Taste – good, dubious, and lacking
Greetings faithful readers,
As cold weather and low skies make the northern hemisphere a gloomier place, I’d like to take this opportunity to inform you that I am in Hawaii at the moment. This isn’t, by any means a choice I would have made on my own. I like cold, dark, gloom. Ideal lighting for a midafternoon abduction and dismembering of a used car salesman.
Hawaii, on the other hand has little to recommend it. After a few hundred years, even the wittiest of undead humor grows thin (“My last meal disagreed with me. So I ate him. Har Har.” Aaargh!).
And yet, here I am, trying to avoid direct sunlight in a place where the sun seems to be permanently smiling on beautiful tanned bodies. Not a place where the undead walk joyfully. And the humidity is just hell on zombies – they get moldier and riper. As you can imagine, I am here by invitation of the Big Island’s royal ghosts. I’m currently sitting deep inside a natural cave formed by a lava floe, and my wireless access is patchy (what does it say about the world when you can actually get internet acces in a CAVE?).
Being here has, once more, gotten me thinking about the relationship between money and taste – mainly because I’m surrounded by tourists who were able to afford the price of admission, so presumably have at least some disposable income.
Most people hear the word taste and equate it with money. Good taste seems to be something that everyman is not allowed to have. Now, while I will be the first to admit that it is in short supply, and would like nothing better than to say that yes, it is the exclusive domain of those wha are well-to-do, I simply can’t do so with a good conscience (and before the moralists out there point it out, yes, I am a multiple mass murderer. But it doesn’t affect my conscience, since they are only humans. Lying about this or anything else, however, would be beneath me).
Now, while I’ve often been accused of being a snob about money, the truth is that I’m a snob about taste. I would much rather spend my time with the ghost of a penniless maid who’s spent the intervening years haunting a library than even the most aristocratic vampire whose idea of elegance is a pimped Cadillac Escalade. Hell, I’d rather spend time with the Old Monster than this particular aristocrat. Earthy as the monster is, she is at least honest and unpretentious.
To those with even a modicum of taste, the above will seem obvious, a waste of a few hundred words. But those of us who are here at the Aikanaka Reunión and Bloodbath, there is a single self-evident truth, a new first law of everything, if you will. One that, when broken, will cause gods of the underworld to cry: Zombies. Flowered shirts. NO.
I have seen things here that no undead was ever meant to see.
Regards,
H
What to wear?
The age-old question of what to wear seems to come around with depressing regularity and seems to be exacerbated twice a year when designers put out their new Spring and Autumn collections. I’ve always been a bit leery of these developments for various reasons.
The first reason has to do with the fact that, since I lived in Paris in the final days of the monarchy, no excesses of fashion or decadence will ever impress me again. Even now, hundreds of years later, I see cues from the court of Loius XVI being timidly revived. Gold embroidery one season, pleated sleeves the next. Mortals today are such wimps. Old King Luey’s retinue used to use it all at the same time. You could say they lost their heads when it came to fashion.
The second is that, being male, I’ve been a bit less victimized by this trend. Despite moving in the best of circles and having to be on top of my game, I have found that about nine-tenths of my wardrobe survives unscathed from one year to the next. There are some things that just can’t be worn next season, but they usually only lie fallow for a year or two before they can be shown in public again.
But the main reason is that the kind of place where I buy my work clothes has only recently begun to advertise their collections.
How so? Well, it’s pretty simple, actually. Most of my interaction with mortals, whether alone or at social events, tends to be of the spattering kind. You would be surprised at the amount of blood that a human body can drop on clothes and furniture before the heart stops, and before the bits are ready to eat. Before the invention of plastic sheeting (a gift from whatever powers look over the undead), my house was a hell of layers upon layers of waxed canvas. Ugh.
A similar thing comes up with clothing. It used to be that I would buy a year’s supply of blacksmith’s aprons every time I was in town, and discard them as they became soiled. As you can imagine, wearing nothing other than this vest often left me in an undignified poistion, and was completely unsuitable for entertaining the neighborhood ghouls.
This sad situation changed in the second half of the 19th century, especially after the publication of the Marquis of Sade’s delightful little books (say what you may about his sexual tendencies, but his knowledge of human pain was sound). Small, private shops began springing up in every major capital where leather goods with a little more panache were available for a price. While most mortals assumed that the shops catered to the cruel and perverted among the aristocracy, the truth is that they would never have survived living off princes and high-end prostitues alone.
Most of their trade went to the vampires, zombies and ghouls that were so much more common in the Victorian era than they aare now. While living in gaslight London, I even met an evil mummy who’d escaped from the British museum, who’d dress only in the leather clothing supplied by a certain small establishment in whitechapel – he insisted that getting the blood out of his bandages was murder.
Which brings us to today, and the glories of having entire warehouse trade shows filled with leather clothing specifically designed to be comfortable while inflicting pain – and mortals still think that they’re the ones doing the buying. There are more or less dignified takes on each theme, of course, but therein lies the wearer’s taste. I guarantee, you will see the entire range at any party worth its salt.
Before I go, I leave you with a warning about the dangers and pitfalls of the season. Latex, no matter how sinister and shiny, is not in this season, and, if I had my way, never would be.
And as for yellow plastic raincoats, well, while they may be practical, they are something only the Old Monster would ever stoop to wearing. Shudder.
Happy hunting,
Baron Hieronymous
