What I know about Beau Brummell

Sunday I went to a lecture about Regency dandy Beau Brummell at Te Papa, given by Ian Kelly, an English actor and Brummell's biographer. The lecture was put on by the Friends of Te Papa and held in the Soundings Theatre, at the not inconsiderable sum of $25 at ticket for non-members. 

I do have vaguely directed interests in both Regency History and the history of costume, but it was the marketing genius of the lecture title that sold it to me: Undressing Mr Darcy: sex, suits and shifting cultures 1770 - 1820. Naked Mr Darcy!

Ian Kelly was a very entertaining speaker, and gave a lecture that was informative without being too specialised but wasn't patronising either. The tone was a little bit naughty. Titters abounded.

The only issue I had with the entire experience was with this horrible old bat who sat next to me in the five minutes before the lecture was due to start. As the speaker was introduced, this woman turned to me and said: "Are you going to write throughout the entire presentation?"

Me: "Ah - I thought I'd take a few notes...?"

HOB: "Well, I find it very distracting. If you're going to write, you should go and sit over there - " indicating single, lonely seat in the corner by a giant pole.

Me (fighting my "respect your elders upbringing" and horrified by the rudeness of aforementioned HOB): "Well, if you find it distracting, perhaps you could sit over there."

HOB ignores my comment. I ignore her and start making notes, but I'm boiling with anger and guilt. In the end I decide that I can't stand her giving me the evils from the edges of her pince nez , and I flouncily gather up my bits and begin to move away.

HOB (sniffily): "Thank you."

Me (hissing): "Spectacular rudeness." Which was neither particularly mature nor very respectful to my elders, but did allow me to have the last word. Ha.

I then preceded to sit on the lonely, sad person seat where I was unable to concentrate on the first ten minutes of the lecture because I was furious and kept coming up with a million better comebacks than spectacular rudeness.

Anyways, what I now know about Beau Brummell:

• He was born at Number 10 Downing Street (then Number 5 Downing Square). His parents weren't married and his mother was a courtesan.
• His parents had a country house with a flint hermitage. They advertised in a London paper for a hermit to live in their hermitage. Tom Stoppard makes a reference to this in one of his plays (Arcadia?).
• His entry into society, as it were, was as the child subject of a Joshua Reynolds painting called "The Brummell heirs".
• The Prime Minister Lord North (his father's boss) sent him and his brother to Eton where he began working on what would later be known as "the Brummell look" - i.e., mostly monochrome, with sexy skin-0tight pants.
• Some of the wearers of these skin-tight pants (Lord Byron was mentioned I think?) definitely did not wear undies, probably due to VPL. This can be deduced from their laundry bills.
• Brummell was the Prince of Wales' (later the Prince Regent) best man when he (George) disastrously married Caroline of Brunswick. Marriage fail!
• He resigned his commission from the Hussars when the regiment was posted to Manchester, claiming that he couldn't be seen anywhere so unfashionable.
• Brummell and his tailor at Meyer and Mortimer are attributed with the invention of the full length trouser.
• He bathed every day which was a scandalous innovation. The bathing took up one hour of the three it would take him to get dressed every morning. A second hour of the dressing process was spent tying his cravat perfectly.
• Peeps, including the Prince Regent, would come and observe this process. Because Beau Brummell was just that fashionable.
• Ignominious end: he fled the country because he insulted the Prince of Wales (short story - called him fat), and also because he had mountains of debt.
• Annnddd.... he died in Northern France in 1840 of tertiary syphilis sans hair and sans teeth, hallucinating about having Regency celebrities over for parties.

My favourite conclusions though were around what parts of the Regency lifestyle can be seen as contributing to Victorian standards of morality and the Victorian obsession with insanity and depression. And what it comes down to (at least, according to Ian Kelly) is that  the attendant venereal diseases (especially syphilis) of Regency promiscuity left a super-nasty taste in the mouth of the aristocracy and upper classes, no family of which had escaped unscathed. Lots of congenital madness and what not. 

CONCLUSION: Horrible Old Bats aside, lecture was good. Future idea for Friends of Te Papa lectures: find a seat far away from the main entrance.

Shannon says "Blog about the Cicadas!"

