Month: May 2012

So Filson is offering their green Levi’s-designed trucker jacket for almost half off.  This is the jacket that I tried on in New York City – it looked pretty good, the wife was surprisingly pleased with it, but it has a critical flaw: no hand warmer pockets.  Instead, there are weird side-pouch things (you could wrap your arms around your chest and stick your hands in that way) and of course the double-zippered game bag in back for that rabbit you shot on the way to the bar or whatever…wait, what?

Here now a more in-depth breakdown of the jacket:

* It’s $150, down from $278.  You can see it here.  The thing is, I’m not convinced it’s the same thing as what I saw in New York, which is here.

* Not to be confused with this one, mind you.  Which has the not-inconsequential advantage of swapping the game bag pockets for, you know, normal pockets.  Although it’s possible those enormous circular pockets MIGHT take an iPad on the green ones…

* What is this jacket for?  Basically it’s meant for weather that’s not cold enough for the peacoat but too cold for the shell or one of the cotton jackets.  Think roughly 40-60 degrees with mild precipitation – which is to say, winter in the Bay Area.

* This would basically displace at least four jackets in current rotation: the Vandy soft-shell, the oilcloth engineer’s jacket, the leather Indy jacket and the suede (I KNOW STOP IT) trucker jacket.  

This would be a much easier call if I hadn’t just laid down $90 for 3 jackets in NYC (none of which is going to be much help in precipitation or temps below about 55 degrees).  As it is, my instinct is to hold off until about November or so and put it on the Christmas list if it looks like wearing…

It’s been fifteen years now.

Fifteen years since the last week at Vanderbilt, when despite my studying and false bravado I knew damn well I wasn’t going to make it this time.  After three years of barely pulling my ass out of the fire over and over, getting progressively more singed every time, I was going down for good. And I knew it.  I couldn’t admit it, even to myself in the darkest hours, because I didn’t have a clue what would happen next, but I knew the end was near. My inability to deal with Horrible, to cut her out of my life, had sunk what should have been a reasonably promising career in political science.  And her increasingly erratic behavior had made things worse and worse, to the point where I finally decided that I’d had enough. Granted, that point was only a couple hours after taking (and as it turns out failing) the second prelim exam, so the barn door was locked pretty much after the horse burned it down, but still…

I was bereft. My high school friends were long since scattered to the winds.  I didn’t have any college friends; the person from undergrad I was closest to was the one I was desperately trying to break up with.  Flunking out pretty much confused and alienated my family, who didn’t exactly have a track record of knowing and understanding me anyway.  And there I was, falling off the cliff.  So when a rope appeared, I grabbed it without really caring about who might be holding the other end. As it turned out, the other end was a small knot of an Internet community that would become the kernel of my rebuilt life.  I started over in a new town, with a new career, and a new girlfriend.  I suppose if you want to be technical about it, she was my as-yet-uncounted third (and final) collegiate girlfriend, because she overlapped my last days at grad school by – a week?  Maybe?

I say all this because just this past weekend she got married, some eleven and a half years after we figured out each of us was the wrong one for the other.  Fortunately, I was lucky enough to attend the wedding in the company of the right one – who I married seven years ago myself. Achievement unlocked. I also saw a bunch of people at this wedding who I haven’t seen in many years and some only sporadically then, so there was a lot of drinking and catching up and reminiscing and recriminating.  Which is what put my memory on this track to begin with.

See, everything I was and had been in April 1997 came to an end on the day I left Nashville in May. I couldn’t honestly claim Vanderbilt as my own for years after that, I had a huge black hole yawning open behind me, I had no idea who I was anymore – or who I could legitimately become.  So when I say that April 1997 felt like the end of everything, it’s because it really was. My year always seems keyed to the old patterns and rhythms of school anyway.  Fall equals new beginning, starting over (moving to DC in 1997, newly single in 2000, starting at Apple in 2004, changing jobs in 2007…) and spring is the end.  The end of the year, the early coming of summer heat, the cloud of allergy meds – and for fifteen years now, the annual echo of the closest thing I have to a near-death experience.

