The Texture of Christmas--2014

Texture-Pattern-Shape-Color…tactile and visual attributes. It’s no secret that the fuzzier for me the better. Until now.

Restraint? Well I’m not gonna go overboard. But I do think in my old-er age I might be pulling back just a teeny bit from my Southern, country ass, GTH togged “look at me, look at me” cornpone sprezzatura. Who knows, maybe I’m unwittingly slipping into a phase of official mourning. Somber, black crepe hanging attire included. Queen Victoria did it after Albert died. And God knows she loved Albert better than Peter loved the Lord. That’s almost as much as I loved my mama. False alarm. I just realized that if you’ve unwittingly slipped into something, it’s kinda hard to then deem it official upon arrival. Hold me. I’m confused. Unofficially.

Case in point regarding my new, albeit just a teeny-tiny scooch over towards modulated fuzzy moderation…I took a pass on this orange corduroy Ralph jacket the other day. I’m only six weeks into orphanhood and it just seemed damn wrong on all levels to consider taking title to it. Plus I didn’t go to Clemson or Princeton or Tennessee or Florida or any of those other schools that claim orange as one of their school hues.

But forty years of mourning? I do think Victoria took it a bit too far. What with only wearing black and refusing to leave Balmoral for ages on end and using nothing but black bordered mourning stationery for the rest of her chubby little roly-poly life. Johnny Cash is the only fella who had the color black’s permission to singularly don it for decades on end. And he wasn’t mourning a damn thing.

Apropos of her forty years of black creped-ness, Vanity Fair reissued their original portrait of Queen Victoria in monochrome black with a mourning border when she finally joined Albert and Jesus in 1901.

Here’s the colorful original version from Vanity Fair—June 17 1897.

And another thing about Queen Victoria before we move on…What we don’t know for sure is whether or not she was getting some real bereavement comfort from her trusted ghillie John Brown. I sure hope so. And I’m not just talking about the therapeutic benefits of long walks and talks. We all know that they did a bunch of that. Lord knows I can talk. And walking still comes easy. I’m thinking I need me one of them constant bereavement companions for a while. Butcept a girl one. With benefits.

The texture of my 2014 Christmas has so far been rough and smooth. I’m alone but not lonely. My heart is still heavy—now magnified by this being the first Christmas without my mama—but I’m not wallowing in it. I drove home yesterday. In a MINI Cooper. John Cooper Works performance edition to be exact ("Performance Edition"MINI...ain't that a hoot?)...with my prostate seven inches off of I-95 for 7.5 hours. I need another car. And a smaller...

I’m typing this from my childhood cowboy bedroom and the monastic silence of being here alone isn’t depressing at all. LFG is in Florida, my brother is around the corner at his house and I’ve reconnected with a bunch of childhood friends who are here for the holidays. So I’m by myself in this once boisterous and noisy holiday house but I’m ok. I had a visceral, primal need to be here so here I am.

A tree? Of course. I’ll never have an artificial one but since I was solo this Christmas I didn’t need a big one of any type. So I nabbed a piccolo fir and just donned it with my favorite ornaments.

And thanks to Susie and Dougie for sending me presents. Otherwise the tree wouldn’t a been the only thing attenuated.

Back to texture and pattern...I had to put on real clothes the other day and make some business and personal rounds. And I coulda put on some GTH Christmas corduroy embroidered caca trousers and some retail red waistcoating like all the other holiday revellers. But I didn’t. Remember, I’m in mourning.

So it was a navy blazer and my Daddy Flusser semi-GTH Bronco Buster wool challis togs. Oh, and my Meermins which are holding up just fine in year-two by the damn way. Shut up. 

And I even got a mourning haircut. I figure another year and my follicular vacancies will be such that I’ll go back to cutting the remaindered sprigs myself.

My bereavement is evident in this Polo Chevy Chase selfie that I took while out and about. Time will bring back my smirky little pinch mouthed puckishness. But time has deemed six weeks not enough.

Oh, and by the way…don’t dress like this and visit a retail establishment lest you want them to think you work there. I don’t.

And I tried on a few things that I can’t buy. Including this bereavement brown vest. Buy it for me.

Maybe brown is my mourning color.

Kinda. Brownish green-essence with a green leather club chair. I mean really…how damned crepe laden can a fuzzy-ass flâneur like me become?

Brown. It’s a restrained color ain’t it? But who says the texture-pattern thang has to be? I vote no and you should too.

I’m gonna close this drivel load now. It’s off to the shower and off to lunch. Christmas just ain't Christmas this year. But it's ok.

Onward. Rough and Smooth.

