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