What is style anyway? Styles, brands, and quality

For me, a person's style is not just their choices about what to put in and what to leave out, but much more the way that they do it, how they move, what kind of music suits them, what their natural speed is, the way they make me feel as a person. It does include their choices of what techniques to use or not use. But those technical choices aren't a big part of it. Certainly not big, compared to the differences in feel that exist between people who use exactly the same range of techniques at a similar level of skill.

In the context of social dancing, it makes sense to me to use vague descriptive terms like 'dynamic' or 'soft' or 'calm' or 'inventive' or 'spare' or 'quiet' or 'exciting' or 'busy'. I don't find it very useful to give styles names. That makes more sense if you're talking about 'style' in the sense of a brand or a product, like Vivienne Westwood, but not really for the kind of thing I have in mind.

My very favourite partners have individual styles of their own, so the whole concept is a bit meaningless. Everyone has more in common with some others, than other others. I could group them in families, like the sounds of different orchestras. Overall, they definitely tend to share certain techniques and habits, but I wouldn't really say it goes beyond what anyone needs for a good level of competence in social dancing. There's all sorts of variation in the kind of trivia people like to set up as shibboleths, naturally. But people who haven't got some compatible version of those techniques and habits, plus or minus trivia, just aren't good social dancers, so the concept of style is not much help.

What I'm saying here is, it doesn't make sense to me to put something into your dance because you think it's part of a 'style' that you're trying to cultivate. The only good and sufficient reason for doing an enrosque is that you really, really want to. If it was me, I don't think I'd bother, but if you think they're super cool, that's an adequate reason to put the work in to get them right. Otherwise there isn't one.

There is such a thing as a brand name. For example, you can associate some set of techniques and habits with some place in Buenos Aires or some set of people. That just does the mundane job that brand names do. Brand names have a function, they're there so you can identify, locate and purchase something you want. Vivienne Westwood, for example, has a style and a brand. The brand allows you to find the style, if you want it, by asking the attendant in Selfridges where it is. You'll get a product that looks a certain way and has a more-or-less-known provenance and quality. Business done, everybody's happy. But if the 'enrosque' outfit doesn't suit you and demands unfeasible underwear, you don't buy it just because it's got the label. You buy it if you know it's useful or believe it's beautiful, or both.

There's also 'style' as a euphemism for quality.

If I say that I saw a couple dancing like an arse with six legs, you could call that an antisocial style, but I may not think they even have a style - they might, or they might not, it's probably hard to tell - I just think they danced selfishly and rudely, and looked like a pair of halfwits. Calling it a 'style' seems like making an excuse.

But if you are trying to persuade someone to improve their dancing by not kicking people so much, one possible way around resistance is to present it as exploration of a new 'style' rather than an improvement in quality. It's a useful lie, a polite lie, and perhaps it's a necessary lie. It really, really does help sometimes. But it's a way of avoiding saying that they're incompetent at the thing they think they're doing, namely social dancing.

As for grouping techniques together and labelling them as style, well, I think that if we really want to talk about technique, we're better off just doing it directly. If I say that someone leads with the point of his shoulder, is a bit tippy, and has no embrace, or if I say someone else has a grip of death and poor balance, leads vaguely, and wrestles the woman around turns, I'm saying they are hard to dance with, not that I don't like their respective styles.

The most these things have to do with style is that you'll tend to catch one disease rather than another depending on what you've unsuccessfully attempted to learn, how, and who from. They are technical issues. Actually having a style in any meaningful way is not something that comes into the picture until after these issues have been fixed.

I have stood in the middle of a conversation in which my partner and the partner of the lady behind me really did start taking the piss out of each other about style, or at least about musical interpretation. But that kind of thing doesn't happen a lot.

There's style, there's branding, and there's quality. They all mean something, they're related, they quite often stand in for each other, especially when we talk about them. But they're not, in my view, the same.

