William F. Buckley, Jr., Icon of Style
Wha? William F. Buckley, Jr., who died last week at 82, a paragon of masculine style?
Well, yes. Believe me on this one, because I was there to witness firsthand the great conservative’s impact on the sartorial ambitions of my generation.
Buckley’s style was extremely reserved but deliciously unfussy. It was based on a simple premise: the natural-shoulder Brooks Brothers sack suit. Unlike its European counterparts, this simple, two-piece uniform was designed for unpretentious comfort and endless durability. It’s called a sack because that’s what it looks like. There is no padding in the shoulders to make a man look broader. The waist is not suppressed to seem narrower. There is no darting—a tailoring technique—to give the suit shape. The trousers are not pleated. The suit, introduced by Brooks Brothers in 1900, embodied a simple philosophy: What you see is what you get.
For decades, whenever you saw Buckley, in person or on TV, you also saw this suit, along with its typical companions: a Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth button-down shirt and a narrow Brooks Brother striped Repp tie. The get-up is sometimes erroneously referred to as “preppy,” due to Brooks Brothers association with East Coast society and the Ivy League. But in fact, it was standard-issue attire for a much more serious and intellectual type of guy, the American traditionalist. This personality enjoyed his heyday from roughly the end of World War II to the advent of the peacock era in men’s style, when coincided with cultural events such as Woodstock and The Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Don’t take my word for it; visit the style forum of a website called Ask Andy About Clothes, where a group of American “trads” gathers at all hours to discuss the look.
Buckley’s version of hardcore trad has other elements: khaki pants, Shetland wool crewneck sweaters, seersucker, all well-worn and rarely impeccably pressed. It’s a wardrobe that’s the antithesis of dandyism and that requires almost no thought. (Unfortunately, Brook Brothers has moved away from the style, but you can still find it at J.Press). Trad provided the blank canvas on which Buckley painted his unique personal style. What’s the lasting image of him that we have? Slouching in his chair on an episode of “Firing Line,” in his rumpled sack, shirt-collar twisted, tie askew, sleeves riding up, hair untrimmed, a $1 clipboard on his lap and a cheap red pen between his less-then-white teeth as his searched for the correct riposte to his (often liberal) guest.
Buckley trad was engendered at Yale and later became the default form of carefree non-chic adopted by, among others, the CIA and the FBI, as well as by most government prosecutors (for a contemporary, and more lawyerly example, check out Ken Starr, Dean of the Pepperdine Law School and Special Prosecutor scourge of President Bill Clinton). It was the house style of uncompromising anti-communism. Like many good things about menswear, it was wrecked by the 1970s and never fully restored during the preppy revival of the 1980s. However, if Buckley was your Virgil, as a young conservative during the high point of Reaganism during the mid ’80s, the look was what you strived to emulate.
I was not a young conservative during the Reagan years. I was instead a young liberal at a large state college in South Carolina, an out-of-towner plopped down among what I considered to be a impressive number of young conservatives. I wore jeans and tweed jackets, going for a kind of Woodward and Bernstein professional counterculturalist thing. My good friend and thoroughgoing Buckleyite—who was also the editor of the school newspaper, as well as a frequent jousting partner in our political science classes together—was trad through and through. He even went unapologetically for the clipboard and the red pen. He kept whiskey in his desk.
The whole underlying point of Buckley’s style was that it was completely transportable and utterly carefree. It was the uniform of the ruling class, who would of course have opportunities to move from office to dinner party to speaking engagement to TV appearance to vacation home to concert hall to personal yacht, quite possibly all during the course of a single day. The genuine proponents of trad are rarely seen these days outside of isolated social quarters, and when they do show up, in numbers and in uniform, the effect is shocking. It’s as if you’re watching a movie set in 1955. You can’t take you eyes off them. You imagine them to possess inner and outer lives in the Buckley mold: reasonably patriotic, affectionately martial without being militaristic, literate, musically sophisticated, able to tell a Constable from a Turner at 50 yards, sailboat-owning, tennis-playing, curious about but still basically disgusted by Fidel, enthusiastic about the young, essentially romantic, sexually frisky, delighted by the Martini, insatiably curious, and, inevitably, rich enough to pursue Renaissance interests, such as starting magazines and writing spy thrillers, with great verve and inexhaustible vigor.
