The Way of Men answers the question: “What is Masculinity?”

When someone tells a man to be a man, they mean that there is a way to be a man. A man is not just a thing to be – it is also a way to be, a path to follow and a way to walk.

The so-called experts give the answers that suit their masters. They tell just-so stories to protect their ideology, their religion, their way of life. They look to women for a nod of approval before speaking. They give socially acceptable answers and half-truths. If what they have to say resonates with men, it is only because they manage to hint at the real answer. The real answer is that The Way of Men is The Way of The Gang.

Manliness  – being good at being a man  – isn’t about impressing women. That’s a side effect of manliness. Manliness isn’t about being a good man. There are plenty of bad guys  – real jerks – who are manlier than you are, and you know it.

Manliness is about demonstrating to other men that you have what it takes to survive tough times. Manliness is about our primal nature. It’s about what men have always needed from each other if they wanted to win struggles against nature, and against other men.

People are talking about “the end of men,” “the decline of males,” and the so-called “crisis of masculinity.” There are many diagnoses for the troubles men face today, but the chattering class is short on solutions. They refuse to deal honestly with the differences between men and women, and fail to entertain the possibility that their vision of the future offers little of value to average males.

The “crisis of masculinity” is really a timeless push-and-pull between masculinity and civilization. The world has changed more than men have, and the security and luxury of modernity have put us conflict with our own natures. The path back to honor for men may lead through a new dark age.

The Way of Men is NOW AVAILABLE for Kindle through Amazon.com.

It’s about 40, 00 words – a quick read and the rough equivalent of a 100-page book. YES, The Way of Men will be available for purchase IN PRINT in about a month (Late April/Early May).

From the Acknowledgements: “My Vulcan friend Trevor Blake and I have been trading ideas about manliness over drinks and cigars for years, and his pages of notes provided much food for thought.”

South East Lincoln, Sherman and Grant. Lone Fir Cemetery.

See Portland Memorials for thousands of memorials in downtown Portland, Oregon USA.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – “Phantom Patrol” (1903)

Lownsdale Park, First Presbyterian Church and the South Park Blocks all contain memorials to the Civil War (1861–1865). First of a series.

See Portland Memorials for thousands of memorials in downtown Portland, Oregon USA.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – “Phantom Patrol” (1903)

I was supposed to link up with an old friend of Jack’s that afternoon. He’d been down to Occupy once, and he offered to go back with me. Trevor knows every inch of Portland. Obscure monuments. Weird iconography. Real history.

This tree stump? Look closer. It’s made of stone. It’s a grave-marker for a member of a forgotten Masonic order. That building over there? It used to be a speak-easy. They had an underground phone line straight to the local police precinct.

Trevor speaks in such a slow, deliberate manner, and in such a low tone of voice, that I have to listen. His whole demeanor is disarming. He has a kind of fastidious, algorithmic intelligence that makes me feel like a small dog barking at cars.

We wound our way through the city on foot. A few blocks from the park, I stopped to tear a piece of cardboard off a discarded box. I needed to make a sign. I pulled a felt tipped marker from my pocket, one I’d swiped from Trevor’s apartment, and wrote:

Afghanistan is the world’s largest deposit of Lithium.
If you own an iPhone, you are a douchebag.

It was subtle, I thought. Considering the fact that Generation Apple had organized most of the Occupy movement via social networking websites, like an Arab Spring for spoiled suburbanites, I figured there was a good chance I would offend virtually everyone I passed.

I didn’t want to debate the gross sociopolitical factors of their white, middle class existence or how it was or wasn’t fundamentally sustained by third world labor and exploitation at almost every level. It was all neo-Marxist bullshit to me, wrapped in a disingenuous skin of Libertarianism by a bunch of people who had never actually read Anarchy, State, Utopia.

Read the rest at FKNONLINE.

See also Portland Memorials by Trevor Blake.

Kate Mather, The Oregonian:

Daniel Rafatpanah thought he was going to die. A jittery gunman was marching the 29-year-old and two of his Southeast Portland housemates upstairs to the attic, a handgun aimed at their backs. None of them knew the man, who demanded Popsicles and alcohol before taking them hostage Monday afternoon. But when he placed the gun under his foot to change into a new pair of pants, they knew it was their only chance. “Everything’s in slow-mo, and I’m like, ‘It’s go time.’ It’s time to fight this guy,” Rafatpanah said.

