Michael Swann

Michael Molyneaux-Swann is an artist, film-maker, writer and DJ connected with the Chappist Movement .

He was born Michael Leopold Freidrich Hagzisser von Svinfilking at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland in 1971 and moved to England in the Summer of 1982. From this time he grew up on the family estate at Stoke By Clare in Suffolk. Swann was schooled at Winchester College, where he had won a scholarship as a King's Scholar. He then went on to study Theoretical Physics at the University of York.

On leaving university he was offered a position with the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. However, before being able to accept this position he met a woman and travelled with her to India and Nepal. For the next four years he travelled the world with this woman, Rachel Goldberg, who became his fiance, until her tragic and untimely death in a hit and run accident on a desolate stretch of road in Caithness, Scotland.

Distraught at this Swann threw himself into, what was to be, nearly ten years of travel. "I was simply trying to run away", he later remarked.

On the course of those travels he produced a number of research papers dealing with the indigeneous tattooing rituals and techniques of the Polynesians, Iban, Dyak , Mentwai and Japanese. In addition to this he was also actually tattooed, in a traditional style, by most of the tribes with whom he stayed. During his travels he also wrote a six part television series on the life of Aleister Crowley, directed a production of Samuel Beckett's "The Entertainer" in NewZealand, was suspended from hooks, smuggled medical supplies to Karen Hilltribes in Burma and, famously, once offended the entire population of a South Pacific island.

A lifelong dandy, famous for refusing to wear anything but linen suits and pith helmets in his jungle adventures, it was inevitable that Mr. Swann would, at some point, make the aquaintance of the sterling coves of The Chap Magazine . This he did, in fine fashion, when he joined them to protest the presence of a monsterous piece of "art" by the confidence trickster Rachel Whiteread in the Cast Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington. The Chaps duly climbed atop the flimsy plaster structure and were duly ignored by security staff and left, in relative peace, to drink malt whisky for a considerable period of time before being ejected.

In the revelry and feasting that followed swann realised that he had found his metier and duly took the plunge. He has become an outspoken critic of the mediocrity and homogeny of modern England. It is Swann's contention that television, advertising and the march of mass-media consumerism are responsible for the decline in social values and that, "By simply exercising good manners and perfect taste, one may destroy the hideous trinity of church, state and media, which holds us all to be it's slave." A self-confessed "extremist" within the movement, Swann is a staunch opponent of "American Cultural Imperialism" (although he always refers to America as "Barbarica") and advocates a complete rejection of a modern world which he sees as, "Defined, in history, by little other than it's abscence of style".

He is a complete opponent of television and has said, "Televison is the great evil of our age. It is, to our society what lead pipes were to the Romans. We have, mistakenly, become hooked on a medium which destroys not only our own sense of time, but our sense of fun, our time, our imagination and our ability to interact with real people. Take the case of Eastenders; given that most children are raised using the idiot box rather than parenting skills, is it any wonder that, exposed to Eastenders, they grow into vile, self-obsessed, consumer robots? The whole programme is devoid of even a single character who could be said to be a "decent human being", there is no concern, no altruism, no civility. They defend it by saying that it is realistic, I say that it is social engineering of the worst kind. If you love your children then you will throw out your television, there is simply no other answer."

He has become a familiar and eccentric fixture of London's nostalgia/caberet subculture. A small, impeccably well dressed man, usually in some manner of bespoke 1940s suit, a Homburg, cane and magnificently waxed moustache, with his ear lobes stretched by the Maasai and his neck tattooed with an ancient Polynesian design, he is certainly a man prepared to stand out in the crowd.

"We live in such boring times. Every aspect of modern life has been identified, commodified and capitalised upon. My life is a war against this. I want to bring back joy, beauty, elegance and, most importantly, a sense of respect for oneself and one's fellows. The modern world, with it's technological gadgetry, ceaseless advertising, noise and ugliness, is an offense to my senses. I yearn for a bygone age when wirelesses played music, not just "urban" noise, children played in the street, not locked away with a gameboy and a Barbarican burger, saving up for a heart attack and when people had a sense of civility, they cared about causing offence to someone and strove to be seen as being decent. It's as simple as that, people have lost their sense of shame. They don't seem to mind being seen to be vile to each other anymore."

Mr. Swann is a frequent contributor to The Chap Magazine , pseudonymical menswear correspondant for a major daily newspaper, a DJ at The Modern Times Club and a painter influenced by the German Expressionist school. He is also producing his first film which he describes as, "Deliberately constructed to have no appeal, whatsoever, to the Barbaricans."