Cargo Shorts and Glen O'Brien: I Pocket a Grapefruit

Glenn O'Brien, GQ's Style Guy, is my main source of sartorial wisdom. This is his advice for the wearing of short pants:

"I'm against any shorts I can't wear on any golf course, especially if they are camouflage. And who needs to be able to pocket a grapefruit? Classicism is Bermudas, a logoless polo, and huaraches or Top-Siders. Keep up your standards!"*

It is a universal truth; cargo shorts are for mouth-breathing philistines. Any man with even the slightest inclination towards stylish dress shuns them as an affront to good taste and a threat to Western culture, and rightly so. 

I tried on a pair of Nantucket red cargo shorts by Ocean Pacific, available at Walmart for $12-16. Shorts often look strange on me. These don't. They fit great and they look good. I got a pair in Kelly green, a pair in khaki and a pair in slate blue. I NEVER find shorts that look good on me. I... I...

I'm a cargo short guy now. 

Oh well. 

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*Link to source

Image, from the New York Public Library, is public domain

Cheesecake and Beefcake and the Charms of Venus

In 1915 a photographer named George Miller was photographing Russian opera singer Elvira Amazar as she lounged in a deck chair, just before she stepped off the boat and on to New York City's terra firma. He asked her to hike up her skirt. The good lady complied. Just before taking the shot Miller exclaimed "This is better than cheesecake!"

A genre was born. Cheesecake photos became a fixture of the early 20th century, and they tended to feature leggy dames. Here's Mr. Miller's ground-breaking shot:

Eyeballs back in your heads, fellas...

The style would come to be known as "pinup art." These photos were pinned up wherever men and tools could be found. My Dad worked a trade, and in any shop of his I ever visited the walls were a veritable archive of women's undergarments, spanning from the forties to the eighties. It was my first introduction to the charms of Venus.*

More cheesecake, courtesy of the New York Public Library's Image Gallery:

These are from RKO's Pocket Pinups. Isn't it better when something is left to the imagination?

The male counterpart to the cheesecake shot is the "beefcake" photo, the term of course playing off of "cheesecake." Victor Mature and Tony Curtis were among the early Adonises (Adoni?) favored with the distinction. These salacious images depict brawny male chests.

Observe:

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*I know, I know... But it felt so good to write it!

First four images are public domain

Fifth image used under a Creative Commons License as long as I credit President Vladimir Putin at... I shit you not... www.kremlin.ru

Behold: My Jam Roly Poly, a Traditional English Pudding

This traditional English pudding was originally steamed in a shirt sleave... which is why it is also known as "dead man's arm." Presumably when grandpa went you'd save his shirt sleeves for pudding utensils... and rags. Rags were actually a commodity. There were rag men who'd buy your dead relatives' clothes, or clothes that had worn out, or old nails and pots... but I digress.

The Recipe:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a bowl mix 2 cups flour, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar.
3. Cut up 4 ounces of butter and squish them into the mixture until it all looks like  a heap of breadcrumbs.
4. Stir in 1/4 cup of milk and 1/4 cup of water. Mix until a dough forms. You'll probably need to add more of one or the other.
5. Flour a surface and roll the dough out into a rectangle.
6. Spread jam on it. Raspberry is common, but mine was good with orange marmalade.
7. Roll it up.
8. Place it seam-side down on a sheet of parchment paper. Place the paper on a baking sheet.
9. Baste with a little milk or egg white or both.
10. Bake for 35 minutes. The outer crust will be crispy and the inner crumb will be soft.
11. Serve warm with ice cream.

Here's what mine looked like after I failed to convert ml's to cups (still tasty, just had to bake longer and came out more flat than I would have liked):

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I hereby release images 1 and 3 into the public domain

Image 2 is public domain

Wasp 101 Outed

Wasp 101 was recently outed. He's a fine looking gent with a lovely wife, but perhaps he's not all that he portrayed himself to be online. Who is?

I'm not going to link to it. That would probably be hypocritical. I'm anonymous and I'd like to stay that way, because it frees me to say anything I like. I don't feel that I'm terribly controversial, but still, I work in a sensitive field and I don't want any blowback from my online persona to affect my real world persona. I'll extend the author of Wasp 101 the courtesy of not identifying him, though it won't do him any good. It will do ME a bit of good, though.

Lest you think me a coward, recall that there is a very fine tradition of gentlemen writing under pseudonyms. People far grander than I have... actually I'm not grand at all, and if I were outed I doubt that more than 5 people would care. Still, I value my online anonymity.

