JHK’s Three-Act Play
Conversation with an aesthete. Graphic designer, blogger, dandy, and artist Allen Crawford (a.k.a. “Lord Whimsy”) yaks with JHK about the state of male presentation in America, the arc of cultural collapse, art, and Walt Whitman — he is the author of a beautifully illustrated hand-lettered volume Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, published by Tin House Press and available at the usual suspects.
Check out: Lord Whimsy on YouTube.
Direct download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_264.mp3
Please send questions and comments to letters@kunstler.com.
The new World Made By Hand novel
!! Is now available !!
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books…
or Amazon…
Also: Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or … Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo
Lord Whimsy has a great youtube about kayaking expedition…its a real eye opener, revealing the two sides of the American landscape.
There is really cool part where nature touches large scale industry…a humongous steel ship! I am surprised the river can hold that monster afloat…
The raison d’etre of today’s “fashion” is simple:
Standardized sizes made clothes cheap. S, M, L, XL, XXL… generic sizing.
Everyone looks the same- poorly fitted.
Fitting used to be routine. Tailoring is fairly unknown today. You would repair and adjust your own clothes. No one knows who to turn to when something rips, gets worn out, or fits poorly today. And no one cares for the price of clothes is too low to matter.
So we went from mindful fitness to un-fit mindlessness.
Everything might as well be mass-produced, machine-made, and too cheap to care about. You don’t like something, you throw it away. The fabric doesn’t have to be finely made- just not dirty.
The phenomena of oversize clothes sprang from the inner-city Crack and Meth crisis. Men were disappearing, especially in the African-American demographic.
Most of the adult men roaming around who were fit and somewhat sober had just gotten out of prison.
Having lost a ton of weight while having nothing to do but pushups and weight lifting, they lose 50 lbs.
Then they are released. Regular life doesn’t require that clothes fit. An alpha man projects power, he doesn’t have to chase it around. Adapting to the only cash economy still standing, drug dealing requires room to stash weapons and drugs, involves a lot of standing one’s ground, and billboarding status symbols was easier with a larger canvas.
I forgot the point- after being released, they are handed the clothes that they arrived in- several sizes too large.
Hence, the baggy look. Rap music arose from ghetto style which arose from this phenomena. From there, the world.
Also, people just don’t know Whitman. My guess is that it is forced on children in school when they aren’t ready for it (as if coersion is something anyone is really “ready” for).
Whitman is completely unknown to the average person. The tattooed lout anything like Whitman? Genius isn’t that common.
Whitman celebrated the “promise” of a more expansive American idea of possibility and equality- as if it were an inevitable evolution.
Reading it is like taking hallucinogens- maybe a concept to bridge the generations.