Adam Ant, Anthems and Oscar Wilde

“And even though you fool your soul your conscience will be mine, all mine.”-Adam Ant, Stand and Deliver.

This past Saturday I went to Cleveland to visit an old friend and see Adam Ant at the House of Blues. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for Booklovers Boook Reviews about the role of curiosity in inspiring, and giving an author the momentum to write an entire book.

I was looking back at the perennially popular essay I wrote the last time I saw Adam Ant in concert, and I was surprised by the date stamp that said it was four years ago.  Adam seems to have gotten younger since I saw him last, which is a good trick. It made me think that maybe I could choose not to age as well.

What I did not realize at the time I wrote that last Ant essay was that the experience of going to the concert would spark my imagination to the degree it did. Had I not been gifted those Adam Ant tickets in 2013, I would probably not have written my second novel, Identity Theft. You never know what will jog that part of your brain. With literary curiosity on my mind, I’ve been thinking about my Oscar Wilde curiosity and my Adam Ant curiosity to see if they come from a common source.

Adam Ant’s current tour is “The Anthems Tour” and I think the anthems are key. Something occurred to me on Saturday as I was watching the opening act, an energetic, fun all-female band called the Glam Skanks. There was a time when I had my own dreams of fronting a rock band. Although I had a decent voice, I never took the steps. Maybe I was waiting for an invitation?

The truth is that I could never put myself out there enough as a performer to be a rock star. I needed to keep a foot in the world of good girl respectability. If I’d been in a band with a name like Glam Skanks what would my dad think?

Slut fear is survival fear. When you’ve been branded a slut, you’re outside of society’s protection. So that was something I was never going to risk. If there had been a real “insect nation” I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to “throw my safety overboard” and join it. Ridicule, at age 13 or 14, is the thing you are most afraid of, Prince Charming.

But the call appealed to me. The desire was there, and I could at least sing the anthem and take occasional vacations to the Insect Nation in the form of concerts.  I was an “antperson” in a consumer fashion. I owned the white vinyl and picture discs. I was not a culture warrior. (I did wear unmatched shoes to school once on purpose.) But Adam Ant made me want to be brave.

The fear of being shamed runs through Identity Theft. The vague sense that I missed out on some experiences because of fear finds its way into the novel in the form of the character Lydia. Lydia, a middle-aged friend of the protagonist, half-jokingly says she regrets not having been more of a slut when she was younger, and unwittingly encourages Candi down a path that turns out to be disastrous.

We are attracted to the idea of throwing off social constraints in proportion to our fear of it. Oscar Wilde played on that dynamic in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Readers could indulge the fantasy of throwing off social convention, giving in to every impulse and desire.  There is a fascination as well with the figure of Oscar Wilde the transgressor. But both Dorian and his author were destroyed by their transgressions, at least that is what the mythology about Wilde suggests. His is the story of the wrath society can bring down on those who transgress. The desire to conform, and the desire to be free of constraints do a constant dance, and we always question our own choreography.

Adam Ant has an Oscar Wilde quote tattooed on his arm. (I have never been close enough to read his arm myself, but Reuters tells me this is true.) It says, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

 

Da diddly qua qua, da diddly qua qua…

 

 

 

 

 

Doomed to Repeat It?

If you noticed that the frequency of my blog posts has gone down substantially this past year, it is because I was working on a labor-intensive bit of historical research for a forthcoming book, Oscar’s Ghost.  (The photos above show only a small portion of the books and notes I used. These are the ones I lugged on “vacation.”) Oscar’s Ghost tells the story of a bitter posthumous feud over Oscar Wilde’s legacy between two of his closest friends. It covers a period from the late 19th Century, leading up to Oscar Wilde’s arrest and death in 1900 and the inter-war years. (Lord Alfred Douglas, one of the two main characters lived from 1870 to 1945.)