[Edit: some obscure and unexpected interaction between my drafts file and Blogger has bumped this post down to a few weeks before I actually posted it ... fixing]

The Wrong Question

Arlene (LondonTango) has an "Ask Arlene" feature where people send in the questions that are on their minds, and she gives some sort of an answer and then throws it to the floor.

The last question was "How good do I have to be for a good dancer to want to dance with me"?

The answers are ok, you can go and read them there. I started to write a comment, but it turned into an essay. So I put it here.

On one level this seems to me like a completely reasonable, natural, and practical question, and I entirely sympathise with it. On another level it seems, like most questions that are interesting at all, to be The Wrong Question.

It does work like that, up to a point. As you get better at dancing, people feel able and willing to dance with you, who weren't before. If you eliminate some quirk that makes you difficult to dance with, you're going to get more dances and they're likely to go better. The goal is to have fun, and to a certain degree it's more fun if your partner is better at it, so it makes sense to want good dancers to ask you, and it makes sense to assume that they want you to be good. It's also more fun if you are better at it, but I'll come back to that.

I feel sympathetic towards the person wondering whether it is actually feasible to make the next step up, what that step would be, how long it's likely to take, and whether, even if she does, it will do her any good at all. Is there anything on the other side of all that effort - effort to be made in an unknown direction, by unknown means - that will make it worth it?

Everybody talks about what makes men good to dance with, but hardly anyone talks about what makes women good to dance with, as opposed to merely inoffensive, and you can easily get the impression that either there's no such thing as quality for women, beyond looking good, or that it just doesn't matter very much. What it consists of is generally a mystery. You may well wonder whether it's worth sticking around, what exactly your contribution is meant to be, and what on earth you are meant to do next.

On top of that, it's very easy to waste a lot of time going down wrong tracks, so I sympathise with the writer's "When?."

If I were trying to pick apart the question, I might point out that there's no general consensus as to what "good" means. People like me and my friend tangocommuter and many others might like it if there were one, and we may sometimes write as though we think there is. And maybe there is, either at some very broad worldwide level or at some narrow local level of people who think and talk about these things, or maybe both. But among the general population of dancers in London, there just isn't. There isn't anything remotely approaching one. I'm not saying there won't be one some day, but there isn't one now.

However, if the questioner were sitting with me or with Arlene at a milonga, we might very well ask "Which good dancer?" And she might reply "That one over there." In that case, the chances are good that we'd have some practical hints. For example:

"You need to be able to do close embrace properly, and work on your connection, and do something to show that you're interested in dancing that style, like always defaulting to close instead of defaulting to open as you were taught."
"It doesn't matter, he's really shy and only dances with people he knows from class. Try chatting to him."
"You need to be able to do a V-embrace. He can't lead square-on."
"You need to be able to do a square-on embrace. He can't lead in a V."
"Try changing your clothes so he knows you want to dance that (other) style."
"You need to stop doing that 'ornament' where you rub your shoe on the man's trousers, he hates hates hates that!"
"You need to have totally neutral steering and be able to deliver everything likely to get thrown at you in social dancing."
"You need to be a safe and accurate follower, and then just chat to him, then wander off for a while and give him a chance to watch you. If it doesn't work just cross him off the list for three months and try again."
"You need to do all of the above and listen to the music more."
"Just ask him, you're a reasonable dancer and he likes to be asked, and so many good dancers ask him he doesn't need to bother."
"You're over half his age, and you don't come in a colour he likes. Forget it."

What I'm saying is, it's not a silly question.

But when I say it's the Wrong Question, I mean it's a question that's directed at a solving a problem that might be better solved by the answer to some other question. It's a Wrong Question I've asked myself more than once, but I've only ever answered it with different ones.

For example:

Is my own pride and satisfaction a sufficient reason for me to want to dance well, rather than badly?

Does this activity, as it is now, add something good to my life that I want to keep?

