England's Independent looks at the classic portrait photography of movie starlets of the 1930s by MGM staff photographer George Hurrell, a topic Virginia Postrel previously explored via a photo essay in Slate three years ago. The Independent's Hannah Duguid writes:

It's the stuff of fantasy: a photograph of Joan Crawford with liquid eyes and flawless skin, her strong bone structure casting sculptural shadows across her face. There is no context, no setting: it is simply a close-up of her perfectly beautiful face. Crawford's troubled character is not apparent in these photographs, nor is her battle with alcohol; the ravages of life are painted over with clever lighting and a thick concealer.

The photograph was taken by George Hurrell, head of portrait photography at MGM Studios in 1930. In those days, Hollywood studios employed full-time photographers who were responsible for creating a star's image. Those were the days of high glamour, when young women became sophisticated princesses, their allure heightened by their unattainability. Hurrell also moulded the images of Jean Harlow, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. He spent hours with his subjects, perfecting their look. Their public persona was a creation, a brand, an image on to which people could project their fantasies and desires. They were not meant to reflect reality, or reveal anything about the women's real character – it was all made up.

Yet, as time progressed, audiences and photographers tired of these images of idealised beauty. There was a place for pure glamour in fashion and society magazines, but now people wanted something more real, they wanted to know who their stars really were.

The modern-day implications of that last sentence bring to mind H.L. Mencken's classic line, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

Or is that trench-like oven warfare? In any case, oh to have been a fly on the wall when this commercial was shown to the boys in the boardroom:

(You'll see why it was promptly rejected at the end.)

Sonny Bunch of the Weekly Standard writes:

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but if you’re looking for a reason to subscribe to the New Yorker, look no further than Anthony Lane. The smartest, wittiest critic out there, Lane’s reviews drip with wit and, almost as importantly, knowledge about the film industry and the history of cinema. Truly an amazing writer. His take on Sex and the City is, needless to say, a must-read:

“When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

The headline to this post is Lane’s suggested subtitle for the movie; a better one I cannot imagine.

Geez, at least at the apogee of the 1980s, Miami Vice managed to combine glitz and conspicuous consumption with car chases, shoot-outs and a bitchin' soundtrack.

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

Actually, given the seemingly permanent near-century-old reactionary state of "modern art", I'm just surprised there's a capital-C in the above-quoted UPI headline.

I've been a bit surprised to see ascots appearing in my latest Brooks Brothers catalogs; I think it's still a look that's far too affected, even for me, but Betsy Newmark wonders if we aren't seeing the aura of a penumbra of its comeback:

According to USA Today, we are seeing glimmerings of a comeback of the ascot. A handful of guys in the public eye are wearing them. The most public practitioner is American Idol contestant, Michael Johns. While I really like Johns and he's my favorite on Idol, I hope he starts to resist such advice from the Idol stylist as this:

And yet: American Idol contender Michael Johns sang a bluesy number last week while wearing a pink-and-purple Alexander McQueen ascot, chosen by Idol stylist Miles Siggins. The contestants need "a recognizable brand, and I was thinking dandy rocker," says Siggins, who has picked out a vintage ascot for Johns to wear this week.

"Dandy rocker?" You gotta be kidding.

Please, please, stop that. America does not need a dandy rocker.

With the unfortunate death of Robert Palmer in 2003, doesn't Bryan Ferry currently have the absolute lock on that job description? (At least as frontman--Charlie Watts is often the best dressed drummer since Tony Williams.)

Geez, haven't any of these people ever been in a Hooters before?

(Via Breitbart.com)

Visit "The Tomb of King Peepankhamun", the winner of the Washington Post's "Peeps Show II, The second annual Sunday Source Peeps Diorama Contest".

No fireworks are involved, but a semifinalist did lock and load a diorama of Stanley Peepbrick's "Full Sugar Coating". No word yet on what Peep Ermey thinks of its technical accuracy, though.

Glenn Reynolds satirically suggests "a lucrative spokesperson gig" is possibly in the Dark Lord's future from Apple; but if this even more famous Mac head--with the nation's single largest audience of listeners--couldn't get signed, Karl probably shouldn't hold his breath.