When you delve into another era like that you inevitably find resonances between their time and our own. In the 1890s when Lord Alfred Douglas and Wilde’s eventual literary executor Robert Ross were young men London was at the center of the world. The British Empire was nearly at its peak when it would span 14 million square miles of the globe and include more than a quarter of the planet’s population. It’s absolute peak came in 1914. It was the largest empire the world has ever seen. It so dominated commerce that it could effectively control the economies of countries that were not officially colonies. Young British aristocrats had the world for a playground. They commonly set out on adventures seeking their fortunes in South African and Australian mining colonies or in the timberlands of Canada. They set out to India and North Africa for exotic vacations. London was also becoming a hub of activity for the working class as industrialization moved many young men from farms to the city. The prosperity also attracted immigrants. From 1800 to 1890 the population of London soared from less than a million to more than four million.

It was in this very period, when they should have been celebrating their unprecedented power and prestige, that England began to experience an undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that they were losing ground. “Decay” became a buzzword. There was a fear that old values were eroding, that unchecked effeminancy was dissipating the soldiers, that England was losing its cultural treasures and its cohesive sense of Britishness. (Robert Ross, in the early 20th century wrote an essay with the title “There is No Decay” arguing against the notion.)

In some ways, this makes perfect sense. Human beings are more motivated by the fear of loss than by dreams of gain. When they were the masters of all they could see, there were few more worlds to conquer and nothing to do but look back with nostalgia and to worry about all they now had to lose.

Thus I am repeatedly struck by the off-hand remarks we see regularly in the news about how awful things are in America at this moment in history. As Klaus Brinkbaumer wrote in Der Spiegel, “The fact that the United States, a nuclear superpower that has dominated the world economically, militarily and culturally for decades, is now presenting itself as the victim, calling in all seriousness for ‘America first’ and trying to force the rest of the world into humiliating concessions is absurd. But precisely because this nonsense is coming from the world’s most powerful man, it is getting trapped by him.”

In England, a Century ago, the rhetoric of “decay” was driven by those with the most to lose; the very people who had been granted the most– the aristocracy. Industrialization had changed the economy, the landed estates were no longer supporting the Lords and Ladies as they used to. The middle class was ascendant. The upper classes, however, still had a big microphone and the ability to shape public discourse. They were some of the loudest voices promoting the notion of “decay.”

The continued erosion of the aristocrats’ way of life caused a great fear that they were becoming, in the words of D. Pryce Jones, “in a scrap heap instead of a social class.” They knew they were not to blame for this state of affairs. So they sought scapegoats and embraced extreme ideologies especially on the far right, but also sometimes to the far left.

The far right drew from, among other sources, a series of exposes on immigration written by Oscar Wilde’s old friend Robert Sherard. While his xenophobic articles describing immigrants as physically and morally degenerate did not specifically refer to them as Jewish, there were enough coded references to allow his readers to make the inference. An undercurrent of discourse at this time linked Jews to anarchism and socialism, even though Jewish immigrants were not prominent in those groups; and to criminality, even though statistics did not bear this out. It did not matter that there were no facts to back up the prejudices. (See Holms, Colin. Anti-Semitism in British Society 1876-1939. New York: Holms & Meier Publishers, 1979.) A population that feared decay was looking for an outside force to blame. Immigrants, especially of another religion, were an obvious choice. The period of history I examined is rife with anti-Jewish sentiment throughout Europe. In France there was the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish officer became a convenient scapegoat in an espionage scandal. (Oscar Wilde was then living in France and he and a number of members of his circle got caught up in the hysteria. Wilde befriended the real spy Esterhazy.)

Lord Alfred Douglas’s good friend Freddie Manners-Sutton (the 5th Viscount of Canterbury) was prepared to disseminate the most extreme version of such prejudice, by publishing a controversial posthumous work by Sir Richard Burton. The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam was an attack on what Burton saw as the cruelty of Judaism. Its most contentious chapter claimed that Jews had been involved in human sacrifice and ritual murder. Burton’s executor, W.H. Wilkins, had been skittish about publishing any of the book but felt he could not go against the wishes of the deceased author. He did, however, cut the most offending section. Somehow Sutton got wind of this and bought the chapter from Wilkins with the intent to publish. This led to a lawsuit, in 1911, by D.L. Alexander who claimed Wilkins had no right to sell the material and successfully received an injunction to prevent its publication. These extreme points of view were gaining prominence in certain segments of Lord Alfred Douglas’s social circle and were increasingly shaping his worldview to the point that he eventually became editor of a journal known more for its anti-semitism than its poetry. This would forever tarnish his legacy. He had been convinced there was a broad Jewish banking conspiracy by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of fabricated anti-Jewish propaganda that was widely disseminated prior to the Second World War. It was the early 20th Century version of “fake news.” (A good book on this subject is Paranoid Apocalypse by Steven Katz.)

