"When The Economy's Worse, Dressing Better"

But what would Machiavelli say?

Manolo for the Men sadly reports, "the economic downturn has led to a true casual-ty: 21, the famed Manhattan restaurant, is no longer requiring that male diners wear ties, as it had for the prior 79 years."

"It is the final victory of Los Angeles," Tim Zagat of the popular eponymously named restaurant wry noted.

Last week, Andrea Harris wrote:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up.

And plenty of it landed in your living room along the way--James Lileks reposts the entire original "Interior Desecrations" site from the late 1990s, the inspiration for his best selling book a few years later. For the full visual horror of the 1970s at its plastic craptastic worst, click here and keep scrolling until your eyes bleed. For my Electronic House magazine review of his 2004 book, click here.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

Heh, indeed.™ As Kathy Shaidle writes, "Listen for weird smashing sounds coming from inside the White House on Inauguration night."

Neo-Neocon warns: " Beware the Necco Smoothie!"

Had dinner at the Four Seasons tonight, on the drive down from New York State to visit my mom in NJ before heading back to California. Three observations:

1. If the New York economy is hurting, you couldn't tell it tonight, as the Pool Room was nearly packed.

2. The filet of bison with foie gras and Perigord truffle sauce main course was pretty amazing.

3. The older, salt and pepper-haired gentleman and his wife sitting opposite us were a seriously class act, picking up the tab for a young Marine in his dress blues having dinner with a young woman in a strapless dress that I can only assume was his girlfriend, fiancee or wife at the other end of our row of tables. When the Marine walked over to thank him, the older gentleman and his wife both replied, "No, thank you for everything you're doing to keep us safe."

Which is an awesome note to end the year on, all around.

...That David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wore his baseball cap with the brim facing backwards:

Who would have thought that twenty years after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers...), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late '80s and mid '90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it's soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, "you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago," will do.

Too bad this unwitting celebrity fashion victim and his army of media handlers such as this Reuters journalist never got the memo:

The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.

As Jonah Goldberg noted last week, American society--let alone the rest of the world--is far too balkanized for such a blanket statement. And in such a diverse environment, news agencies such as Reuters need to mindful of such a wide range of readers. In other words, we all know that one man's uber-cool fashion plate is another man's uber-dork. To be frank, it adds little to the national dialogue to call the attack on the basketball courts by the president elect an uber-cool aesthetic experience.

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

Just to follow up on our link earlier today to Virginia Postrel's post on "Depression Porn", Culture11 explores "Recession Chic" in the fashion magazine industry--"Who knew an economic collapse could be so fabulous?"

Meanwhile over at Ace of Spades, "U.S. Economy In Recession; Women, Minorities, and [B.S.] Artists Hardest Hit."

With a little help from his friendly local Pepsi-Cola bottler ad men, James Lileks charts the decline and fall of western civilization, from Don Draper grown-up swankiness in 1958 to earnest granola-munching, acoustic guitar-strumming pseudo-hippies in 1970.

Sure, blaming the fall of postwar American culture on one soft drink's ad campaign is asking a lot--but we are talking about a company that named an entire generation after its products, after all.

Just in time for Christmas, giant stuffed microbes--it's fun, educational, contagious and plush!

(Besides, any wet smack from Miskatonic University can give a Cthulu plush for Christmas--why not be original this year, huh?)

Exploring the horrific death of Long Island Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, Kirsten Powers writes, "Incivility isn't just accepted these days--from celebrity news to TV shows--it's glorified:"

Last week, the Oxygen Network debuted the third season of "The Bad Girls Club" - like seemingly all reality shows, a toxic celebration of rude, mentally unbalanced people shrieking at each other.

Oxygen's Web site features a section hailing these "Destructive Divas": "From home break-ins to club toss-outs, these girls are bad. The girls get kicked out of three clubs - all in the premier episode!"

The show is the most-watched Oxygen original series ever.

One "bad girl" brags on the premiere: "I like to push people's buttons. I have jealousy issues, I'm very rude, conniving, and opinionated . . . I'm just a bad person to know. If someone was picking on me because I was, like, a cute blonde girl, my first instinct would be to tell them they are ugly."

I would plow over someone at a Wal-Mart to get my hands on discounted lip gloss.

P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997, and has rung the alarm bells on the collapse of civility. While Americans still have manners, he says, we've lost "the manners of past generations."

Big deal, some will say - those "manners" are just outdated customs. No, Forni argues in his book "Choosing Civility": They're the glue that holds society together.

Compare Long Island 2008 with Manhattan in 1939.

(Found via Kathy Shaidle, who has some thoughts on both Powers' essay and the misremembered legend of Kitty Genovese. For my own recent video look at anger in America, click here.)

Reuters reports that Iran is cracking down on "satanic" clothing--Satanic in this meaning, "tight trousers and high boots."

I guess from the Imams' point of view, Nancy Sinatra is the Anti-Christ. Or maybe Suzi Quatro.

More Reuters:

Some analysts say the authorities fear such open acts of defiance against the Islamic Republic's values could escalate if they go unchecked. This worries them when Iran is under pressure from the West over its disputed nuclear work, they say.

"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Rahmani said.

"The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life," he added.

Rahmani did not say how the offenders would be punished. Usual penalties are a warning or a fine.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has in the past suggested Iran's enemies may try to stage a "soft" or "velvet" revolution by infiltrating corrupt culture or ideas.

I'd love to see Iran have its own Velvet Revolution--it certainly worked well in another corrupt culture well that was well worth infiltrating.

Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on the decline of 007, from Kennedy-era Cold War icon to the moral equivalence of the Bourne and Munich-era.

The perfect place to watch the videos we linked to in the previous post: James Lileks gives thanks to the hotel that defined the 1970s--and sadly, vice versa: the Gobbler.

I'm not sure if it looks more like the Death Star, or one of the EVA pods from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this is one surprising looking treehouse.

(Via John Derbyshire.)

"Manolo says, far be it from the Manolo to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but...."

The Boston Herald notes, "Boston City Hall named world's ugliest building"--and note the usual "start from zero" aspects of the 1969 building:

"That's gotta go," said Ivette Arenas of San Francisco, when it was pointed out to her on her way to the Common. "You have some of the best (buildings), and right here you have the worst."

"It is a pretty ugly building," agreed Carol Sue Graves of Orange, Va., as she walked to Faneuil Hall.

An example of the "New Brutalism" school of design, City Hall was seen as a clean break from Boston's past, said Jeff Stein, dean of the Boston Architectural College.

"They were looking for something new and startling," Stein said. "And boy did it succeed."

In From Bauhaus To Our House, Tom Wolfe wrote about the similarly Corbusier-inspired Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, built in 1955 and mercifully demolished less than two decades later:

Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents' worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: "Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up!" The next day, the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

A similar sort of aesthetic euthanasia seems long overdue in Boston.

"Fashion Magazines Bear Brunt Of Economic Meltdown."

Pajamas HQ: "Good News: The 2012 Campaign for President Is Underway" Hey, it's never too early to get started.

Meanwhile, via Colorado's man of good cheer and dry Vermouth, Dave Barry spots what this nation really needs:

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

What I'm saying is: we, as a nation, need to drink more martinis.

I could do with more Martinis--not to mention 1960--myself.

Echoing the slogan of the 1930s National Recovery Administration, Mickey Kaus writes that even "Baskin-Robbins is doing its part" to get their man elected.

The NRA (no relation to this NRA) gave corporations that "did their part" a blue eagle logo to display--and woe betide those who didn't cooperate. Presumably, Baskin-Robbins is hoping to be rewarded with the official "Patriot Employer" symbol for their more recent efforts.

And no doubt, was trashed (likely for good reason) by Mr. Blackwell, who died today at age 86.

Annie Jacobsen writes that if the Muslim world's vice squads consider Barbie to be "Jewish", wait 'til they find out the origins of their favorite cartoon and movie superheros:

When Iranian toy seller Masoumeh Rahimi thinks of Barbie and Ken dolls, she thinks of heavy artillery -- only worse. "I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Ms. Rahmi told the BBC back in 2002. In April 2008, Iran's top prosecutor and religious cleric, Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi, upped the anti-Barbie campaign by calling for a ban on the sale of all Barbie dolls from the country. "Barbie is an emissary of nudity and promotes moral corruption," wrote the hardliner newspaper Kahyan.

* * *

The anti-Semitic tirade came after the Mutaween learned that Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, was Jewish -- and that the American businesswoman, entrepreneur, and U.S. Business Hall of Famer had named the dolls after her two Jewish children, Barbie and Ken Handler.

But it appears not all religious clerics are doing their homework about which Jew created what incredibly popular icon. Last summer, Hassan Nasrallah -- the leader of the terrorist organization Hezbollah -- appeared proudly depicted as Superman in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al Ayyam. In the cartoon, Nasrallah was pictured pulling back his religious robes, a la Clark Kent, to reveal a Superman suit underneath. Superman is Lebanon's most popular superhero. Many teenagers believe him to be Lebanese because of his dark, swarthy looks. But if Barbie is "Jewish," so is Superman; he was created by two Jews named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, in 1932.

The same goes for just about every other "Jewish" superhero, many of whom are growing increasingly popular throughout the same countries in the Middle East. This summer, audiences from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flocked to see movies about Batman, Iron Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men -- all as "Jewish" as Barbie and Superman are. Each of these superheroes was created by a Jewish-American comic book writer.

All I can add (at least while still in my secret identity as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan new media firm) is, "Up, Up, And Oy Vey!"

In a brief slide show, the BBC explains which fonts are chosen for which movie posters and why.

Many fonts are chosen to perform workaday service on movie posters. But only one has gotten the offer to star in a movie of its own:

(Found via a Google search on "Helvetica Postrel", which, speaking of movies, has quite a Damon Runyon-esque ring of its own.)

As Noel Sheppard writes, "Lib Photographer Admits Making McCain Look Sinister for Mag Cover", quoting from the photographer in question, Jill Greenberg:

I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.

No--as long as it's understood that the magazine is taking sides in this election. But then, who isn't these days?

Update: Bumped to top, to include this post from Gateway Pundit, who has a link to Greenberg's homepage, which currently has a rotating series of vile Photoshopped and crudely captioned images of McCain. Now that's dispassionate freelance photojournalism in action!

But more than that, it's also worth flashing back to this April post from Jim Geraghty regarding the far left's meltdown over Hillary Clinton, and this article from last year by Noemie Emery on what was said by the left about President Reagan near the end of his second term. Both of which help to place the burgeoning McCain Derangement Syndrome displayed by self-professed "hard-core Dems" such as Greenberg into sharp perspective, and illustrate that there was nothing out of the ordinary about George W. Bush's presidency to set the left off over the last eight years. He was simply yet another in an endless series of political enemies of the far left who needed to be destroyed. That's valuable governing knowledge for the next Republican (heck, maybe even moderate Democrat) in the White House, whether he's sworn into office this January, or four or eight years hence.

More: Gerard Vanderluen has additional Photoshopped images of McCain that Greenberg has run on her site, along with a press release from Atlantic editor James Bennet:

"We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday.

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics--instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally.

Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain."

As Gerard writes, "It has been my experience that if you have to get PR to push out statements on a Sunday, you know you are in trouble. Developing..."

It's Billy Beer for a new millennium as Obama beer hits the shelves!

As Barack Obama reels in response to John McCain's charges that he's a lightweight more obsessed with image than substance, his campaign has come up with the perfect rejoinder. Gateway Pundit spots Team Obama courting top fashion designers to create his own clothes line.

And why not? For complete stylistic fabulosity, he's already got the logo ready to go!

(Via Founding Bloggers; no word yet on whether the new Obamatogs are Manolo-approved.)

CAIR targets Abercrombie & Fitch, the onetime clothing retailer turned porn shop.

Betsy Newmark writes, "Apparently, under Iowa law, dancing naked on a stage is legal because it can be considered an expression of art."

I realize that while all politics is local, when a man becomes a presidential nominee, he must take a national, at times global perspective; and thus has little time to study hometown issues.

But the question must be asked nonetheless: where does Iowa's most famous son, Dave Burge, aka Iowahawk, currently heading up the maverick's maverick presidential ticket, Burge-Goldstein 2008, stand on this critical issue?

Update: Steven Den Beste responds via email: "As close to the stage as possible, of course!"

Heh, indeed.^TM

Back in 2004, Mark Steyn noted that the famously hard-partying John Kerry had his sensitive troubadour side as well:

The time: last month; the place: MTV. The interviewer asks: ''Well, we know that you were into rock 'n' roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?''

''Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested,'' says John Kerry. ''I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important . . . I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life.''

Steyn dubbed Kerry's "America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper"--sad to say, he's not the last.

Lewis Black, in the above clip, witnesses the eschaton immanentized--and now with extra decaf caramel macchiato flavoring!

But as with all of man's previous attempts to build heaven on earth, the eschaton cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Sadly, the Wall Street Journal has published a list of upcoming Starbucks closings (and none in my town. So there!), and James Lileks explores the plight of the suddenly Starbucks deprived coffee drinker:

We have been bracing for the list of closings, and it was finally revealed: 27 Starbucks outlets will be shuttered in Minnesota, leaving only 45,234. Hasta barista, baby.

