Sick

I have not forgotten nor neglected to post. My insides are not cooperating. I am over the worst and hope to be with you shortly.

Coming this week...

This is very lazy, I know, but the traffic numbers are way up and I want to keep the ball rolling.

I really, really want to get a check from Google, even if it's for $4.32.

On the agenda:

What to wear while reading Graham Greene; Gas prices and the stupid American driver; British cop shows.

Woof!

The Cinema - Helmet-Haired Hero Fails to Foil Phantasm Fiends

The Tall Man glaring at Reggie, who insists on wearing a pre-tied bow.

Phantasm (1977) begins bootaciously, with bared bobbing boobs and grunting, gasping graveyard gropes.

Then the demonic dame stabs the prone putz, for no apparent reason, and we cut abruptly to somebody's funeral, where Jody, who has authentic late 70s helmet hair, is talking with Reggie, who doesn't.

Usually I like a film that makes no sense, but this turkey acts like it does, and this is confusing. Even CACA has rules.

So the upshot is this: The Tall Man (played by the immortal Angus Scrimm) runs a funeral home which is a front for a supernatural outfit that is taking the recently deceased, turning them into little malevolent dwarves in capes, and shipping them through a portal to be slaves in a world with eternal cold and crushing gravity.

Yes, the doomed are heading off into the America of President Barack Obama.

We have: Car chases; six breasts; yellow blood; flying orb thing that drills through some guy's head; absolutely no story to interfere with the plot; terrific hair continuity problems; relentlessly horrible theme music that is the same as "Tubular Bells" from The Exorcist except the phrase goes up, not down.

This gets a "Ffffffft" from Fast-Forward Freddy, and a lone coil from me.

WTH Style

Our old pal and frequent antagonist Russell Street, always one to jump at a chance to wax theoretical about clothing style, has posted on FNB regarding a rather offhand remark from the "Summer Style" post on this blog.

And hey, I'm flattered. Mr. Street (a man of many aliases) strikes me as rather kooky...

But kooky compared to what on the Weird World of the Web?

So, the offhand remark was about socks. "What the hell" as opposed to "Go to hell," specifically.

The GTH look, to me, is typified by loud pants. The four-color model. The plaids. The pants with members of the animal kingdom embroidered upon them.

If I may borrow from an old photo essay, here is my (fictional) cousin Rufus, here decked out in a parody of the GTH style:

Between the obnoxious tie, the pants, and the fact that "Rufus" is a cocktail-swilling buffoon, this is caricature. But lose the tie, the cocktail, and the addled expression, and you'd have a fairly standard GTH presentation, with the trousers bellowing for attention next to the otherwise conventional items.

But here's a stab at "What the hell?"

Same pants, but with boat shoes, ribbon belt, an oxford cloth shirt as it is a little chilly on this wet spring morning, and a shapeless silk jacket that's more of a sweater with lapels. It still looks too studied, I think, but this in the milder direction.

I can see myself thinking, "Aw, what the hell, I'll get some mileage out of these comfortable but somewhat garish plaid pants that seemed like such a good idea when I bought them."

Perhaps the difference between WTH and GTH will come down to this: WTH is more about one's comfort and quiet, private amusement. GTH is exactly what the name says it is.

As I am currently suffering from the antibiotic treatment for what may or may not have been a recurrence of last year's tick-borne illness, and as the extremely spacy state of mind the treatment produces resulted in last year's "My Screwball Cousins" (widely held to be the only worthwhile Coiled Pleasures post ever - and has somehow disappeared from this site - this link goes to the Lakeville Journal), I will try to concoct some examples of WTH style in the next couple of days. But will thinking too hard defeat the purpose?


Postscript:

OK, let's suppose somebody called and said, "Hey, come on over for a cookout, as you are." Not likely on a cloudy Thursday in early May, but we're all used to a certain amount of "let's pretend."

Cotton plaid jacket, pink ocbd, slightly high water chinos, Quoddys with no socks. The WTH element here? The belt with the trout on it.

And the truck with no brakes and the expired registration, of course.

FRIDAY

It actually was a dark and stormy night. Cold and wet this morning, and there are certain errands I absolutely cannot avoid.

The screwy element here is the belt. It's too long, and the loose end flops around a bit. I don't mind, and only if someone's staring at my midsection will it be noticed.





Let's end this unusually fervid exercise in narcissism with a few thoughts from G. Bruce Boyer:

There is no such thing as being "accidentally" well-dressed. Nonchalance is a studied pose, and those men who carry it off have not gotten dressed in the dark...[It] is often seen when some aspect of the outfit plays against the grain of the basic pattern or genre - so long as the difference is minor...Nonchalance is a light tug on the sleeve, not a violent shake by the lapels.

Catskills 2008 - First Trip

High-sticking an attractor-dropper combo. Should have been crouching but my back was sore.

This past weekend I made my first foray of the year to my home waters - the Esopus Creek in Ulster County, N.Y. (and its tributaries).

Conditions were excellent. So good, in fact, that I wonder if we're in for a lot of high and dry-ness later on.

The Esopus is big water. And unlike a lot of Catskill rivers, it is not easy to fish the dry fly here. Too fast, too deep, not enough defined riffle-pool-riffle setups.

Lots of pocket water, though, and a great place for the high-sticking wet fly or nymph man.