Homosexuals were another convenient scapegoat. One of the last volleys in the battle between Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross was a bizarre libel trial in which a conservative MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, used the courts to promote conspiracy theories about British soldiers losing the Great War because they were being seduced by German Jewish men and women on the homefront were becoming lesbians. He claimed he knew of a“Black Book” in which the Germans kept a list of 47,000 sex perverts so they could blackmail prominent English politicians and generals into committing espionage and treason.

Billing was a curious purity crusader. Tall and handsome with strong cheekbones and a confident charisma, he was “an archetypal playboy” and womanizer. He was wealthy and flashy, doing his political campaigning from an impressive yellow Rolls-Royce. The trial had a circus-like atmosphere. It played like a modern reality TV drama and included such sideshows as Lord Alfred Douglas calling his former lover, Oscar Wilde, “the greatest force for evil in the last 350 years.” The ridiculous spectacle distracted many people from the dangerous undercurrent of homophobia, xenophobia, and racism that Billing was peddling.

Today I read George Takei’s excellent article on Japanese Internment Remembrance Day. The actor, who spent part of his childhood in an internment camp because of his ethnicity, writes:

I cannot help but hear in these words terrible echoes from the past. The internment happened because of three things: fear, prejudice and a failure of political leadership… The false narrative — that there are those who belong here and those who do not — is designed precisely to divorce us from the truth that we are all here and in this together. We are an interdependent people, sharing a common bond of humanity…

The question before us, then, on Remembrance Day is a simple one: Will America remember? The internment is not a “precedent,” it is a stark and painful lesson. We will only learn from the past if we know, understand and remember it. For if we fail, we most assuredly are doomed to repeat it.

 

 

 

On Seeing Adam Ant in Concert

The author dressed as Adam Ant, circa 1983.

I lived parallel lives when I was young. I had an imitation life, a false life. In this life I was a painfully shy, slightly chubby pre-teen going through the motions of algebra classes, study hall and–horror-of-horrors– gym class. My real life was elsewhere. It began when I closed the door to my bedroom, fired up the turntable and escaped into the pages of Bop Magazine. My real peers were not the preppy pre-teens in their Gloria Vanderbilt jeans or the pimply, skinny boys who bullied me. My true peers were the friends I saw in the videos on the brand-new music television network. It is a well-kept secret that MTV was created just for me.

The greatest rock star of them all was Adam Ant. Clad in war paint and pirate gear, Adam yodeled, war whooped and pounded his way into my consciousness. Adam exuded sex appeal and a sense of freedom. His songs were a crashing mixture of electric guitars, tribal drums and yodels. He swashbuckled through his music videos as the consummate 80s hero—a suave Valentino with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek.

He posed and preened and looked down at me from every inch of my bedroom wall. When I ran out of space there, the posters expanded like vines onto the slanted surfaces that led to the ceiling. Then I rearranged the furniture to expose more wall for Adam images.

The pretty boys of Duran Duran were too polished, too fashionable, too tame. Adam had emerged from the underworld of punk music. There was something about him– something complicated, strong yet vulnerable. I sensed he was wounded, and I knew what he had overcome to get where he was.
I understood Adam Ant. He had been underestimated and under-appreciated like me and now he was living a dream– my dream. I had to go to school and be ordinary and ignored but he had created his own world. He was a pirate sailing the seas, an Indian chief, whatever he wanted to be. Adam Ant gave me hope that I could do it too.