The effect on the Twin Cities will be light -- the average citizen will still be within six minutes of a $4 cup of coffee at all times. Productivity will not suffer as people slump over at their desks from lack of jitter-juice. The people you have to pity -- aside from the employees, who probably can't fill a bathtub now without thinking "room for cream?" and won't soon find another job requiring that question -- are the folks in the small towns who will lose a piece of the outside world.

A Strib story last week by Emma Carew told the plight of Albert Lea teens mourning the loss of their coffee shop.

And you can understand why: Starbucks was like an embassy of a country where people sat around and read foreign newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and discussed things.

Geez, isn't that what they invented the Internet for?

Dr. Melissa Clouthier makes a suggestion as to what the Obama-In-Berlin poster resembles. But after a quick survey of Germanic graphic design in the immediate post-Weimar and post-Bauhaus era, I'd say it's closer to the compositional elements and color pallet here.

But as Ross Douthat writes:

Yes, of course the Hitler comparisons are absurd, but I'd really like to know which genius on the Obama campaign thought it would be a good idea to have their candidate conduct a major campaign rally in Europe with three months to go till the election and their candidate, despite an incredibly favorable climate and a fumbling opponent, still clinging to a 2-4 point lead in the polls?

I can see though, why the poster does appear to give off, at first glance, a definite whiff of, to borrow from a line from John Glenn back in 2004, "the old Hitler business." But as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out in Liberal Fascism, these sorts of propagandistic design elements were in the air throughout the west in the 1930s. As were programs such as this.

Because everything old is new again!

Update: While the text is in Italian, most of the artwork isn't, and you can see some interesting (and mostly recent) juxtapositions and comparisons of the Obama poster here.

AMC's Mad Men series is filled with poke-the-viewer-in-the-ribs moments where characters in a TV series set in 1960 are smoking and drinking like, err, mad--even with their kids around, and on the way, in the case of one pregnant character who smokes like a chimney. And yet somehow, we all managed to survive such a stone knives and bearskins culture. So I have to laugh when a celebrity gossip site, full of photos of Hollywood actresses in various stages of undress and occasionally in various stages of acts that would have caused the boys in the Hayes Office to go into complete myocardial infarction in 1960, has a puritanical headline such as this: "Britney Spears in a Bikini is Smoking... In Front of Her Kids."

Gosh--I know I'm shocked.

Something else the characters in Mad Men wouldn't be the least surprised by, because they had a millennium of history and common sense to go by: "Social stigma drives some women to remove tattoos."

And as usual, the L.A. Times, where history and culture are always in the present-tense, is surprised by (a) a topic that Theodore Dalrymple was writing about nearly a decade and a half ago and (b) your grandmother understood 50 years ago.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

Jeff Jarvis writes that "Actually is the new 'y'know'":

The most overused and unnecessary word on broadcast is "actually." Start counting how many times it is used by TV people and you'll hate me for driving you nuts.

While I'm kvetching, why do TV people introduce a panel of three people and then say, "Mr. Jones, let me start with you." Just start with him: ask your question. Why this need to warn Mr. Jones?

I actually find myself actually using the word far too often myself. As I'm actually doing right now...

Karl of Protein Wisdom links to my interview on PJM Political this past week with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men series; there's an interesting debate on the show's aesthetics and writing going on under the post in the comment section.

Isn't the fascist epistemology of bicycling obvious? I mean, think about it: Freddie Mercury and Queen were dubbed "may be the first truly fascist rock band" by Rolling Stone at precisely the time they were singing...this.

Coincidence?

Of course.

But Sonny Bunch has a great observation here:

The hypocrisy of the biking community is kind of breathtaking. On the one hand, they demand equal access to the roads and get incredibly angry when car drivers suggest that the dangerously slow speeds at which bikers travel might hinder the flow of traffic. On the other, they proclaim that the laws of the road do not apply to them, and car drivers are just jealous. You can’t have it both ways, dears. Make up your minds.

Howard Dean could not be reached for comment. Nor could P.J. O'Rourke, but his earlier views on the topic can be found here.

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

Just arrived from Amazon is the DVD collection of the first season of AMC's Mad Men, a show about which I've written several times previously. But the package is fascinating: its four DVDs are encased in a nifty giant tin mock cigarette lighter, and inside is an ad for a pair of actual working Zippo lighters embossed with the Mad Men logo. The inserted ad recalls an earlier sponsorship of the show. They're reminders that the producers of Mad Men want to have it both ways--they want to look down upon their characters for smoking and excessive drinking (pretty rich coming from hedonistic Hollywood), but simultaneously, they're happy to use their series on the excesses of advertising to advertise the exact vices the show condemns. Now that's postmodern entertainment!

Does the hectoring subtext of the writing matter all that much? Maybe not, as I wrote last week:

While the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

On the Museum of the Moving Image's Website (found via the IMDB) is a nicely written, if slightly hyperbolic article on the strength of Mad Men's production design, though--Warning!--it does contain a pretty big spoiler for anyone coming into the show cold via the DVD package. And come to think of it, the scene in question creates a modern connection to the show that I'm absolutely sure its writers didn't intend at all:

The climax of the first season of Mad Men, set at the dawn of the 1960s at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, is actually a brilliant anticlimax—a revelation swiftly followed by a re-veiling. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a clumsy striver at Sterling Cooper, attempts to topple the resident alpha dog, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), with what looks to be a career-ending disclosure: Draper, the firm's dazzling creative director, is living under an assumed name; he's a fraud, likely a Korean War deserter, and possibly worse. Campbell blurts it all out to the avuncular overlord, Bertram Cooper [Wonderfully played by Robert Morse, who's perhaps the show's most inspired casting choice--Ed], while Draper stands by silently, poker-faced, hands steady enough to light yet another cigarette. The elder statesman Cooper considers, waits an agonizing long beat, and makes a purely utilitarian reply.

"Mr. Campbell, who cares?" Cooper asks calmly, his voice burring with pity and disdain for the youngster's naive theatrics. "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here."

"The Japanese have a saying," Cooper continues. "‘A man is whatever room he is in'—and right now, Donald Draper is in this room."

This marvelously tense scene—from the season's penultimate episode, titled "Nixon vs. Kennedy"—is Mad Men in a nutshell. (The AMC series has its second-season premiere on July 27; the complete first cycle of 13 episodes is now out on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Lionsgate.) The televised Nixon-Kennedy debates are generally acknowledged as the moment when image overtook content and began supplanting it; for the hard-drinking, impeccably tailored men and women who populate the randy, smoke-filled offices of Sterling Cooper, the self is a performance, adjusted according to the demands of The Room. Context is everything. Everyone leads at least a double life. (For the men, juggling a wife and mistress is practically a job requirement.) Denial is enormously useful. (One character was pregnant all season and didn't know it.) But it's the dashing über-WASP Don Draper—né Dick Whitman, son of a prostitute, orphan of the Depression—who most fully embodies the idea of the self as a brand that can be revamped on the whims of the market, without remorse or apology. He is what he does. (And why is Donald Draper in this room? Because he generates revenue.)

"A man is whatever room he is in"--that's a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn't it?

Related: The characters in Mad Men would be horrified by this lack of consumer choice in Obama's hometown; something tells me the producers wouldn't, though.

"Just cut to the chase and name the kid Rehab."

"Around the world, demand for bourbon is booming."

But does your choice of liquor make you...racist?

Via TVCriticism.com, here's a sneak preview from the debut episode of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, which plays like a stone knives and bearskins version of the replicants and their obsession with collecting photographs in Blade Runner:

One of Kyle Smith's readers commenting on a recent fawning New York Times profile of the series and its producer makes a great observation of the importance of the show's production design:

Regarding the article itself, I read a few pages and I believe the show’s creator said something like the show isn’t about the look of it. He’s dead wrong: it’s entirely about the look of it. Take away the look and you don’t have much.

I think that's exactly right. Sort of similar to the observation that the Don Draper character makes in the above clip, while the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

As James Lileks would likely agree, take today's computer technology and the aesthetics of the 1950s (that staid, conservative, gray flannel reactionary era that gave the world the Les Paul and Stratocaster electric guitars, the Ford Thunderbird and Chevy Corvette, Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry), and you've got the best of all worlds. Or as Rondi Adamson wrote last year, contrasting the rigid formula of Mad Men's writing with the joy of its production design:

The ad-men themselves, when they aren't drinking martinis for breakfast and smoking, are groping the hapless and/or slutty secretaries and making sexist and racist comments. The homelives of the ad-men are portrayed with equal subtlety. Every housewife is miserable and repressed -- though still managing some joyful smoking even while doing the dishes -- and every husband is adulterous -- though still around enough to drunkenly put together a dollhouse for his children. 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.

In short, it's all great fun, but what I am enjoying most of all about Mad Men is the fashion and the etiquette. 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 them looking like they were on their way to the convenience store nearest their 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.

The second season of Mad Men debuts on Sunday, July 27th; in the interim, the first season is available on DVD, along with a soundtrack collection.

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!

Helpful note for our California readers: merely substitute the word "Dude" for "Mate" in Tim Blair's latest Sunday Telegraph column, and all of his linguistic rules will work for you, as well.

It's hard to believe that England was once the embodiment of cool, but from Savile Row in the 1930s, to the early James Bond films and the Beatles, England could certainly be cool when she wanted to be. But to be "cool", it helps to know what you're about, and to maintain a certain inner reserve. It prevents aesthetic abortions such as the 2012 Olympics logo, of which James Lileks writes:

Seriously, what is the matter with people who come up with this? And what is the matter with the people who approved it? Ads that showed the logos have reportedly caused seizures among British epileptics, but I think this thing would make a fossilized femur bone suffer convulsive muscle spasms. If you can’t tell, it’s the year of the London games – 2012. I think it’s also meant to imply a human form – say, a discus thrower, or a runner bursting from the blocks. Whatever it is, it’s an aesthetic catastrophe, and would seem to indicate there’s no one around in the London Games who had the nerve to bark “rubbish, that; try again, and give me a proper logo with some bloody numbers.” I think there’s a point at which people lose the ability to pretend they have any sort of aesthetic criteria, and embrace whatever’s loud and ugly simply because loud and ugly is the style of the times. There’s always a fair amount of coin to be had for dissing the traditionalists, of course; I imagine that if someone submitted a logo with a flag or a bulldog they would have suffered a gentle sneer: still pining for the empire, eh, Smithson. Well, Kipling’s dead. Yes he is. Dig him up, you’ll find Posh Spice’s heel stuck in his heart, the coffin stuffed with I Heart Diana memorial teddy bears.

Ugh.

Ugh, indeed. Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain began by contrasting England's collectively dignified response to the death of Churchill (who in large part won the Second World War) in the mid-1960s, to Britain's emotional spasms over the death of Diana (who in large part modeled Versace) in the 1990s. Churchill would roll over in his grave if he saw what has happened to England's sensibilities even in the short period after Diana's death, let alone after his own.

On the other hand, Glenn Reynolds notes that the possible military implications of the Olympic design. (Too bad the remaining members of Monty Python have gone reactionary--a sketch about "The Killer Logo" would have been a scream.)

It's a small sign, but you take what you can get these days: “a generation lobotomized by vodka" returns to the joys of gin.

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked back on the decade which had recently concluded and said, "Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade". And part of that sea change in their beliefs was replacing a JFK-era New Frontier optimism towards future progress with an enormous fear of modernity that in many respects continues to this day, seeking to replace life-enhancing technology with a Rousseauvian return to nature.

Perhaps wishing to live out Moynihan's observation, in 1972, Orson Welles narrated and appeared on camera in the McGraw-Hill(!) production of a short film presenting a few of the doomsday-ish concepts from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. (Toffler's 1980 sequel, The Third Wave was a much more optimistic look at the near future, and blessedly free of the lingering effects of psychedelia which tainted his 1970 book.)

In a way, this is the culmination, the apex of 1970s Merdework, to borrow a Lileksian word. Thrill! To dissonant first generation Moog synthesizers! Gasp! At Orson Welles and his quick paycheck-seeking stentorian sell-no-documentary before-its-time tones--and his omnipresent 12-inch Double Corona Monte Cristo Cuban phallic symbol! Shudder! As Welles fears the technological ramifications of giant mainframe computers with less computing power than your Motorola cell phone!

These first ten minutes are presented as part of an ongoing public service to remind our readers how frightening the aesthetics of the 1970s truly were; more adventurous souls may wish to view the remainder of the documentary, available here.

Building on George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language", John Leo explores how badly English has descended--particularly in academic usage--since Orwell wrote his seminal essay over 60 years ago.

Certainly more than the New York Times does, at least.

(Via Instapundit. Besides, her post gives me an excuse to link to one of the great trash rock songs of the early days of MTV.)

Found via Virginia Postrel, check out Helvetica: The Motion Picture.

(Previous font blogging here; title explanation over at Blogcritics.)

