A Tale of Two Caped Figures

 

In the absence of bats, a caped Kirk Field 

feeds the pigeons in Trafalgar Square (1981)

 

Meanwhile, a caped Larry David (alongside Jerry Stiller) 

features in an episode of Seinfeld (1994)

 

 

I.

 

One of the things best loved about the season six episode of Seinfeld titled 'The Chinese Woman' [1] is the uncredited guest appearance by series co-creator Larry David as Frank Costanza's eccentric divorce lawyer - a man with a penchant for wearing a cape ...

 

II.

 

The history of the sleevless cape in men's fashion is a journey from an essential piece of outerwear worn by the everyman in the ancient world for protection from the elements to an elite status symbol and indicator of class, before being largely relegated to ceremonial dress and an item favoured only by vampires and superheroes. 

 

Although the Ancient Romans loved their capes, it wasn't until the early-modern period that the cape reached its fashionable apex, frequently integrated into outfits along with doublets and breeches. Whilst the majority of men made do with short, heavy wool capes, the wealthy and privileged would wear capes of various length and style made of velvet and other fine materials, secured at the shoulder with jewelled brooches.   

 

There was nothing a nobleman loved doing more than sweeping aside his cape to reveal a sword or pistol at his side [2].

 

However, fashions change and as Roland Barthes would tell you, in the 18th and 19th centuries there came a cultural turning point known as the Great Renunciation when men increasingly abandoned ostentatious, colourful and theatrical clothing in favour of sober, functional, and uniform attire [3] - say goodbye to the swish cloak and cape [4] and say hello to the heavy overcoat.

 

By the early 20th century, the triumph of modern tailored overcoats meant that the cape was no longer seen as romantic and dashing but archaic and cumbersome. The cultural perception of the man's cape was further altered by Bela Lugosi's 1931 portrayal of Dracula and the 1938 debut of Superman, forever linking the garment to gothic horror, theatrical villains, and comic book characters.

 

With the cape firmly relegated to the margins of modern society, we can now return to the streets of Manhattan ...

  

III. 

 

When out picking up some groceries one day, Jerry and Elaine spot George's dad, Frank, with a mysterious figure wearing a cape. 

 

Elaine asks: 'Why is Mr Costanza with a man in a cape?' 

 

To which Jerry replies (in typical Jerry manner): 'Well it is good cape weather - cool, breezy ...'

 

Elaine is still troubled, however: 'Why a cape? Who wears a cape? Where d'you even get a cape?' 

 

Eventually, Jerry is forced to concede: 'You're right - it is strange', and he suggests they cross to the other side of the street to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.  

 

Later, at Jerry's apartment, they tell George that they saw his father and Elaine mentions he was with a man in a cape. 

 

George asks: 'Why was he wearing a cape? Was my father wearing a cape?

 

Jerry replies: 'No, jacket and tie - no cape.' 

 

George is perplexed: 'Hmm. What was a man with a cape doing with my father? What was my father doing with a man in a cape? Why a cape?'

Later, when confronted on it, Frank reveals to his son that the man in a cape was his lawyer, casually explaining that he's 'very independent: he doesn't follow the trends'. 

 

IV. 

 

What motivated my friend and fellow punk Kirk Field to start wearing a cape back in the early 1980s, I don't know. Perhaps he too might be described as independent-minded and as someone who doesn't follow trends ... 

 

Only, of course, by 1981 the punk movement had already splintered into so-called post-punk and whereas some punks transformed into colourfully dressed new romantics, others sought out the darker, moodier look and sound of what became known as gothic rock (or goth for short). 

 

Thanks to Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi had risen from the dead [5] ... and would-be vampires like nineteen-year-old Mr Field were putting on their eye-liner and wearing their capes, before venues like the Batcave had even opened their doors [6]. 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Seinfeld, 'The Chinese Woman' [S6/E4], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Peter Mehlman (Oct 1994). Frank Costanza was played by Jerry Stiller. Click on the link to watch the relevant scenes discussed in this post. 