80-g-2

Tadich Ethic—Part One

As the DC area decides this morning whether or not to delay or cancel the various events and happenings that will impact my LFG chauffeuring duties today, I’ve found a moment to finish a story—one that I began almost one year ago. While I’m pleased to pick up the ball on this blog story, I hope that things won’t be delayed or cancelled today. I’d really like to see my child.

I began a story last year about my very last minute speaking engagement in San Francisco and for some reason, it just fell aside. As I now gather enough fodder to reflect on last week’s slightly less impromptu but still last minute San Francisco reprieve, it’s easy to dovetail the year-old draft story herein. The year-old stuff and the Tadich Ethic meaning will appear tomorrow.

I think it was Longwing who commented or asked over at my tumblr about how could/would  I be at the Mirage in Las Vegas the first of last week…then San Francisco mid-week and back at the Las Vegas MGM last Friday. Well here’s the deal. I did a session last Tuesday at the Mirage. Another business unit within the same company asked me to do a session to close out their week-long meeting on Friday. The client company is so large that they essentially filled three different hotels in Las Vegas. It made no sense to return home Tuesday evening and return to Las Vegas on Thursday for my Friday MGM gig.

My Las Vegas loathing is well documented. There exists no place on earth I’ve experienced thus far that elicits in me the same level of revulsion. Las Vegas renders me repulsed to the point of physical and psychological discombobulation. Wayne Newton rather sums it up for me. And I rolled in there Monday before last amidst a wobbly recovery from a 36 hour tummy bug to boot. I decided that there was no way I could survive the Wednesday and Thursday downtime between talks by just hanging out in Las Vegas and I was in no mood to rent a car and do some kinda Hoover damn Dam sortie or similar. 

So I contacted clients in Los Angeles and the Bay Area and decided I’d decamp to one or the other, based on what client; first come-first served, responded. I’d simply create a business but mostly recreational reason to be in another city. And I was delighted that the first ping-back originated in Baghdad by the Bay. Feeling mildly knocked around after my full-on session in Las Vegas, I was still more than ready to knock around San Francisco.

And the Fairmont atop Nob Hill along with The Mark offered me rooms at a buck-fifty a night. So the Fairmont it would be. I don’t think I can describe the efficacy…the cleansing salve of San Francisco’s crisp-blue skied winter air as I walked out front of the Fairmont on Wednesday morning. My two days in San Francisco were bliss. Cable cars may be touristy but I rode ‘em with glee.

And I liked standing at the corner of  California street on Wednesday evening after dinner at the University Club…when things were quieter…and you could hear the hiss of the cables running just under the street's surface.

The sartorial rounds were brief. There isn’t much to see in San Francisco clothing wise, that a clotheshorse like me hasn’t or doesn’t see in other cities. I will make it a point to get over to Union Made the next time I’m there. Tasty, eclectic, high quality goods for a younger crowd perhaps. But their website alone is enticing enough for me to wanna have a look-see in situ. Alas, I did go to Cable Car Clothiers' new, smaller digs. Let me just say that unless there’s a dramatic reimagining of what CCC was…is…aspires to be—they won’t be—for much longer.

Certainly my bucket hat and wool challis bowtie purchase won’t keep ‘em afloat.

I held no hope that these framed Vanity Fair prints of Bret Harte and Rider Haggard, along with their personal letters, would remain available at Brick Row Booksellers in that building on Geary Street where art dealers and rare booksellers have long since been ensconced. I’m generally not so lucky but alas they were there and I decided to not pass on them again. Rare book dealers and antiquarian print purveyors are a quirky lot. And trust me—I know quirk when I’m amidst it…having learned to embrace my own idiosyncrasies. Or as one of my dinner mates from the University Club on Wednesday evening declared regarding the proclivities of his high end, persnickety clientele… “I’ve made peace with crazy.” Now don’t get me wrong. None of the dealers in the 49 Geary Street building are crazy—just a bit—and delightfully so—quirky. And quirky played to my favor in that for some juju-esque reason, both of the framed images cost me less than what one of them was quoted to me a year ago. And God knows I need some framed caricatures.

With a bit of unexpected extra time on Thursday I ventured over to North Beach and traipsed the mild underbelly of a part of San Francisco that gives me more reason to love the entire city. Unlike the frenetically loud, neonelectrified smarm of Las Vegas, San Francisco’s smarm is patinated. I just wish that I’d a been there when the El Matador was still serving hooch and jazz and hosting the smart set from all over the world when they rolled in to San Francisco. The thirty something year old Barnaby Conrad was told to “do something with the money” that came pouring in after his novel Matador took off…so “I opened a bar.” 