James Lileks' trip to DisneyWorld continues apace:

Gnat – who’d ridden Space Mountain without a care – was slightly freaked out by the Haunted Mansion, and not without reason. It was stunning. Wonderfully creepy. We rode along, floating in the dark over a void the depths of which you could not sense, passing the desiccated corpses and cobweb-draped skeletons, observing a ballroom where everyone spun around in eternal pursuit, so focused on the dance they'd forgotten they were dead.

What an excellent metaphor for my life in newspapers.

Read the whole thing--it's a small Bleat, after all.

Wow--this is just bizarre: Austin, Texas 7th grader "suspended because his hair is too short".

This sort of thing makes me feel so old: Why, sonny, I can remember the good ol' days back when schools were concerned about boys with long hair--long like Paul McCartney's, dagnamit!--not crew cuts.

(Via the always well-coiffed InstaPundit.)

In an Age Of Abundance, the aesthetics of the New Puritanism are drafted.

"You get a big plate of eggs, bacon, potatoes and sausages, plus tiny Belgian waffles shaped like you-know-who. This is what it means to be an American: pouring syrup on Mickey’s head and eating him. It’s secular communion".

--Needless to say, James Lileks visits Walt Disney World, and returns to Bleat about it.

The redorkulated love child of John Denver and Bill Gates has a hit new song!

Dude, these kinds of maneuvers are why God invented skateboards.

It moves in mysterious ways, as James Lileks illustrates in his latest Bleat, first via two side-by-side photographs of sculptures at the Minneapolis Public Library, and then an astonishing--and astonishingly rare--moment of clarity regarding the 1950s from Garrison Keillor.

Over at the Pajamas' mother of the ship, The Manolo weighs in on the $400 a pop haircut of the John Edwards:

Southern politicians and televangelists know, the beautiful and important southern hair can make up for many sins of the flesh and spirit.

Don't miss it, even if you're one of "the Manolo’s internet friends who still go to the Super-Duper Cuts, or the Floyd the Barber", and not the Pink Sapphire.

Robert Bidinotto, editor of the Objectivist New Individualist magazine agrees with my take from Saturday on Michael Bloomberg and (original inner circle member) Nathaniel Branden's "Stolen Concept" concept.

Speaking of Bloomberg, I was going to comment on his recent fashion faux pas, but the photo of Val Kilmer that Tammy Bruce found today makes Mayor Mike seem like the very definition of sybaritic elegance.

Update: City Journal's Nicole Gelinas has more on Bloomberg's public and private transportation woes.

Modernism is virtually synonymous with the Helvetica Bold typeface: it's everywhere from Amtrak's trains to American Airlines' planes, to the headlines of virtually all IRS forms. So it's not surprising that New York's Museum of Modern Art is currently celebrating this ubiquitous font's 50th birthday.

Steve Green of VodkaPundit has--appropriately enough--a new cocktail on his site today:

Freely adapted from Joe's Lemon Drop, available at Plate World Cuisine in Colorado Springs. Joe is a damn fine bartender, but my version is prettier -- Melissa made me practice making it. A lot. Sure, it's a girly drink, but it's also a great way to get my wife to drink something with a high proof.

Follow the link for the recipe. A similar drink that combines pretty aesthetics with a velvet punch would the Aviation cocktail, one of the few gin-based drinks my wife enjoys. (Its name dates back to the golden age of commercial flying, but its nom de booze also describes the effect that a couple of these will have on the imbiber.)

Astonishingly, they have it on the menu at the Olives Restaurant in the Bellagio in Vegas--and they make a pretty darn good version of it. Though anyone can, if you can find a bottle of maraschino liqueur. Apparently, in the late 1990s it was fairly scarce according to the late, lamented Hotwired "Cocktail" Website, but I believe it's now readily available at Beverages & More, and presumably, other well-stocked liquor stores.

Elsewhere in the booze blogging world, TigerHawk has some thoughts on the current state of the drinking age.

Coming later this month to an Internet near you:

MANOLO says, many years ago, when the young Manolo was sunk into despair over the dismal and impoverished conditions in which he had found himself, he sat down at the rickety table in his tiny garret, picked up his pen, and turned to his muses to help him write the few lines of baleful poetry commemorative of his state. As the tears of the Manolo spilled onto the paper, causing the lavender ink of his sorrowful verse to run, there appeared to him, as in a dream, the tall, majestic older woman clad in the finely tailored pink Chanel suit of the cut and style that was not of that season, nor the last, but of the previous generation.

In the right hand this regal woman carried the Hermès bag; in the left she brought illustrated books of the sort that appear on the finest coffee tables in this benighted land. Her countenance was kindly and wise, her upswept silvery hair bore the faint traces of the master coiffeur’s art, and upon her feets were the handsome and luxurious shoes made of the opulent leather and adorned with the tiny gems of the most costly type.

“Ayyyyy!” shouted the Manolo. “Who are you?”

She did not immediately answer, but seated herself at the end of the Manolo’s hard, narrow bed and placed her tastefully jeweled hand upon his shoulder.

“I am Lady Fashion, my child.”

“Ayyyyyyyy!” the Manolo again shouted, this time for joy, for in that instant the Manolo saw that it was true, that here in his chilly room was the personification of the deity whom the young Manolo worshipped with his entire being.

“O, Mistress of All Virtues,” asked the Manolo, the tears welling in his eyes, “why have you come down from the Fashion Heaven to visit this lonely place of banishment and sorrow?”

The Manolo's muse has led to the newest of the pamphlets. Don't miss it.

(Via Dr. Korncrake, the author of the introduction.)

Since the 1960s, academia and the arts have gone in one direction, while the masses another. It was in the 1960s that liberalism took its seemingly permanent hard left turn away from the relatively moderate New Deal that tied together the eras of FDR, Harry Truman and JFK, and simultaneously, Bill Buckley's brand of post-WWII modern conservatism was just beginning to reach fruition.

You can see one aspect of this juncture in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic from 1969: Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Barbara Walters, Ingo Preminger, and host of other media and New York society figures gathered in the Bernstein’s stunning Park Avenue duplex, paid for via Bernstein’s role as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, to hear the Black Panthers essentially tell them that they'd slaughter them all if they ever came to power. Pass the hor d'oeuvres, and please give generously to the cause! Three years later, Democrats nominated George McGovern, who compared Ho Che Minh to George Washington and whose staffers took to wearing American flag pins upside down. Manhattan's crime rate was soaring, the stock market merely treading water, and the economy was heading towards an iceberg.

The American public saw repeated gestures such as those, and happily voted over the years for law & order presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. And Bill Clinton's two terms only happened because of his (often grudging) efforts to steer liberalism back towards the center.

That's the duality that's explored (amongst many other topics) in Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture & the Arts, the review copy of which arrived in my mailbox today. There are loads of heavy hitters in here; their essays over the years in The New Criterion are anthologized:

Mark Steyn

David Frum

Mordecai Richler

Robert Bork

Heather MacDonald

James Panero

Gertrude Himmelfarb

John Derbyshire

Theodore Dalrymple

John Simon

And many more, along with, of course, The New Criterion’s co-editors and publishers, Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, who have attempted to steer culture back on course, and provide the necessary counterpoint when it resists their efforts.

That's the headline of an item by James Panero on the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" blog, along with a photo of a new "art" exhibit captioned, "Six Foot Jesus Made Of Chocolate". Panero responds:

'Forty Days in the Dessert'? The 'Immaculate Confection'? The possible New York Post headlines here are endless (and yes, I know the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.) But one thing is clear. From Piss Christ to The Sensation Show, America hates New York for cheap art-world stunts, and for good reason. Check out the following notice that just came over the transom. (Be sure to read down for the bit about how this artist is "best remembered for covering a New York City hotel room in melted cheese." And just what is "anatomically correct" supposed to mean? And why do I feel like this has been done before? And why have I yet to see a custard Mohammed?)

Truth be told, I don't think America hates New York because of this stuff. Like the anti-Christian content that fuels so much of Hollywood's current product, they're too bored by how reactionary it all is to break much of a sweat over it.

The Manolo says:

Sometimes the Manolo comes across the pictures of the celebrity event which astound. Such is the case with the photos from the premiere of the new Quentino Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez juvenile movie, Grindhouse.

This is clearly a case of celebrities trying hard to look as ugly and clapped out as the movie they'll be watching.

Update: The Manolo reminds us of another Grindhouse-related fashion abortion.

As someone who is half-Irish, I believe it is my civic duty to remind readers to please--please--remember to treat St. Patrick's Day like a real holiday:

(Via Mary Katharine O'Ham.)

Beef, booze, Fido, and lots of photos--this post, via Tim Blair, has it all.

(I'm blogging this via my Verizon card on an Amtak train into NYC, incidentally. Love that mobile Internet!)

In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.

Paul Wolfwitz: president of the World Bank, clad in a beautiful navy Savile Row suit, single-breasted, cuffed trousers...and photographed leaving a holy spot with extremely holey socks.

No doubt, he'll shortly be getting more than he'll know what to do with from friends and well-wishers. And every man who's had to take his shoes off at TSA line will be sympathizing with him.

Reynolds Wrap--that's the fabulous new in trend for men's fashion that's poised for outer space take-off on the runways of Milan this month!

Tinfoil, it's not just for hats anymore!

Mickey Kaus writes:

Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese "transplants" building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit's designs are inferior for a reason, even when they're well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW--or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism--than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate "culture."

P.S.: If Detroit can only be competititive when the UAW makes grudging concessions, isn't it likely the UAW will only concede enough to make GM and Ford survive, but never enough to let them actually beat the Japanese manufactures? I try to make this point here.

Read, and/or watch the whole thing; related thoughts here.

Over the weekend, Nina and I, along with a couple of friends, drove down to San Simeon, to tour William Randolph Hearst's legendary estate, which served as the inspiration for the fictional Citizen Kane's "Xanadu". We wanted to see "Hearst Castle", as it's popularly and somewhat inaccurately called today, before the Christmas decorations came down. On Saturday, we took the last night tour of the season, and on Sunday, one of the several day tours that are offered.

In contrast to the cold, dark, gothic, cavernous surroundings depicted in Kane, while the entire San Simeon estate is enormous, the individual rooms feel surprisingly warm and inviting. Those rooms are very large, especially when compared to the average home, and yet, the whole thing is built on a surprisingly human scale. For the interior effect as a whole, think Stately Wayne Manor, rather than Kane's Xanadu, for an appropriate historic fictional pop culture comparison.

This brief snippet of Wikipedia's page on Hearst Castle suggests what Hearst was trying to accomplish:

The estate is a pastiche of historic architectural styles that Hearst admired in his travels around Europe. For example, the main house is modeled after a 16th century Spanish cathedral, while the outdoor pool features an ancient Roman temple front transported wholesale from Europe and reconstructed at the site. Hearst furnished the estate with truckloads of art, antiques, and even whole ceilings that he acquired en masse from Europe and Egypt.

On both tours the state-supplied guides repeated numerous times that as a proper progressive, Hearst was not at all a religious man.

Heaven forbid! If you'll pardon the religious allusions. Hearst certainly didn't mind them, as so much of the building's interiors and artwork has a Catholic theme, because Hearst was obsessed with recreating the Europe he explored in his younger days on the Grand Tour with his parents.

Construction of Hearst's estate began in 1919 and continued until 1947, when Hearst was too ill to remain living on his estate; he would eventually move to Beverly Hills to be closer to his surgeons, and died in 1951.

That means that the bulk of the construction was occurring in the 1920s, the very decade that the modernists of Weimar Germany's nascent Bauhaus movement (and those in Europe's International Style who moved more or less in its orbit, such as France's Le Corbusier) were doing their utter damndest to banish not just decoration in architecture, but the past as well. As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus To Our House:

The country of the young Bauhausler, Germany, had been crushed in the war and humiliated at Versailles; the economy had collapsed in a delirium of inflation; the Kaiser had departed; the Social Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism; mobs of young men ricocheted through the cities drinking beer and awaiting a Soviet-style revolution from the east, or some terrific brawls at the very least. Rubble, smoking ruins--starting from zero! If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.

The result was a fire sale for someone on Hearst's enormous budget. If Europe was committed to destroying itself and starting over from zero, Hearst would buy the best of the past for his home.

I think Mies, who always expressed a fondness for old churches, beginning with Charlemagne's cathedral in Aachen, his birthplace, and any building that was "really built", as he would say, would have admired San Simeon. But Corbusier would have probably broken out in hives just from looking at its photos, let alone visiting there. (If 20th century Manhattan upset Corbu's delicate equilibrium, just imagine what San Simeon would have done.)

It's a reminder that culture wars are nothing new, and are often partially internecine struggles: at the very moment when the leftwing progressives of the Bauhaus movement were banishing the past, another liberal of the time (at least before FDR--whom Hearst had originally supported--nearly taxed him out of existence in the mid-'30s, causing Hearst's politics to swing to the isolationist-era anti-New Deal right) was spending millions of his own fortune to preserve it.