Seeking to take his mind off the frozen tundra of Jasperwood, James Lileks does unspeaking things to poor, defenseless foam rubber (isn't that what they're made out of? Feels like it when biting into them) Peeps:

While it lacks the staggering production values and stentorian dialogue readings of the finest Fred Spencer Productions, the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, our in-house video blog, is online. It analyzes and breaks down the creepy 9/11-ish vibe of a couple of advertisements, the first a Starbucks ad that actually ran in Manhattan less than a year after September 11th (here's our concurrent blog post from our first year). And the second, a much more recent viral video for a (possibly fictitious?) Dutch travel agency with close to a million and half views on YouTube and at least one appearance on the cable news channels, which is where I first saw it at the start of this month.

(Past episodes of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

In addition to killing print newspapers, you're killing their ink-stained wretches' favorite watering holes, too!

Of course, it's also likely that the political correctness of the modern newspaper person isn't doing much for saloon keepers: today's journalist on a bender is much more likely to blow through a cube of Diet Pepsi than a fifth of Chivas.

"And is it possible to like sushi and still be conservative?"

Well, at least a pretty strong classical liberal.

But where do they put the wasabi?

(Via Breitbart.TV)

"A man, a vision, a three-story structure built out of solidified liquid":

Anne Applebaum asks, "Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russian Women Come From?":

There was a particular historical moment, round about 1995 or so, when anyone entering a well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London was sure to encounter a beautiful Russian woman. Though the word beautiful doesn't really capture the phenomenon. The women I'm remembering were extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous.

These women were half-Kazakh or half-Tartar with Mongolian ancestors and perfect skin; dressed in the most tasteful, most expensive clothes; shod in soft leather boots; and perfectly coiffed. They were usually accompanied by an older man, sometimes much older, to whom they were perhaps married, or more likely not. They spoke in low, alluringly accented voices and towered over the lesser mortals in the room. I distinctly remember gazing upon one such creature while in the company of a friend, an old Russia hand who'd spent much of the previous decade in the Soviet Union. He stared, shook his head, and whispered, "But where were they all before?"

In the aftermath of the Australian Open, a tennis tournament whose final rounds featured a parade of notably stunning ex-Soviet-bloc players, it is perhaps time to make a stab at answering my friend's question. Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude. Whatever you may say about women's professional tennis in the 1970s or '80s, it did not feature many players who looked like Maria Sharapova, the latest Australian Open victor.

Where were they all before?

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

As Applebaum concludes, "Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius."

James Lileks sails into the annual Minneapolis Boat Show, camcorder in hand:

(Larger version viewable here.)

The Official Beverage Of Hell--soon in liquor stores everywhere!

Violate it while campaigning at your peril.

(Now a nice navy blue Trilby from Lock & Co.--that's a different story!)

"Vuitton-clad Venezuela minister spouts socialism."

(As opposed to your average Reuters columnist, of course.)

This Amazon.com Automotive Editors' Blog post is the equivalent of the Greenwich Village art & heroin crowd's love for Manhattan in the Death Wish/Taxi Driver era: they know the 1970s sucked like the proverbial Hoover--and yet they can't help but want to relive it:

Many 1970s American cars are empirically bad - slow, inefficient, overstyled, under-engineered - but they are still interesting. Most people read history in books or watch it on TV; 1970s cars are rolling history, imbued with the spirit of both the people who design them and the people that use them.

Take, say, the Pinto. Not a great car. In fact, many people think it was one of the worst cars of the 1970s. Somewhere, three decades ago, a designer proudly unveiled it to the bosses at Ford; workers spent their waking hours building it. Young families bought Pintos, showed Pintos off to their friends, washed Pintos in their driveways, drove their babies home from the hospital in Pintos. Some of you drove Pintos; some of your parents or grandparents drove Pintos. Pintos were on TV, in movies, in magazines and newspapers.

The Pinto is part of the fabric of our history. Drive one today, and you can share that. The sloppy suspension, the awkward styling, the tractor-like engine; these place you bodily back in the 1970s. You experience exactly what drivers experienced in the 1970s. The realities of the OPEC difficulties, the emissions crackdown, the priorities of Americans in the 1970s--these are all reflected in the Pinto, frozen in sheetmetal and glass.