I remember walking around campus, lingering in the places I’d hurried through in months and years past, wondering if I’d ever see them again.  I made sure to update my Commodore Card to the new model, and made sure there was a little money left on it, just in case – and if the worst happened, there might still be utility in having an up-to-date college ID with my own name and picture on it.  A chance viewing of a snippet of a play on Headline News suddenly turned into stopping in Tower Record and buying the soundtrack to Les Miserables and playing “One Day More” on a loop.

And I flashed back to the premonition, turning uphill onto Hillsboro Road on the very first day I moved in, and suddenly being overcome with the sense that “I’m never going to find out what’s on the other side of that hill.”  Which, as it turns out, was absolutely correct.  Not that it made me feel any better to know that one of my psychic impulses had finally come true.  Instead, I lay in bed flipping around radio stations, playing follow-the-bouncing-ball with who had hired or fired Adam Dread this week and listening to Lightning 100 and Thunder 94 – the last time I would ever be so stuck into American terrestrial music radio. It was spring, as green and lush and lovely as I can ever remember Nashville being – the early-morning lawn by Central Library looked like you were nearing the turn at Augusta National – and my world was falling apart for the last time.

Ultimately, all I could do was retreat into my computer and the crazy Internet people on the other end. And yes, there were plenty of bumps and bruises along the way, but they all made it possible for me to regenerate and live to fight another day. Those people on the other end of the cable gave me friends, gave me chances, gave me something to keep my head above water during the long and agonizing process of becoming a new person.

They saved my life.

While in New York City, I finally had the chance to run into a branch of Uniqlo.  It’s easiest to think of as the Japanese version of the Gap – in fact, they specifically adopted the Gap’s operating strategy in 1997, selling only unisex casual clothing of their own manufacture.  They are apparently the largest clothing retailer in Japan by volume and profit alike, according to the Wikis, and their only US presence is in three stores in Manhattan.

I first heard of Uniqlo, predictably, through the writings of William Gibson.  The novelist/present-futurist is apparently a fan of theirs, and having been provoked heavily by the Bigend Trilogy in terms of my own fashion sense, I had to make a run. Not least because they had on offer a cotton peacoat that might just be the alternative to the heavy wool one that has since become my favorite winter outerwear (even though it rarely gets cold enough to wear it).

Unfortunately, the price was too high for me to justify taking the plunge on a garment that didn’t blow me away.  But I did buy three cotton jackets for $30 each.  One was a black blouson-type thing, with patch pockets at the chest and sides, which is that vaguely-BDU-ish sort of military look that you can’t really identify whether it’s a shirt or a jacket.  It’s also just a bit on the large side, so I deliberately washed it to see what would happen (we’ll find out as soon as it’s done drying over a chair in the garage).  But the other two items are both sport coats – simple cotton blazers, three-button, one in a light khaki and one in a dark blue.  And I’ve worn one every day this week.

They’re the last thing I would have thought of glomming onto. Not water-resistant in the least (quite the opposite), sufficiently wrinkly to be impractical for stuffing in a bag, but ideal for summer in the greater San Francisco area when you need to turn the chill of the fog for a bit but not swelter with the thing in the afternoons.  And they’re sized just about perfectly – far more so than the Saboteur Invincible I spent way too much on.  These two combined cost an order of magnitude less than the Saboteur.

I feel different with this thing on – today is the navy one, over a short-sleeve button-up patterned shirt – and I can’t put a finger on how.  Older?  Not really; nothing about cotton sportcoat suggests “old” necessarily.  Younger? Eh, even though the blazer-jeans look was my go-to throughout grad school, I’m not feeling fifteen years knocked off (of which more later). Mature?  Possibly – who can tell?  Keeping the Nerf gun in one pocket might undercut that, though.

The other useful fashion news from this trip is that the Blundstones that I thought I wanted are just a hair too snug up front, and would almost certainly screw up my toe again.  Meanwhile, the forest-green Levi’s/Filson collaborative trucker jacket looks really good – but for $278, I need something with regular side pockets.

I suspect there’s going to be a pretty aggressive cull of the jacket rack before long.  The leather is going into storage for lack of utility unless something changes, and I’d like to put paid to the “performance outerwear” as much as possible and instead try to dress like somebody who doesn’t want you to think they hike and bike and run on the weekends, because, hi, have you met me?