Because, if the answer to those is no, I am not doing myself justice and I should switch to something that does satisfy me as a person. If the answer is yes, then who asks me to dance doesn't cease to matter, but it does become something I look at in a different way.

I can use whatever motivation there is lying around to get me through difficult times when I'm doing something I want to do. If I feel inspired by someone in particular, I can try to put myself in a place where I'll truly appreciate him and be able to give him back as much fun as he gives me. There's nothing wrong with that. It's natural and it makes sense, and it's great motivation to look for improvements and try to solve the mysteries.

But I don't have control over whether he wants to dance with me. That's not up to me to decide, and I can't necessarily change it by dancing well.

If I do dance well, I'll get dances with others who dance well too. I'll be able to give and recieve more pleasure. But this is not a mechanical thing. It's not like passing some sort of exam. As I do it for longer, and the average quality goes up, another dimension starts to matter, too; those who I have known for a while now, and who also care about me.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Sex and Suits

Yesterday my sister took me to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the musical), because she had some tix and knows that I like Very Silly Things. We enjoyed it a lot. She thought the script was clichéd, I thought it was brilliant. She's the one with the degree in English Literature.

I hadn't seen the film, so all I knew about it was that it was about drag queens on a bus in the Australian desert. I won't trouble you with the plot, which was rather touching.

But I was fascinated by the three main characters, or at least, by their choice of clothes, which is what it's all about. They all wear women's clothes at least some of the time, but in very distinct, individual ways. I found myself thinking about what function the clothes performed for each of them. Not why each of them wanted that job done - motivations are unknowable, and and I don't think it really makes sense to try to explain them - but what job the clothes were doing. And how their decisions when they put on women's clothing might be similar to, or different from, my decisions when, being a woman, I simply get dressed.

None of this stuff is explained in the musical, and I don't suppose for a moment it is in the movie. It's three characters doing what they do. This is just what turned up in my head while I was watching it.

Transsexual Bernadette wears women's clothes all the time, and very elegant clothes, too. Perhaps rather formal and old-fashioned; and always specifically, positively, unambiguously female. Whether she actually "is" a woman seems like a question too big, or perhaps too trivial, to answer. It seemed to me that the function of the clothes was to give other people the cue to treat and perceive her as female, and my instinctive reaction to the character is to respect that wish, at least to the extent of using female pronouns.

Wearing clothes as Bernadette does, with close attention to both their social meaning and their visual unity, is how you get elegance. I can only do this by keeping it very simple, because I don't spend enough time or money on it or treat it as a high enough priority to do anything complex. I try, now and then, but I'd never do it all the time like she does.

Bisexual (or maybe just straight) Tick wears women's clothes as an artistic medium. He's a drag artist, and that's it. When he's not on stage, he mostly dresses like a fashionable man; he doesn't wear women's clothes to walk down the street. Nor does he look much like a woman when he wears them on stage. The job being done seems to be artistic. I wondered if in, say, 1708, when everyone's clothes included more elaboration, the same artistic ambition could have been fulfilled without cross-dressing at all. But I'm not sure about this.

Wearing clothes for their artistic effect is something I do from time to time, just not very well, because I haven't got the trained visual sense. Again, success at it requires effort and time and genuine interest. It really is an artistic endeavour beyond just going for what feels right. I can see that cross-dressing is a fascinating artistic thing to do, if that's what inspires you, and of course fashion designers, and women putting together their own outfits, borrow masculine details all the time for visual effect. I have a very smart coat with a masculine cut and militaresque epaulettes; it looks great on me.

The third character, indifferently called Adam or Felicia, was more of a puzzle to me. He's a homosexual man and has no interest in women at all, not even artistically that I could see. He dresses, more or less, like a glamour model; a female one when on stage, or when up to what he considers mischief, and a male one off. My strongest impression was of artificiality, some sort of doubleness I couldn't see the shape of. His stage clothes have all sorts of female accoutrements but don't actually look in any way female; as can happen with haute couture. He doesn't wish, aspire, or pretend for a moment to be anything but male. That, I was sure, was not what the clothes were doing.

