A Crooked House.com

The single best description
of who I was and and who I desperately wanted to be in the Best Decade Ever.

Via Mark Dery  over at The Thought Catalog.

I REMEMBER THE ’80s. I remember reading about the New Romantics in Rolling Stone, sniggering at the silliness of the French-poodle quiffs and the geometric maquillage that turned nightclubbers’ faces into Russian Constructivist paintings but thrilling, nonetheless, to the return, after what felt like 40 years’ exile in the wastelands of punk’s squatter style, of glam. (With Bowie’s benediction, no less. For his “Ashes to Ashes” video, he lifted Steve Strange’s Pierrot costume and recruited the Blitz Kids as extras.) I remember leafing, with a sort of rapt contempt, through Face cover stories that split the difference between breathlessness and bored hauteur, assuring us on the other side of the red-velvet VIP rope that Haysi Fantayzee or Blue Rondo à la Turk or Blancmange or Bronski Beat or Rip Rig + Panic or [fill in the blank] was—yawn—the Next Big Thing. I remember a Face feature that took readers on a guided tour of August “Kid Creole” Darnell’s wardrobe, fondling his vintage suits, oggling his hand-painted 1940s’ neckties. I remember wearing a silver sharkskin suit, blindingly white Capezios (I retouched any smudges with White-Out), and a pink leopardskin tie from Fiorucci’s to Depeche Mode’s first gig in L.A., doing that electro-pop dance move everyone was doing then, cheeks sucked in like one of those mirrorshaded models in a Nagel poster, arms bent at the elbow, swiveling from the waist up, feet nailed to the floor, while the band played “Just Can’t Get Enough.”