Buckley was the last great exemplar of all this in the public eye (on the lefty side, it was George Plimpton). Nowadays, to be on television, even as a political intellectual, is to be airbrushed and styled by professionals. You need to try to look cool, in furtherance of your brainy brand. Buckley was completely different and I would argue massively more influential. By looking as if he could care less, he commanded attention. By looking as if nothing really mattered, he made sure that many, many things did.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Graffiti Versus Bad Art in L.A.
The Kids Are All Write
The recently announced plan for Los Angeles County and the Sheriff’s department to crack down on graffiti, and especially graffiti inflicted on murals, has revived an old debate. The demagoguery goes something like this: kids who get into graffiti are coddled urban layabouts who, for lack of nobler pursuits, take to the streets and degrade the quality of life enjoyed by upstanding (i.e., adult) citizens. To stop to this delinquent behavior, L.A. Country will henceforth penalize not just the offending graffitists, but also their indulgent parents. Message to the grownups: we’re serious—confiscate your kids’ markers and spray cans and set them on the course of more socially acceptable pastimes, such as spending hours inside playing ultra-violent video games or preparing to enlist in the Army.
In particular, the county has taken on the practice known as “tagging,” which is how most graffiti “writers,” as they are known in their demimonde, get their start. Tagging, at its most basic level, is fairly crude. A new writer will take to the streets with a thick marker and scrawl his stylized signature on any available surface. Generally speaking, graffiti writers either tag for a while and give up, or graduate to more elaborate forms. As far as contemporary urban graffiti goes, there is a forty-year history of this apprenticeship. According to story published in the L.A. Times several weeks ago, the latest generation of taggers has provoked the ire of the country by tagging public murals. In fact, much of the graffiti on the murals has been mislabeled as tagging—it’s actually closer to the “throw up” bubble-letter style that’s considered a stepping stone to the far more intense “wildstyle,” which should be familiar to anyone who lived in New York in the 1970s and early ’80s, when subway graffiti was at its peak. People who like and defend graffiti as legitimate art will often draw a line when it comes to tagging. County officials have opportunistically seized on this distinction to commence their latest battle in the graffiti wars.
Public murals are a cherished aspect of L.A. vernacular visual landscape. The vast, spread-out nature of the city means that there is plenty of available canvas on which to create sprawling imagery. They are beloved here in a way that’s baffling to residents of other cities. There’s even a non-profit corporation, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, dedicated to preserving and protecting them. And make no mistake, the enemy of the mural and its affluent supporters is the graffiti artist, who is a vandal and a criminal bent on defacing this happy legacy of… well, what exactly?
Bad art. And not even merely bad art. Astonishingly bad art. The majority of L.A. murals are thematically childish and laughably executed. Their basic form, which was codified in the 1960s and ’70s, represents the worst excess of a stalled esthetic counterculture. They pollute our freeways and neighborhoods with themes of bland uplift and multicultural empowerment. It ought to tell us something that young people with the energy to take to the streets with spray cans in order to express themselves see these monuments to mediocrity and city-hall cronyism as a primary target. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have negligent parents. It could mean they simply don’t like being oppressed by images of ethnic striving, universal goodwill, or hippie visions of politically neutered progress.
All art of significance, from the ancients to the dazzling works of one-time graffiti writer Jean-Michel Basquiat, is rebellion. So get used to it. We’ve come a long way from the glory days of the New Deal, when real artists produced murals. The 21st-century muralist is more likely to be an art-school washout who turned to painting on buildings when the major gallery career, for understandable reasons, didn’t work out. Ironically, muralists hope to be well-known but are usually just as obscure as the taggers they loathe. The difference is that taggers aren’t interested in wider fame (although, interestingly, more than a few graffiti artists have made the jump from concrete jungle to stately museum). They write in a code accessible mainly to their peers. For them, non-profit means too broke to afford more spray paint. They do not expect their work to endure, much less be protected by tax dollars.