And boy did he “open a bar”. The El Matador hosted not only the smart set but also some pretty good jazz musicians during its heyday. It seems that North Beach was a jazz destination “…in 1963 the jazz scene moved on. North Beach, with its reputation as a louche entertainment enclave, emerged as the San Francisco jazz epicenter and reigned as such in the fifties, sixties and even into the seventies…”

Here with Conrad at the El Matador is Tyrone Power who starred in Blood and Sand…as a Matador. And I suppose that Power’s role in The Sun Also Rises gave these two imbibers a bit more conversational fodder.

Caen and Conrad. Good clean fun fronting the El Matador.

I tracked down the old El Matador location. It’s vacant and man-oh-man if the walls therein could talk. Wanna re-open it or something similar? “Maxminimus” Yep. That’s what we’ll call it. And I’ll open it—from the proceeds of my first novel.

Look at the abandoned El Matador and ponder what once rounded that corner… “Part saloon, part salon, Barnaby Conrad's El Matador was nestled in the heart of San Francisco's cabaret and nightlife district. There, within the space of a few blocks of North Beach's Barbary Coast, one could catch Johnny Mathis singing at Ann's 440 Club, cross the street to the Swiss American Hotel where Lenny Bruce once thought he was a bird and attempted to fly out of a second-story window, and walk a couple of blocks to the Hungry i to check out newcomers like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Barbra Streisand, and the Smothers Brothers. Still, despite the accumulation of dozens of bars, restaurants, and night spots, the area lacked "a truly chic and comfortable (club), a place where attractive and interesting people could congregate over a martini". Conrad's El Matador stylishly filled the void. On any given night, one might find Noel Coward, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, or Tyrone Power in the club, or hear Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Eva Gabor, George Shearing, or Andre Previn take over the piano.” 

What will be longed for in another fifty years? Large Escalades pulling up in front of some loud-ass club…Cristal drenched bling-blingers and an upskirt shot courtesy of an iPhone? Where are the El Matadors today?

Barnaby Conrad Jr. has lived one hell of a life and I’m gonna delve into it a bit more when his two memoirs arrive.

Here’s a little glimpse… “At nineteen Barnaby Conrad vaulted into a Mexican arena and waved his Brooks Brothers raincoat at an enraged bull. At twenty-one he escalated from code clerk to vice-consul in twenty-four hours and was sent to Spain where he became El Nino de California (The California Kid) of the bull fights. At twenty-five he was selling books on the subject.”

  And of course there’s Carol Doda and the Condor amidst City Lights book store and the Beats. I’ve yet to stand at the corner of Haight and Ashbury and haven’t made erudite my Hippie studies but is there truth that the Beats felt like their call to action was more worthy than the Hippies?

And was Doda’s topless-bottomlessness plaque worthy?

I can tell you unequivocally that my plein air solo dining before heading to the airport and back to the Las Vegas smarm was plaque worthy. Stay tuned for round two of my San Francisco sortie.

Onward. Having just learned that all is open for business in DC…now I’m gonna go fetch my young’un.

ADG II

Trad-Ivy Tuesday: Sir T’oad McThrottle’s Request

Let’s talk tweed…Keeper’s if you will. And flannel. Why not, it’s only gonna be just shy of a hundred degrees—again—here inside the Beltway today. And what about my extra good buddy T’oad’s request? It seems that Sir T’oad (The apostrophe is a one-off affectation that I throwed on this morning, thinking that I may weave some fictitious French or other Continental lineage into Sir T’oad’s journey to his current position as landed gentry. But then I thought better of it. He is devoid of pigment.) declares it too soon for tweed talk and has requested refrain from such.

And the McThrottle moniker comes from his rightful belief that any blogger who mentions flannel or tweed before the weather gets nippy deserves a flogging. Here’s his exact words from my tumblr… “Mentally, I've promised myself that until the weather cools, I'd throttle the first guy who posts about tweed, flannel, wool, etc. Consider yourself throttled.” Ok den.

And he’s correct. But I had to post the photo above. The lighting sucked but if you’d seen this thing in situ, you’d a take a photo too. The lushness of the navy blue flannel was stunning. Marky Mark Mark Rykken of Paul Stuart Custom made this rig for one of the minions at The Rake. You’ll see it in an upcoming issue.

It is too early to talk tweed but I’m gonna do it. I’m a warm weather guy but if I’ve gotta endure the rawness of winter, I’d like to do so swathed in the topographical and geometric fuzziness of texturated English fabrics. All of the cloths and many of the contrivances over at Bookster remind me of Edwardian English shooting parties and as I type this, the salad days print ads from Polo Ralph harken for me the same recollectionated juju.

