Cool Roots: 19th Century BreakdownA Hundred Years Ago Today, Some Mad Lads
Made with the Wildest Style and Wiggage
By Dick Blackburn
Cool Roots: 19th Century Breakdown
A Hundred Years Ago Today, Some Mad Lads
Made with the Wildest Style and Wiggage
By Dick Blackburn
Sure, the current century gets the highest coolness rating.
But its predecessor also moved mightily, as seen in the
assorted tics and thrill-quests of those who chose to groove
where none had grooved before...
French Kicking
Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) was a member of Les Bousingos (the
Wildmen), a group of poets that included Petrus "Le Lycanthrope"
Borel 
and Philothee O'Neddy (who wore
glasses in his sleep to see his dreams). After debating in the
buff, these guys found some dolls, downed rum punch in skulls,
fired off pistols, and bopped till they dropped to the "gallop
infernal," which littered the pad-floor with unconscious
bodies. But Gerard, an eventual suicide, out-weirded 'em all when
he began taking his lobster-on-a-pale-blue-ribbon for a shuffle
through the Jardins de Tuileries. When passersby asked why he
had such a bizarro pet, Ger' blithely replied "Because he
comes from the depths of the ocean and never barks."
"Nature is only interesting when she is sickly and desolate," wrote the king of decadence, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) in Parisian Sketches (Croquis Parisiens, 1880), grooving on industrial pollution and the smell of women's armpits before penning his magnum flip-top Against Nature (A Rebours, 1884). The Nature boy is an aristo perv who surrounds himself with monstrous flowers, a "mouth organ" (liqueurs whose tastes correspond to musical instruments), a bejeweled tortoise, and a ship's cabin on springs set within a room to imitate the motion of the sea. When it comes time for him to travel, he puts off his trip, prefering to groove on fantasy over reality.
Penniless nobleman Jean-Marie-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers
de L'Isle-Adam, was on the same wavelength as Huysmans. In his
play Axel's Castle, a novitiate renounces her vows and
crashes out of a nunnery to the basement of a chateau where she
meets a no-dough aristo-cat. They fall for each other, live an
entire fantasy lifetime in minutes, swallow poison and kick. "But
what about living?," she asks, going under. His answer? "Our
servants can do that for us." Cruel Tales (Contes Cruels,
1883), his other boss oeuvre, was way ahead of its time. In
one eternally cool
piece, an author unsuccessfully swears he's a no-talent hack to
a paranoid publisher who's terrified of hiring uncommercial geniuses.
In 1889, Villiers, worn out by being too hip for the room, married
his cleaning lady on his deathbed. R.I.P. Jean-Marie.
All of these guys managed to blow some great riffs before finally shuffling off to St. Pete's rent party. Tristan Corbiere (1845-1875), felled by TB on a yacht in the Mediterranean, laid out such word jazz as "Paysage Mauvaise" (Evil Landscape):
So sayeth Tristan.
On the Gaulic rhyme-front, all the poetes maudites
tried to out-decadent Chuck Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, scribbling
twisto verse and blasting "abs", the slang term for absinthe. The
"green hell" liqueur was so popular that the term heure bleu (crepuscular
early evening dusk) was changed to heure vert 'cause so many cafe habitues
and people off work were getting zonked. Absinthe even came with its own ritual.
A special silver slotted spoon holding a sugar cube was balanced over a glass
half full of abs while water, from a carafe placed at the imbiber's elbow,
was dripped through the cube, turning the liquor milky and opalescent. Malheursement
abs got the "Just say no" treatment by the early 1900's, due to
the effects of cheap brain-rot publicized by vintners tired of having their
product undersold by absinthe, and by the military, who didn't want the infantry
crocked during World War I. Today abs is outlawed in every country except
Spain.
Health kicks of the Big Nineteenth were no less gone than the era's substance
abuse. For a time it was chic for anemic chicks to make it down to the neighborhood
abbatoir to down a steaming cocktail of just-slaughtered ox blood. It was
just such behavior that helped spread the vampire myth of
the day.