There's a much cheaper way to relive the aesthetic hell of the 1970s--and it's far less flammable, too.

Update: The American cars of the "naughts" have their issues as well, needless to say.

For years, I've been aware that I prefer more vermouth than most modern sybarites whenever I mix a Martini. Now I know why!

There is no Hell, there is only the 1970s. And its clothes.

(H/T: VP)

From his recent anti-American movie to his old man stubble and overflowing facial topiary, which combines to make him look like an elderly hippie clerking for beer money at Guitar Center, Tommy Lee Jones has definitely seen better days.

Frank Martin explains why Harry Reid's poll numbers in Nevada are so low, even the crack forensic scientists of CSI: Las Vegas couldn't find them.

Truth be told, I don't think that Reid actually believes any of this stuff, but when you're a spokesman for an ideology that's headed far, far to the left in recent years, you've got to toe the party line.

Keef has nothing on the British Navy:

In 1805, British Admiral Horatio Nelson was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain. Most sailors were simply put to rest at sea, but as an admiral, Nelson had to be brought back to England for an official burial.

To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.

Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood.

Pschew! I think I'll stick with my Remy Martin 1738, sans royal navy zombie brains.

Fashion, thy name is Lyndon Baines Johnson.

A video on Breitbart.TV is headlined, "Southwest Airlines Sorry for Making Man Remove Vulgar T-Shirt". I don't know why, when the man in question wore a T-shirt with the words "MASTER BAITER" printed in large type on the back and front of the shirt. With a huge "Ain't I a stinker?" grin on his face, he told a television reporter, "To undress in front of 132 people, to put a new shirt on, I was unbelievably embarrassed."

In a sane world, he would have been too unbelievably embarrassed to wear such a shirt in public in the first place. Kudos to Southwest for sparing the passengers around him two hours or more of having to stare at a vulgarity.

Kathy Shaidle has an urgent plea: "Dear Men Across The English Speaking World -- Please. Stop. Looking. Like. This":

I'm not sure what you were thinking ten years ago when you started with the mouth mullets, knock-off hipster glasses, bald head "frat-jock-semi-pro-goalie" look, but Clinton's not the President anymore, the X-Files is over and we all have to, as they say, move on.

This look was ugly back then but now it is both ugly and old. It's also nakedly, desperately aspirational: "I'm really a working class bloke but I'm trying to look like a middle class, 24/7-table-reading-of-Glenngary-Glen-Ross, commission-only-Toyota-salesman for some reason."

Kaithy adds, "We'll talk about tattoos another day."

By all means, please do.

It's Mad Men: The Next Generation; Breitbart.TV notes, "Topless Woman in ‘Provacative Pose’ Billboard Shocks Even New Yorkers":

Hey, it's not like they broke the law...

Outtakes from The Preppie Handbook? The 1981 summer Brooks Brothers catalog? (I know, I know, Papa Bush is a J. Press man. Please! Stop your letters and emails!)

In any case, Robin Givhan's next article writes itself.

(And where it all will end, only knows God.)

As a follow-up to my review for Pajamas of AMC's Mad Men (and in case you're wondering, I'm enjoying the mini-series quite a bit more these days than my original take, now that it's gotten past its overly expository folk-Marxist premiere episode), Rondi Adamson makes a great observation. If you buy into the Babbitt-like subtext of the series, "Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners." On the other hand:

Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among us looking like we're on our way to the convenience store nearest our trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

Speaking of the aesthetics of relationships designed largely for public consumption, don't miss her photographic comparison of now and then as an example of how society has "progressed" over the past 50 years.

Rondi's post reminds me very much of something that James Lileks once wrote about the era portrayed--ocasionally with a brush so heavy-handed it must weigh a ton, in Mad Men:

I'm fascinated by the post-war era--1946 to, say, 1964--and in many ways it was an absolute Golden Age. Not perfect; no era is. It's stupid to romanticize a period, but equally stupid to dismiss it for its failure to be as Perfect and Glorious and Wise as our enlightened time. It's easy to snicker at their fear of Communism, but in context I'd be scared too--the USSR was a heavily armed, expansionist totalitarian state, and its domestic apologists were not only wrong, but defending a system that equaled and bested the Nazis for prolonged brutality.

