Loafers and Loaves

 A new pair of loafers arrived in the mail, and were immediately returned-to-sender... they hurt in a way that I recognized, and I knew that they would never be broken-in.  I would go into detail, but I've been bad-mouthing the company enough lately.  On the walk home from the waterfront, I found this new hidden bakery off of Hanover St.

 

An alley hidden in plain sight. 

A stroll down the tiny passageway. 

Go in the door, and take the stairs down.

Excellent bread.  A full bag cost me $3.

The alley out.

Hard to find.  Well worth it.

----

The North End is also home to the "Skinny House"... one of America's famous spite houses.  I can identify with this type of operation.  There is often a pleasantly bitter taste is petty retribution... like the flavor of Angostura, but mixed with smug self-satisfaction and shaken with ice.

Ralph Lauren Gets It Wrong

The crest on a velvet jacket at Ralph Lauren's store in Boston a few days ago.

Polo Ralph Lauren was established in 1968*.  However, when they "borrowed" King Henry VIII's crest for one of their velvet jackets, someone got the banner wrong when they printed "MCMLXII". "1962"  

The crown is a hilarious touch.

Henry VIII's crest.

Fleur de Lis in threes and Leo in Trio.

For all the time and money they spend, they can't even come up with their own fake crests?  They have resorted to stealing those from the likes of Eton and others.  Emulating is one thing, but thievery is another... besides, I'm sure that Henry VIII would have been able to correctly write his Roman numerals. 

For the record, I rarely take crests seriously.

-----

I have clothing with the little horse on it, and I don't really mind that small quantity.  

But "RL" on your slippers?  Your name better be "Randolph Lattersly" or something similar. Why not put his initials on your stationary as well, or just go all the way and legally change your name?  Maybe you're actually a descendant of Marco Polo, in which case, I'll shut my mouth.

*There are conflicting reports as to when the company was founded, possibly mincing the actual incorporation with the concept launch.  I go with the business documents that all say 1968.

Foul Weather and Wearing Day-Glo

A reader recently emailed me about this photo:

He asked why I thought "that neon [was] still possible on any man after 1988".  While these socks are bright, they don't quite qualify as neon/Day-Glo/Hi-Viz, or any of the other industrial names associated with safety and visibility.  It's good to get a little peppy (I said peppy, not preppy) with the clothing now and then, but I must respond with an answer that will twist the stomachs of the holier-than-thou.  These colors are meant to draw attention to themselves for increased visibility.  I see this color very often in my daily life as well, and the most common uses span every strata on the "cares about what they wear" index.  Stay with me on this one... I'll come back...

-Police officers and road crews wear them for obvious reasons... SAFETY.  Anything that gains someone an additional second or two to avoid being plowed into while managing our infrastructure is fine with me.  This is an appropriate industrial application.  The yellowish/green version has been common in Europe for a while, and has only recently replaced the high-visibility orange once favored industrially in America.  Stay with me here...

-My neighbor (a technology entrepreneur) wears this color while bicycling to his swank office everyday.  Again, he is interested in arriving to work in a state of not having been killed.

Now, on to the meat of it.  I ended up wearing said color yesterday after the wind and pouring rain worked my wax-cloth jacket beyond capacity.  Actually, only the hood of my jacket was the hue in question.

---Wax-cloth jacket and LL Bean Jones Cap... good for light rain---

When a little drizzle with some wind is the forecast, the wax-cloth can suit you well.  When the wind picks up enough to destroy most umbrellas, if you are doing more than just running from car to building, a heavier jacket is needed.  The off-shore and coastal sailing jackets come out and that is when you start to see neon.  You can often see men with nice shirts and ties dashing through the financial district with their neon yellow hoods over their heads and suits, having given up on their long Brooks Brothers raincoats.

The hoods are neon because when you fall in the water, only your hood and cuffs are visible.  On the deck of a boat, the neon hood lets you quickly see where all of the vulnerable craniums are.

