Sunday, August 2, 2009

I Heart New Delhi






I did not notice his loveheart til I had taken the photograph.
But now I love him ten zillion times more!

Someone special gave me a book of essays by David Mamet, the film director. 
Within, the title Exuvial Magic: An Essay Concerning Fashion caught my eye.
(Seriously... exuvial?)

Mamet writes:
"The pursuit of fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy."

WTF does this mean, David?
"In adopting the clothing of those in pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates." 

...Examples?
"We dress in the denim of the farm worker, the khaki of the field soldier, the beaten leather jackets of the breadline. The white world tries to emulate the black world; the gay world emulates those elements of America it considers tragic - the clothing of the 1950s."

In progressing "from an emulation of the romantic to an emulation of the tragic," Mamet continues, the middle class "avows not only the aridity of its lifestyle, but the complete failure of its fantasies, and of its very ability to fantasize."

Do we buy this, kids? 
Certainly dressing is evocation.
I myself wish most ardently each Winter that I could dress like a Mongolian falconer in furs and ride about on a black stallion. 
 I don't view that persona as pitiful or tragic; but I do envy its 'nonequivocal experience'. 
Extreme experiences suggest initiation into hidden life knowledge.

Anyway. 
I think that with his loveheart, this non-middle class boy is co-opting the romantic rather than the tragic.









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