Twiggy: Perfectly You

 

Just a wisp. Short and skinny. A boy’s haircut. Awkward poses. Lesley Hornby. A most unlikely fashion model yet perfect for a time and place that loved to smash the parapets. Who wants to be ‘normal’?

Twiggy by name and by nature. O those Margaret Keane eyes. It was her very anomality that made you notice how much fun she was, how different from steely-eyed glamazons glaring from Vogue covers. Fewer pretensions in a Britain too poor for a class war. The candor of her gaze expelled irony. We could join her at the party.

Carnaby Street. She strolls by without a watch, a purse or purpose. Up for the next laugh, celebrating her good fortune, unencumbered and unfettered, swinging now to a future so deeply in love with itself.

And of herself, she said, “I always describe her, 60s Twiggy, as my little friend who sits on my shoulder.” How wonderful to stroll the leafy lanes of life knowing that you have been, all along, indisputably, irrefutably, perfectly, you.

 

#twiggy #lesleyhornby #carnaby street #fashion #1960s #1967 #davidbailey #theboyfriend #documentart #london #davidbowie

Amanda Lear: A Riddle inside an Enigma Wrapped in a Sequin Gown

 

Was she born a man? A woman? When? 1939? 1941? Where? Saigon?  Hong Kong? Singapore? Switzerland?  And why is her voice so deep?

Who was/is/will be Amanda Lear? 

Questions without answers. Yet there she is – beautiful, vivacious, easy to laugh, rushing to the next party, posing for Salvador Dali, hanging with the Beatles and Stones. She models for prominent designers. She’s a cover girl on fashion magazines.

David Bowie pays for her singing lessons and off she goes to become a big star in France and Germany. A disco queen. A professional muse.  She paints canvas. Dali paints her. She poses for Playboy.

So easily bored. Amanda writes songs. She has lovers. She is a gay icon. She doesn’t belong in the 1960s/70s/80s/90s because she has no use for time. 

The real Amanda can only be seen by moonlight in a patina of pixie dust, sprinkled by a wayward nymph on her lazy way to nowhere.  

The best mystery enjoys unending immunity.

Adam Diment: A Dandy in Aspic

 A kinky, cool mod flare that is outrageously entertaining….If you appreciate clever plotting, plenty of excitement, sex at its most uninhibited, a dollop or two of explicit sadism, Adam Diment is a name to remember. – Publishers’ Weekly, 1967

Adam heads for the sky

The author as book cover

Adam Diment’s greatest creation was himself. Whereas Ian Fleming liked to

pose with a firearm now and then, just for a bemused homage, Diment seemed to have fallen full-born from the pages of his own spy novels.

There he was, draped in scarfs, tall, long blonde hair, leaning against a sports car, with a detached attitude that suggested drug-based dissolution. The fact that it was confected and stage managed only added to his appeal.

The young women who appeared throughout his promotional photos were, one might conjecture, paid for their services, including cab fare. That too is immaterial.

Always the women

Adam D: Partius Maximus

His four spy novels, The Dolly Dolly Spy (1967), The Great Spy Race (1968), The Bang Bang Birds (1968), and Think, Inc. (1971), are in and out of print – mostly out. But like many things 60s, he’s coming back.

After his last novel, he vanished. Poof! Never to be seen again. “He’s in Zurich!” “He’s in London.” “He’s dead. “There was talk of criminal proceedings; that he changed his name; that he became bored with fame. Who was he?

Oddly, the story of Adam Diment has no protagonist, no hero, villain or love-interest. There’s no linear plot development or character exposition. No forward movement. Rather, with his billowing sleeves, satin vests, and bevy of hippy chicks, Time has left him unscathed. He’s a dandy in aspic. 

Tara Browne: a little life rounded with a sleep



...our little life...
rounded with a sleep...

