THE LURE OF THE LURE ..... ( another way of doing war ????)

The attraction to Underground aesthetics as a starting point
for the discovery of Dandies, Dilettanti and Eccentrics .
And how I choose what better suited my natural disposition
since I was ten years old.

Eccentricity is often associated with genius, giftedness,
or creativity. The individual's eccentric behavior is
perceived to be the outward expression of his or her
unique intelligence or creative impulse.In this vein,
the eccentric's habits are incomprehensible not because
they are illogical or the result of madness, but because
they stem from a mind so original that it cannot be
conformed to societal norms.

Edith Sitwell wrote:

"Eccentricity is not, as some would believe,
a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent
pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat
are frequently regarded as eccentrics because
genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of
and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries
of the crowd."

The things one can do when is young come from an instinct
from a sort of intuition.
We get pulled by forces that demand from us to choose one
thing against another.
Later, we can see more clearly and look at our choices
from a perspective, at this point we can regret what we
did or we can actually realize that what had been a pure
impulse seemingly irrational was actually a given
knowledge and that we where still feeling and thinking
on the same line, in a kind of natural coherence.
Then, is when reinforced by certainty we concentrate
over what we now know more than ever.
Analyst can call this self boycott , because what is called
and defined as Underground and its similar Dilettante ,
appears to go against the grain and elude mainstream
success .But what can you do if you loath what you see
and the wider majority likes and supports?
The Barcelona I grow up on was just boring , claustrophobic,
conservative, repressive and mediocre .
I could just say this was a normal age gap and the
antagonistic values of its natural generational difference.
But it wasn't . At the age of ten I used to go to the garage
of a neighbour that had lots of records, he was fifteen,
I would sneak between him and his friends during the
summer and just have fun listening to music and dancing .
He brought The Rolling Stones , David Bowie, Marc Bolan's
T Rex and the Motown sounds in to my young life..
And that same year I had my first singles and with them my
first wet dreams dedicated to Brian Jones and Marc Bolan
specially.
For some reason, call this fate, there was no one of my age
that I could share this with, and the young like me , let's say
that of my generation, where just entertaining a very different
sort of tastes and life style. Surprisingly, they where not
rebelling against anything , they where just good Spanish
catholic ultra-conservative boys and girls.
Why, then, I was attracted to this rock and roll icons with
make up and dandy looks? Why I found so special a look
of androginy and feminine boys?
What really means to have adopted the icons of an older
generation and of a very small portion of them, any way,
from five to ten years my seniors ?
My neighborhood in Barcelona was a bourgeois place, with
bourgeois shops and cafes, but suddenly some one opened
this fashion shop...It was very close to my house, and to go
there you had to go down a spiral stair leading to a huge
basement .
And there... all this boys ( still the same age gap older
than me) where looking like Bowie's, Brian's , Richards and
Bolan' s.
I was called, lured, hypnotized and I was just twelve .
With out any knowledge about what this was... apart of the simple
its from the foreign world .. its London.. and its wild ..
Only now looking backwards I can see why, and I can see that all
this had to do with my personality and my identity and what its
more amazing with my whole work's narrative and life style.
Which means how influential all this elder bad boys from
Barcelona had been for me and how , when I made their Icons
my Icons I started to discover an amazing amount of people that
still now have my respect and are a source for my inspiration.
Excluding all the people who died of an OD.. later and sadly,
most of this people from Barcelona changed over time and went
right back to their bourgeois lives and got jobs and created families.
For them just had been a fashion an aesthetic minor rebellion a
matter of age and youth.
But for me this had just been the surface of a deeper issue :
sexual freedom, bohemia, marxism, difference in many ways, that
transcended in to the discovery of much wilder and deeper subjects.
A very special kind of : Writers, Philosophers, Artist, Musicians and
Politics.