When the weather get REALLY ugly, all style bets are off.  The tall soft-fleece collar feels nice around the ears, the jacket is warm, the fleece-lined pockets are deep, and the wearer is guaranteed to not get one drop of wind-driven rain on his clothing underneath.  Is it stylish? Not really.  Am I asking questions and then answering them myself?  Yes.  Yes I am.  

--Rigging Coat--

If you are the pretentious type who wants to advertise to everyone that you have experience with boats, you can rest assured that your branding message will be driven home because of your offshore jacket (the same way people do with their ski jackets).  So there you have it... either someone is wearing the neon hood to draw attention to themselves about their boating skills or they want to stay dry and they don't care how odd they may look in it. Two opposite approaches under the same ugly neon hood, and you'll have to decide into which category they fall.

Also, if you enjoy genuine blogs that capture the visceral joy of sailing, you'll love Earwigoagin.

What is Really Worn: More Preparatory School Myths

As Massachusetts is a hotbed of excellent schools, I thought I would continue my series of reality-based blogging.  I excluded the co-ed schools, because the fetishistic mythology in the blogosphere seems to wax delusional about boys-only academies in particular.  Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren imagery is happily absorbed and regurgitated as factual in the same way the Barbour catalog scenery is assumed to be real and on-going if one just knew the right person and could just get the right invitation to join.  Again, it's mostly nonsense.  Private schools very often make horrible decisions like everyone else.


Criteria for my research:

1. Had to be a private boys-only school

2. Had to have a daily jacket and tie requirement

3. Had to be in Massachusetts

...just in case anybody thought that this kind of stuff is real.

What is overwhelmingly the most popular style of shoe for young lads at the best Massachusetts boys-only schools?

I'm not joking. Boat shoes are a distant second, but suede bucks, loafers, or more English style lace-up shoes are rare.  I'm not saying that this is bad either, I'm pointing it out to dispel some of the  misunderstandings.  I was recently told via email that I was wrong because the information I was conveying was not corroborated by 1980's "preppy" movies and did not have specific mention in The Official Preppy Handbook, an eye-rolling chuckle that is now decades old but still referenced piously as manifesto  by young perverts.  I own a copy of several birding handbooks, but I don't dress like the birds in the descriptions... same for my mushroom handbook.

Winter Firewood Wear and Warm Drafts

Just in time for the warmish weather snap, the firewood arrived (the above photos are not mine). For the house in the city, I can get through just about half of a cord... maybe 3/4 of a cord.  Between travel and a reconfigured heating circulator, burning through a full cord in one winter is almost impossible for me.  Swinging a new Estwing one-piece into the nicely seasoned hardwood gives the shoulders and hands a familiar sensation... a youth and young adulthood spent swinging an axe regularly.  Getting to know the season of each round rested on the splitting stump, practicing the angles, the accuracy, the solitude and the strange intimacy that comes from repetition and focus. Start the task with a jacket, shift into sweater, then rolled sleeves, and occasionally into a tee shirt in the snow.  The number of garments removed correlate directly to the length of time splitting.  My father used to say "come back in when you've worked yourself down to your shirt."  I would put the axe and the maul into the bench-vise and sharpen the edges with the hand-stone, wiping them with a slightly oiled rag.

These days, after the wood is delivered to the city, several neighbors come by to take their share of the stack, and though they all pitch in to the order, cherry-picking is not allowed.  We all haul the wood into each other's houses, sometimes hoisted by gantline to top floors, sometimes stacking it into basements, but always ending with a neighborly glass together.

My 1/2 cord stacked in the courtyard (above) with a sweatshirt over cuff-links (below). 

Every winter, I buy my wood from a professional woodsman in-state.  He wears old running shoes, a Boston College Eagles Footlball sweatshirt, and regular jeans.  He's young, and makes his living cutting trees, milling them into planks or cutting them into rounds, and even splitting them.  He doesn't wear silly $80 flannel shirts, and he sure as hell does not wear $350 boots.  He recently had to hire two other guys because his hard work has been paying off.  I imagine he has no use for the trendy Urban Lumberjerk.  

----

Later that evening, an annual black-tie party in the city with some showy socks on my feet.

Slightly obnoxious

In New England winters, one stands or sits in front of the heating vents in the drafty old city houses, and lets the warm air get very familiar with your lowers.  C'mon... it works.  

