30 December 2012

Walking North

"That long, long path over the moors and into the forest, who has trodden it? Man, a human being, the first one who came here. There was no path before him. Later a few animals followed the faint tracks over the heaths and moors and made them clearer, and still later a few Lapps began to nose out the path and to use it when they were going from one mountain to another to see to their reindeer. This is how the path through the great common, the no-man’s-land owned by no one, came into being.

A man comes walking north. He carries a sack, the first sack, containing provisions for the road and some implements. The man is strong and rough-hewn, with a red iron beard and little scars on face and hands, sites of old wounds—were they gotten at work or in a fight? Maybe he has been in jail and wants to go into hiding, or perhaps he is a philosopher looking for peace; in any case, here he comes, a human being in the midst of this immense solitude."

Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (1917)

27 December 2012

Blue Beard

25 December 2012

Merry Christmas 2012

24 December 2012

Rare Exports

Yuletide Tweed

فيروز) ثلج ثلج)

19 December 2012

Brooks Brothers Three-Piece

Are you into three-pieces? I certainly am, expecially in chilly weather when a sturdy suit of sartorial armour is practically a necessity. The candid photographic image (at left) depicts a vintage Brooks Brothers three-piece suit in thick charcoal Tweed and 3/2 button configuration. Shirt and repp tie, also by Brooks Brothers. They've been in my collection for years. I can just recall my late father, a Wall Street executive, wearing three-piece suits in the 1970s and early 1980s. They must have kept him warm on the daily commute to and from Manhattan. Please forgive the quality of the photograph, hastily taken by an admiring paparazza (note my hand bestowing a well-deserved pat on the head) in a wood-panelled corridor of financial power, which invariably occurs when one is dashing about being charming. The effect, I can report with a smile, was quite palpable.

Pipe & Razor Club

18 December 2012

Scandinavian Rowing Club

Club de Remeros Escandinavos, Tigre, Beunos Aires


17 December 2012

Amerika (Rammstein)

15 December 2012

Surf Trad: Pendleton Board Shirt

  

Pendleton Board Shirt: A favorite of adventure bound men
since the Beach Boys premiered it on an album cover
in the 1960s


12 December 2012

The Misty Mountains

en garde


Single Deadly Combat


11 December 2012

Hussar Style

10 December 2012

The Carolingian Inference

South Laguna Beach

A brief update. The word on the street is that I have been extraordinarily busy at the orifice in recent months. The last six weeks of the year are when the resolve of many professional chaps seems to slacken. For me, it is time to gird one's Tweed suit and sally forth with renewed determination. Nose to the grindstone, and all that. It is always best to finish strong.

As you know, I loathe the holiday season with a loathing of white-hot fervidness. The lumpen holiday tunes. Displays of naked capitalist-consumerism. The spectacle of earnest females busily engaged in buying up shitty little baubles. And memories, for me, of big family dinners beset with squabbling, drama, argument, drama, gossip, and more drama. I simply never felt it, a condition extending to certain other areas of life of which I am sure my family from my earliest years were quite aware. Modern Americans only seem to come together if it involves monetary exchange, and even then there really is very little there. It almost moves me to violence. Modern life presents the civilised man not with disappointment, as John Cheever famously said, but with insult.

I work hard, true, but, as you may have heard, I do like to have fun on a regular basis. And this usually involves a pretty filly or two. My recent reports on the topic have been meagre, I admit; I aim to remedy this shortly. I will tell you one thing, though. I regularly patrol the champagne-pits of the California show-coast where I encounter hordes of seriously attractive, single, childless women in their 30s-40s trolling for rich beta-bait. The number of such females is quite startling. Easy pickings for some of us--but cause for serious despair for others, including the foolish females themselves. I am taking--and have taken--full advantage of the sexual availability of modern females. But there lingers at the back of my mind--I do not deny it--an idea that something better once prevailed.

If it is true the present consortium is breaking up and circumstances have not yet progressed to the point where men can finally experience life as it is meant to be experienced--in full blood and glory--then there are worse places to be than poolside with a cocktail in one hand and a hottie in the other.

Sent from my iPhone

Dandy Clan

04 December 2012

Wine & Hope

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)