And as it must to all men, death came to William Randolph Hearst. Whoops, sorry to go all Kane on you! When I quipped to our first tour guide, "what, there's no sled", he immediately shot back, "They burned it at the end of the movie, didn't they?"

The modernists eventually won their cultural battle of course, and "Starting From Zero" would become the recurring theme of the 20th century, (certainly not just in architecture) and like the fictional Kane's posessions, Europe is still finding new ways to continue its cultural self-immolation and the fire sale on its past.

But with Hearst's demise, San Simeon is now open to the public. If you're ever out this way, I highly recommend a visit.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs spots the perfect gift for the hip, young wannabe terrorist whose Che or hammer and sickle T-shirt is looking particularly ratty--for sale at the Las Vegas Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has some very much related gift suggestions.

Fernando Tesón, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post on political art as "a noteworthy case of discourse failure":

Thanks to the emotional power of beauty, art can, at least sometimes, help noble ideals reach the general public. Many of these works have great artistic value (Picasso's Guernica, for example), and some of them have surely contributed to worthy causes.

However, political art is a special form of discourse failure. Art is a type of concrete imagery, and as such it evokes a “fact” that may activate default theories in the audience. Those willing to challenge the political stances represented by the artifact have to overcome the suggestive power of beauty. Political paintings (say, Diego Rivera’s murals) often suggest causal connections that, for the reasons I indicated in my previous posts, permeate theories that people hold by default. Political art’s appeal to emotion usurps reasoned political argument. If you think big oil is responsible for the evils in the world, make an argument. The movie Syriana will not do. (A related puzzle: why is all political art of the left? We have answers to this too.)

Read on for Tesón's thoughts; while he’s being largely slammed in the Volokh’s comments section for his dreaded use of “all”, this seems like a reaonable post to posit something I noticed when visiting the newly revamped and much-expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York this summer. There seemed to be much more anti-American political art on public display than when I visited there seemingly every other week in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, the more propagandistic pieces were largely confined to less public areas, such as the small reference library that was then located on MoMA's third or fourth floor:

Their library requires permission to use, and its material isn't allowed out of the room, and it isn't open to the general public. MoMA maintains a cool, professional face in its public spaces. But the walls of its reference library were festooned (at least at the time) with all sorts of anti-American and anti-Reagan (yes, I know--I was there around 1993 or '94, but this stuff was still proudly displayed) posters.

Curiously, despite having plowed millions and millions of dollars into renovating the museum, and, presumably eager to get some return on their expenditures by keeping visitors happy and coming back, MoMA seems much more willing to let this type of stuff hang out there in the public these days.

Or, maybe this is what visitors to MoMA expect to see these days, and they are keeping them happy. But it was certainly a noticeable shift in the new digs.

"The wide collar, fat tie, and three-piece suit–please say the seventies aren’t coming back…"

The seventies took a brief vacation from 1981 to about 1989--or to 2002 if you're really feeling charitable. Other than that, when did they ever leave?

Over at Tech Central Station, Donald J. Boudreaux has a great take on recycling: "market prices compel us to recycle when recycling is appropriate - and to not recycle when recycling is inappropriate."

Read the whole thing. Surely the New York Times would agree with Boudreaux...right?

I'm not sure where Tammy Bruce is going in this post, but any post that's able to combine Tammy, Starbucks and a breathtaking photo of Catherine Deneuve is well worth your time.

The Manolo ponders the important questions of the time of ours:

The Manolo has often wondered, is it the egg or the chicken: do the important men of the South obtain the important hair only after they become prominent, or does the important hair precede and perhaps aid in the rise to power? Only God and the Mr. Christophe know the answer to this.

Read the whole of the thing.

"Wherein our Special Pajamas Correspondent … that scion of the superfabulous, that crosschecker of chic … The Manolo (He of “The Manolo Loves The Shoes”) deigns to glance at the wardrobe Iran’s Man of the Moment… and finds it is not to die for."

Which The Manolo finds is true of most brutal dictators, with one exception--who comes complete with vicious killer fembots!

Mickey Kaus thoughtfully goes SUV shopping for the just-back-from-vacation Professor:

Glenn, your new car is ready.

Heh, indeed. Watch the whole thing.

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

Or as The Currency Lad writes today, "Alright brutal soldiers of the swinish Zionist entity, detain me already!"

(Guys--especially--make sure you follow his links; found via Tim Blair.)

I must say, this little fella has exceptional taste in imported beers!

(Via Tammy Bruce.)

Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, you can also meet a certain very prominent shoe blogger and his posse and spend a marvelous evening trading thoughts on the John Lobb, the New & Lingwood, the Prada, and the Hasselhoff...

Three really interesting podcasts went online over the past couple of days:

Gerard Vanderleun of Pajamas has an interview with Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dicky Cheney, on her role in the 2000 and 2004 elections. She was also on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday (Radio Blogger has clips and a transcription), and is a great interviewee.

Glenn and Helen Reynolds interview James Lileks and Cathy Seipp on parenting then and now. (I interviewed James in the fall of last year; which makes for fun simul-reading while The Glenn & Helen Show runs.)

And finally, Michelle Malkin has a slickly produced video podcast documenting with chromakeyed photos BDS amongst the fashionistas, from Marc Jacobs' San Francisco storefront, to Johnny Depp's Che necklace on the cover of Rolling Stone. Then there's the Arafat-style kaffiyeh that Howard Dean was once spotted wearing on the 2004 presidential campaign trail. As Michelle mentions, the radical chic of thse fashion accessories unknowingly--or worse, knowingly--ties their wearers in with the very people who would put fashion models in burkas, and do far worse to someone openly gay such as Jacobs.

Just to tie it all together (though not with a kaffiyeh), as Cathy Seipp once said:

“one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

Not all do--as Mary Cheney herself illustrates. But anarcho-authoritarianism certainly runs deep.

In his classic 1977 book on selling, master automobile salesman Joe Girard wrote that when facing potential car buyers, "Political stuff I say nothing about, because politics is not something you can talk about with a customer without getting into trouble. If my own son were running for President, I wouldn't ware a Girard For President button to work".

That sort of thing used to be common sense in business. But as with so much of what used to be common sense, it seems to be dying away these days in our bluer alcoves.

Update: Conservative Princess, who combines "Right-wing extremism with impeccable fashion sense" (hey, extremism in defense of Brooks Brothers is no vice...) has some very much related thoughts.

Nikes and seersucker are two great tastes that shouldn't be anywhere near each other.

Asked to give a speech by The Harlem Studio of Art, Roger Kimball responded:

It was Andy Warhol, I think, who, when asked to define art, said that "Art is what you can get away with." Warhol's own career, and, indeed, a large part part of the contemporary art world testify to the power--if not the truth--of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only be put forward but also and accepted and celebrated as a work of art. I won't bother to rehearse examples: everyone here knows what I am talking about: Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethore, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Matthew Barney: the very names conjure up a cultural disaster zone.

The question is: How did did we get here? Well, that is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word "beauty": What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty.

I know that this is both vague and portentous. But surely we are in a very curious situation. Traditionally, the goal or end of fine art was to make beautiful objects. Beauty itself came with a lot of Platonic and Christian metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even positively hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.

G.K. Chesterton is credited with saying, "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything". And (with notable exceptions) willing to create anything, and call it art, as well.

Read the rest of Kimball's speech.

In February, I wrote that Robin Givhan is the Washington Post's last line of defense:

Givhan is called in whenever the GOP scores an advance: her columns--a combination of Sigmund Freud and Alan Flusser--have ripped apart newly nominated Supreme Court Judges Roberts and Alito, and shortly after the 2004 election, Cheney himself. She's not so much the Doomsday Machine as a sartorial kamikaze: from Hell's Bloomingdale's, she stabs at thee!

And her hit pieces have made her a big hit amongst her fellow members of the legacy media. The result? Well, as Betsy Newmark puts it, "Gimme a break! A Pulitzer for Robin Givhan?!"

Betsy calls Monday's awards "the Pulitzer equivalents of the Nobel Peace Prize for Jimmy Carter". I think that's spot-on. Be sure to read the rest of her post.

Back in February, Paul Berger, whose blog is titled An Englishman In New York, was surprised at how ubiqituous the greeting "How are you?" seems in the Big Apple. To place the phrase into some sort of historical perspective, I linked to David Gelernter's wonderful City Journal retrospective from the mid-1990s of Manhattan mores on the cusp of World War II:

Nineteen thirty-nine lived in an " ought" culture. We inhabit more of a "want" culture, a desire-not-obligation culture. One of the most obvious and important consequences of the slow death between 1939 and today of American civic religion—the coherent, deeply held set of shared beliefs and ideas that bound Americans into one community—is the sweeping aside of its oughts.

The ought culture made itself felt in many ways. For example: 1939's daily experience was assembled to a far greater extent than ours out of countless small rituals—pieces of formulaic behavior that you enacted not because you feel like it, necessarily, but because it was expected of you. Because it is the proper thing, and you ought to do it.

A middle-class dinner or even breakfast of the 1930s might involve an entire family seated at table with the males in ties and the maid scurrying about. The ritual of each child's planting a breakfast kiss on seated mamma's cheek was sufficiently well known to have been included in movie scenes not evidently intended to be farcical. Hats have rules: a gentleman of course removes his when speaking to a lady on the street, removes it when a lady enters an elevator (unless the elevator is inside an office building or a store); replaces it when he steps off into the corridor. He lifts his hat as a gesture of politeness to strangers and lifts it more emphatically when he performs an outdoor informal (versus an indoor ceremonial) bow.

Nineteen thirty-nine's polite conversation is scripted and therefore ritualized to a much greater extent than ours is. "Under all possible circumstances, the reply to an introduction is 'How do you do?'" ("The taboo of taboos is 'Pleased to meet you.'") When the need arises, one says "I beg your pardon"—never, ever, "Pardon me," which is a barbarism. It goes without saying that first names are to be used only under the proper, restricted circumstances (never among strangers), and that "sir," "madam," or "miss" is an appropriate form of address.

As I wrote back then:

Read the rest of Gelernter's article--while many of the buildings in Manhattan remain the same, the ubiquitous "how are you" that Berger's encountering is one of the last remnants of an "ought" culture that, depending upon your perspective, is either long since passed, or in the latter stages of twilight.

If anything, the situation is even grimmer in modern England, as the great Theodore Dalrymple observes:

A problem arises, however, when all such rules, arbitrary as some of them might be, are eroded to the point of total informality. The culture of any society becomes graceless in the absence of all formality, a development that is peculiarly evident in my own country, Great Britain. Here, gracelessness has become, by a peculiar ideological inversion that has occurred in my lifetime, a manifestation of political virtue. My father’s view of the whole matter of manners has triumphed all but completely.

The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.

Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality—of the actual rather than the formal kind—has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

Carol Platt Liebau, from whom I found Dr. Dalymple's article, adds:

With that observation, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple skewers the dumbing down of etiquette in this country (and his own native Britain), associating it as something akin to a liberal disease. He also goes on to point out -- quite rightly -- that exquisite manners are certainly not a function of money. In fact, I was brought up to believe that good manners were nothing more than a matter of kindness: When in doubt, do the gracious thing, and chances are that it would be the "proper" thing. Manners are, in short, a set of rules by which civilized people can live together in harmony.

With the abandonment of any formality in dress, conversation and so much more, we are all the poorer. Many instinctively feel this -- it's one reason, I believe, for the popularity of Jane Austen novels and other similar materials . . .

Finally, for the Anglo response to Gelernter's look at Manhattan 67 years ago, Christy Davis has a somewhat similar look at England at the turn of the 20th century.

Update: Welcome City Journal readers! Please look around; I'm sure there's much here that you'll enjoy.

Just click.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

The Manolo, he present The Manolo's Food Blog!

All of a sudden, Portugal's sounding like an excellent vacation spot!

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has been out promoting his new book. In order to demonstrate how well connected to the world ordinary people now are, how much choice they have, and much information they have easy and inexpensive access to, he has repeatedly brought up the example of the bar he likes to work " with 27 kinds of beer on tap, a nice patio and... a free wireless Internet hookup,"

It sounds reasonably good.

As it happens though, Jonathan Pearce and I went to Porto in Portugal last weekend in order to get pissed have a stimulating weekend. On saturday night, we ended up in a bar with a choice of over 200 kinds of port. There was something work related that I had to get done reasonably promptly, so I got out of my laptop and joy of joys, the bar was providing free wireless there too. I was able to get my work done. It certainly beat spending time in the office. It beat a mere 27 kinds of beer too.

So what can I say? Samizdata 200 - Instapundit 27. We win.

Heh. Indeed^TM.

In the Four Seasons' UItimate Bartender's Guide, the authors have a great recipe for a Brandied Port (Churchill was apparently a big fan of this combination, from what I've read) that's worth experimenting with: pour four ounces of Port, a half ounce of Cognac into a wine (or brandy) glass, and stir. It adds a nice little extra bit of complexity to the Port, and is a breeze to make.

Amy Alkon is none-too-thrilled with LAX.