The '50s are sniffed at, I think, because the victors write the history, and in the cultural battles fought by the boomers, the '50s were the era of Mom and Dad, the era of rules, the era of oppression. To the boomers, the '60s are the Years of Glory, because that's when they got to go to college, live in dorms, stay out late and come home blitzed on ditchweed without answering a lot of questions. Being Boomers, they elevated this period to mythic status, and hence we've had to live with this incessant '60s worship ever since. Personally, I'm sick of it; I'm sick of their music, their fashions, their politics, their interminable self-satisfaction and narcissistic desire to regard their generation as the apogee of human endeavor. Yawn. It's been such a stultifying weight on society that we can't seem to come up with anything new--hence this never-ending cycle of nostalgia we're in. We must worship the '60s, be amused by the '70s, and loathe the '80s. Why loathe? Because that's when the boomers first started to feel out of touch, i.e., old.

These are all horrible overgeneralizations. That's the problem. Each era gets boiled down to a few pat symbols. The '50s are sock hops and tail fins. The '60s are protest and Woodstock. The '70s are shag and disco balls. The '80s mean greed and Izod. The '90s--well, who knows. It's all ridiculous; every era is much more than that, and at the same time no different than our own. People eat, work, raise kids, laugh, snore, worry about whether the sofa should go in that corner or over there.

All that said, I have only two points: I love living now, and wouldn't change this time for any other. Point #2: were it a choice between driving a minivan down a vacant suburb strip mall corridor eating a franchise hamburger and listening to some "Big Pimpin'" on the CD player, OR driving a turquoise BelAir around downtown Philly listening to Joe Niagara introduce Chuck Berry tunes on the AM radio--

Not even close.

Tip of the Trilby to the always stylishly-shod Manolo, who also links to the newest blog in his burgeoning fashion empire. I think the punchline at the end of this post actually was understood reasonably well during the era of depicted in Mad Men, and then forgotten, oh, about six or seven years later. I'd like to think that hopefully as The Great Relearning slowly (all too slowly) progresses, it too will be rediscovered.

Greg Pollowitz has some thoughts on Tom Brokaw, new media, and classic cocktails:

Tom Brokaw's thoughts show that he really doesn't take the threat of "new media" to "old media" seriously:

In 1992 someone asked me how I would change the presidential debate format. I proposed handing each of the candidates a double martini in the firm belief that would get them beyond their canned answers.

I think in 2007 we can pair up the martini past and the electronic future. How long would Joe Biden talk on a cellphone after knocking back a big Gibson, straight up?

A Gibson? Kind of shows the demographic the network nightly newscasts are aiming for.

I'm sorry, but a conservatism divided against vintage, time-tested, perfectly-proportioned, classic libations cannot stand! I will defend the rise of the new media to anyone who listens, and have frequently pointed out the rapidly aging demographics of television news, but a Gibson is not Geritol.

As Jonah Goldberg once wrote:

Conservatism has always been a mix of the gut and the brain. Lincoln defined it as a preference for the old and tried against the new and untried.

And which mix would you rather have in your gut and brain? A classic cocktail with a century or so of breeding and history, or something like this?

James Lileks writes, "Target and its mortal foe Wal-Mart are dumping those infuriating Kevlar plastic containers for cardboard. Not because the new ones are easier to open, but because bad PR is finally catching up with the clamshell. They’re not just annoying. They’re immoral":

Downside of the eco-friendly packaging? People will drive to these stores to get it, thereby generated greenhouse gases. I swear, I want to weep when I read things like that. It gets better:

"'Retailers like Target and Wal-Mart have conditioned people to make these big, weekly shopping trips, and that's vastly increased the amount of pollution associated with shopping,' said Stacy Mitchell, author of a book on big-box retailers and senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis."

No, Ms. Mitchell, they haven’t conditioned people to make big weekly shopping trips. People make big weekly shopping trips because it’s the most efficient means of getting everything done. No one ever stands before their trunk in a Target parking lot, lofting a 18-roll bale of bathroom tissue into the back, thinking: this is madness! How did it come to this? Why am I not walking to the corner store every other day to buy the rolls individually? I have been conditioned! But how?