Should the county back off and allow the taggers to tag? Probably not, as tagging wouldn’t be tagging with some persecution thrown in. And admittedly, a fair amount of tagging is bravado, signifying nothing more than surplus testosterone. But the terms of the debate should be more honestly framed. Contemporary graffiti has been around long enough to establish itself as a rival to the mural. In this latest case, it’s not a crime—it’s criticism. Those in the mural camp should acknowledge that their challenge is largely esthetic and not run crying to the authorities because there’s some competition in town.
The recently announced plan for Los Angeles County and the Sheriff’s department to crack down on graffiti, and especially graffiti inflicted on murals, has revived an old debate. The demagoguery goes something like this: kids who get into graffiti are coddled urban layabouts who, for lack of nobler pursuits, take to the streets and degrade the quality of life enjoyed by upstanding (i.e., adult) citizens. To stop to this delinquent behavior, L.A. Country will henceforth penalize not just the offending graffitists, but also their indulgent parents. Message to the grownups: we’re serious—confiscate your kids’ markers and spray cans and set them on the course of more socially acceptable pastimes, such as spending hours inside playing ultra-violent video games or preparing to enlist in the Army.
In particular, the county has taken on the practice known as “tagging,” which is how most graffiti “writers,” as they are known in their demimonde, get their start. Tagging, at its most basic level, is fairly crude. A new writer will take to the streets with a thick marker and scrawl his stylized signature on any available surface. Generally speaking, graffiti writers either tag for a while and give up, or graduate to more elaborate forms. As far as contemporary urban graffiti goes, there is a forty-year history of this apprenticeship. According to story published in the L.A. Times several weeks ago, the latest generation of taggers has provoked the ire of the country by tagging public murals. In fact, much of the graffiti on the murals has been mislabeled as tagging—it’s actually closer to the “throw up” bubble-letter style that’s considered a stepping stone to the far more intense “wildstyle,” which should be familiar to anyone who lived in New York in the 1970s and early ’80s, when subway graffiti was at its peak. People who like and defend graffiti as legitimate art will often draw a line when it comes to tagging. County officials have opportunistically seized on this distinction to commence their latest battle in the graffiti wars.
Public murals are a cherished aspect of L.A. vernacular visual landscape. The vast, spread-out nature of the city means that there is plenty of available canvas on which to create sprawling imagery. They are beloved here in a way that’s baffling to residents of other cities. There’s even a non-profit corporation, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, dedicated to preserving and protecting them. And make no mistake, the enemy of the mural and its affluent supporters is the graffiti artist, who is a vandal and a criminal bent on defacing this happy legacy of… well, what exactly?
Bad art. And not even merely bad art. Astonishingly bad art. The majority of L.A. murals are thematically childish and laughably executed. Their basic form, which was codified in the 1960s and ’70s, represents the worst excess of a stalled esthetic counterculture. They pollute our freeways and neighborhoods with themes of bland uplift and multicultural empowerment. It ought to tell us something that young people with the energy to take to the streets with spray cans in order to express themselves see these monuments to mediocrity and city-hall cronyism as a primary target. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have negligent parents. It could mean they simply don’t like being oppressed by images of ethnic striving, universal goodwill, or hippie visions of politically neutered progress.
All art of significance, from the ancients to the dazzling works of one-time graffiti writer Jean-Michel Basquiat, is rebellion. So get used to it. We’ve come a long way from the glory days of the New Deal, when real artists produced murals. The 21st-century muralist is more likely to be an art-school washout who turned to painting on buildings when the major gallery career, for understandable reasons, didn’t work out. Ironically, muralists hope to be well-known but are usually just as obscure as the taggers they loathe. The difference is that taggers aren’t interested in wider fame (although, interestingly, more than a few graffiti artists have made the jump from concrete jungle to stately museum). They write in a code accessible mainly to their peers. For them, non-profit means too broke to afford more spray paint. They do not expect their work to endure, much less be protected by tax dollars.
Should the county back off and allow the taggers to tag? Probably not, as tagging wouldn’t be tagging with some persecution thrown in. And admittedly, a fair amount of tagging is bravado, signifying nothing more than surplus testosterone. But the terms of the debate should be more honestly framed. Contemporary graffiti has been around long enough to establish itself as a rival to the mural. In this latest case, it’s not a crime—it’s criticism. Those in the mural camp should acknowledge that their challenge is largely esthetic and not run crying to the authorities because there’s some competition in town.
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