The spot where I began, however, has a stretch along the southern bank that is relatively flat and placid - and is shaded by mid-morning. A perfect place, in fact, to prospect with a dry fly, either roll-casting from the bank or fishing straight ahead from the stream.

I am a fan of the larger fly. Dinky flies don't interest me, probably because I can't see them.

So I tied on my favorite "Hey, Get a Load of Me!" pattern - a Royal caddis, size 14 - and started flicking it here and there.

Sure enough, a nice rainbow rose up and grabbed it on the fourth or fifth cast. Nothing spectacular, a 12 or 13-inch wild rainbow.

But the Esopus has something like 60,000 of them at any given time in an 11-mile stretch from the Portal in Allaben to the Ashokan reservoir.

That's a lot of fish.

That ended the actual fish-catching portion of the day, however.

Be sure to stand out where the fish can see you, and splash around a lot

I did watch a fellow on the opposite bank put on a clinic on How Not To Fish. Here's the gist of it:

• Start on the wrong side of the river for a right-hander, and the side that will be in the sun until, well, sundown.
• Stand on every prominent boulder and false cast a lot. A teenage girl might mistake you for Brad Pitt.
• Splash your way downstream. That way the trout not scared off by the sight of you waving your rod around from the prominent boulders will run away lest you step on them.
• Be sure at all times to have at least twice as much line in your hands or floating around your legs as you have in the air. This will amuse the other fishermen, even if they aren't doing so hot themselves.

I also spent a little time on some semi-private water. I belong to a loose confederation of fly rodders who pony up each year to stock a section of an Esopus tributary with brown trout. Cooperative landowners allow access for fly fishing only.

I am always curious to see if there are any holdovers. Last year I caught an extremely long, skinny and hungry specimen on a miserable day in April. He gave me a really nasty look, too. "You mamma-tamma - my first square meal in months, and it's a fake!"

No browns this time, but I did get a couple of the ubiquitous wild rainbows - little guys on their first time around the track.

As is my usual practice, I released everybody, hoping the combination of sore jaws and long memories makes for good outings in the future.


Notes:

Fishing style - The Well-Dressed Angler is wearing cotton/wool blend Viyella shirts this early season. Here is a Lands End model bought secondhand, which blends nicely with the puke-green waders from Cabelas. Polarized clip-ons from Cocoons allow the WDA to use his bifocals, without which he can no longer tie on a fly.

The Summer Style

So I have retrieved all my summer weight jackets and suits from the mothballs. I have a lot more of them than I remembered.

I have five poplin suits and two seersuckers; about a dozen cotton sport coats, many in highly obnoxious checked patterns; a couple of lined linen or linen/wool/silk blends, and a completely unstructured silk jacket that is really nice for the chilly evenings in May and early June, and again come September.

I also have amassed a pretty decent collection of spectator shoes. Last year I was complaining about weddings; this time around my inner fop is hoping somebody gets spliced just so I can trot these things out.

(I am pretty fearless when it comes to work attire; I routinely outdress everybody. But even I would have to draw the line at showing up in a seersucker and spectators.)

I also kept a few partially lined, lightweight tweeds handy. It was 75 today, but will be 42 tonight.

I put away a bunch of shirts for the summer. I have far too many shirts anyway, and I want to give some of the sprightlier ones a good workout.

This year I think I will abandon the tie, for the most part, for July and August. There will always be circumstances that demand one, but for the routine day at work I think I will skip it.

(That's what I thought last year, too, but I relapsed.)

Solid linen ties in light colors are what I'm looking for in the thrifts now. I have several rather busy shirts and I don't want to attack the viewer.

I also spent an afternoon washing and ironing (hah) a big pile of poplin trousers. Poplin is a fabric that resists ironing and wrinkles almost immediately anyway, but I thought I'd at least get off on the good foot.

Dirty bucks, what-the-hell (as opposed to go-to-hell) socks, cotton belts, loafers...

It was a long winter.

The Great Trad Manifesto

Well, not really...

Read the Trad subforum at Ask Andy About Clothes for a week or so and you'll discover that the most public devotees of the style cannot agree on what it is.

The curious can read the occasional discussions on the other message boards devoted to men's clothing - Style Forum and Film Noir Buff - and become even more confused.

"Trad" - a clumsy term, short for "traditional" (whose tradition?) - is best defined, I think, by what it isn't:

• Darted jackets
• Any shirt collar other than buttondown, with occasional exceptions for forward point or club collars
• Pleated trousers
• Anything that looks like it was designed by someone with a last name ending with "-ini."
• Anything that appears to have been designed at all
  
• Anything that fits too well
• Anything flashy
  

Right.

Now immediately we can start to pick at this list. If we are going to make exceptions for some collars, why not all?

Is a guy wearing flat-front trousers, a white buttondown-collared shirt, a repp tie and a darted two-button blazer going to be zapped by a thunderbolt hurled by Chipp, the Trad god of Compliance?

Is a man in lime-green pants with embroidered, spouting whales on them really going to try to maintain he is a master of quiet understatement?

And my beloved chinos, baggy to the nth degree, can hardly be called elegant. One pair is so voluminous it's hard to think of them as pants - more of a mobile cotton force field.

So what is it then, this Trad? The British Ivy look, as ceaselessly promoted by FNB's Russell Street?

The look in the photos of "American Trad Men" in this thread on AAAC?

The efforts of the actual forumites, in this thread?

Or something entirely different?

More to the point -

Who cares?

Wear what you like and have fun.

So much for the manifesto.

Selah.