WTH Style - Angling for the Neo-Hippie Vote

If I was running for office I'd wear something like this to get the indie rock festival crowd vote. With a color scheme like this, who needs psychedelics?

Let's face it, the khaki sack is a pretty drab garment. But with a little creativity something funky this way comes.

The shirt is a Mercer, and if I had it to do again I think I'd have had this (and its yellow-blue brother) made as a buttondown.

The tie is a thrifted jobber from the "Rugby" line from Ralph of Long Island. The colors are nice and it is completely unlined, which is unusual and makes it hang funny.

Having gone thus far with colors I didn't think a blast of orange and purple from the breast pocket could possibly hurt. What the hell.

An extra fillip of color on the watch strap, and then things calm down at the feet.

The Great Loafer Hunt (continued)

Just got these Johnston & Murphy Aristocrats from eBay, and they fit.

Hooray for that.

They need new soles and the heels are getting close to done. I think I will try my local cobbler rather than going the NuShoe route, partly because I am curious about the indigenous guy, and I think he will be cheaper, and partly because I know a girl in that town and I could just accidentally drop in and say hello.

These have a nicely banged-up look to them. I have no idea how to guess their age, but I'm sure some shoe nut out there can tell from the markings on the heel.

What do you suppose "Sulvaprene" is? Sounds like an ointment for genital warts or something equally foul.

"Lifelong," no less. A gift that keeps on giving?

Funny thing - a few years ago I would have eaten a mud pie on national television rather than wear loafers. Now I devote considerable time, energy and resources to the quest for the right ones. Damn you, clothing forums.

I Have Seen Flavor Flav, and We Are Doomed

Just to compound the dreadfulness, Flavor Flav's evening costume has notched lapels.

Last night I watched something called "Flavor of Love" on the VH1 channel, in the company of some of the younger residents at the facility where I earn the weekly check.

Mr. Flav, a rapper of modest accomplishment, wears outlandish clothes, crowns, viking helmets, and large clocks around his neck. In the "reality" program, he is interviewing, sort of, three silly young women all vying for the unenviable position of being Mr. Flav's paramour.

Mr. Flav, whose memory appears faulty, possibly for the same reason his eyes appear bloodshot, has problems remembering the girls' names, so he makes up monikers for them that are easy to recall. One of them is known as "Thing 2," which assumes there was an original Thing.

Regular readers of this blog know that I take a peculiar delight in watching bad movies. Kitschy pop culture is a lot of fun.

"Flavor of Love" is just wretched stuff. There is nothing funny, witty, or clever about it.

Jazz writer Stanley Crouch has something to say about the Flavor Flavs of this world, in an interview with All About Jazz:

AAJ: When you condemn gangsta rap, aren't you fighting city hall? This isn't a subculture any longer. It is the predominate cultural influence.

SC: It is contemporary minstrelsy. You have to remember that minstrelsy was once very big. Minstrelsy was extremely popular when it came out. People didn't imitate the minstrels off stage like they do now, but that was definitely a big industry and created all these products that had all these grinning “coon” figures.

All of that was part of the minstrelsy that dominated American life in terms of its popular culture. That's what we're in the middle of now and it has to be recognized for what it is.

In 1990 I did my student teaching in a high school in Kingston, N.Y. One of my kids wore a large clock around his neck. Oddly enough, he was always late.

This young man had little interest in English, very poor social skills, and a burgeoning drug problem. I didn't understand him at first but now, years later, I suspect he was imitating his hero.

The Memorial Day routine

Fact: Cousin Charlie and family like to come to the summer camp on these major holidays, and while it's all very jolly hanging around with little children...

Besides, I get the place to myself most of the year, so it's no skin off my nose to skedaddle and let the folks have their time in peace.

It is my extreme good fortune that the other side of the family has a cabin in the Catskills, an hour and a quarter's drive from here. We don't share this with anybody, and it even has plumbing and electricity.

Arriving Sunday morning at about 10:30 a.m., I was confronted with the dilemma - do I sweep mouse turds and deceased faux ladybugs, or cut the knee-high grass?

(The ambitious and go-getting among you are thinking, "Aren't you going to do both?" Ha.)

I went with the grass.

Then I read the end of a pretty good mystery - The Skeleton Man, by Jim Kelly, and started a Weenie novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

("What the hell is a Weenie novel?This blog is going downhill fast.")

And then I went fishing, in my silly hat, shirt with the epaulets (in case of field promotion) and copious amounts of sunscreen.

The Esopus Creek is a medium-sized trout stream until it gets to Allaben, N.Y., where the discharge from what is known as The Portal, bringing water from the distant Schoharie Reservoir, turns it into a major example of muscle fishing (also suitable for kayaks and fat people in inner tubes). I like the upstream section because it's lightly fished and there's an excellent napping spot.

I cleaned out my chest pack and pared down the selection to the flies on the fold-down thing plus two small boxes. If I can't catch fish with what I've got, plus guile and experience, then I stink.

A slow day, in all. The sun beats down on the stretch I was on, which is angled almost exactly east-west, so nothing really started to move until about 7:30 p.m.

Which was fine, as I had a sandwich, cold seltzer, and the Weenie novel available for the napping portion of the fishing day.

Five trout total, only one of any consequence - a brown of perhaps 15 inches, who slurped in a swamped Light Cahill dry from the downstream part of the pool in the photo. I took the shot from that angle to show how close the stream is to the road, for no particular reason.

Above: The usual exercises in narcissism, shot by my trusty assistant Ralphus. Trad grass-cutting clothes: devolved Eddie Bauer chinos tucked into socks to deter ticks; Filson boots; Lands end buttondown short-sleeve; crumpled Orvis Stetson.