Jonathan Mooney, 26, bearhugged the gunman from behind. Robert Steinfeld, 21, broke a beer bottle over his head. And Rafatpanah started throwing punches, his hands bloodied by the shattered glass. Everyone reached for the gun as the man fell. The man fired a shot as the struggle continued. Rafatpanah’s right hand got sliced open by the gun’s mechanism, and blood poured everywhere.

A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear. “Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth. “Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded. The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.

“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn – my blood, his blood.”

Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.

Article continues, with video.

Previously at OVO:

Trevor Blake: Time Machine (after The Invisibles by Grant Morrison). June 2011. Model: Danny Chaoflux.

The USS Oregon was launched in 1893 and served until 1919. The battleship’s crew saw action in five wars. The Oregon was scrapped in 1956. The bow, mast and anchor chain of the Oregon are in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, near SW Pine and Naito. One mile north is the Albers Mill Building. The smokestacks of the Oregon were in a Liberty Ship memorial park where this parking lot is now. The Willamette River Greenway Trail runs next to the Building. Walk along it until you find a wall running into the Willamette River. On the other side of this wall are the remains of some Liberty Ships that had been made in Portland. This is what remains of the Liberty Ship memorial park.

Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – Phantom Patrol (1903)

Learn of thousands of other memorials in Portland Memorials by Trevor Blake.

Thanks to the following for linking to OVO.

Eithin links to Liberating Wednesday.
Monday Vatican links to The Concordant Story.
Financial Advices Blog links to The Bonus Army.
Rambone at Indiana Gun Owners links to The Bonus Army.
The American Book of the Dead links to Unspeakable Horrors.

Today, 25 November, was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  May you have a special day as well.  I don’t want to do what Mishima did, I want to do what I do as fully as he did what he did.

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they’re just repeating what others before them have done.” – Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2010.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2009.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

… and more.

Those who long to live in 1911 choose that year – really any year from 1890 to 1914 would be equally ok – just because it’s safely in the middle of that long lingering last “decade” of the long 19th Century – which was also the first heroic decade of true modern radicalism – e.g. – the Wandervogel, Stirnerite anarchism, the IWW and Jim Larkin, Ascona, Sex Radicals & Nudists – etc.  And still far removed from the future of total war & totalitarianism to come – a time of utopian revolutionary hope.

Also of course it’s the Age of Decadence – final year of the Manchu Dynasty – opium ten cents a bottle at any country store – the Paris of J. K. Huysmans.  Gaslight.  Also: the last gasp of true agrarianism in the USA – age of Populism, the Grange, Farmers Alliance – the last rural decade.

But there’s another reason we choose 1911 (or thereabouts) for our little Golden Age. It has to do with technology. In 1911 almost all the actual conveniences of modern tech already existed: the car, the telephone, the electric bulb, the phonograph… Now we Luddites do not approve of cars or any of these inventions, which all subtract from the quanta of Imagination available to individuals & to the Social. But we have to admit – they’re convenient. In their primitive forms they’re almost likable. The only real convenience invented since then – the electric refrigerator – can be replaced by an Amish-built propane refrigerator – OR – we could re-invent the ice-box. We hope someday to learn to sing again, but till then we can accept a few hand-cranked shellac records (but no radio or TV). Computers are NOT in any way part of a revived 1911 however. It’s time to wake up & smell the rot of technopathology.

The telephone easily corrodes social presence & reduces selves to disembodies “voices of the Unseen,” as the Arabs called the invention. But again the primitive version, with its “party lines” & snoopy local Operators, had a social aspect now completely leached out of the medium. If we must be thus haunted let it be via one of these elegant sinister objects – a real murder weapon.

Full play of Imagination becomes possible only without modern technology, because tech has become the heartless operation of Capital, which hates all forms of sharing. Let’s work for a secular Anabaptism, bold enough finally to refuse everything back to the steam engine – at least. Whereupon we may resume human life.