Responsibility, and the Dark Side of Being Fancy

The expérience grande continues, gentle readers, as we struggle to turn things in by certain due dates. I will be your host for the day, and I would like to know what you think about certain issues. Extra fancy issues.

We here at Elevennames are, to a (wo)man, relatively fancy. We have individual pursuits (that we mock each other for in private) that we demand to be of high caliber. We enjoy expensive sandwiches. I enjoy fokesy indie freak-folk, and would jump for joy if I heard that Jose Gonzales would do a cover of, say, Massive Attack. Ha ha, excuses to link, how I love thee (also, bonus points for having some of the most needlessly "I am showing off to the internet" analysis I've ever read in the comments). We are each pithy little autodidacts in our respective areas of fondness, holding well-studied and extremely personal degrees in junk we enjoy. And there's nothing wrong with this, because, as we discussed during that week of debauchery we call Hedonism Week (which was oddly prescient of this whole Elliot Spitzer thing, no?) it is OKAY TO LIKE TO DO THINGS THAT ARE FUN.

But there is a big, angry bird lurking on the other side of this coin. A big angry bird that wants to show off to you, and never! Stop! Talking! About! Itself! Vide ghoulish semi-wit Sebastian Horsely. His youtubes are unpopular! He has written a book! He has visited many whores! He has a sort of costume! He wrote a book named after a T. Rex album! He is very fond of himself, and wishes you would be, too. I am not sure of other people's interpretations, but I find the man grating. Like two grates, grating against each other, while another grate watches, from the shadows. Smoking.

Very grating indeed.

Too often, I feel, we fall in love with the exterior of something, the big famous bits that make us ignore flaws. People love Voltaire when he's zinging the government, less so when he's zinging them. Atlantic Ocean hater Oscar Wilde is great when he's young and speaking endlessly of himself, but less so after his stint in prison (though he did get that awesome teardrop tattoo and join the Bloods) and he started caring about others. Self reflection is not, strictly speaking, what is lusted after, unless we can control what we reflect - we seek not a mirror of truth, but one that contorts our own Dorian Grayish visage into something that we can tolerate. Indulgence is well and good, but it's a razor's width away from delusion.

Which brings us back to Horsley. And his badly-written adulators (as opposed to me, who I guess am a badly written detractor). Listening to the man talk is like one of those anti-drug commercials starring Peter O'Toole's boring younger twin.

This is not a tyrade against dandies, nor against dandyism as a whole. I fancy myself one (more of a raconteur, really, but that's beside the point), so it distresses me to think that what I think of Horsley, other people think of me. Which is terrible! I mean, I can understand when some people dislike me for a good reason (such as saying that they are hungry ghosts, or dead!), and for that I apologize. To be so consciously unconsciously offensive, though, is mystifying.

Ultimately, I suppose it's merely self-image that I am concerned with, an ouroborosian cycle of trying to divorce myself from my own negative qualities. I do not want to become so self-interested, however, that the only thing I can talk about is myself - I am not universe, no world replete with hidden wonders. To assume that I am, in my opinion, is to become the most dreadful kind of boor, the conversationalist who can only speak of their own novelty. Unalloyed with seriousness, compassion, intelligence, or responsibility, self indulgence and general frippery are merely the pastimes of those faeculum-class of human beings that seek political office. Hedonism requires responsibility in order to make it worthwhile - otherwise it's merely flash and glitz with nothing beside, a fading firework, gone before it's even night.