I'm still going with Oakland as the worst major west coast airport I've been in, though. And I did enjoy (with sufficiently reduced tourist trap expectations) LAX's Googie-inspired George Jetson-on-acid-style Encounter Restaurant.

Paul Berger, a self-described Englishman In New York, seems somewhat surprised by, as he calls it, The Greeting:

I have spent the past month doing research work in the city. It’s the longest I have spent in an office environment since my days booking hotel rooms in London six years ago. I’ve adjusted to the commute. I’ve adjusted to the lack of sunlight. And I’ve adjusted to eating lunch out every day. But I’m still struggling with the office greeting.

Not content with “hello” I’ve noticed many people prefer the “how are you?”. By the time I have answered “fine” we have already passed each other and the opportunity for me to return the question has gone. This leaves me feeling selfish and somewhat egotistical since I am spending my days telling everyone I am fine but never managing to inquire as to their wellbeing.

I have resolved for today, and next week, to pop the question first.

How are you--or as it's normally enunciated, at great speed, how'r'ya! is a derivation of slightly more complex greeting, as David Gelernter wrote in a absolutely terrific City Journal article ten years ago. Gelernter's piece is an almost archeological look at what life was like in New York in 1939, as America's Depression slowly but inexorably gave way to her entrance into World War II:

Nineteen thirty-nine lived in an " ought" culture. We inhabit more of a "want" culture, a desire-not-obligation culture. One of the most obvious and important consequences of the slow death between 1939 and today of American civic religion—the coherent, deeply held set of shared beliefs and ideas that bound Americans into one community—is the sweeping aside of its oughts.

The ought culture made itself felt in many ways. For example: 1939's daily experience was assembled to a far greater extent than ours out of countless small rituals—pieces of formulaic behavior that you enacted not because you feel like it, necessarily, but because it was expected of you. Because it is the proper thing, and you ought to do it.

A middle-class dinner or even breakfast of the 1930s might involve an entire family seated at table with the males in ties and the maid scurrying about. The ritual of each child's planting a breakfast kiss on seated mamma's cheek was sufficiently well known to have been included in movie scenes not evidently intended to be farcical. Hats have rules: a gentleman of course removes his when speaking to a lady on the street, removes it when a lady enters an elevator (unless the elevator is inside an office building or a store); replaces it when he steps off into the corridor. He lifts his hat as a gesture of politeness to strangers and lifts it more emphatically when he performs an outdoor informal (versus an indoor ceremonial) bow.

Nineteen thirty-nine's polite conversation is scripted and therefore ritualized to a much greater extent than ours is. "Under all possible circumstances, the reply to an introduction is 'How do you do?'" ("The taboo of taboos is 'Pleased to meet you.'") When the need arises, one says "I beg your pardon"—never, ever, "Pardon me," which is a barbarism. It goes without saying that first names are to be used only under the proper, restricted circumstances (never among strangers), and that "sir," "madam," or "miss" is an appropriate form of address.

Read the rest of Gelernter's article--while many of the buildings in Manhattan remain the same, the ubiquitous "how are you" that Berger's encountering is one of the last remnants of an "ought" culture that, depending upon your perspective, is either long since passed, or in the latter stages of twilight.

I think I'd prefer James Bond's Astin Martin DB5, or maybe even the Batmobile itself. But the Manolo has definitely found the wheels of his dreams, in a size 97-triple-D.

One reason why women in particular should consider launching videocasts of their own on the Web: to break the peroxide apartheid of cable TV.

(And no, this does not mean I think Virginia Postrel should change her hair color if and when DynamistTV goes live.)

Smelling the Coffee looks at the three waves of America's coffee love, along with the small but growing backlash against Starbucks.

New Hampshire-based journalist John Burtis uses his own riff on a Tom Wolfe title to explore "The Bonfire of The Inanities":

In their Herculean efforts to lend further "gravitas" to the beleaguered story, the media trundled out grizzled hunting experts, college-trained weather men and women, experts on color recognition and the reasons for the use of international orange on hunting outfits, the problems to be encountered from lead poisoning, ornithologists and the year of the expected Texas quail extinction, medical experts and the grave damage to be expected from the horrors of bird shot, cardiologists, Neil Young and the needles and the damage done, schematic diagrams of shooting victims, savvy attorneys to discourse on the legal ramifications of the expected charges for attempted murder and great bodily harm, pettifoggers to discuss the upcoming civil penalties, constitutional scholars to describe this latest nail in the proverbial coffin of impeachment, pundits to describe in glib detail the replacement of Dick Cheney for this strategic gaffe of immense proportions and experts in finer points of haberdashery to explain the meaning of the pink tie - the full list may never be fully tabulated because of its absolutely daunting size and the fact that it was pounded out in 24 news cycles for nearly a week.

The line about "the meaning of the pink tie" is a reference to the Washington Post's Robin Givhan--the Post's last line of defense. Givhan is called in whenever the GOP scores an advance: her columns--a combination of Sigmund Freud and Alan Flusser--have ripped apart newly nominated Supreme Court Judges Roberts and Alito, and shortly after the 2004 election, Cheney himself. She's not so much the Doomsday Machine as a sartorial kamikaze: from Hell's Bloomingdale's, she stabs at thee!

Via the Pajamas motherblog and TigerHawk, SportsProf has a great post on the joys of old L.L. Bean duds. I'll second that emotion--somehow, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my mom got stuck on L.L. Bean for much of her Christmas shopping; I still have L.L. Bean clothes from that era that hold up astonishingly well. Come to think of it--including the plaid button-down shirt I'm wearing as I type this!

It also highlights one of the rules of menswear: if you avoid the latest outfits touted by GQ and other mens' magazines, you'll save a ton of money, by avoiding styles that rapidly go out of fashion.

In his cover story in National Review this week, Mark Steyn looked at how worn-out Hollywood's subject matter is, even though the people who produce it (such as George Clooney) think they're on the cutting edge:

Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

Modern architecture went through a similar reactionary phase in the 1960s, as its leaders died off as elderly men one after the other during the decade: First Frank Lloyd Wright, then Corbusier, then in 1969 first Gropius, and then Mies. But in their final years, these men, once pioneers, were frequently living off past designs. In 1966, Robert Venturi wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in which they pointed out that Mies van Der Rohe's architecture was little changed from projects he envisioned in the late 1920s. In other words, what called itself "modern architecture" was based on concepts that were forty years old--or more.

Modern art is going through a similar phase--only its concepts are even older, and much more reactionary. Modern architecture, especially as it advanced beyond its very early days in the 1910s and early twenties, was rarely designed to shock, unlike so much of today's modern art. On Saturday, I wrote:

Leftwing artists specialized in Epater Les Bourgeois for much of the 19th and 20th century to the point where everyone who could possibly be disgusted is now barely able to simulate the aura of the penumbra of amusement.

No doubt, Giuseppe Veneziano, the Italian artist who painted "Oriana Fallaci Beheaded" thought he was making a wild gesture that really epaters those bourgeois! But instead, it's the same old stuff; we've seen it a million times before.

Of course, to paraphrase something Glenn Reynolds wrote about Kanye West recently, if Veneziano had balls, he'd paint a portrait of Mohammed beheaded, instead of Fallaci. (Don't write--I'm being facetious. I don't want to see paintings of anybody beheaded.) But hey, who wants to end up like Theo Van Gogh? Nobody wants to suffer for their art that much, right?

And besides, that would run the risk of actually agreeing with Fallaci. And that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Update: Michelle Malkin has some thoughts as well.

It's always kept you up--but now it lets you sleep! A blog named Achieve-IT! explains "How to Take A Caffeine Nap".

(Via Discarded Lies.)

Virginia Postrel has a great post on how content and aesthetics drove the launch of radio in the late 1920s and 1930s. Long before the Web--heck, long before television, radio was the new technology of the pre-World War II era. We take it for granted today, but how remarkable it must have seemed when it first debuted.

(Woody Allen, before auguring his career into the ground, did a wonderful job of capturing that era with Radio Days.)

The Manolo, he love the monkstrap shoe for the man of the mystery:

Where the fashion for the men is concerned, the Manolo he is the traditionalist. Men should wear well-polished, good quality feetwear, which should distinguish itself not with the outré color, or the hand-tooled cat leather, but with the high quality of the material and the workmanship, and with the classical, elegant line of the shoe itself.

Thus the Manolo he would recommend to his “downtown” friend the black monkstrap shoe from the Bally called the Breda.

The monkstrap shoe it is the ever so slightly eccentric shoe. Indeed there is the faintest whiff of the mystery about the man who wears the monkstrap. This man he is not the uptight man of business, instead he is free from such mundane concerns, and yet there is still the admirable personal restraint. He is slightly old-fashioned, but in only the best sense, as being one who does not abandon tradition at the first blush of the new.

The Ed, he cannot help but agree, merely adding that the suede monkstrap--while it takes a certain amount of time to perform the scoping of its retail location--is one of the best forms of this classic shoe with the faintest whiff of the mystery.

There's a line spoken by James Bond in Goldfinger that I never could figure out: during his briefing with M and Col. Smithers, the character who hands Bond a gold bar to bait Goldfinger, Bond sniffs a decanter of brandy and rolls his eyes, prompting M to ask what's wrong with it. Bond replies, “I’d say it was a 30-year-old Fine indifferently blended, sir. With an overdose of Bon Bois.”

Say what? Fortunately, this well-written Website explains all:

For those of us who don’t speak brandy, Cognac can be made with grapes from six different growing areas within the Cognac region, with each area distinguished by its soil. Fine (or Fins) Bois and Bon Bois are two of these areas. Grapes from these two areas are not considered to be as high in quality as those from the Grande Champagne or Petite Champagne areas, hence 007’s remark.

Glad we cleared that up! The site also explores every drink from every Bond book and movie, including the Vesper, a potent 007 variation on the Martini, which I've made a couple of times myself.

The Manolo, he offers the sound advice, as per the usual per:

Manolo says, recently the Manolo he has been hearing much talk about the Russian Valenki boot as being the next Ugg, the next ugly boot to be the big trend.

Here, allow the Manolo to nip this in the bud.

If you are the shuffling, toothless, 100 kilogram Russian babushka with the head scarf then by all the means, wear the valenki. If you are not the Russian granny then, in the opinion of the Manolo, you have no business wearing the Valenki.

Trust the Manolo, nothing says, Comrade, I have in my soviet-era apartment stockpiled 500 rolls of the low-quality toilet paper like the Valenki.

Do not be the babushka, do not wear the Valenkis.

Hard to say which is sillier--the Manolo's typically pithy blogging-as-performance art-writing, or the dreadful boots he's writing about.

Perhaps the answer, it is simple: read the Manolo, avoid the Valenkis, repeat the dosage.

It took me years and years to master the Japanese art of eating sushi. While I was learning, I felt a bit like David Carridine in Kung Fu, except I didn't have Keye Luke as my mentor, I didn't shave my head or wear a polypropylene skull cap, and I didn't play the miscast Occidental star of a 1970s series about the mysteries of ancient Oriental fighting techniques.

Fortunately, you need not endure such rigorous training (or strained blogger references to 1970s TV shows) yourself: just follow this easy to understand guide, and in about eight minutes, the mysteries of the sushi bar will be revealed to you, too.

(Truth be told, if you're already a sushi junky, you may enjoy this a lot more.)

The "permanent collections" of major art museums are often anything but, writes Hilton Kramer in The New Criterion.

(Via Terry Teachout.)

This Christmas, "Trust the Manolo most sane men do not wish to wear the cheap novelty tie".

And if you're not sure what to look for, trust the Ed that this is a great place to start.

Over at Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes that everything you know about sprawl is probably wrong.

Speaking of the Manolo, he writes:

Here for the Black Friday are the Manolo’s political beliefs, summed up in the following short statements

Read the whole of the thing--the Ed is in the complete of the agreement on all of the items on the list, especially items five and six:

5) The clothes they are important. They say important things about your identity, even if you pretend that they do not.

6) The fashion it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery. One does not need the grounding in the theoretical sciences to know how to dress well.

For men, I'd start here.

Update: Julie Fredrickson of Almost Girl writes:

Fashion, more than many arenas, is one of contradictions and half efforts and half starts. My theory is that because fashion tugs so firmly at the core of our own identities as an industry it manifests those contradictions in ways that other areas do not. Toothpaste, despite all marketing to the contrary, does not say as much about us as our clothing. Image, expectations, and ideals all manifest themselves through the aesthetics we project. Clothing makes the man they say, but only because image has the power to convert, cajole, and seduce in a way that other consumer products do not. A large TV can only impress if others come to your house. Clothing is the armour we wear in society, in many ways it is our public persona.

For guys, it's even more so--as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire once warned, "Never underestimate the power of what you wear...After all, there's just a small bit of you-yourself sticking out, at the cuff and at the neck. The rest of what the world sees is what you hang on the frame".