PLUS:

You're never too young to be exploited

Jon Savage's social history of youth and youth culture, Teenage, touches all bases, from Sinatra fans to Anne Frank, says Andrew Anthony

Buy Teenage at the Guardian bookshop Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 by Jon Savage Chatto & Windus £20, pp576 The word 'teenager', it is claimed, entered mass currency in 1944. Inevitably, it was coined in America. Unlike 'adolescence', which evoked European Sturm und Drang (though, in fact, the term was minted by pioneer American psychologist G Stanley Hall), 'teenager' represented all-American optimism. Adolescents were the products of social dislocation, whereas teenagers were the vanguard consumers of a bright, new, material world under urgent construction. In reality, they were one and the same thing, the difference being that 'teenager' was a marketing invention employed to define adolescents with spending power. In this sprawling social history, Jon Savage argues that this youthful demographic had, in fact, arrived in embryo some 70 years earlier. Or, as the grand and rather fastidious subtitle of the book puts it, 'The Creation of Youth 1875-1945'. Youth, as we know, is what's wasted on the young. And the young have been around even longer than the old. But Savage's concern is the modern limbo stage of human development, those years suspended uncertainly in Western culture between childhood and adulthood. Throughout most of history, that transition was brief, if not entirely unproblematic. It's only relatively recently that society has allowed the process to be extended with a more favourable distribution of rights and responsibilities to the young. In truth, 1875 is a bit of an arbitrary date for the birth of self-conscious youth, but then the book has to start somewhere. And at more than 500 pages with notes, it has to end somewhere too. Savage's choice of opening with the story of Marie Bashkirtseff, a precocious and self-obsessed 17-year-old diarist, and concluding with the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki may seem a little bizarre, also. But with a literary whimper and a cataclysmic bang, he neatly frames the narcissism and nihilism that form the twin themes of the narrative. Nevertheless, it's a little perverse that a book entitled Teenage never gets to the Teen Age of the second half of the 20th century up to the present. When Bashkirtseff writes: 'I dream of celebrity, of fame', one is reminded of the shared preoccupations of the MySpace generation. Such ambitions were once the preserve of the privileged, like Bashkirtseff, but now they are harboured by every wannabe Big Brother and X Factor contestant. In the period with which Savage deals, teen culture is struggling to emerge in a society that veers between repression and indifference. But what happens when teen culture is established as the norm? Does it aid or arrest development, articulate alienation or turn it into a fashion statement? Perhaps these are questions for a second volume. Here, at least, Savage is less interested in the everyday reality of teenagers than in the creative and destructive extremes of adolescence and the social forces that shaped youth into what he calls 'an abstract concept, detached from biology'. Violence and experimental art are both treated as bold renunciations of the old. So delinquency and Dada are reduced to expressions of youth's sacred duty: to stick two fingers up at convention. In this exaltation of rebellion, one detects the same enraptured sensibility that informed England's Dreaming, Savage's exhaustive meditation on the origins and meaning of punk rock. And when he pays tribute to Hall's monumental work, Adolescence, by describing it as 'a classic of vitalist literature', Savage seems to be setting down his stylistic benchmark. A kind of ecstatic scholarship appears to guide the assemblage of disparate material documenting the moral panics, romantic myths, literary fantasies, political movements and popular culture constructed by and around teenagers. His editorial choice, he admits, is 'always to find the extraordinary within the ordinary'. Thus he jumps from the impatient angst of Rimbaud to the idealism of JM Barrie's Peter Pan and discerns in both the same youthful revolt that, by the Twenties, would become the new social order. 'The Great War,' writes Savage, 'had forever destroyed the automatic obedience that elders had expected from youth.' Innocence is lost in these pages with the same hopeless regularity that a drunk is parted from his house keys. Savage is particularly perceptive on how the Nazis harnessed the social frustration of the Depression-era young to create a potent iconography of youth that would ultimately consume those it idealised. He also unearths Victorian newspaper reports on juvenile offenders that bear an uncanny resemblance to current news stories: 'The young street ruffian and prowler with this heavy belt, treacherous knife and dangerous pistol is amongst us. The question for every man who cares for streets that are safe after dark, decent when dark ... is what is to be done with this new development of the city boy and slum denizen.' And, as you would expect from a veteran rock critic, he also handles youth cults with insight and sympathy. But while the episodic nature of the book is one of its considerable strengths, it proves also to be its narrative limitation. For if the breadth of research is admirable, there is sometimes a sense of history in search of a unifying argument. What Savage lacks in thesis, he tries to compensate with theme. Mostly, this is successful. His ability to jump confidently across disciplines and continents accompanied only by a slim idea is reminiscent of the method of documentary film-maker Adam Curtis. But on occasion the effort to stretch a point between discrete events borders on the distasteful, especially when the point is not altogether clear. At one stage, Savage moves from Frank Sinatra at the Paramount to Anne Frank at Auschwitz with such disorienting swiftness that they seem almost like two gigs on a tour. Like his subject, Savage may not always know exactly what he's trying to say, but his bristling passion and sheer eloquence ensure he's worth listening to.