The Too Much Teuton
Around the same time, to the east, the original Walt Disney, Mad
King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1864-1886), was wiping out his country's
treasury, building castles that outgrooved Sleeping Beauty's Fantasyland
crib big-time. In Linderhof, after overdoing the cherub decorations,
Luddy installed weighted trap doors so gourmet meals prepared
by unseen servants could magically appear. An early animal-rights
advocate, he hunted track-run mechanical bunnies from a horse-drawn
sleigh. In an artifical grotto, Ludwig would drift about in his
swan boat serenaded by a string quartet concealed inside a paper
mache rock, or set a spell on his massive Peacock Throne awaiting
inspiration. He got it, commissioning an inventor to come up with
an aircraft so Lud could do the wing thing over the mountains.
To the Chamber of Councillors this was firm proof that the monarch
was mad. Finally, his indigent countrymen rose up and drowned
him in a lake. Ten years later the first airplane flew. A hundred
years later, the Mad King's realized dreams are the region's
biggest tourist attraction.
England's Garb Gang: Flipped, Fop and Fly
A couple years before Ludwig's scene, Britain's style-obsessed
Beau Brummel had kicked off dandyism, using up countless yards
of stiff linen to get the perfect knot in his cravat. "By
using a few hours in each day, which would otherwise be wasted,
you may hope to have excellent cravats
in middle life. The whole knack lies in pointing your chin to
the sky, and then arranging your folds by the gradual descent
of your lower jaw." This from Rodney Stone, A. Conan
Doyle's (1896) novel of the Regency. Connie's young hero is encouraged
to cultivate an eccentricity to launch
himself in society. "Do you think that you could engage to
climb round the furniture of an ordinary room without setting
foot upon the ground?" The speaker, a famous exquisite, is
later socially ruined when he tragically chooses Isinglass over
starch as a cravat stiffener.
By mid-century, the Victorian clothes horse had become a fantasy figure for the masses. Music hall audiences dug The Great Vance (1838-1888), a monocled swell who sang about his East End tailor in order to obtain free "clobber," in a verse style that uncannily prefigures Lord Buckley or Forties bopster Babs Gonzales...
By the fin de siecle things had gotten out of hand. Henry Cyril Padgett, fifth Marquis of Angsley (1875-1903), was a fopped-out gem freak. To dig his dazzlers, he'd drape his nude young wife from head to toe in them, and ogle her. When their marriage was annulled for non-consummation, "the Dancing Marquis" toured in his own amateur theatricals, where he fluttered about doing "The Butterfly Dance," a pre-"Bird" step of his own creation, in bejeweled costumes costing up to 40,000 pounds. By 1901, the Dancing Marq was tripped up for good, owing creditors over half a million pounds. It took 40 days to sell all his vines, stones, dogs, horses and carriages, yachts, motor cars and gem-encrusted walking sticks.
The Last Victorian: Big Sal with the Shoe
Hat
While chronology keeps him out of the era (b. 1898, d. 1980),
Salvador Dali demonstrated a real spiritual affinity with the
Big Nineteenth eccentrics. He copped Huysmans' jeweled tortoise
lick, but did him one better by mounting an ashtray on the creature's
back. Some of Sal's other cool moves: predicting that everyone
would eventually have their thumbnails replaced by tiny TV screens.
Inventing the Self- Irrigating Taxicab full of seaweed, mannequins
and snails. Baking long and longer loaves of bread, leaving them
in public places while the media went crazy trying to figure out
what his message was. Inventing the High-heel Shoe Hat. Creating
"heart jewelry" that actually beat. Labeling Mondrian
a maker of Linoleum. Writing an unfilmable script for the Marx
Bros. Digging Dan's Do-Nut Drive-in off the San Diego Frwy in
L.A. Having a long, unusually thin window built in his bathroom
so he could sit on the toilet and watch the red descent of the
sun like mercury in a thermometer. Getting naked, covering himself
with olive oil, and waiting till he no longer felt the flies before
starting to paint...
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