Pajamas Media has a round-up of action from the official kick-off of the Christmas shopping season.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel looks at--to coin a phrase--the Substance of Style:

The great thing about fashion markets today is how diverse they are, even outside of major metro areas. Many different styles coexist and there isn't a simple, price-based status hierarchy. You can buy trendy but disposable clothes--"fast fashion"--or classic, enduring pieces. Basic jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts cost about the same, in nominal dollars, as they did when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, and their materials and construction are generally much better. Those cheap clothes are also helping a billion Chinese climb out of abject poverty.

The bad thing about fashion markets today is how many empire-waist tops and dresses they sell. I don't care how cute, young, and skinny you are. Those things make you look pregnant.

The other bad thing about fashion markets is that they give The Decade That Taste Forgot a feeling of permanence it in no way deserves.

I’m in Los Angeles for a couple of days with Nina, who’s here on Official Pajamas Business.

We had dinner last night at the Encounter Restaurant, which is the “destination restaurant” in LAX--A.K.A., tourist trap, but we knew that going in. It’s done up in a cross between late George Jetson and early Austin Powers, a sort of psychedelic postmodern homage to late sixties swank, before the crushing stuck-on-stupidity of the wide sideburn brown bellbottom seventies came crashing in. (The atmosphere of the remodeled Brasserie in the Seagram building is very vaguely along similar lines, but the food is much better, and the atmosphere much less interstellar—more Ken Adam and Ed Straker, less Barbarella and Austin Powers.)

The Encounter, which first opened in 1997 (as did the Austin Powers franchise, curiously enough) is certainly a fun restaurant, housed at the top of a vaguely Eero Saarinen-inspired circular multistory building from the early '60s that looks like it could have been George Jetson’s apartment complex. Back then, Saarinen’s architecture was the model for airports--pity that that era has passed. To complete the Jetsons atmosphere, you can hear the psychedelic techno-trance music pumped into the elevator ride up to the restaurant on their Website.

The Encounter's service wasn’t bad, but the actual food and drink were definitely up and down. My Tanqueray Martinis were great, and in just the right sized glass. Not skimpy, but not a big humungous bucket-o-booze designed to quickly bring on insobriety. But the glass of B&B I had with dessert was definitely underfilled—a small puddle of brandy that looked lonely at the very bottom of its cognac glass.

The Apple Tart dessert was quite good, though. The shrimp and scallop appetizers that Nina and I shared at the start of the meal were dynamite—but my pepper-crusted New York Steak was tough and chewy. Not quite filet of Florsheim, but not too far from it, either.

But all-in-all, for someone looking to kill a couple of hours before a flight, it’s definitely worth stopping by--and certainly beats the food court-style dining so many airports have devolved into.

Could somebody please shoot the 1970s and put them out of our misery? In the mail today was an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog filled with the worst clothes of the 1970s Manhattan art crowd: pre-destroyed $80 jeans filled with enormous tears, rips, gashes and bleach spills, brown bell-bottoms, horrendous olive T-shirts, and female models who alternately look like Mia Farrow from her saucer-eyed Rosemary's Baby period and Angela Davis with a circa-1972 24-inch high Afro.

William F. Buckley probably won't get carded if he picks this catalog up in his local Manhattan Abercrombie & Fitch, but I think he'd probably want to take a shower after looking at all of these pathetic duds--the smell of stagnant bongwater just oozes from every page. The Manolo, he would have the coronary infarction if he ever flips through this drek.

As James Lileks once wrote, The '70s was the decade that taste forgot. And God knows why, but for clothing retailers, it's the decade that never, ever ends.

Betsy Newmark has some thoughts about Robin Givhan, the Washington Post's political-fashion reporter (there's a job that cried out for being created, huh?), a sort of cross between Maureen Dowd's snarkiness, Mr. Blackwell's fashion sense, combined with lots of dollar book Freudian analysis and the Post's usual liberal pieties:

You might remember Robin Givhan. She's the nasty reporter who commented quite snarkily on how Mrs. Roberts dressed her children just too perfectly in their pastel Sunday clothes to go to the White House when their father was nominated for the Supreme Court. And remember how critical she was of Dick Cheney's choice of jacket at the ceremony at Auschwitz? I guess his jacket distracted her from the heavy thoughts about the Holocaust she might have had otherwise. But one administration official she has approved of in a fashion sense is Condoleezza Rice. Givhan was just breathless on the Secretary of State's choice of black boots and the impression of sex and power. Apparently, Givhan approves if your clothes choice is reminiscent of The Matrix.

And, during the 2004 campaign, she felt compelled to agree with John Kerry that the Democratic ticket just had the better hair. She looked at the Republican hair do's and concluded: Yech!

"Fortunately", Betsy writes, "the American people don't vote based on such cosmetological criteria".

The Manolo has relaunched a new and improved blog for the men.

The Manolo explains some simple facts which so many in society--both high and low--have forgotten:

These inescapable facts obtain: that the clothes they are always necessary, and that others they will always judge us by them. These are the reasons why the Manolo he would have you dress with the purpose, to consider carefully what you would wear, and to think about the effect your clothes and how you wear them will have on others.

Of the course, this it does not mean that you must dress to please others, nor that you should follow the lowing herd, but rather that you should be conscious of the image you are projecting.

For the example, if you wish to project the image of carefree disdain for the high fashion, be aware that your dirty t-shirt of the Oakland Raiders, torn sweat pants, and flip-flops may not be conveying that exact message, may in the stead be saying to the by passer, “Cross to the other side of the street, lest this person’s disdain for personal hygiene and grooming infect you with the parasites.”

Manolo says, the fashion, it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery.

There are the simple rules for dressing that can be used by anyone to maximize the assests and diminish the faults, and thus project the worthy image. Likewise, there are the ways and reasons to deviate from these rules that will thus project the pleasing counter image. But the central necessity for properly using, and sometimes ignoring, the rules of the fashion and the clothing it is to be thoughtful, to consider your choices carefully, and to be aware that you are always, always, always projecting the image, even when you think you are not.

Exactly. Or as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire warned:

Never underestimate the power of what you wear...After all, there's just a small bit of you-yourself sticking out, at the cuff and at the neck. The rest of what the world sees is what you hang on the frame.

(From Alan Flusser's indispensable--well for us guys who care about these things--1985 book, Clothes And The Man.)

Glenn Reynolds has been tracking the progress of James Lileks' new book on Amazon, and is of course, partially responsible for its quick and blinding success. (I had no idea it would be out so soon, and immediately ordered a copy yesterday. Incidentally, can you still use "with a bullet"? Probably not if you're a New York teacher; fortunately for my sanity, I'm not.)

The other reason for its success is its theme, which sounds great, based on Lileks' own description:

It’s called “Mommy Knows Worst,” and the short description is thus: The Gallery of Regrettable Parenting. It’s a compendium of archaic child-rearing advice, going back to the 1920s, when parents were urged to give their kids sunburns and linseed enemas. It’s perhaps the only book I will ever write that devotes a substantial chapter to the greatest problem of the 1940s: CONSTIPATION. You have no idea how slow the bowels of American children moved in the forties. Dads will enjoy how stupid and useless they were made to look in the 50s; Moms will enjoy the detailed how-to-give-birth-at-home section from the WW1 era, and everyone will love the 1960s pamphlet on dealing with home stresses via industrial tranquilizers. It’s the usual retro-fest with many ads, laden with unfair commentary, and attractively priced; perfect for everyone who’s ever had a kid or a mother. I think that covers it all.

Many thanks to the Prof for the push. Now let’s get this thing into the top ten – if only for a minute. It’ll make me happy. It’ll make you happy, knowing that the continued success of these books keeps lileks.com ad-free. AND, if you like the Joe Ohio series, well, good sales figures on this one will make the book version more likely.

Twelve bucks! Cheap. And hours of laughs.

I thank you. Now buy! Or I’ll podcast twice as hard on Friday!

His last book, Interior Desecrations is still worth picking up as well of course--here's what I wrote about it last year for Electronic House magazine, when I suggested it would make a great Christmas gift:

Interior Desecrations
By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

12/09/04 - With the holidays rapidly approaching, you're probably looking for fun gifts for the holiday season. One book that might make a great gift, and at 24 bucks or less, not break the piggybank, is James Lileks' new "Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s".

How hideous? The book's back cover flashes a stern WARNING! in a 48-point all caps bold sans-serif classic-1970s font, followed by this disclaimer:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

Hideous Photos, But Captions Make The Book

Hear me now and believe me later, these photos are staggering in their horrific ugliness. If any of your rooms look like those in "Interior Desecrations", you don't need a Roomba; you need a flamethrower and a gallon of napalm to start fresh.

But as frightening as the photos are, it's Lileks' captions that make the book so much fun. Lileks, who toils during the day for the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" newspaper, and writes one of the Internet's best Weblogs at night, is a humor writer on par with Dave Barry and P.J. O'Rourke.

Underneath a particularly horrendous area rug combining patches of blue, teal, green, yellow, red, orange, and a dozen other colors not found in nature, arranged in a pattern charitably described as "abstract", Lileks writes:

"Mommmmmmmmmmm! Fido threw up Smurfs all over the rug again! To fully grasp the horror of the era, you have to realize a crucial, telling fact: this was the perfect rug for someone's room. They were happy when they found this rug."

Blame Park Avenue

Lileks alludes to the subtext of his book in its introduction, but it's worth repeating: by and large, these aren't photos of average, everyday 1970s American interiors. Rather, they're photos that Lileks has collected and scanned from 1970s-era home decoration magazines.

In other words, these photos reflect the collected wisdom of decorating pros working inside posh office buildings high above Manhattan's Park and Madison Avenues in the 1970s, and their take on what would be best for homes that wanted to stay contemporary.

I gotta say though, as much as I hate everything else pictured in "Interior Desecrations", that "2001"-style bathroom with the curved Orion Space Shuttle walls is pretty radical. Next time we remodel Casa de Ed, I'm soooo there! I wonder if I can find that abstract Smurf rug on ebay?

Resource Links

Amazon.com: If it sounds intriguing, you may buy the book here.

SmartHome.com: What the intelligent home wears—inside its walls.

Lileks.com: Both a sneak preview at the horrors of "Interior Desecrations" and an extension of the book: this section of Lileks' personal site contains material found after the book went to press.

In his Pajamas Media profile yesterday, the Manolo, (celebrating the first anniversary of his Super Fantastic blog!) he say the childhood of the Manolo was hardly the out of the ordinary experience:

From these earliest moments the Manolo he developed in the usual ways that the young boys develop, kicking the football with the other boys, playing the hooky from the school, making the tiny designer shoes out of the tinfoil for the household pets, the usual sorts of the things.

Which of course, prompted my wife and our friend Susan to attempt just that with Susan's dog, Bea.

Bea was certainly a good sport about it--God knows what was going through her mind though, while humans attempted to mummify her front paws in Reynolds Wrap. (No, not that Reynolds. No blenders were involved in this project, much to Bea's relief.)

Incidentally, it's not at all surprising that Manolo was photographed wearing a fine pair of kicks himself. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I was wearing my brown suede monkstraps for my profile's photo--although unlike the shoes of the Manolo--and the Bea--they were out of the camera range.

Update: Welcome Super Fantastic readers of the Manolo! Please look around; hopefully you'll find other material that will be of the interest.

James Lileks touches upon the issue that continues to divide us all:

Here’s a link to a rather amazing commercial – you just wish it did something else than suggest that the entire purpose of life is to drink beer. The entire purpose of life is to drink whiskey.

Nonsense. It is to drink gin.

Michelle Malkin reviews the latest in homicide chic French fashions. A little grungy, a little too Chav for my tastes--but then I doubt I'm in the target market for the explosive growth in these killer designs...

I hadn't heard of All Things Beautiful until I did a vanity Technorati search over the weekend, but I can't help but like any blog that puts me via a single post, in the same company with John Roberts and Cary Grant:

Roberts' dress code is entirely based on Cary Grant in his favorite movie. Therefore, the man clearly has - 'Integrity'

Number two, he is a born Leader.....of fashion. According to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, we have a welcomed return of the black tailored suit, the very style that Roberts favors.

The subject of American aesthetics (see interesting article by Edward Driscoll), and inherently men's sense of fashion, still largely rests on Integrity. The quality of being honest, and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness. Roberts is known to be a man of integrity: whole, undivided, unimpaired and unified.

The 'Chief Justice Roberts' Look is corporate, commanding, prudent, full of integrity, with a 'touch of heart' discretely worn on your well cut sleeve. My guess is that we will see a lot of dark tailored suits amongst the young Americans who will be driving this trend.

Sounds good to me.

Incidentally, nifty Warhol-esque photo of the blog's hostess on her bio.

My dad has always been a pious fellow, but he couldn't help making that joking riff on the similar sounding line in the Lord's Prayer from time to time, which I'm sure he heard as a kid, growing up in pre-World War II Yonkers.

It's a phrase that took on new meaning in 1968, when the current version of Penn Station opened, replacing the magnificent original, which stood from 1910 until the mid-1960s, when it was demolished by a cash-starved Pennsylvania Railroad to build its current subterrainian version, and place the current Madison Square Garden and an office tower on its air rights.

