by way of introduction.

From another blog. March 22, 2006.

i'm still dancing with the idea of the broken gentleman. right now he's the eternal and everchanging embodiment of the masculine ideal, the gentlemanly ideal. in the past, he lived as a renaissance man, as a wizard of electricity and science, as a philosopher, as an author, a playwright. now there's no defined ideal, and he can't embody the single famous people who alternate as the masculine ideal. the idea of the gentleman is dead. so he sits, and he shifts randomly between the ideals of the past, between different strains of genius and respectability. he's never in the same suit, but it's never pressed and ready. there's a few spots of stubble he's missed. he'll sit in the corner of the coffee shop, the library, the martini bar, and seem somehow born for his seat. he'll talk to you about nearly anything, and he'll do it as though he created the idea. he did, in a lot of ways. but he switches specialties and beliefs and personalities by the second. and he's not in love with the modern world.

the displaced man, the transplanted man. a relic of another time, a relic of every other time. he's the broken gentleman. he doesn't fit. but he can tell you every story, first hand, until the dawn of the anti-hero. and he'll do it in a distracted, disjointed manner, over a coffee, a manhattan, some coltrane.

(put better, the broken gentleman is the essence of a world in which a unified, yet fractured perception is a requirement for understanding.)