In Northeastern winters, a bundle of four or five split hardwood log segments is an acceptable gift to bring to a party, if you are tired of bringing wine... just make sure that your host has a method for burning the logs.

-----

Wet socks, gloves, hats, and kitchen towels steam and then stiffen at the fireside, a fireside made possible by genuine honest-to-goodness woodsmen who don't own or wear foolish designer outdoorsman outfits.  

Dumb Trends that Endure, and How Southern Women Can Save Us

Fashion is for people with no style, it is often said.  On the near-empty subway home from a very pleasant dinner of sushi and martinis, I sat next to an abandoned copy of GQ (January 2012 issue), and started spinning through it.  To my schadenfreudian pleasure, I saw that it was still borderline useless, designed by man-boys for the specific consumption by other man-children. 

Look very closely at the images below.  If you have a pulse and are awake while viewing these pictures, you will see that the trend clobbers your style sense with its ugly style agenda.

There is nothing wrong with socklessness in moderation, but the high-water/pegged cuff-with-dress shoes trend is just that: a trend.  And it's dumb. Very dumb.  It's for children and not for men.  It was almost charming when young Londoners did it in the 60's, and it was almost funny when Pee-Wee Herman did it in the 80's, but today it still looks dumb.  I try to avoid saying that this or that is right or wrong, but many trends can generally be dismissed out of hand as suspect at best, and subversive at worst.

Not that this should come as a surprise within the pages of "men's" magazines... especially when they are publications that encourage men to undertake grotesque body-building (unrelated to athleticism, by the way), practice sporadic abstinence with shaving, and to pain endlessly to achieve a pseudo bed-head hair style.  I generally tend to be laissez faire when it comes to style, preferring that people do and wear what they like if it is no harm to me, but when it becomes wedged down one's throat, my hackles get crackled. 

Consider this "fashion advice" from their long-running column:

Since a bow tie conceals the collar points, I find this advice especially moronic. Below, I have a spread collar with a bow tie... what's the problem?

  

 
"YWP, If you don't always like GQ, don't read it."  An appropriate suggestion since I just said "laissez faire" a few lines ago, but it goes deeper than that.  It is clear that there is a resurgence in style-hungry young men, and like you, I quietly bristle (as unsanctimoniously as possible) at that to which these eyes turn.  Should they be looking to blogs?  Maybe as a last resort.  Magazines? No.  They should have been guided by an older generation of fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, teachers, and even public figures.  Further, they should be guided (by insistence) by mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and wives.

Southern women are the best for this... they lay it out plainly about what their boys and men should wear, how they should act, etc., and they stubbornly adhere to their expectations in a way that is always refreshing and appropriate.  I always love spending time in the Mid-Atlantic and South for this reason.  They insist that men dress and behave in a certain way, and it pays off.  As a Yankee (who married a Yankee) who travels several times per month, I assure you that the contrast is vivid.  That is not to say that there are not appropriately strong-willed and exceedingly hospitable women elsewhere who refuse to abdicate to lower standards.  In New England there are many, and I imagine that it comes from family, school, friends, or any combination of those, or even from an innate sense of self-assuredness and certainty of how they choose to interact with the world (a nod to the Fowler sisters, M.F and K.F.).

In Boston, men will pretend to sleep or read on the subways and buses to avoid giving their seats to the elderly, the injured, or even very pregnant women.  When the offense becomes too glaring, it will normally be the smartly dressed gal with a sweet southern lilt (student or transplant) who will be the first to insist that "At least one of you able-bodied men will SURELY give you seat to this woman."

My close friend with three girls says that if he had three sons, he could only teach three boys how to behave... but with three daughters he can teach the whole town... and he lives in Maine.  Sound philosophy.