The current Penn Station is a horrible, dank place, the absolute nadir of modernism, and blasphemy to the greatness the name implied for decades. But as I explain in my latest Tech Central Station column, across the street, there is, as George Lucas would say, A New Hope...

Other than the expensive therapy bills it cost me from all the brutally painful 1970s flashbacks I experienced while reading it, I loved James Lileks' Interior Desecrations book last year, which carried this important WARNING! on its back cover:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

It's a warning that Anjelica Huston evidently failed to heed, when she designed her appropriately named "Little Mud House".

(Here's a WARNING! of our own: clicking above link risks blindness and/or physical discomfort caused by overexposure to overly saturated psychedelic color scheme. Don't see we didn't warn you...)

Based on the excerpt from its first chapter, James Hirsen's Hollywood Nation: Left Coast Lies, Old Media Spin, and the New Media Revolution sounds like a pretty good read, sort of along the lines of Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted from last year (which I ended up naming this site's whole show-biz category after). But I couldn't help noticing it unwittingly recycles urban myths whose origins date as far back as the mid-1930s:

It’s long been the case that the entertainment biz has provided the measuring stick by which we determine who, and what, is attractive or fashionable. As Joel Siegel puts it, “None of this is new. It’s been going on forever.” Siegel cites the famous example of how “undershirt companies went bankrupt” in the 1930s after Clark Gable appeared sans T-shirt in the Oscar-winning film It Happened One Night. Gable was the leading star of the day, a major sex symbol, and so, Siegel says, men took the cue from him and “stopped wearing undershirts.”

John F. Kennedy was that rare politician who had a glamorous air about him. As Siegel remembers, Kennedy broke with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Hats were part of the standard look for men in those days—even at “ball games, they wore a hat,” Siegel notes. But as soon as people saw the fedora-absent inaugural footage, formal head attire went out of fashion.

Siegel also recalls the influence of Marilyn Monroe’s most famous scene from The Seven Year Itch, the “scene where the subway blows her dress up.” He tells me that at the time “women in Japan stopped wearing underwear to get that Marilyn Monroe look.”

Well, so much for trusting Joel Siegel's memory...

Maybe Roger L. Simon, just back from Japan, can give us the inside scoop on that last item, but as the Snopes urban-legend Website has documented, those first two items simply aren't true. They have a page on Clark Gable's supposed murder of the T-shirt (which couldn't have been too deadly a shot--every guy I knew in school in the 1970s wore one under the blue oxford cloth shirt of his school uniform, at least during the bitterly cold New Jersey winters, and my dad still wears them to this day--a fact that I hope he won't mind me telling the world).

As for Kennedy and the hat industry, while there's no doubt that hats are a much rarer breed these days (Roger, Tom Wolfe, Matt Drudge and myself may be the only men left still wearing them on a regular basis), you can't blame Kennedy's inauguration for putting them on the endangered species list, something I noted right around this time three years ago:

As someone who has worn hats (Fedoras, Trilbies, and Panama Optimos, not baseball caps with Caterpillar Tractor logos on them) off and on for several years now, I've long taken the "JFK killed the hat industry" myth at its word. However, Snopes' Urban Legends does its usual thorough job of debunking that myth.

Like I said, Hollywood Nation is still probably an enjoyable read, and hopefully if there's a paperback or second edition, it will have Siegel's urban myths eliminated.

(Now if we could just get modern presidents to start wearing top hats again at their inaugurations...)

12 years ago--in other words, a decade and two years ago...or 15 minus three years ago!--Dave Barry noticed an alarming trend, in his back to school column, which thoughtfully began:

Summer vacation is almost over, so today Uncle Dave has a special back-to-school ''pep talk'' for you young people, starting with these heartfelt words of encouragement: HA HA HA YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNCLE DAVE DOESN'T NEENER NEENER NEENER.

Seriously, young people, I have some important back-to-school advice for you, and I can boil it down to four simple words: ``Study Your Mathematics.''

I say this in light of a recent alarming Associated Press story stating that three out of every four high-school students -- nearly 50 percent -- leave school without an adequate understanding of mathematics. Frankly, I am not surprised. ''How,'' I am constantly asking myself, ``can we expect today's young people to understand mathematics when so many of them can't even point their baseball caps in the right direction?''

I am constantly seeing young people with the bills of their baseball caps pointing backward. This makes no sense, young people! If you examine your cap closely, you will note that it has a piece sticking out the front, called a ''bill.'' The purpose of the bill is to keep sun off your face, which, unless your parents did a great many drugs in the '60s (Ask them about it!), is located on the FRONT of your head. Wearing your cap backward is like wearing sunglasses on the back of your head, or wearing a hearing aid in your nose. (Perhaps you young people are doing this also. Uncle Dave doesn't want to know.)

So to summarize what we've learned: ``FRONT of cap goes on FRONT of head.''

Got it, young people? Let's all strive to do better in the coming school year!

Flashforward to 2005, and David Bernstein observes that few have learned the other Dave's important lesson (did I mention Uncle Dave wrote that 12 friggin' years ago?):

Who would have thought that twenty years [Note: 20 years is eight more than 12 years!--Ed] after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers...), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late '80s and mid '90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it's soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, "you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago," will do.

And as I wrote two years ago, "the only guys who can pull off a backwards baseball cap are MLB catchers, rap stars, SWAT snipers and 12 year old kids"--and odds are, you and I don't fit any of those profiles.

Note: My wife Nina has been insanely busy for the past couple of months, and a very big part of her workload has been handling the legal aspects of Pajamas Media. As such, she's retired her own Weblog, but will be posting a few items here from time to time--Ed

Ladies! Have You No Respect For Yourselves?

There, that feels better. But excuse me. If a woman spends 30 to 60 (or more) minutes getting ready to go out, trying to look her best for the event and her partner, and he spends 1.78 seconds putting sandals on over the socks he’s worn for three days (along with the rest of his clothes), then something is seriously out of balance with the respect they are showing each other.

Oh, you say, he didn’t sleep in those clothes for three days, that’s a very expensive and intentional look. Nina, you just don't understand contemporary men's fashion.

Then excuse me again. But that’s worse. So it’s not that he’s just careless, sloppy and was playing video games till she had been standing at the door for ten minutes. It’s actually that he spent money trying to look like he doesn’t care about wherever they are going together. So he is working hard to dress in a way that says "this is an important event for her, but neither she, nor the event is important enough for me to give a damn." Yes, that’s worse than just being a slob.

When a man says once "I love you in short skirts" the woman, even liberated, professional, assertive women, go out and have all of their skirts shortened (ok, I know not all women, but a lot). When a woman says "wow, you look gorgeous in that suit" the one time in five years he gets dressed up, does he look for more places to wear a suit. Nope.

A male friend of mine actually once said "there was this guy in college, he always got dressed up.... and he always got, you know, lucky."

Well duh.

There's no doubt women go for the rough and tumple, Lady Chatterly's tilling the soil gardner type. But slovenliness and rough physicality do not need to go hand in hand. It is possible to do both--urbane sophistication and brute physicality. That is if you care for your partner and wish to show her some respect. And that is, if you have enough respect for yourself that you believe you can do both. I think many guys just don't have enough self-confidence to pull it off.

And for those of you who don't know - my husband dresses, as Manolo would say "Super Fantastic."

Well, at least he tries to.--Ed

Mary Katharine Ham, senior writer and associate editor of Townhall.com explains what should be obvious to the Washington Post:

If you're a mom taking two young children to the White House, you'd want your children in their very best clothes--perhaps even one step above their Sunday Best for the MOST IMPORTANT NIGHT in the family's life to date.

It seems to me that Mrs. Roberts hit the nail on the head. But we laypeople know nought of what we speak.

Those aren't cute clothes. They're just another example of Chimpy McBushitler's aristocratic cronies throwing their seersucker-clad affluence in the faces of the masses. This is patent-leather hegemony run rampant! Do not be hypnotized by the "glistening" pageboy and wide blue eyes of global domination.

Perhaps when Robin's done with the pre-schoolers, she could pick on someone her own size-- someone like Ralph Lauren, whose fall collection included this horror...

The double-standard of the Post is staggering. There's no way the family of a Supreme Court nominee of a president who's name is say...Clinton would be raked over the coals by the Post's Fashion Police as Roberts' was.

(Via PoliPundit.)

That post of mine that Manolo mentions on his Weblog can be found here. Or just scroll down a little 'til you see the "Hope For The Secret Vice" headline.

Speaking of the Grey Lady, here's a Times article on menswear by Cathy Horyn that I enjoyed, but even so, there's a hint of baby boomer absentmindedness to it:

Peacock displays seem to come in 20-year cycles, reflecting the stock market as well as social changes. In the 60's, when Mr. Wolfe wrote "The Secret Vice," about the mania for custom suits, Pop artists had come uptown, London was swinging, and it was cool to have your clothes made on Savile Row. Even Lyndon Johnson did, ordering six suits from the firm of Carr, Son & Woor, following the 1960 election, with the instructions, "I want to look like a British diplomat."

But this assumes that menswear began in 1960, as opposed to observing a millennia of change. (It's ironic: the left is absolutely mortified of the concept of Creationism and its theory that God created the Earth 6000 years ago being taught in schools. But you get the sense that so many baby boomers seem to believe that the universe only dates back to about 1963, with JFK's assassination as the Big Bang.)

As Wolfe himself wrote in his wonderful "Secret Vice" article--which was written in the early, Kennedy-era '60s, not its later Austin Powers phase when pop artists had come uptown, and London was swinging:

In Europe, all over England, in France, the mass ready-made suit industry is a new thing. All men, great and small, have had tailors make their suits for years, and they tend to talk a little more with each other about what they're getting. But in America it's the secret vice.

In the excerpt quoted above, Horyn also wrote, "Peacock displays seem to come in 20-year cycles, reflecting the stock market as well as social changes". But in actuality, as menswear designer and fashion historian Alan Flusser has written in his various books (most recently in this one), it was the 1930s, when the stock market was at its lowest ebb, that menswear design was its peak, curtailed only by World War II. As to the second half of Horyn's statement, the apogee of menswear's style in the 1930s had nothing to do with the election of FDR, but rather as a continuation of design trends of the 1920s, and the ability of the Duke of Windsor to seemingly invent and introduce new styles at will.

I'm glad to see that the Times has hope though. And I'll second that emotion: while in San Francisco yesterday, Nina and I stopped by Cable Car Clothiers, which we were surprised to see in a much larger location that they moved into a couple of years ago ("with quite a long-term lease", a salesman told me), in addition to their Internet portal and wonderful "dead tree" catalog. (Cable Car's owner, a spry octogenarian named Charles Pivnick, understood in the late 1960s that mail order was a key to his business's survival.)

At the other end of the Bay, a handsome new Brooks Brothers opened last week in The Village Santana Row in San Jose. And Brooks as a whole is undergoing an interesting revival, as current owner Claudio Del Vecchio, who purchased the line in 2001, is steering it away from its dark and pitiful era in the 1990s when England's Marks & Spencer owned it, back to its more traditional 1920s and '30s look. He's brought back some very nice items from the past, including club-collared dress shirts and other handsome designs long since thought dead.

Who knows: maybe there's hope for how the average American man dresses (as opposed to you and I, of course) yet.

James Bowman notices how much the style section of the newspaper and politics seem to be intertwined these days--much as increasingly, sports and politics have become interlinked as well.

The Manolo (whom I just permalinked) and I are definitely on the same page when it comes to this book and its author's knowledge of the Secret Vice.

In this recent New York Sun article, Julia Vitullo-Martin says that a lot of mediocre modernist buildings are about to become landmarked in Manhattan:

Since landmarking has the effect of rigidifying current use and preventing evolutionary change, New Yorkers need to pay close attention to this debate.

The Municipal Art Society’s watch list of 30 Under 30 includes, for example, the egregious Marriott Marquis Hotel designed by John Portman, the immense IBM Building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Philip Johnson’s cathedral-size AT&T/Sony Building. Do New Yorkers really want these structures pre-empting all future uses? Are we confident enough of their merit to protect them into perpetuity? Will Walter Gropius’s MetLife Building, looming over Grand Central Terminal, be next on the list of buildings to be protected?

The problem is that modernist architects espoused a good number of truly bad ideas, which are far more important than their familiar contempt for color and ornamentation. At its most fundamental, modernist architecture intended to break with the past, defy the streetscape, and rend the urban fabric. In urging that buildings be landmarked, preservationists are not merely advancing the benefits of modernism’s clean, uncluttered lines. They argue the benefits of what are often modernism’s depredations, such as the superblock.

Of course, some of the debate will be settled by deterioration. As a Yale architectural historian, Vincent Scully, pointed out in 1999, modernists embraced an aesthetic of impermanence — with the result that most of their buildings will not survive because they were poorly built. Mies van der Rohe may have defined architecture as the will of an epoch translated into space, but much of that will is crumbling beneath its shoddy materials.