Iowa Smith and the Temple of Trout: Indy fedora from the Village Hat Shop and Filson shirt.


Below: This fold-out thing on my chest pack is handy but tends to get clogged up with flies. I spent the better part of forty minutes clearing it out and setting it up with wets. The hackles on dries get crushed when it's zipped up.

A stonefly casing from the upper Esopus. These big clumsy bugs make their unsteady way to the shore at night. Trout love 'em. When the casings are on the rocks it's good news for us.

The fly below hatched and courteously flew right into my hand. I have no idea what it is; my taxonomic skills are along the lines of "the little brown one, the big green one." A Light Cahill seemed the closest fit in color, and hey - it worked.

Pool on upper Esopus. Water is very clear; the angler must keep a low profile. Luckily it's a corner of the road; louts do not scramble down to throw corn and garlic cheese at the fish because there is nowhere to park, and the first rule of lout fishing is "Do Not Get More Than 50 Feet From the Car."

Bird crap on rock. The creature who did this must have been pretty big. Or pretty stopped up. I think I might use this photo to augment the movie reviews - a film so bad it doesn't even deserve a coil could get the Birdshit Award.

Cold & Murky WTH Style

I'm spending my (late) evenings and mornings at the family summer camp, conveniently located only a few miles from my apartment.

With no plumbing to speak of and the weather remaining unseasonably cold, it's not as much fun as mid-summer, when I can quite literally go jump in the lake.

The other day, in fact, it was chilly enough to chuck together items with the aim of staying warm and dry as I puttered around. I even went and chucked a line into the lake attired as such, which is:

A Lands End tweed from the days when they made sacks, just one of the many great finds from the Ask Andy Trad forum; an LL Bean long-sleeve pullover that I never wear, for no good reason; beater chinos from the days the K-Mart's house brand was flat-fronted, untreated, and about $12 per; and another Ask Andy find, a pair of hardly-worn Filson boots I could not ever afford new.

Small Streams

I am a small stream fan. I enjoy the difficulty of casting in close quarters and the stealthy creeping about so the trout don't see me coming a mile away.

My nearby favorite drains out of a warm-water lake, cools off in the forest, takes on additional cold water from innumerable springs, and drops about a thousand feet in a three mile run.

There are three ways to approach it - from the top and work down, from one of two spots in the middle accessible by hard-to-find paths, and from the bottom.

All three methods represent an indisputable pain in the fundament.

Once embarked on a course of action, it is difficult to retreat. Especially moving upstream, as clambering up is, on balance, easier than clambering down.

The payoffs are a tremendous workout; solitude; and the chance to catch crazy little wild brook trout.

I typically use either a seven-foot bamboo rod or a six-foot graphite, both for five weight lines. Once in a while I will trot out a magic wand, a six-footer for a number two line, but I prefer the heavier line because it rolls better, if that's what the situation calls for, and is much more useful for fishing nymphs, droppers, and with weight.

"Hold on a minute," you say, looking at the photos of the tiny creek. "Weighted flies in this dinky water?"

You bet. A lunker in this brook is a 10-inch fish, and they didn't achieve elder status by rushing madly to the surface to attack whatever gaudy dry fly happens to float by, like their younger contemporaries.

No, they tend to hang out in the plunge pools, which get surprisingly deep, and generally bide their time until something attractive floats by, or drifts along the bottom.

So I use an attractor-dropper rig, albeit with a short length of tippet material between flies - say, a foot and a half, tops.

Sometimes, though, this strategy seems too fussy, and I switch to the strategic prospecting with a single dry fly, usually big, bushy, colorful, or some combo thereof. It's fun planning the cast, because the fly is going to a very specific spot and one wrong move means either spooking the fish or getting hung up on the back cast (assuming there is room for one at all).

Might strike some of you as a lot of trouble for itty-bitty trout that I never keep (most of them would have a hard time dominating a saltine cracker), but I love it.

Above: The brook, looking much wider than it is. Below: A typical finny denizen, and the absurd attractor fly "Madame X". By the way, if you are looking for a good source of flies and tend to buy in bulk, go no further than Wally Allen in Boulder, Colo. at www.ligasflies.com.

I've been a customer for eight years. Great selection, great prices and fast shipping.

Pensive WTH Style

Why "pensive," you ask?

Because it's a better word than "lachrymose," "lugubrious," or "angst-ridden" for the situation.

Which is, in a nutshell, this:

I got sick. I thought it was last year's tick thing. There is no evidence of that, but to be on the safe side the doc gave me a course of antibiotics, which make me sick as a particularly mangy-looking dog.

One side effect of the medication is a roiled tummy. And where there is a roiled tummy there are frequent trips to that little building in the middle distance in the first photo.

I could be doing this in my apartment but it's much quieter and nicer up here at the summer camp.

Which has no plumbing to speak of.

Just to pile on the joy, I went on a Graham Greene kick, grabbing a stack from the library. (A Burnt-Out Case, The Human Factor, The Honorary Consul.) I haven't read these books in years, and while they are excellent and enjoyable they are not, perhaps, the best tonic for a man whose insides are churning around. As I read about Senor So-and-so's struggles with Faith or inability to love his fellow human beings I am reminded of the insides doing the fandango, and of the fact I haven't had a date since the Super Bowl.

So until this thing wears off I am switching to P.G. Wodehouse.

Jacket is a McGregor; madras shirt from J. Press; Lands End Super-Ultimate-Mega Chinos; Sebago loafers and SmartWool socks, as it was a bit chilly that day.