Nope.  Plain $30 cotton blazer might just be who I am nowadays.

Of which, as I said, more later.

That ship has sailed, son.  The Occupy movement couldn’t keep their collective eye on the ball and, in the grand tradition of the professional left, let a movement that should have been tremendously motivating to the average working stiff in America get hijacked by the usual slaw of bong-watered granola-shavers and Free Mumia dipshits and International ANSWER Chomsky sophomores and Black Bloc gutterpunks.  As soon as the Oakland branch became the national focus of the movement, the game was up, and rightly so.

Back to the drawing board, kids.  Need to start over, need to come up with a new brand and a tight focus and no getting distracted by the barnacles that have glommed onto every remotely-progressive response movement for thirty years.  Load up on khakis and polos and try for a telegenic and inclusive movement for once.

Sleep No More is a play.  Sort of.  It is staged in a “hotel” in New York City.  You go in, go through the rooms and floors, walk through the “set” and experience the “actors” as the events happen around you in a very stylized and abstract way.  You open doors, crawl through windows if you like, take candy from the jar…you’re inside the show.  The whole thing is derived from Shakespeare and Hitchcock in similar measure, and it positively drips with the atmosphere of urban fantasy taken out of time in its blend of the 30s and Victoriana and God knows what else.  So if you think you might be down for this, don’t read on.

 

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(tribute to the old listserv days)

 

Ready?  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin…

 

They led us into the “hotel”, gave us a playing card as we “checked in,” took all our coats and bags and things, and sent us up the stairs to the lounge.  It turns out they’re serious: you do NOT need your coat and you DEFINITELY won’t want to be carrying a bag.  In fact, the most critical things you can do to be ready are to wear your running shoes and put in contacts rather than wearing glasses.

The lounge looks like half a dozen speakeasy bars: dark wood, thick scarlet velvet curtains, absinthe punch.  Fog, or mist, or haze, or something drifts through the tables around the small stage (piano, bass, drums).  No musicians yet, just the compere with his oily British accent calling our card numbers.  Your number comes up, your group shuffles out, and a similarly unctuous Brit-accented lady lounge singer hands out…masks.  Think plague masks as designed by Jason Voorhes.  And your instructions are strict: no talking after this, until you leave the show.  Everyone goes into the elevator, which rises – and then one person is grabbed and put off the elevator.  It then descends and everyone else is allowed off…

…into a sanitarium.  Or something.  Beds, bathtubs, medical instruments, and then the door and the window lead outside into a maze of thorny trees, with a hut off in one corner…and then people appear.  There’s a nurse in the hut.  There’s another one attending to somebody in a bathtub, and you can’t even really tell if it’s male or female or what age. It looks cold and creepy and yet the temperature is starting to climb, and when you’re trying to sidle your way up to whatever the hell’s going on in the middle of that maze with fifty other people, you can tell it’s going to get uncomfortably hot before the night’s out.

Eventually you give up trying to make heads or tails of the sanitarium and just head downstairs…into an empty village.  There’s a tea shop, there’s a detective agency, there’s a candy store and you can actually nick the peppermints and butterscotch and licorice allsorts from the jars.  And then there’s a couple of people having a fight, or somebody crawling up the wall and suspending themselves against the ceiling, and then there’s an abandoned nightclub lounge that looks exactly like where you just came from, covered in dust and cobwebs, and all of a sudden there’s the witches’ scene from Macbeth reinterpreted as some kind of dubstep rave orgy strobelight nightmare, and before you can say “what the hell’s that?” everyone runs away.

On downstairs again, where there’s something – is that a hotel?  A dining room?  Does that let out into a backyard cemetery or is that a garden?  That statue isn’t moving, is it?  Is that another bathtub in the ballroom of that house?  Are those supposed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in there?

You get the idea.  It turns out to be surreal and hallucinatory and dreamlike and impossible to follow.  And by the time it was over, with Macbeth hanged at the coronation feast, you’re equal parts “what the hell was that?” and “They need to bring that to San Francisco so I can see it again.”  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen as “theater” and I’d totally go again if given a chance…