Dirty Girl Things
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Number Fifty-Three
“The Decadent Handbook for the Modern Libertine”
The Decadent Handbook, Ed. Rowan Pelling, Amelia Hodson & James Doyle
Naughty but nice: a perversely perky cabaret
By John Walsh
Is decadence a style or a sickness? When Liza Minnelli waggled her black-varnished fingernails at Michael York in Cabaret and breathed, “Divine decadence, darling,” her self-conscious naughtiness revealed her as a vapid poseuse. When she later flogged her fur coat to pay for an abortion rather than face life as the wife of a Cambridge don, she was, without realising it, closer to the real thing. Authenticity is vital when dealing with this foggy, opalescent subject. Ernest Dowson drinking himself to death while asserting the primacy of hopeless desire over fulfilment - now that was decadent; so was Baudelaire’s embrace of sickness and depression; so was Aubrey Beardley’s etiolated passion for the grotesque. Decadence has no truck with effort. According to the dictionary, its practitioners are “lacking in moral and physical vigour”. Paradoxically, anyone who tries to be decadent, ain’t.
Read the rest of The Independent’s review here.
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Decadence for art’s sake.
“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.” - Ernest Hemingway
Decadence, we are told by Stuart Kelly, is “like most artistic phenomena..easy to recognise and hard to define.” From the Latin de-cadere, and an aesthetic that flourished in the late 19th century best embodied by French poet Charles Baudelaire and other like-minded “bards of pessimism, disease and the grave”, decadence involves “a falling down or falling off.” What rogue publishers Dedalus offer here, is “a useful companion for anyone hoping to embark on a life of debauchery, aesthetic refinement and their constant shadow companion, terminal ennui.” Edited by Rowan Pelling (of the Erotic Review), The Decadent Hanbook, is “an anti-lifestyle guide for people who wish to transform the spirit of the age, or, failing that, ignore it altogether. It’s for all those who seek respite from the worst banalities of modern existence: property ladders, yummy mummies, footie daddies, loyalty cards, friendly bacteria, Glade air freshener, decking, Coldplay, The Da Vinci Code and Natasha Kaplinksy. The Handbook seeks not to instruct, but to offer diverse inspirations.”
Read the rest of Dogmatika’s review here.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
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