Rum Runner How Style Swamps Substance
04/01/2016 - "Rum Runner How Style Swamps Substance" by Donal Carroll
 
 

Rum Runner: How style swamps substance


A Happy New Year 2016 gift  What’s a poem for: an unsettler, think-nudger, to voice the unheard, a frolic in language…? All of these? Here’s a poem I wrote a long time ago –a way of saying thank you at the end of the year to all Critical Difference customers and supporters. Thank you again.    First a few questions: In what city was the club, Rum Runner (not London)? When? What group were playing, who were already rising on the style mentioned in the poem?


 


R um Runner  dress up and drop out’  (Style Dick Hebdige)


Wind-skint, they gird up their macho, wooing


in traditional style: strut, jut, linger


and strategic disinterest that would pull


success… anywhere else but here


where the event pours its insides out


into the alley each time the door opens


showering them with sound and rising salsa:


the doorman fouls their eyes, ignoring them.


 


Inside, spaced-in, the sound becomes a look:


in a petty-Borges atmosphere,


newage choirboys and matinee dreamboats


ignore teenage grannies who ignore twotones


subalterns of style, ignoring the odd couple,


Eric Flynn and Rita Haywhat, ignoring


Bog-Art, salivating gum, dressed in a conceptual mackintosh,


knocking back stacks of rockn’roll mouthwash


ignoring the spare Ted, well Lazurus’d.


 


Latin l’amours wear off the shoulder


highwaymen with Dick Turpentine cocktails;


pirates eye-shadow Regency dandies,


bockerknickered with brio and Brylcreem


and suffering from terminal flashback;


the ballet dressed talking bicep with the


authority of Sandra Dee’s underwear


quotes a crinoline: cubby-hole peacocks.


 


The dearth of cocktail kitsch cruelty wear


goes unnoticed; the military fatigues;


Bowie clones invade the space placed round them,


wiggle their toggle, skeletal small-boying,


with their affliction curtaining one eye,


a hair so conscious it speaks its own lines;


all electronicking about the floor,


they salon, with a chip in their shoulders,


micro-moving the process of dancing:


even a fractured eyelash is action.


 


This is the world of protective clothing;


style whiles away the climate of doing,


of necessity, other than itself;


sobbing soubrettes sartorial stimulants


– the socially biodegradable;


suddenly ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’


appears, a brown-shirted moment –ignored


like the price of the drinks, in the hunt for


 the glint round the necklace of Narcissus. 


 


Donal Carroll Critical Difference Consultancy & Coaching  


Written some time ago!    Feedback welcome

 
 
 
 

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