For you South Carolinians who read this load, I define the Polo “salad days” somewhere within the range of 1975-1985…with Thousand Island dressing and two two-packs of Melba toast. South Carolina Diner style.

Ok, back to tweeds and such. The impracticalities of those shooting party outfits present a dilemma. Or as someone taking shots at me over at my tumbler said about the intent, utility or relevance of my clothes, declaring them as—and I paraphrase loosely—“outfits for parties and events to which you no longer get invited.” I reckon the reason that stung is because my snide commentator is right. I’m wearing Sponge Bob Square Pants pajama bottoms right now so what event am I currently ready for? People like me get all caught up in the possibilities of such outfits and then find that, and I paraphrase my not so anonymous shot taker again, we don’t get invited to … “butterfly collecting but only when the mosquitoes aren’t so bad” events where the costumery is mandatory.

But I still had to have one. The tweedy Shooting Party esque two-piece contrivances that always look so damned good on people who are doing things where such kit is appropriate have always intrigued me. But not enough to spend the dough necessary to commission one for my damn self. I don’t generally run with the Highland Wingshooting, Stalking, Moors slogging crowd.

That’s where Bookster comes in. I’ve yet to have them make a jacket for me but my fifth pair of Bookster trousers is in the works right now. Hopefully they’ll roll in with enough time left for me to wear them once this season. Linen flat front fish-tails.  Oh, and fish-tail split backs are tricky as hell. You better know your size because when you start fiddling with waist alterations, you’re gonna foul the fish. That is, if you can find a tailor willing to take on the task.

I’ve spent tons of dough on custom clothes but I rarely allow the Flusser boys to make odd trousers for me. Hertling and Bookster quality/caliber is just fine for me. Really. So amidst my longing for a Shooting Party-esque suit that I’ll never wear, I wondered if the Bookster Seafield piece goods would remotely match up with my already well-worn and beloved Flusser Seafield poacher pocketed chest pocket flapped jacket that always gets admirable reviews.

I requested a swatch and the match-up is fine. Just fine. But I didn’t get much of a chance to wear this rig last season because, just like my linens that I decided to order at the wrong time, the Bookster trousers rolled in a bit too late in the season.  And when you order the proper sized fish tail trousers, this is what they should look like.

And then…and then I began to think about the Vanity Fair shooting prints. Several prints capture the essence of  shooting party dress and Lord Savile of RuffordAbbey has probably the best display of shooting kit as any of the Vanity Fair victims. “Spy”…Sir Leslie Ward, had, by the time he drew Savile for Vanity Fair, devolved his caricaturing skills to nothing more than society portraiture. You’ll see the difference in Ward's earlier caricatures. Stay tuned.

Here’s further evidence that Ward’s Vanity Fair contrivance was nothing more than a portrait…certainly not caricature. The Vanity Fair image is almost identical to Savile's photograph. I’ve long since, thank goodness, given up my flirtation with a mustache but Savile’s is one for the record books.

And Rufford Abbey? Similar to many of the estates which thrived when the balance of land ownership and thus every other venue to power was held in the hands of few, Rufford Abbey is no longer.  Here's a few more Vanity Fair shooting subjects...

Sir R.W.Payne-Gallwey

Sir R.W.Payne-Gallwey…Letters to Young Shooters.

Payne-Gallweywas a fairly prolific author whose three volume Letters to Young Shooters and his Book of Duck Decoys are highly collectible today.

R.H.R Rimington Wilson.  Listed by The Field as number sixty-nine of the one hundred best shots in English history.

R.H.R Rimington Wilson…Driven Grouse.

The Earl De Grey. Frederick Robinson, 2nd Marquess of Ripon

The Earl De Grey…The Best Game Shot in England. But how difficult is it to be the best game shot in England when you’ve got estate raised birds and beaters driving them to you?

Richard John Lloyd Price of Rhiwias. Author of Practical Pheasant Rearing and Rabbits for Profit—Rabbits for Powder.

As well as Dogs’ Tales

Oh and Dogs Ancient and Modern and Walks in Wales.

Richard John Lloyd Price of Rhiwias…Pointers.

Ok, time for me to bust out of my Sponge Bob Square Pants pajamas and get cracking on the day. Somebody please, invite me to something this coming season where I can wear this rig. I’ll bring my first shotgun with me. It was a .410 Flight King…from K-Mart. Hoyt Purdey sold it to my daddy.

And speaking of shotguns and stuff...This is anything but tweed. It's Weejuns, keg beer and ...

Onward. Throttled. ADG II