I suspect that companies are pursuing this line for cosmetic reasons. It’s good PR, and it flatters the customers’ new hemp-halo’d neo-green self-image. Whatever the reason, I don’t care; if I can open something without using garden shears, I’ll be happy. How about you? Would you recondition your shopping habits to seek out "greener" packaging?

Sorry, I have to stop laughing; that last sentence may be the funniest thing Lileks has written in ages.

On the other hand, this may be the first goreball worming initiative I can really get behind: Raise the speed limit to fight global warming!

Let me amend that: Raise the speed limit on newly privatized roads to fight global warming. Now we're talking!

Update: The latest Bobo obsession: hand wringing over "Food Miles".

"Old Creepy Ads" definitely lives up to its name.

And speaking of Lileks on acid, it sounds like James could use some antacid, after his recent trip to Alaska:

On a cruise ship you’re either heading towards cake or coming from cake. I did not know it was possible to eat so much. There were meals between meals. There were meals in the middle of meals. You could pass out in the main cafeteria with a room-service menu on your chest and they’d wake you at daybreak, pry open your mouth and pour a rich, nutritious slurry of eggs and French toast down your throat. By the end of the cruise you had to grease the doorframe of your cabin to get out. Every so often you tottered to the window to see whales, and you usually did, although most of the time it was your reflection.

More reflections at Bleat HQ.

This just in from the New York Times: Nerd culture discovered; Asians, other minorities hardest hit.

Update: The International Herald-Tribune, a spin-off of the New York Times, undertakes their own Noam Chomsky-style research on nerd linguistical patterns.

More: Jerome J. Schmitt adds: "In sum, I believe that this article and study reveal a lot more about the racial bigotry and monomania of the NY Times and swaths of the liberal arts and social sciences than it does about nerds."

James Panero's post on the New Criterion's Armavirumque blog brings new meaning to the phrase "Culture of Death":

The other day I remarked on hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen's loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," Damien Hirst's work featuring a dead shark floating in a formaldehyde vitrine. Rumor has it that MoMA and the Met both went fishing for the shark. Now the Met will have the honor of bestowing unearned respectability on Cohen's costly purchase ($8 million from Charles Saatchi in 2004).

By the way, if you want to know the disgusting details about how this work is maintained, read Carol Vogel's story here. (the answer is injections of formaldehyde.) What is not explained in this article, of course, is how Vogel maintains her job as a critic after REPEATEDLY shilling for Hirst and his rich collectors (the answer is injections of formaldehyde). [Ouch!--Ed]

Now in other news, we learn that Damien Hirst has recently wrapped up his latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in London. This was the show featuring Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, called “For the Love of God,” which sported approximately $20 million in jewels and retailed for about $100 million. Even without factoring in the sale of the skull (did it sell? Does Cohen have it on reserve?), Hirst’s exhibition took in $265 million in sales--if reports are to be believed. Such numbers puts Hirst in league with the marketplace for modern masters.

Hirst is a conceptual artist for the art of conspicuous consumption. Hirst’s work exhibits none of the traditional indicators of artistic value. It is not original (take for example his “spin” and “dot” paintings, based on children’s toys and pop art). Nor is it masterly (his work is crafted by an army of assistants whom Hirst openly describes as better painters than he is).

Hirst’s work is, quite deliberately, worthless beyond its material content. But through a conceptual sleight of hand, he has already earned himself a footnote in the history of art, not to mention a pile of cash.

In other words, David Lynch meets Thomas Kinkaid.

Manolo for the Men's Izzy asks the question about the 2008 election: "There’s a lot of buzz about whether America is willing to elect a black president, but should we be willing to elect a president who wears black suits?"

Headline via Pajamas; post at Gateway Pundit.

Incidentally, I didn't notice until now that I've spent the day digitally dissing the Goracle--while wearing a brown shirt! (Linen, monogrammed, custom-made with as high a carbon footprint as possible by Brooks Brothers, of course.)

Which is either irony or Gaia having the last laugh, depending upon how you look at it.

