When I was taking these photos, and was thinking ahead to the post I was already planning to write about them—which, in truth, I had already been thinking about previously, and which occasioned the taking of the photos—I thought that when I wrote the post, I would start it off in a fairly abstruse and complicated vein. I would start it off, I thought when I took the photos, by mentioning Richard Taruskin's Text and Act, the first and only collection of his essays and reviews that I've read.
When I was taking these photos and thinking ahead to the post I am now writing, I thought I would mention Taruskin's claim that so-called "historically informed performance", or period performance, or "authentic" performance, conceived in opposition to the ideal of "Werktreue" in the earlier part of the previous century, was not, despite its name and its advertisements for itself, a recovery of the past, or an opportunity for the audience to hear the pieces as audiences of the past would have heard them. Such performances and ideals, as I intended to recollect his argument, were thoroughly up-to-the-minute and modern. Whatever one of thinks of the resemblance of the playing or of the techniques employed to the playing or techniques employed by ensembles of the various composers' times, the contemporary employment of them answers a distinctively modern craving precisely for the "authentic", despite its irrecoverability.
When I thought about how I would employ this point to further the end with which I was taking the photos, namely deriding and ridiculing the establishment shown in the photos, I thought that I would endeavor to draw attention to something that my varied and dear readers would likely see plainly for themselves. I thought that my acute blog friendship would not need much prompting to see the decidedly old-fashioned design of the window decorations, the out-of-date prices for barbering services, and the specifics of the advertised goods and services, which function nicely as a list of contemporary imaginings of rugged yet tasteful masculinities of the past. Although I suspected at the time I was thinking about how I would write this post and how I would relate Taruskin's position to the details of the photos of the shop windows that I would not need to point out to those reading the post the text in the first picture reading "solutions for the modern gentleman", I still intended to do so.
After having pointed out this text, my thought, as I imagined the progression of the argument of the post, when I was taking the pictures I am now posting, is probably now obvious to my readers, who are uniformly a sharp bunch: my thought was to deny any incongruity. I would have asked: what in fact is more characteristic of the "modern gentleman" than to clutch desperately at the tokens of an imagined past gentlemanliness? The craving for what Taruskin referred to as "the tainted A-word", authenticity, is as in evidence here as in an improvised cadenza by Christopher Hogwood. (At the time I was thinking these thoughts, I did not know that in addition to a keyboardist bearing the name Christopher Hogwood, there also lived in the present century a pig bearing that same name, so I could not have thought, at the time, to insert a mock-clarificatory note. Now that I am actually writing the post that I had previously only been thinking of composing, however, and because I have learned that both Hogwood the keyboardist and Hogwood the pig lived in the present century, I am able to have that thought.)
After I had taken the photos and was walking back to my office, still dwelling on the post I was planning on writing at some remove regarding the photos, I thought about what accounts for the dissimilarity between this store, which is stupid and tacky, and Hogwood's music, which is not, when they both originate, in some sense, in the same impulse. I was thinking of this both as a question to myself, and as a question I might pose in the post whose writing I was then dwelling on. I would put the question in the post, I thought, as if I were still musing on it. I intended, when I was walking back to the office, to ask in the post whether it was because Hogwood's performances came after long study and practice so that he could more fully play his parts as, for example, Mozart would have expected them to be played, whereas the proprietors of this shop seemed to believe that the sale of cufflinks as such is worthy of advertisement, and the sale of sabers intended to be used for opening bottles of sparkling wine is worthy of anything but shame. If Hogwood had started performing immediately after learning that improvisation was common in Mozart's time without knowing much about the specifics, would he not also have seemed foolish? I had no intention, walking back to my office, of providing a definitive answer to such questions as these, intending rather to leave them open. Another possibility that I intended to moot was that there was an important difference in the subject matter. I thought, as I was returning to my office with Taruskin's argument commingling in my mind with the very idea of a "belt bar", that I might ask my readers if the exploration of different performance styles, even an exploration conceptualized as a recovery of past performance styles, was simply a less ridiculous and more admirable thing to do than the exploration of styles of masculinity, especially an archaizing exploration conceptualized as a recovery of a style of masculinity that places an emphasis on scotch, cigars, and clubs. (Prior to taking the photos that led me to think these thoughts, I had been reminded of the existence of this store when I walked past it at a time that was not kairotic for photography. This walking past of the store by me did lead me to google the shop for information about it, and I discovered in so doing that it has an attached club, or perhaps the club has an attached shop. As I was walking back to my office after having taken the photos, I had not forgotten about this history of how I learned about the club occurred to me, but neither was I thinking about it.) Perhaps—I imagined that I might pose this question in the post—it's just the obvious concern with outmoded masculinity or masculinity at all that's so bad.
I had all these thoughts several days prior to the time at which I actually began to write the post. For one or two days after I had taken the photos, and after having had the thoughts about what I would write in the post that I recounted in the first five paragraphs of this post, I continued to think that the post I would write would proceed along more or less the lines I had earlier conceived for it. During all of these days I knew that I would not actually begin writing the post until the weekend.
At some point after the one or two days during which I continued to believe that I would write a post along the lines that had occurred to me while I was taking the photos and walking back to my office, but before I began to write the post which you are now reading, I realized that I did not need to do anything so complicated to convey my point or, hopefully, amuse my blog friends. I realized, at some point before the weekend but one or two days after I had taken the photos, that a much simpler avenue was open to me.
My realization was this: I had only to point out that one of the brands stocked by the store is named "Rodd & Gunn".
(Several days after having written the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post, I realized that I had been confused while writing them. I had thought that Taruskin praised Hogwood's playing for its contemporary-antique freshness. In fact, I should have named Robert Levin. I learned this only after having obtained a copy of Text and Act, which I did not have at the time I wrote the above-mentioned paragraphs, and having read an essay in it, "A Mozart Wholly Ours". After learning that Levin's was the correct name, I contemplated editing the text of the post to replace Hogwood's name with Levin's. I began to do so, but realized that I would no longer be able, with any real cause, to mention the pig named Christopher Hogwood. I opted for this addendum for that reason.)
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