 

[2] Perhaps the last echo of this is to be seen in a Fistful of Dollars (dir. Sergio Leone, 1964) when the Clint Eastwood character flips back the right side of his poncho over his left shoulder exposing the holster on his hip and thus providing a clear visual cue that he is about to draw his pistol. This gesture serves as a signature dramatic signal immediately before a gunfight - as in the early scene from the movie linked to.  

 

[3] See Roland Barthes, 'Language and Clothing' and ' Dandyism and Fashion', in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael carter (Berg, 2006).

 

[4] Is there a clear distinction between a cloak and a cape? Well, in fashion, the word cape usually refers to a shorter garment and cloak to a longer (and technically different) type of garment, though the two terms are often used synonymously for full-length coverings.

 

[5] Recorded live in the studio in one take in January 1979 and released in August of that year, Bauhaus's astonishing debut single 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' (Small Wonder Records) laid the blueprint for goth with its slow, sepulchral bassline, dub-inflected drums, and vampire-themed theatricality. 

 

[6] The Batcave was a weekly club-night launched in Soho in 1982. It is considered to be the birthplace of the goth subculture in London and the south east of England. As Kirk and I were Leeds based in 1981-84, this was not our regular haunt - we danced the nights away at Le Phonographique. 

 

   

The Bats Have Left the Bell Tower: Notes on the Life and Death of Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi lying in his coffin at a Hollywood funeral home 

Photo by David Katzman

 

 

I. 

 

On this night in 1882, a star was born: the Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi, best remembered as Dracula in the 1931 horror classic of that title (dir. Tod Browning); the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known.   

 

It was a role that he had previously played on stage in a 1927 Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel and one that both defined him as an actor and limited his future opportunities; eventually giving us a comic turn as the Count in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (dir. Charles Barton, 1948). 

 

This pretty much signalled the end of his career as a serious actor and, addicted to morphine combined with worsening alcoholism, things quickly went from bad to worse and he ended up taking roles in the films of Ed Wood, a filmmaker famously described by critics as the worst director of all time. 

 

 

II. 

 

On August 16, 1956, the news was announced that Bela Lugosi had died, peacefully in his sleep, aged 73.

 

Amusingly, he was typecast to the very end; buried wearing his Dracula costume, including the cape. This was not at his prior request, but done on the instructions of an ex-wife, Lillian, and their son, Bela Lugosi Jr., believing that the old man would've liked it (I'm not entirely sure about that). 

 

Even more amusing is the story of how, when standing by Lugosi's open coffin, Peter Lorre turned to fellow actor Vincent Price and said: 'Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart, just in case?'   

 

III.

  

To be perfectly honest, I can't say I'm a fan: Lugosi certainly had on screen presence as Dracula, but I always thought his performance lacked a little bite. In fact, he didn't even wear fangs for the film, this only becoming a cinematic convention in the 1950s; think Christopher Lee in the Hammer version of Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher, 1958). 

 

And, as a child, I was always more enthralled by other Universal monsters; Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man, for example. Lugosi's Dracula seemed a little too hammy for my tastes; not that his performance was unskilled, just that it was a little too theatrical and reliant on exaggerated gestures and a heavy foreign accent. 

 

Still, it doesn't really matter what I think: Lugosi has his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; Andy Warhol made a 1963 silkscreen print titled 'The Kiss (Bela Lugosi)', inspired by a scene from Dracula; and Bauhaus have immortalised the actor in their classic single 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' (Small Wonder Records, 1979): click here.  

All They Ever Wanted Was Everything: Notes on the Scandalous Affair of Mr Lawrence and Mrs Weekley

D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley 

as imagined in 1912 [a] 

 

When in March 1912, Lawrence called upon Ernest Weekley, a professor of modern languages at Nottingham University College, in order to seek his help and advice with a proposed move to Germany, it was to prove a turning point in his life.

 

Not because of anything Weekley said or offered to do, but because he was introduced to Weekley's wife, Frieda; the woman he would marry two years later, having convinced her to leave her middle-aged husband and abandon her three young children and start a new life with him, a promising young writer. 