So I wasn't sure what they actually were doing. Maybe nothing more than appealing to someone whose taste I don't share. But a detail that struck me was that when, in dressing for a night out, he wishes to be a little naughtier than usual, he expresses that by putting on a bra. I've occasionally expressed the same feeling by leaving off the bra. The bra is a physical necessity for neither of us: I am about equally comfortable with or without. Therefore, both of us must be wearing one, or not, for its social meaning and visual effect, not for any physical job it performs; essentially for the same reason, but with opposite starting points and opposite conclusions.

I think it was that bit that really fried my brain for the evening.

What is it that makes clothes male or female?

If I were to take a large piece of cloth, fasten it at each shoulder, and tie a girdle round the middle, I would be wearing something that would be regarded as female clothing anywhere in western Europe at any time in the last thousand years. I wouldn't necessarily be well, or fully, dressed; but I would not be cross-dressing - certainly not if I took another piece and wrapped it around head and shoulders as a shawl.

If I were a man and wrapped myself in the same two pieces of cloth in the same way, the same would not be true, or at least not clearly, unless we went back at least another five hundred years. I would be not just eccentrically dressed, but additionally disguised as a woman.

Why?

What would a Martian make of all this?

Luckily, Anne Hollander has written a rather good book about that very subject - at least the history of the why, if not the Martian - called Sex and Suits. She argues from the history of European art and dress that men's clothing is creative, dynamic, and modern, whereas women's clothing is extremely conservative and has only approached modernity in very recent years. Along the way she gives us the exceedingly interesting history of the male suit, which I now see in a new light and with far more appreciative eyes. I think I'll have to read it again. She also curated Fabric of Vision - dress and drapery in painting, which was fascinating but sadly is no longer on the National Gallery's website. I wish she would do a lecture or something about Priscilla and put it on the web.

Anyway, I came home with the feeling that there were great mysteries in everyday things, and that the contents of my wardrobe and drawers were suddenly written in Linear A. I have no idea what they mean any more. The force of habit should tide me over until my illusions come back.

The Truth and Michael Schumacher

From the drafts file. I agreed with Mike Atherton:

"Those who line up to crucify Hamilton are doing so not because he has failed to live up to his own standards but because he has failed to live up to the expectations of others that have been created for him by a pushy father, an agency keen to milk the holy cow for all it is worth and a Formula One team for whom disappointment is measured in millions of dollars rather than the tarnishing of an image. Everything that Hamilton has done on the racetrack has projected a different image, so the reaction to the events in Australia says more about our gullibility than it does about him. "

In a previous life I wrote an internet column about F1 racing, which included a sort-of race report and a sort-of field guide to the drivers of the time (this was for a few years from 1997.) I was young, I was bored, I had finished my education and was wondering what I was meant to do next. I was exploring the concept of actually daring to have a real opinion on something rather than just go along with the essay-writing game. I'd also made a curious discovery; if you write down the bleeding obvious, and you write it well, people laugh.

Being profoundly ignorant of engineering - though it awes and delights me - I largely stuck to the human side.

My approach was very simple. I watched the race on television, and usually the qualifying, rather carefully. I watched the press conferences and grid interviews. I also referred, for a bit of extra colour, to Italian, German, and occasionally French magazines and newspapers.

I almost ignored the British press. I might look at what they said, but not until after I'd written at least the first or second draft. As a consequence, their specific mythological world-view didn't influence me much, while I made good use of the equally deranged but, crucially, foreign insights of the magnificently bonkers Gazzetta dello Sport and the Not Safe For Work Bild. (Which has toned down its internet front page a lot since those days. The last time I looked, they only had a video of the woman who jumped into the polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo, and she was fully clothed - though admittedly sopping wet, ample of figure, tenuously suspended on a rope, screaming, and in imminent danger of being eaten by polar bears under the eyes of a fascinated audience.)