2012: Black Tie, Robbery, and Opera Pumps

A Happy New Year to all.  I was honored to receive your well-wishes and blessings, and I want the same for all of you.  Ringing in the new year is always a fun party, regardless of what is happening.  Even if you are hosting nobody and attending nothing, there is no point in not sprucing up one's clothing assembly a bit.  I never, NEVER buy into the over-priced blow-outs at restaurants, etc., and generally opt for the black-tie parties.  Some ill-timed remodeling required a dinner party elsewhere, and while the entertainment had some trouble staying sober enough to hit the right harmonies, the band was still tight.  I was happy to wear the Dr. Frankenshirt creation I had whipped together earlier in the year:

I like that the pattern is visible through the bib.  I also tend to wear shirt studs with a peak-lapel dinner jacket, and not with the American notched style.  I like the casual easiness of toned-down evening wear.  Black tie should be cooled off and approachable, and not the revved-up once-in-ten-years burden that it has become.  

I called Giuseppe, and asked where he got his cummerbund.  "Keezer's" he said, so I picked up a new black one... for $7.  If you live in or near Boston, you really should go in there to experience it... I picked up several nice silk ties for under $15.  It's a unique and great experience, and you feel like you're looting a formal shop in post-apocalyptic Russia.  The tie in the photo above is 100% silk, square-ended, and delightfully unlined, making it easy to tie and easier to wear, and they asked $9 for it new.

A pair of Henry Maxwell opera pumps* (refitted by John Lobb... not a collaboration) held well and kept me vertical on the wooden floor of the dance hall off of the main dining room.  Don't listen to the purists... these are fine shoes for black tie.  Come to think of it, don't listen to the purists on anything.

By the time Mrs. and I took the floor, "Fly Me To The Moon" was being belted out by an over-scotched crooner, and an equally gin-soaked bassist, trying their hardest to hit the right notes, which they mostly did.  At any party, don't be too cool for the little plastic hats either... wear them.

I'm very often confused for someone who cares deeply about wine... while I enjoy it, I'm not precious at all about it, so please stop insisting that I get a new wine glass for every different bottle served with the various courses. Besides, I enjoy making the uppity climbers scoff by rinsing out my glass with drinking water before switching from red to white, gulping down the pinot-rinse before the white is poured.  Great-Uncle Max used to tell barmen who offered him a new glass for each drink (usually Scotch) "No, I'll keep this one... I'm just now getting to know the ice."

Purple/blue socks...  the left one now smells of either XO or VSOP.

An odd little chair stuffed into the back corner of the dressing room... likely donated.  I'd like to think that someone absconded with it during their college years and finally dumped it off decades later, as I did with many of my college chairs.

As the sun rose over Boston on the first day of 2012, I was the first one up... the first one in the entire city, it seemed.  A cool (not cold) cloudless day greeted us, and we made our way back home for the usual New Years Day coffee (hangover's brunch) with friends and neighbors: a chance to gather together with strong coffee or tea, a solid breakfast, and an opportunity to retell the stories from the night before.  I generally keep my wits about me on New Years Eve, because a very young boy will wake me at 6am regardless of the quantities from the night before.

A new striped bow tie also from Keezer's. $12.

Elegant and fun black tie NYE parties don't have to be expensive at all... in fact, the expensive ones nearly always suck.  Horribly.  My favorite NYE is still the evening I spent with Mrs. (before we were married) at a burger joint in Boston after we got tired of the party we had waded through for several hours.  

A close friend in Seattle sent me this story:

An elegantly dressed man showed up in a Fairfax Denny's early New Year's Day, but he wasn't just there for the pancakes. Police say the suspect, wearing either a gray suit or tuxedo, held up the restaurant manager at gun point, and escaped with a wad of cash. The incident happened at the Denny's location at 10473 Fairfax Boulevard, at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday.  According to police, the suspect approached the 25-year-old restaurant manager holding a handgun.  The manager opened up the safe and handed over an undisclosed amount of money.  Nobody was injured. Police said the suspect is a 6'1" tall white male, approximately 50 years old, possibly wearing a gray wig.  Police said his handgun is black. Anyone with information on the crime has been asked to contact City of Fairfax Police at (703) 385-7924.

Strange that the gun was black, because I've always thought that a chrome Walther PPK goes best with black tie.

Happy 2012.

*Some call them court shoes.  My "court shoes" are white, have non-marking soles, and are festering in a Back Bay locker.