Burt Prelutsky has some thoughts on what the recent affair involving L.A.'s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas tells us about American attitudes towards sex:

Why, you ask, is this so important? Because it behooves us all not to supply the French with artillery with which they can mock us. Which, when you get right down to it, is the only sort of artillery the French ever actually use.

No, there is another. And it's the best piece of artillery the French ever invented.

James Lileks writes that "Prince’s new perfume debuts tomorrow":

It 's called “3121,” which is either some mystical secret message or his ATM PIN. It’s billed as “xquiste” and “xotic,” and it’s probably as xpensive (hah! See what I did there?) as the rest of the perfumes on the market. Americans spend $2.8 billion on fragrances per year, which seems a little low. That’s about 3,953 bottles.

There was a time when people applied cologne with a paint roller; you’d get in an elevator behind someone drenched in Giorgio, and your eyes watered like Salieri listening to something Mozart dashed off on his lunch hour. There was something so proudly corrupt about that smell. It was like the aroma given off by a bonfire of costumes worn on “Dynasty.” It went out of style, as they all do; when I was tending bar in a college joint, half the guys appeared to have exchanged their blood for Drakkar Noir, and now that’s out. I’m not opposed to scents, and I’m partial to a little Bay Rum in the winter; smells like you’ve just come from an old-style barbershop where the men read Esquire and speak in terse, Hemmingway-esque sentences. But I never finish a bottle of anything. Don’t know anyone who has, either.

When I was going to school, Polo was the big cologne; I remember guys who would bathe in it if they had a hot date that night. I like a lot of Ralph Lauren's duds, but I could easily do without smelling his cologne again.

"The mistake wasn't spending $1,250 on a haircut. It was calling Torrenueva 'that guy.'"

As much we revere the 1980s for a return to laissez-faire economics, and its innovative music, television and a temporary return (amongst some) to sartorial sanity after the endless nostalgie de la boue nightmare of the seventies, it's important to remember that no decade is ever perfect:

Via the all of the knowing guide to all of the things fashion.

Bob Hope once introduced comedian Mort Sahl (the thinking man's Woody Allen!) at the Academy Awards by saying "Here he is folks, the favorite of nuclear physicists everywhere!"

Similarly, based on his choice of footwear, Ron Paul--the thinking man's Pat Paulsen--definitely has the all-important American gym teacher vote all sewn-up.

Rather than a pair of black sneakers, Ron might have better odds in a slightly more upscale pair of kicks such as these. However, despite his shabby shodding, the Ron Paul boomlet could be catching--I actually saw a car parked at the Marie Callender's restaurant just outside of San Jose with not one, but two Ron Paul bumperstickers in its rear window.

No word yet on which phys. ed. class its owner teaches.

In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas reviews Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin R. Barber:

Somewhere in Consumed, Benjamin Barber, a civil-society professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld, has a serious point to make: many Americans have opted out of a common civic culture based on shared values and have turned inward instead, to a relentless, infantile narcissism that free markets only encourage. But Barber can never quite grasp this point in his own book, or make practical suggestions on how to deal with the problem. Instead, he wildly overreaches and couches everything he writes in apocalyptic terms.

For the flipside of Barber's argument, one that has been made frequently by a surprisingly puritanical left probably even before Peter Seeger and Malvina Reynolds' ticky-tacky-screedy "Little Boxes" singalong, it's worth rereading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style.

Just kidding about that headline. But no one could accuse James Lileks of kidding around when he writes, "Nothing quickens the pulse like a fresh, aromatic" new study--and fortunately he's got one!

According to a new Coors Light survey of Minneapolis men, ages 21-44, more than 75 percent would rather have air conditioning in their homes than win a date with a supermodel . . .

This seems to make no sense, but it’s probably true. The air conditioning unit would stick around and do something, and the supermodel would sit there looking bored smoking cigarettes and texting friends in Monaco while you decided whether to put on the Macy Gray or the Green Day record. On the other hand, it’s easier to get a supermodel in the a window than an air conditioning unit; tell her Karl Lagerfeld is in the parking lot below, and she’ll lean right out.

No. When it comes to serious babe magnets, there is another.

Your next styling project awaits you!