I'm sitting outside the Mess Hall at Camp A Low Hum, where Shannon is attempting to set up some kind of fangled gizz-a-mee. Things are going wrong and he is attempting to keep me occupied by pointing the computer at the internet and saying "Blog about the Cicadas!" The cicadas are noisy. It's a beautiful evening here. There are lots of wee hipster types massing about from one point to another, and there is a very noisy sound check/rig set up going on to my left and down a bit. I think that the Sound Guy is making "pink noise" to check his set up. I can smell the lemon on the fish and chips of the guy on the picnic table over from me who has a very nice accent, and a feather in his straw hat. He's with a guy wearing Wayfarers (quelle surprise). I'm rather jealous of their beer. Last night I also tagged along with the Boy when he went to see a man about a radio. The man was a Ham Radio Man and wanted to show the Boy all his radio bits. There was a lot of discussion about antennas and aerials and wavelengths and such like. Most of it was "blah blah technical bullshit blah"; I vagued out and examined the spines of all the books (succulents and gardening and radio/electronic manuals). After the technical rant, we were tuned into the 2 metre network and audibly introduced to George, Will and Ted, who are also Ham Radio Men. Ted and George were in their seventies and learnt Morse code at age ten and nine respectably. They were desperate to convert Shannon to their Way. And thus it is with ham radio apparently - once you pop you can't stop. I had never realised that the ham radio Underground Movement was so strong in New Zealand. And the strength and obsessiveness of the Hardcore Conservative AM Preservation Movement freaked me out and totally fascinated me - that is, that in a small group of fanatics there are an either smaller group of hard core AM radio fanatics. I rather fancibly started endowing them with a Luddite kind of fanaticism, imagining them tearing down FM radio receivers and bludgeoning equipment that only displayed an FM band. They have their own network on a specific frequency where I imagine that they mutter mutinously about the dire state of the AM frequency and plot to restore it to its rightful place in the great canon of radio greatness. Extreme loudness has begun on the sound set up downstairs and its making me feel... urgh. The sound guy is the same one that blasted my ear drums at the Dodos; he's waging some kind of angry war against hearing... can't write, ears trembling.

Train Sketch

A guard today - a young man with painted wooden arm, ending in an metal hook that opens and closes. He clamps my ticket in the hook while he clips it. I find it difficult not to stare at him during the rest of the journey - I wonder how the hook works - I imagine it wired to his nervous system. Machinery and biology intertwined; I crane to see the point wear the Arm meets his, just above the hem of his shirt sleeve.

He has a beard. He's uncomfortable, glancing around too much.

In between stops he picks up a book, tucks it under his wooden/hook arm. It's a spy novel.

Train Sketch

Tall angular and awkward, the Train Man is reading. He is hunched over his copy of the Listener with his nose pushed flush against the page, his eyes scrunched up. They look like carbonised dried fruits pressed into his face. Reading looks painful.

Before he leaves the train he puts on a pair of glasses - the lenses so thick that wearing them must be like seeing from the inside of an aquarium. Swimmy.

Train Sketch

The woman and man on the train. She is tall, thin, a strange square head on a long neck, hair yellow from layers of dye. Mouse brown is creeping up from the roots. He has long, thick, frizzy hair, which he has tied in a ponytail. The mass of his hair where it springs a the nape mirrors the shape and size of his head. He's wearing cheap sunglasses with small round lenses, and a handknitted purple scarf. His laughter is stilted and nervous: 'huh. huh. huh'.

When they get on the train, she unpacks her bag, pulling out four different packs of dye and a bottle of apple scented shampoo, which he admires. She boasts that she's spent almost all her dole money already; she needs more conditioner; she can't find black hair ties. She's dressed in glitter and sequins and polarfleece. Tawdry daylight glamour, but a commitment to Pretty? A glamour of glamour

They ride the train with her in his lap. They're daring each other "I've done it before, I'm not scared".

On Monday they listen to Guns 'n' Roses. They're pressed temple to temple and crouched over the cassette player.

There is a curious naivety to the two of them. I suspect them of planning to spend the day watching Disney Cartoons in a damp Upper Hutt flat, unmade bed in a bedsit.

North Island Road Trip - Tokomaru Bay

Just arrived back from a week road tripping around the North Island with the Boy. We hired a campervan, and I completely fell in love with cooking in the ticky-tacky Wendy house kitchen. Against my better judgement, I also fell in love with cooking for the Boy in general – making masses of dishes and then lapping up the praise while watching him wash up. Cooking – fun, dishes – a bitch.

Our trip revolved around declining rural centres, rotting industrial architecture and op shops. Our photos are a collection of images of the burnt out meatworks at Patea and the abandoned freezing works and shipping centre in Tokomaru Bay.

At work I’ve been reading mostly about how important coastal shipping was in the past, building up New Zealand’s economy; without knowing the histories of these places these industrial complexes are arbitrary and bizarre, completely foreign in the landscape.

Tokomaru Bay takes the prize for bizarre; such a huge decline in population, a thousand less people living there now than during its heyday. Signage on the shops is the same as it was when the owners abandoned their businesses during the 1960s.

The local motorcycle gang has a beautiful Art Deco bank as their headquarters; the original glass still identifies the building, “Bank of New Zealand”. As you drive towards the freezing works, you pass through an avenue of huge exotic palms; the carnival atmosphere evoked by these is jarringly at odds with the town itself and only serves to draw more attention to the disintegration of the houses around them. The avenue leads ultimately to Tokomaru wharf, a rotting concrete structure from where meat and wool was once shipped internationally. Today the thing shakes like a leaf in the wind and against the tides and currents of the sea.

I write this as merely a sketch of a town that fascinates me in its present day appearance and in the history of its rise and decline – I really can’t say anything novel, or new, or interesting, or even Not Trite about the area. The buildings themselves just seem to stand so resolutely despite their complete neglect – fascinating, to visit, like tourism in the bones of history.