The Dudes Are Alright

Just picked up this Michael Bastian sweater for Gant with the nice mountain detail on the front.  Now all I need to do is learn to ski. 

I’d like to give a big thumbs up to whoever decided it would be a good idea to combine punk flyers with Swiss Modernism. 

See those boots that Jake Ryan’s wearing in Sixteen Candles?  I’ve made it my mission to find a pair of those for myself, and after years of searching, I found a pair of deadstock Carolina boots that are the exact same pair!  They were nestled away behind dozens of boxes of other work boots at a quaint general store on the NY/CT. border called Saperstein’s.  The best part?  The guy wanted to get rid of them, so I got them for $40 bucks!  So right now I’m sitting at the foot of the Berkshires, drinking bourbon, listening to Todd Rundgren and feeling damn good. 

I’ve done more drugs in my lifetime than I’d like to admit.  Granted, most of those drugs were drugs you can buy at your local Walgreens, but I have abused those drugs.  I’ve abused Stacker 2s when they had ephedrine so I could finish papers, and I snorted Ritalin tablets in high school, but most of all, I’ve drank a lot of NyQuil. 

1. I think I saw angels in the winter of 1999 as I lay on my tiny mattress on my top floor apartment in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village.  I had a high fever, and I chugged a bottle, put on Brian Eno’s Ambient 1/Music for Airports, and fell into a weird state of sleep that took on some strange metaphysical bend as I recall looking at myself, and looking at the radiator as it made this high-pitched whistle.  

The next morning my roommate had his doctor father come look at me, and he told me I should have overdosed from all the NyQuil I drank. 

2.  Seeing Sigur Ros at Massey Hall in Toronto in September of 2011.  It was a week after 9/11, I was depressed.  I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, I was fighting with my friends, and I was sick.  For some reason I remember the show was on a Monday, and I had class that day, but didn’t have anything the next day for some reason.  I stayed at a friend’s house, and I remember him saying, “If you want to cure the blues, drink NyQuil.”  I’d thought that sounded cheesy, but decided to try it.

For the next two months I drank the stuff to fall asleep at least 3 nights a week. 

I recently wrote a piece for The Paris Review on the (somewhat awkward, possibly short lived) marriage between literature and menswear.  As I was researching it, I visited over fifteen stores that used books as props in their showrooms.  I took pictures of all of them.  The one above is from outside Jack Spade.  

I’m on vacation in Anguilla for the second year in a row.  Things of note include discovering that when you mix a strawberry daiquiri with frozen piña colada, you get something called a Miami Vice (I admit to drinking one out of sheer curiosity and finding it pretty awesome), reading The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obrhet along with two P.G Wodehouse novels, and wearing a white straw fedora with a band made from a Hawaiian shirt.  I also tried to say hi to Roman Abramovich, but unfortunately he’s the 53rd richest person in the world, and has bodyguards the size of polar bears. 

Foodwise, I’ve spent two afternoons eating lunch at Jacala on the Meads Bay section of the island.  Both times I ordered the tuna carpaccio as an appetizer, and yesterday I ate the handmade beef tartare, which was prepared right in front of me, and totally fantastic.  

There’s a lack of nightlife on the island, which is actually alright by me.  We stopped in to Viceory, the most contemporary resort, for a nightcap.  Unfortunately it ended up feeling more like a Meatpacking District club with the addition of underage tourists thrown into the mix.  I’ve seen an alarming number of guys with tattoos over their bellies, and assorted folks who I may or may not have gone to JCC summer camp with.  Other than that, people mostly keep to themselves.

Normally I’m uncomfortable with the whole quiet relaxation thing, but it’s easy to lose yourself here.  There’s no hustle, no bustle, the fish is unbelievable, and there’s a serious lack of corporate logos on the entire island.  It’s not exactly the old world, but there’s something about Anguilla that I’m not entirely used to, and that might be what makes me love it so much.  Obviously I miss my cats and my apartment in New York, but this is really my favorite true vacation destination thanks to the fact that there is really nothing to do other than chill out. 

Now I need to start budgeting myself for the Duty Free in St. Martin before I go back home.  

I have friends who joke that all Chan Marshall does these days are cover songs (not true), but at this point she can do whatever she wants if her videos all look as stunning as the one for “King Rides By,” which features Manny Pacquiao hitting a speed bag in slow motion. 

My friend Michael Miller at the Observer called it “ruin porn,” Elmore Leonard wrote in the forward that “maybe that old machinery isn’t as ugly as I thought,” and The New Yorker and Vogue both paid attention to it.  The new book, Detroit: 138 Square Miles isn’t photos of the once-thriving Motor City in its heyday; rather, it’s the here and now.  Julia Reyes Taubman spent six years taking nearly 30,000 photos working on Detroit, and the best of those is in this collection.  The book appeals on a visceral level, but also gives you moments to pause and think, “Could this happen to my city if it happened to the heart of America?”  (Answer: yup.)  It’s a comely and eerie work, one that seems to have started out as a hobby, but turned into a labor of love for a city.

I spent my childhood driving through the rustbelt on my way to hockey tournaments and family vacations.  I’m from one of the Midwestern metropolises that somehow managed to crawl out of the rubble from America’s industrial collapse (Chicago), so to get out and see the effects all around me as a child had an impact that I can’t explain.  The burnt out buildings of Gary, IN., the rusted carcasses of factories in various parts of Ohio, and the ruins in cities like Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.  Reyes Taubman’s photos show what’s left of Detroit in all its glory, offering little commentary or lip service as to the city’s supposed rebirth that the media likes battering around so much, but leaving you with a sense of hope that things can only go up. 

Among other things this week, I’ve been dwelling on Walton Ford’s exhibition that’s closing in a few days. 

I took a trip down to South Street Seaport a few days ago to visit the recently reopened Browne & Co. Stationers.  The New York Times wrote up the shop a few months back.