I then wrote down and published whatever I was fairly sure sure was both true and funny. I sometimes wrote what wasn't funny, but I carefully deleted anything that, on reflection, I didn't really think was true. Especially if it was also funny, because that way lies Bullshit. And there is enough Bullshit.

At that time, the approach of the humorous writers was to write witty falsehoods, which in my opinion fails because they're always less funny than the truth. The approach of the newspapers and magazines was to elaborate on prevailing mythology without reference to facts. Which makes you refer to Michael Schumacher's blue eyes.

I read about Michael Schumacher's blue eyes many, many times in English and at least once in Italian. A glance at any photo shows that they were - and presumably, still are - hazel. You might say a rather greyish hazel, in certain lights; but not blue. It's simply not possible that any writer who wrote this had in fact looked at the colour of Schumacher's eyes and concluded that they were blue. Now, it is possible that some writers, themselves uninterested in Schumacher's admittedly-plain face, had heard someone else make the same reference and repeated it without asking themselves whether it was literally true. And perhaps it's even possible that their professional editors made the same mistake. But it's more likely they were referring to blue eyes in a non-literal sense which I didn't think then, and don't think now, bears very close examination.

Which kind of drivel do you prefer? I found it hard to decide between them, and preferred to make my own.

Quite a few of my small pool of readers - perhaps a hundred regular readers at the peak - were at least briefly convinced that I was an insider. I was told that one of them guessed I was Becky Herbert.

In fact, I only ever even went to about two races (I enjoyed the experience, but I was young, and alone, and it's terribly expensive). Apart from not being entirely ignorant of two or three languages taught in English schools, I had no access to any information that hadn't been seen by everyone who watched on TV. All I had to do to obtain a loyal following of regular, chatty, and congenial readers was say different things, that had some evidence in their favour and nothing obvious against, and sounded (to me, at least, and perhaps to others) as though they might be true. That was all. I made one of the dearest friends I will ever have in my life out of it.

I don't know why people don't try it more often. Perhaps they don't have time.

Puccini and Jussi Björling and being inside music

When I was in my teens I used to listen to Italian opera all the time. I hadn't forgotten just how good Puccini was at what he did, or how good the singers are, but I had forgotten details of this. It's a set of duets, with the great Jussi Björling singing Puccini, Verdi, and Bizet. (I got an iPod for my birthday and I'm listening to all sorts of things I haven't listened to for ages).

Listening to one of these duets - from the first act of Tosca - I've just been admiring how good Jussi Bjoerling was.

The character he's playing is an artist, currently painting a fresco* on the wall of a church. He is interrupted, first by a political fugitive, to whom he is sympathetic, and then by his girlfriend, Tosca. He can't tell her the fugitive is hiding there, because that would be a very bad idea, so he has to lie about the rustling sound she's just heard, but he also has to convince her (perfectly truthfully) that he loves her and the rustling sound wasn't another woman, and specifically not the other woman who actually appears in his work-in-progress. His conversation with her is the duet.

It's not only brilliant singing, producing these wonderful tunes. He makes a clear difference in his voice when the character is lying, when he's telling the truth, and when he's telling the truth and he's totally in love with this woman but he really really wishes she would go away, and he can't make her do that. The combination of all these things is different for every line, and I think it's a wonderful piece of vocal acting.

I think the opportunity to be inside tango music, by dancing it, has hugely improved my appreciation of this sort of music too. It's a closely related style, so it's not surprising. I should listen to some more and see what I find. It's certainly true that because I used to sing very simple Renaissance church music in a choir, Spem in Alium is a lot more to me than just an amazing wall of sound. It doesn't matter that I can't sing Spem in Alium.

I always had the strong impression - based on his operas alone, as I never went into the facts of his life - that Puccini actually liked women as people, which led me to like him more in return. I did read somewhere that women generally liked him too.

* It has to be a fresco because you don't paint an oil painting in the place it's going to go.