever situation (or markedly less “my best” but I can’t blame the clothes for that).
But when it comes to status, clothing has lost a good deal of it’s impact in the apparent eye of the beholder, and only those detail- and label-minded among us will see on first glance what status and/or position your clothing is supposed to project. Where clothing used to make the man all in its own right, nowadays the perception of clothing by others goes a lot farther in determining the make of a man.
Where in days past a different style or material would set you apart as wealthy, or a fashionist(a), today anybody with enough determination to save up for it can deck him- or herself out in Vuitton-styled atrocities, or Chanel based bad choices, and if one is lacking this determination or funding, one can buy generic look-a-likes in the closest low street store. To a certain extent this is a logical by-product of the circle of faddish live (which really does move us all) where high end avant-garde designs are turned into prêt-a-porter concepts and then through generic easiness into bargain basement grabability. Anything that is worn enough will be watered down and copied, and so on ad infinitum. And ad nauseam, in some cases, off course.
So what is one to do if one wants to set oneself apart from the general population, but without the option of taking a train to Berlin for their spring ideas or sending your tailor to Florence for their needlework? Well, those options are off course still open, only much less useful nowadays. Vintage-clothing is always an option, but then again, it can all of a sudden become tres hip, and then where are you?
That said, it is only bad to be avant-garde if it turns out there is no garde, so a little bit of dare and originality is absolutely not frowned upon by the writer of this little piece. And if the followers never appear, simply discard and try again. Nobody achieved elegance and refinement first of without stumbling headlong in the wall of faux pas at their first tries.
Grtz,
Kevin
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