Guinness Heir, 21, Is Killed In London Sportscar Crash

LONDON, Dec 18 (1966) - Tara Browne, 21-year-old heir to the Guinness brewery fortune and a leader of London’s “mod” social set, was killed early today when his sportscar smashed into a parked truck in the South Kensington district.

- New York Times

There are some people whose purpose in life — in a cultural sense — is to offer context to the lives of their contemporaries. They are rarely catalysts for action; rather, they provide a kind of mood music or a subtext for movement. Tara Browne (1945-1966) was like that.

The short, happy life of Tara Browne survives in print and pictures for what he represents, not what he did (although his twenty-one years were not without merit and accomplishment). And what he represents is that burst of color and noise and fashion that ran amok through the Carnaby district of London, from about 1964 – 1970, give or take.



Melted into thin air

Perhaps he represents a little more. By its very nature, ‘Pop’ doesn’t do anything, doesn’t feed the hungry or house the poor. It just is, like Tara. No creativity required, no mesmeric eloquence or moon-lit beauty: you just have to be there in the right place in the right clothes. That’s it – but it’s not that easy because we only know where there is in retrospect. Tara seemed to know.

Browne  spooned some of his inheritance into a fashion store called Dandy (on King’s Road) which sold clothes made by his tailoring business. He also had a failing marriage, kids and girlfriends.



A brief, happy life

He was a little bit Edie Sedgwick, a tiny touch of Porfirio Rubirosa, a dash of David Bailey, a pinch of Sir Guy Grand — with a lime wedge of poor-little-rich-kid. He was well liked. When Tara died, John Lennon wrote about it in ‘A Day in the Life’ and the Pretty Things recorded the more literal Death Of A Socialite’…Every little bit counts.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It’s been suggested that when Shakespeare wrote those words — almost the final words he ever wrote — he was saying that all art is ephemeral, nothing more than thin air. He was wrong of course (as his own longevity proves — and he knew in his heart): art, just like a person, endures if it — or they — touches the Truth.

Whatever smartly-dressed Tara Browne discovered long ago - under a white Mary Quant umbrella -dancing in a warm rain down Kingly Court - is a mystery - but it must have been some wonderful, deathless, fashionable Truth.

The Prisoner: Say Farewell to Number Six

I read the news today....oh boy...

"Popular culture is the collection of ideas or memes that are popular, well-liked or common and create the prevailing culture.

"Popular culture is the views and perspectives most strongly represented and accepted within a society." - Wikipedia

"What we now call the 1960s began with JFKs Inaugural and ended with Nixon's resignation...roughly."

- I. M. Clarke, in an isolated moment of insight


It's fitting that we begin this blog on 60s pop culture a few days after the death of Number Six, aka 'The Prisoner', aka Patrick McGoohan (1928 - 2009). Thesis have been about this TV program (which lived for just 17 episodes), trying to unravel—what TV Guide suggested—is "a weird, enigmatic drama, a Kafkaesque allegory about the individual's struggle in the modern age."

Very '68.

Which TV programs of today stem from The Prisoner's family tree? What of music? And fashion? As Ray Davies once wrote: "Where have all the swinging Londoners gone? Ossie Clark and Mary Quant. And what of Christine Keeler, John Stephen and Alvaro, where on earth did they all go? Mr. Fish and Mr. Chow, I wonder where they all are now."

We're only 'here' because we were once 'there'. But be careful as we consider 'pop'.

Wikipedia defines 'reminisce' this way: "Indulge in enjoyable recollection of past events." Sounds like a dead end. Why don't we breathe fresh air and 'remember' 60s pop with an eye on 2009.

So long pal...

Let's invite Emma Peel and The Haight and Matt Helm and Lava Lamps and Nehru Jackets and Jim Morrison and Ken Kesey and Mimi Farina and Ram Dass and all of them in for a fondue dinner. In fact, I wonder where they are right now.

Last thought to Ray Davies. "And I wonder what became of all the rockers and the mods. I hope they're making it, they all have steady jobs."