Many of the finest modernist buildings have already been landmarked. Joseph’s Urban’s sublime New School for Social Research, for example, on West 12th Street, is protected by an individual designation. Mayer, Whittlesley & Glass’s Butterfield House, across the street, is protected by the overarching of the Greenwich Village Historic District. The best-known modernist buildings were designated when they became eligible. Gordon Bunshaft’s 1952 Lever House on Park Avenue, for example, was designated a landmark in 1983, a year after eligibility.

So was Mies's Seagram building, right across the street, and arguably the best modernist building in Manhattan.

The prospect of Gropius's Met Life building (formerly known for years as the Pan Am building) being landmarked is a bit depressing though. It's an enormous battleship of a building, totally dominates nearby Grand Central Station, and divides Park Avenue in half. It was one of Gropius's last buildings, but it's also the building that New Yorkers love to hate, and probably wouldn't miss if they were assured of something better in its place--or an unobstructed view down Park ave.

Steve Conover of The Skeptical Optimist is looking for ideas for his leisurely drive down the California coast this spring.

It's an obvious one, but you could do far worse than a "trip to nowhere" and a surprisingly first class dinner or lunch on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

(Found via Villainous Company.)

Jonah Goldberg's slogans will be appearing on select Starbucks coffee cups near you.

As somebody who has at times viewed caffeine the way that Keith Richards views smack, I am jealous of this on so, so many levels. (Actually, I think Jonah was a great choice, and I'll look for his imprint next time I pickup a Caramel Macchiato.)

Update: When I read Jonah's post in The Corner, I joked with my wife via IM that, "I assume they'll have 20 liberal quotes to counterbalance him. But it's pretty cool that they got Jonah to be their token conservative".

After clicking around their Website, I think I was pretty close with the numbers, actually.

Tangentially Related Update: Speaking of having the deck stacked against you, this certainly qualifies.

One More Update: Heh.

I was browsing through eBay when I came across a line of ties called, staggeringly enough, Infectious Awareables, Inc.

I'm not sure this is at all a good concept, and here's why. Imagine you leave work late for a singles' bar, meet someone cute, get to talking, hit it off, and she says, "hey, what an interesting tie!"

How well will a phrase like this go over? "Oh that? That's my Gonorrhea tie! I couldn't decide if the Herpes or the West Nile tie went the best with this suit, so I figured I'd play it safe and go with the ol' Gonorrhea pattern and a Windsor knot. Whatdya think?!"

Stick with Ralph Lauren, kids. Trust me on this!

(I wish I had known of this line when Steve Green was doing his "50 Words and Phrases Not to Use on a First Date" list. This would surely qualify.)

And the only prescription is more of the footwear!

Chris Muir catches Manolo fever, and the Shoe God himself achieves the immortality of the Weblogosphere. (And yes, it is incredibly easy to start talking like him; it's driving my wife nuts as I keep doing vocal impersonations of the Manolo's ultra-idiosyncratic writing style.)

Robin Givhan of the Washington Post channels Sigmund Freud channeling Mr. Blackwell as she gives us her take on the semiotics of Condi Rice's stylish duds.

Update: On the other hand, as Tim Blair writes, "The never said that about Lawrence Eagleburger".

Can't argue with that!

Political guru Larry Sabato writes that Hillary's chances are overrated: she carries heap big baggage from her first tour of the White House with Bill.

Meanwhile, a possible opponent is looking mighty stylish in the Washington Post (and no, I don't mean John McCain).

(I wonder if the Manolo likes the boots?)

Update: It's official: Condi's kicks are Manolo approved. (And welcome to his readers, incidentally!)

Another Update: Steve Green has more from Sabato.

Sorry for the lack of rich bloggity goodness yesterday--I had an article to polish and a newsletter to write, and by late afternoon, Nina and I were both feeling like we needed a break and decided to get out of the house for dinner. While northern California isn't in danger of washing into the Pacific like its southern counterpart, we've definitely gotten our share of rain this year. It's left us feeling a bit claustrophobic. Not Jack Nicholson in The Shining claustrophobic, but still.

So we did what any couple near San Jose would do. We went to the Village where Leo McKern is always interrogating Patrick McGoohan.

Say what? Read on.

Read More »

Forbes looks at a forgotten utility adult beverage, in a piece called "Blended Scotches We Love":

The big advantage of drinking blended Scotch is that it doesn't have to be taken seriously; you don't have to treat it with the ritualistic reverence that goes along with drinking single malts.

Rather, it's a comfortable, everyday drink--something you don't have to think too much about. Simply throw a handful of ice into a glass and add a good, blended scotch (and, perhaps, some soda). It's a drink you can enjoy it in the bar after work with your buddies or at a raucous party, and you won't have to concentrate on savoring all of its subtle nuances.

Won't make me give up my favorite clear beverage, but it certainly sounds good to me.

Two words--just two simple words: caffeinated beer.

Talk about immanentizing the eschaton: this really does sound like heaven on earth.

(Via Galley Slaves. And for the origin of Skittlebrau, click here.)

I just read on the New Criterion's Weblog that Philip Johnson died yesterday at age 98. Johnson was a pretty good architect, but an astonishing impresario of architecture--he helped establish the Museum of Modern Art's architectural section, which he also ran for many years.

More importantly, Johnson (at left and in the background in this photo from my first National Review Online article in 2001) helped Mies van der Rohe escape the Nazis in the 1930s and emigrate to Chicago; and Mies would, for better or worse, make modernism--and specifically, his version of it--the dominant form of urban architecture in America from the end of World War II until the late 1970s.

Roger Kimball has a long, detailed and well-measured memoriam to Johnson--which showcases the highs, and the lows (and the lows were staggeringly low), of his long and checkered life and career.

Two words. Just two simple words, and it's easy to see how far mankind has come.

Customized M&Ms.

Customized freakin' M&Ms!

The future is now--and I can only wonder if Van Halen's lawyers have begun to update their contracts to reflect this.

No, it's a not a new blog devoted to one of Woody Allen's better films. They're discussing recipes of the classic drink on NRO's Corner.

This is a pretty good page on the history of the drink, which I like to mix with Maker's Mark.

This isn't my personal favorite, but for a variant, there's always my father's drink of choice: ever since I've been around, Dad has always ordered his Manhattans made with Seagram's V.O., and dry vermouth, poured up, with a twist of lemon. He's given many a waiter or waitress the evil eye for bringing it with a cherry.

Yes, it's named after a piece of French artillery, but don't let that throw you: it's a champagne cocktail they really got right, and makes for a great holiday Christmastime drink.

I can't say I'm crazy about Absinthe--I've tried it (at least the non-wormwood-equipped Absente, and I think I have a bottle of similar-tasting Pernod sitting around), but the licorice taste isn't enough to make me want to give up gin, even to see the Green Fairy.

But Beautiful Atrocities says Absinthe is the new chic hooch these days.

As James Lileks recently wrote, "The season of nonsectarian joy and fellowship is finally upon us, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Baby Claus Tree".

If you're looking for gift ideas, I have a review of his new book, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s, over at my Electronic House newsletter.

New York's legendary Museum of Modern Art reopens to the public tomorrow (or today, depending upon which time zone you're in) after being closed for several years for an extensive remodeling and renovation. If you can't make it there on Saturday, The New Criterion has a sneak preview.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent many, many hours at MOMA--Nina and I even had our wedding reception there in 1998. But this new version sounds like a very, very different museum.

Myrna Blyth looks at "Ma and Pa Botox":

Drs. Jean and Alistair are the couple who say they figured out the beautifying potential of Botox, the trade name for the Botulinum Toxin Type A. That's the toxin secreted by the bacteria that causes botulism, the deadly paralytic illness. Injecting Botox in teeny, tiny doses to smooth wrinkles and unfurrow brows became the number-one non-surgical cosmetic procedure in the United States in 2003.

John Kerry's mentioned in the article, but he doesn't appear to be worried about it.

One of my favorite Tom Wolfe essays from the early 1960s, in which Tom first outed himself as a dandy who took clothes seriously is on the Web, along with an essay on the same subject from 1960 by the late George Frazier.

This is wonderful stuff--four decades before the birth of that ridiculous word, "metrosexual".

Closet dandies of the world enjoy--you have much to learn from these two masters of a lost art.

A couple of years ago, when DirecTV added VH1 Classic to the line-up, it was a real treat to watch--the early days of MTV (roughly 1982 to about 1987) were tremendous fun, back before MTV blew it by cutting back on showing videos, and replacing them with longer shows, "socially relevant programming", "Rock The Vote" (Tabitha Soren in a must see interview with candidate Bill Clinton! "Boxers or briefs, Governor?!"), and other pedantic shows. Eventually, MTV lost the zeitgeist so badly, that even Bart Simpson didn't want his MTV.

For those who don't get VH1 Classic on their local cable system, or want a permanent archive of those hazy, crazy days of the mid-1980s, Universal has created a new DVD series of video compilations that parallels their popular "20th Century Masters" collection of CDs--and Matt Rowe reviews some of their offerings.

Eric Gibson looks at how Ikea is bringing modernism to the masses, "for those of us who did not grow up with Mies van der Rohe or Alvar Aalto in the family".

In some places, it wasn't very modern at all. Raymond Loewy was one of the great designers of the 20th century (with a career ranging from the Pennsylvania Railroad's magnificent GG-1 locomotive to Air Force One to Skylab.) So the photos that Virginia Postrel posts are a tough thing to swallow.

The average person's brain has a sort of chronometer which assumes that all photos prior to say, the mid-1950s should be in black and white. But Michael Jennings links to some gorgeous color photos of Chicago in the 1940s and '50s, and infinitely more astonishing, staggering color photos of Czarist Russia from the years just prior to World War I.

Found via Joanne Jacobs, these are the sorts of images that truly make owning a high-speed connection worth it.

Glenn Reynolds links to a photo of Josh Marshall in action in Iowa, and suggests a grooming tip. I'd also recommend that Josh ditch the hat. The only guys who can pull off a backwards baseball cap are MLB catchers, rap stars, SWAT snipers and 12 year old kids, and last time I checked, Josh was none of the above.

I was invited to dinner Saturday night at Piatti's, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Palo Alto, which serves a sort of fusion of Italian and California Cuisine. I knew I'd be one of the few guys wearing a dark suit and tie there, but I'm always surprised at just how shabby people dress for a Saturday dinner out in one of Northern California's richest suburbs. Pony-tailed middle-aged men wearing leather jackets, cheap collarless shirts, sweats, and lots of other items that Tom Wolfe would probably describe as prole gear were the order of the night.

In The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel argues that America's aesthetics have never been better. And in terms of design--cars, buildings, appliances, household goods, etc., I agree. But somehow, after the sleek 1980s, men reverted back to dressing like the worst of '60s and '70s.

And yet, ironically, this nation has to spend more per capita for clothes than any other on the planet. And money isn't the issue--An hour and a half drive away from Palo Alto is the Gilroy Outlet Mall, where names such as Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Perry Ellis, and many, many others sell extremely nice clothes at deeply discounted prices. And there are certainly plenty of books on the subject as well. Not to mention wives who are probably sick of their men looking like their gardeners.

It just seems odd to see men who own imported European cars that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $52,391, and living on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet to be dressing worse than their gardener or mechanic probably does when he goes out on the town.

Update: In July of 2004, I spun this post into an extended essay in The New Partisan.

Is it due for a comeback? And if so, what would Mies van der Rohe think about today's practitioners?

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't completely wallow in nostalgia--there's a lot about today's society that I like. But it's tough not to feel that we've lost a fair amount of civility, when comparing this essay on Manhattan in 1939 (linked to by James Lileks) with this recent article in the Wall Street Journal on today's fashions--or lack thereof.

The 1980s rediscovered fashion to a certain extent. As Lileks once described it people temporarily threw off their beat 1970s Army surplus olive drab Vietnam-protesting jackets and decided to look sharp.

Will it happen again? Hope springs eternal, but its arteries (at least around here) are definitely feeling sclerosed these days.

Ironically, America has lost its sense of fashion, just as it's become obsessed with design aesthetic. But how do you abandon personal aesthetics, and insist on good design in inanimate objects?

They all intersect at Samizdata.net, in a very interesting post. Be sure to read the comments.

UPDATE: I was about to post in Samizdata's comments, but figured I'd post this here as well. Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus To Our House does a pretty good job of explaining how modern architecture came to be the dominant form of architecture in the US, and does a thorough job of deflating the egos and pretensions of Corbu, Mies, Gropius, Johnson, et al.

There's a lot of modern architecture that I really like, but Corbusier's housing projects and city planning were uniformly disastrous. It always amazes me to see them worshipped 30 years after the first American housing projects based on his designs (such as Pruitt-Igoe) were first dynamited. (There's footage of Pruitt-Igoe, both before and after its spectacular demolition in Koyaanisqatsi, incidentally.)

In contrast, Corbusier's private residences of the 1920s, where he got his start as an architect-for-hire, were pretty nifty. But they were individually commissioned, by wealthy clients who knew what they were getting into, and specifically wanted that style--a far, far different experience than those residents of projects such as Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green, who had modern architecture inflicted on them.