Somewhere out there– in the fake world that others called real– was a musician who had been born Stuart Goddard. He looked very much like the man in my posters, but this Adam Ant was no more real to me than a unicorn in Brigadoon. The real Adam Ant was the one I imagined– the one my true self lived with inside MTV. So I waited, planned my escape, and kept my secret.

But predictably, I grew up, moved on, and the posters came down. I never upgraded my Adam Ant LPs to CD. The dusty records sat unplayed as I devoted my attention to my own ambitions.

For my 44th birthday my mother (who attended my first Adam Ant concert with me when I was 13) gave me a pair of tickets to go see Adam Ant perform at the beautiful Majestic Theater in downtown Detroit.

I remember quite clearly when I was a young teen that I believed my tastes would never change.  I wasn’t going to be like those boring sell-outs who stopped listening to rock music and all the obviously good things.

My tastes did change. The obviously good things for me now include Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, sociology and theology texts and classical ballet.  All of this would have sounded very dry and dull to 13-year-old me.

I was curious about the concert though. Adam Ant would not get the same unconditional devotion he would have received from my 13-year-old self. He would have to win me over.

I won’t keep you in suspense: He did.

Things have changed since 1983. The audience, for example, was made up of people my parents age.  Did I need reminding? I am, in fact, the exact same age my mother was when she took me to my first Adam Ant concert in Cleveland, Ohio.

I had twisted my ankle that day.  If you must know how, I jumped in the air to imitate a popular Toyota commercial and I came down wrong. That is the kind of thing I don’t do much of these days. When the lights went down on the crowd thirty years ago, the squealing girls and a few guys rushed forward, closer to the stage. I was not about to lose my place, and I ran too.  I remember myself standing, on a bum ankle, holding onto a bar so that I could keep my spot right up against the stage.

In all honesty, I may be melding the memory of a couple of Adam Ant concerts here.  At the first Adam Ant concert I saw, Adam tore some ligaments in his knee, and came back with it bandaged.  I don’t think I was also standing on a bum ankle for that one, but the experience of staking my claim and holding that spot on the edge of the Adam Ant stage is what I remember most vividly.

Flash forward and I am at the Jack White Theater (so named because singer Jack White bailed out the Masonic) in row 14.  Not bad.  The band is on stage, the music is swelling in preparation for Adam Ant’s grand entrance. Everyone is standing. I am hoping they will not stand through the whole show, because I just got back from tour and I am tired.

I’m tall, and before iphones I had a height advantage at concerts.  Now the woman in seat 13 H has her smartphone in the air above her head, right at my eye level. She wants to record this moment for posterity instead of living it now. I see Adam’s entrance through the phone’s screen.

Adam Ant no doubt has been sent his complimentary copies of the AARP Magazine. In a couple of years he’ll be 60.  He is a bit thicker in the waist, his movements are a bit more stiff, and when he enters in his hussar jacket and Napoleon hat– fetchingly paired with horn rimmed glasses, I might add–my first thought is that it is all a bit ridiculous for a man his age.

Adam, I will forgive you for getting older if you will forgive me.

Why is it, anyway, that drawing attention to yourself seems less and less acceptable as we age?  “When I am an old woman I shall wear Prince Charming Stripes.”

“Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.”

Go on then, Adam, rock the Napoleon hat.

1983 and 2013 seemed to fold in on each other.  I saw my younger self, clinging to the stage, breathing the rock star in, willing to brave permanent ankle damage to be close to him. (My ankle swelled up to twice its size the next day and it still bothers me sometimes when it is humid.)  Am I the same person I was then? Do I want the same things?

Modern Adam performs a seamless set, rarely stopping to talk to the audience or catch his breath. One song melts into another, and the number of familiar songs, hits, favorites is quite staggering.  As my eyes get accustomed to the new version of him, he seems to slim before my eyes.  He becomes younger. Maybe I do too.

I am surprised by the power the anthem “Kings of the Wild Frontier” still holds over me. It is not nostalgia, it is something else.  I respond to a call to create a different world with  community of Ant followers.  “Ant people are the warriors!  Ant music is our banner!”