 

Not that she took much persuading, as this aristocratic German woman was bored out of her mind living a suburban middle-class lifestyle as wife and mother and had been having regular love affairs since 1905, including with Otto Gross, a drug-addicted psychoanalyst who was also fucking her sister, Else, at the time, and with Ernst Frick, an artist and anarchist.  

 

As John Worthen notes: "Frieda's affairs  appear to have satisfied her need for sex and self-determination" and they demonstrate how she was drawn to men "with lifestyles and purposes" very different from her husband's [b]. 

 

Thus, no suprise that she should immediately be attracted to Lawrence; a clever and unusual young man, seven years her junior. The story of them leaping into bed together within twenty minutes of first meeting whilst her husband busied himself in his study, her children played in the garden, and the servants looked the other way is, however, a myth [c].  

 

Probably, Frieda initially wanted Lawrence simply as another lover [d]. But, Lawrence being Lawrence, he wasn't going to be satisfied with that; like Pete Murphy, all he ever wanted was everything [e] and he regarded Mrs Weekley as "the most wonderful woman in all England" [f]. 

 

That is to say, the kind of woman his mother warned him against; one who was uninhibited and unconventional enough to let him fuck her whenever, wherever, and however he liked. Frieda had a punk indifference to bourgeois social norms and notions of right and wrong; she was carefree, spontaneous, and lived for the moment and if at times this shocked Lawrence, these were also qualities he admired and found deeply seductive.    

 

In May 1912, they travelled to Germany together; he was going to visit his cousin; she was going to join her father who was celebrating his 50th year in the army. They would be able to spend at least a week together and Lawrence believed that it was a make or break moment; that Frieda was going to inform Weekley of her affair. But this she didn't do - although she did tell her mother and sister Else about him at the first opportunity.  

 

Lawrence, meanwhile was kept out of the way of her father and put in a respectable family hotel, growing increasingly impatient and irritated with the entire situation: he wanted committment. 

 

But Mrs Weekly was far from ready to give such; "she loved Lawrence [...] and believed in him as an extraordinary person, but [...] he was in his way as unsuitable as Gross or Frick as a partner" [115], i.e., poor and probably a little insane - or, as Frieda's father described Lawrence when he did finally meet him, an ill-bred and penniless lout. 

 

However, things came to a head when Lawrence wrote to Weekley and declared his love for Frieda. Upon receiving Lawrence's letter - along with a telegram from his wife confirming the affair - he immediately wrote to declare the marriage over. To celebrate, Lawrence and Frieda went for a walk together and fucked in a dry ditch. Then he wrote a rather lovely poem for her: 'Bei Hennef', which can be read here.    

 

Of course, there was a lot of shit from all sides: Frieda's father threatened to "never see her again if she went off with Lawrence" [117]; Weekly became hysterical, threatening to kill himself and the children and calling her nasty names; and even Else "was convinced that her sister was behaving foolishly" [118].

 

But, eventually, after much struggling and painful conflict - I didn't know life was so hard - they come through and they are able to "transcend into some condition of blessedness" [g], leaving behind "the restraints of their old lives" [120], but not necessarily their old habits and there's kind of a sting in the tail of this illicit love story ... 

 

For just a few months later, whilst on a walking tour of southern Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol, Frieda had sex with a 21-year-old Englishman called Harold Hobson - in a hay-hut - whilst Lawence was off searching for alpine plants. I'm not quite sure what I think of this and Lawrence bottled up any anger and hurt he may have experienced (later telling Frieda that it didn't matter). 

 

But Worthen offers the following analysis:

 

"She was asserting to Lawrence (and to herself) that she was not giving up her independence, despite making a new life with him [...] If Lawrence wanted her, then he had to accept that she would not always stay faithful; and she did not." [123]

  

 

Notes

 

[a] This (fake) image by Stephen Alexander uses a headshot of Lawrence from 1913, aged 27, and a much earlier headshot of Frieda, taken in 1901, aged 22. The bodies belong to the Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) and the model Rose Soady (1885-1978), who was his principal muse and became Lindsay's second wife and business manager.   