What's truly regrettable is that "Richard" seems to have been outed as the result of an online pissing contest. That's not at all classy. The man who dug up the dirt did a fairly obsessive investigation, the sole aim of which was to discredit a person who had never done him any injury at all. The muckraker confesses that such behavior is "sad," but that didn't stop him. We do love a scandal for its own sake, don't we?

How we, the public, treat a scandal says a lot about us. Part of me wants to gleefully post pictures and names and make snarky comments. Why? For attention? To glory in the demise of a blogger whose work was read much more widely than my own? Not a very noble impulse. Behavior is a choice; it's not something that comes naturally, at least good behavior doesn't.

It was a fascinating blog and I'm sorry that "Richard" took it down. I can't say that I agreed with his every utterance, or even most of them. Often I found his views to be obnoxious, but I was certainly interested in what he wrote. I hope that his political career doesn't suffer. As it is he's being denounced as "racist, classist and sexist." Well, maybe he tended that way, at times, or maybe not*.

Pretty rough.

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*Interestingly, the young lady known as "Kip" in the blog may be Hispanic. This puts a bit of a multicultural spin on the blog. Personally I find that comforting.

Image, by Trounce, used under a Creative Commons license

Eating Like Aubrey

I am about ten novels into Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. In his "Aubreyad" Mr. O'Brian presents what are to my mind the best drawn characters in the most authentic settings I've ever seen in print. If you like this blog you will love these books.

Anyway, the books are saturated with food. I think it must be because food used to be so much more expensive. People paid more attention to every day comestibles, if I may borrow an archaic term from the author. I once read that before the modern age common people spent about 60% of their income on food. In Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, for example, he discusses the constant pull he felt between spending his money on books or on food. He gave up beer in order to buy more books. Actually he started the first lending library for this reason; books were often beyond the reach of the working man if he wanted to read more than a couple per year.

So if food is so important to Captain Aubrey, how can it be that I have plodded through half the series in total ignorance of nineteenth century naval cuisine? What do Captain Aubrey's wonderful puddings look like? What is a "boiled baby?" What is portable soup?

A minute's worth of googling revealed the answers.

In the mid 1990's three completely charming ladies answered these questions and more in their book Lobscouse And Spotted Dog. I have not purchased the book, but it is on my list, and their website is a lot of fun.

Tonight for dessert I'll serve up a jam roly poly, or dead man's arm, and think of the sea. Recipe here.

Click here to learn how to make a warm custard sauce.

 

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Image by Logawi used under a Creative Commons License

Jan Hrabek Saves Contemporary Classical Music

 

That didn't take long.

The Londonist identifies the top ten living composers, and they seem to be thriving in London. This is very gratifying if you're a raging Anglophiliac, or rather it would be if the music was anything like beautiful.

Check it out here.

Most of these gentlemen compose minimalist music. Turns out I'm not wild about minimalism. Minimalism causes me to consider the merits of drinking bleach.

Here is a list of 21st century composers. I had a hell of a time finding somebody I liked, and the gentleman I found isn't actually on the list; I tripped over him while researching somebody else. It's as if these guys are afraid of writing something that sounds good to the layman. Oh, and beware he who calls himself a "sound artist."

Take for example John Luther Adams' Inuksuit. What the flaming hell is this? I freely concede that I don't have the palate to appreciate this. Maybe it's brilliant and I just can't see it. On the other hand, maybe there's a reason why 99% of the composers played on my local classical station are dead.

Or maybe contemporary classical music can objectively be PROVEN to inspire thoughts of self-harm. The Telegraph ran an article three years ago which provides scientific evidence that our brains cannot recognize contemporary classical music as music. So there.

Ah, but then there is Jan Hrabek. He lived from 1945-2003, so he's not with us anymore, more's the pity, but at least he survived to see the 2000's. He's close enough for me. His music sounds great, and is thus necessarily obscure, the genre's preference bending more towards the sound of industrial accidents, but Mr. Hrabek is well worth your time, gentle reader [That was a tortured sentence].

Anyway:

Here is his suite in the style of the rococo composers.

Have a listen to his suite in the style of baroque composers.

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Image, by Modigliani (1920), is public domain

Is Classical Music Dead?

 

Renee Fleming, a national treasure, discusses why classical music lost its audience with Leon Bolstein:

Link

It will never "die," of course, but I, as a very casual fan, am hard pressed to name any living composer. Has it lost its cultural relevance? The real money in composition seems to be in scoring for film. I can name Basil Papawhatsit... The guy who composed for the first Conan movie. That work stands the test of time; I love the soundtrack. Very manly stuff.

Check it out here.

I'm going to do some digging round the net and see if I can't scrounge up a living composer who I like.

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Image by David Shankbone used under a Creative Commons license