Back in the day, he was the embodiment of my ID.  He was voicing something primal that I wanted to release, if only my youth didn’t stand in the way.  If only I could be allowed out of the prison of school, out into the world instead of having to wait.

Now I stood thinking, if only I were younger.  If only I had the energy and the freedom I had then.  The freedom, perhaps, not to worry about looking ridiculous.  (Where is my Napoleon hat?)

Was there a moment in the middle I missed?

My favorite Adam and the Ants song was “Beat My Guest.” If my parents worried about the S&M lyrics of songs like that and “Whip in My Valise,” they never said anything to me about it. (My father did balk at the idea of my wearing an Adam Ant t-shirt with the words “pure sex” on it.)  The songs weren’t really about bondage to me, I just liked their energy. My friend Jenny and I made up parody lyrics to “Beat My Guest.”  I don’t remember them, except for the line “fish that fly” which I found myself wanting to shout out at the concert.

I notice something about Adam’s signature costume that never occurred to me before.  That combination of colonial military jacket and native American garb is a bit weird when you think about it. The colonizer and the colonized in one persona.

“Oh no, no the ants invasion.”

Did you know that there were European settlers who admired the Native communities so much that they tried to defect?  Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his people from fleeing to Native villages. Pilgrims passed laws to prevent their men from copying Native fashions.  They made it illegal for men to wear their hair long. Benjamin Franklin once said, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

The fairly unconventional definition of “savage” as “irresistible” begs the question: What was it about Native life that was so appealing that Europeans felt they had to enact laws to maintain their social hold?

“I feel beneath the white there is a red skin suffering from centuries of taming.”

Maybe the defectors looked something like Adam Ant.

Just read this today: “A great example of low theory can be found in Peter Linebaugh’s and Marcus Redliker’s monumental account of the history of opposition to capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, The Many-Headed Hydra… Their book traces what they call ‘the struggles for alternative ways of life’…In stories about piracy…they detail the modes of colonial and national violence that brutally stamped out all challenges to middle-class power and that cast proletarian rebellion as disorganized, random and apolitical.”

“A new royal family a wild nobility. We are the family.”

Perhaps a sociologist would read more into a working class boy’s appropriation of the colonial officer’s regalia than I care to. I just liked it. The Ant costume pushed a lot of subconscious buttons.

Did you know you can buy a “Lady Adam Ant” costume on Ebay for $105? I put mine together from thrift store cast offs.

I saw an interview where Adam Ant said he realized he had arrived when he met The Queen. “Adam, I did not recognize you without your makeup,” said Her Majesty.  The son of a house cleaner, and the Queen knew his name.

Pinned up against that stage, I remember dreaming. If I could only lose 40 pounds, I thought, I could be worthy of someone like him.

I skipped lunch, put my lunch money in a box, and saved up for records and pieces of clothing to imitate the Adam Ant look. I choreographed an aerobic dance routine to “Ant Music.” It was an insanely fast piece of music for an aerobic dance routine. I lost 40 pounds, but I never felt Adam Ant worthy.

If only I’d appreciated how beautiful I was when I was young. In my twenties, I was as physically attractive as I would ever be, and yet I never experienced that moment of feeling Adam Ant worthy.

Then again, Adam-Ant-worthy is not how I measure my attractiveness or status these days.

So this was my experience of the concert. It was hardly a review, more about me than about Adam. Totally unfair to him after he went to all the trouble of sweating it out for two hours.  The thing is, reporting on what happened on the stage would not capture the experience.  I couldn’t share the moment with you, even if I’d filmed it all with my iphone and uploaded it to Youtube.

I can tell you something about that awkward 13 year-old girl though. She wanted so much from life.  The music of Adam Ant sparked her imagination because she was a dreamer.  She longed for deep human connection, but her shy temperament drove her off on her own to read, to reflect and to imagine, to create other worlds in her mind.

I have not changed.

Thanks, Adam.

An Open Letter to the Old Boyfriend I Couldn’t Find on Facebook

Yeah, I’ve looked you up a bunch of times.  How is it that you’re the only person on earth without any social media accounts?  And would it kill you to have a less common name?