      Like Lawrence, Lindsay attracted a mixture of acclaim and controversy for his work which often featured erotic pagan elements and was deemed by his critics to be not only obscene but anti-Christian. Adopting a larrikin public persona and affirming a libertine philosophy, Lindsay cheerfully fought against the strict moral conservativism of his times. Thus, I think this body swap is justified and appropriate (as well as amusing). 

      The lettering, of course, is taken from Jamie Reid's Fuck Forever design for the Sex Pistols and used to promote The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), a silkscreen print of which can be viewed on artsy.net: click here. I have added this in order to reaffirm my idea of Lawrence as a punk.

 

[b] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 110. Future page references to this work will be give directly in the post.  

 

[c] According to Worthen, Lawrence "refused to have sex with Frieda in the Weekley's house" as that would have constituted "too gross a betrayal of Weekley, who had shown him nothing but kindness". See p. 111 of the work cited above. 

 

[d] Worthen writes that although Frieda was attracted to Lawrence - and eventually came to love him - "she had not the least intention of leaving her husband or children", ibid., p. 112.   

 

[e] Pete Murphy was the lead vocalist with the post-punk band Bauhaus and I'm referencing a song entitled 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything', from the album The Sky's Gone Out (Beggars Banquet, 1982): click here.  

 

[f] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol, I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 376. 

      In a letter written the following month to Edward Garnett (17 April 1912), Lawrence describes Mrs Weekley as ripping, splendid, and perfectly unconventional. See the above volume of letters, p. 384. 

 

[g] See 'The Argument' at the beginning of Look! We Have Come Though!, by D. H. Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1917). It can be found on p. 155 in volume I of the Cambridge Edition of The Poems (2013).

      Most of the poems in this collection were written during 1912-13 and tell the story of Lawrence's affair with Frieda during this period. It was not well received by the critics at the time, Lawrence claiming that the English press only spat on the work (and by implication his love for Frieda).

  

 

The Bats Have Left the Bell Tower: Reflections on Graveyard Poetry and Post-Punk Goth

Love Among the Gravestones (1981) 

Photo by Kirk Field

 

 

La Rochefoucauld famously suggested that people never would have fallen in love if they hadn’t first learnt about it in works of art. And one wonders if something similar might also be said of the morbid and sometimes macabre fascination that many young lovers have for skulls, coffins, epitaphs and worms, i.e., all the trappings and paraphernalia of death. 

 

Would, for example, the two teens pictured above have spent so much time smooching in cemeteries were it not for the influence of the Graveyard Poets upon the erotic imagination?

 

It's doubtful. 

 

For whilst their post-punk queer gothic sensibility was primarily shaped by Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Sex Gang Children - along with numerous other bands from this period (early-1980s) - we can trace their love of the uncanny and the occult all the way back to these 18th-century poets, whose mournful meditations on mortality and the love that tears us apart foreshadowed the work of songwriters like Ian Curtis and Nick Cave.   

 

There is - perhaps not surprisingly - much debate within critical circles about what constitutes a graveyard poem and about which authors should be classified as belonging to the Graveyard school (and it might be noted that the term itself was not used to refer to a style of writer and their work until coined by a literary scholar in 1893). 

 

What we can say, however, is that the following four poems remain crucial to our understanding of it:

 

Night Piece on Death (1722) - Thomas Parnell

Night-Thoughts (1742-45) - Edward Young

The Grave (1743) - Robert Blair

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard  (1751) - Thomas Gray

Obviously, none of these works have the pop brilliance of songs by the above bands and artists, but readers who are interested in melancholic 18th-century poetry to do with life, death, ghosts and graveyards should certainly check them out. 

 

Be prepared, however, for a tedious amount of Christian moralising; for it's an unfortunate fact that didacticism and piety often detract from the delicious decadence and horror of these works.    

 

 

Musical bonus: Public Image Ltd., 'Graveyard', from the album Metal Box, (Virgin, 1979): click here.