I’ve wanted to reach out to you, but even if I knew your address, writing a real letter with a stamp and all that would be too much of a “thing.”  I don’t want a “thing,” I just wonder about you.

You wrote me a letter– a real one with a stamp and an airmail sticker– almost twenty years ago.  Could it be that long?

I never answered.  It came at a bad time when I was busy falling apart over a life that had nothing to do with you and, when I think of it now, nothing to do with me either.

I did want to reply.  But by the time I had the power to say what I wanted I had a new address and it seemed as if too much time had passed.  Now it’s really passed.  Can you believe it?

I don’t suppose you ever type my name into a search engine– just to see?

In case you did and you found your way here: I can’t believe “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred was our song.  Yes.  I’m talking about you.

Losing My Religion

“It is an age of nervousness… the growing malady of the day, the physiological feature of the age,” said a New York Tribune editorial.  “Nowhere are the rush and hurry and overstrain of life more marked than in this much-achieving Nation…  Inventions, discoveries, achievements of science all add to the sum of that which is to be learned, and widen the field in which there is work to be done.  If knowledge has increased, we should take more time for acquiring it…  For it would be a sorry ending of this splendid age of learning and of labor to be known as an age of unsettled brains and shattered nerves.”  The article was written in 1895.

There is one thing that you can count on throughout history.  People are nostalgic for an earlier age, one that was less busy, one in which young people took the time to read books, and when people still believed in that “old time religion.”

As for reading, that golden age in America, when every person had his nose in a book is as much a myth as the memory of an age when no one felt pressured and rushed. 

“If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent,” Paul Collins wrote in Sixpence House.  “There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. We see their accumulated pages, and marvel – what readers they were! But were they? Back in the 1920s, booksellers assessed the core literary population of the United States, the people who could be relied on to buy books with a serious content, at about 200,000 people. This, in a country of 100 million: a ratio of about 500 to 1. It was this minuscule subset spread out over a three-thousand-mile swath, this group of people who could fit into a few football stadiums, that thousands of books released each year had to compete for. Perhaps the ratio has gone higher since then. You see, literary culture is perpetually dead and dying; and when some respected writer discovers and loudly pro­claims the finality of this fact, it is a forensic marker of their own decomposition. It means that they have artistically expired within the last ten years, and that they will corporeally expire within the next twenty.”

Which brings us to that old time religion.  I was reading on the blog Made in America today an article by Claude Fisher, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.  His article, Faith Endures, opens with a scene from 1907 when a group of ministers met with president Theodore Roosevelt to discuss the crisis of declining church attendance.  Yet church attendance did not decline, and was booming in the 1950s.  Fisher describes a complex history of Americans relationship to church-going from the nation’s founding- the good old days when most of the founding fathers were “unchurched” to the present day.  The history is not a straight line (oh but we love to see history as linear!) Rather church attendance has waxed and waned.

“Since time immemorial, it seems, people have described – some have decried – the loss of that ‘old time religion.’” Fisher writes.  “Modern scholars call it secularization. With the coming of science, industry, and urbanization, faith had to crumble, they argued. There must have been a time when everyone believed deeply and that time has presumably passed.”

The article presents a graph that shows a surprisingly consistent level of church attendance throughout our history.

Importantly, we see this consistency in expressions of faith even though the early surveys include many respondents who had been born around the end of the 19th century and in the later surveys these elderly folks are replaced by respondents who had been born in the 1970s and ‘80s. Swapping the World War I generation for Gen X’ers hardly changed average levels of faith.

Faith among Americans endures, surprisingly so to many casual observers — even to professional observers…

Had the ministers who visited Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 known that a century later this would be the level of American faith, would they have been less alarmed? I suspect not.  Except when the evidence is too overwhelming — for instance, during the Great Awakenings around 1800 or during the 1950s — people just assume that faith is one of those things we are always in the process of losing.

So the loss of those old time values and a simpler way of life have always been and will always be decried even as things remain, to quote that great thinker David Byrne “same as it ever was.”

Talking Heads – Once In A Lifetime by hushhush112