the long-suffering trad

I’m traveling this week so posts will be infrequent.

I was finally able to watch the first 3 episodes of Mad Men this weekend. Naturally I have a few things to say.

• It must have been awful being a woman back then. Sitting where we do today, it’s easy to look back on the women’s movement and say “What was the big deal?” Maybe it really was a big deal.
• The show suggests to me that all the social convulsions of the late ’60s and ’70s were absolutely inevitable. No way around it.
• How come we looked so good when we were all screwed up but now that we’re relatively well adjusted we look like hell? Is presenting oneself nicely directly related to being an absolute emotional mess? I hope not.
• Having seen pictures of January Jones on the net, I’m really surprised by how fragile her character is. It must have been the picture of her holding the gun. I was expecting something quite different.

In case there is any doubt, I love the show. Wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise.

Alright trads, this post was going to be about the easiest way to tell which J. Press jackets are Southwick made and which are not. I got the whole thing worked out then thought, “Well, dummy, the easiest way to tell if a jacket is Southwick would be to check the tag to see if it’s made in the USA. If it’s made in the USA it’s Southwick (or it’s been around for a while), if it’s made in Canada it’s not.” So this is now a post about the second easiest way to tell if a J. Press jacket is made by Southwick. Superfluous and redundant, yes. But isn’t that what you’ve come to expect?

It’s all about side seams vs. side darts. By side dart I’m not talking about those nasty things on the front of a jacket that mark you as untrad. This is something different. What we are talking about here is the whether your jacket’s body is made up of 4 pieces or 6.

You may have always assumed that your jacket body was made of 6 pieces, and in many cases you would have been right. But not with a Southwick. You were probably thinking that a jacket had two front pieces, two side pieces and two back pieces. But on a Southwick the front pieces and the side pieces are the same pieces. Southwick uses a side dart instead of a side seam.

Please look at figures 1 and 2:

Whether they be darts or seams, they run right to the pockets. On the Canadian made Cohen jacket(fig. 1), the side seam runs through the pocket all the way down to the bottom of the jacket. On the US made Southwick, the side dart terminates at the top of the pocket and the single piece of fabric wraps around under the pocket so that the front piece and the side piece are the same piece, as I said before.

I probably could have picked two examples where it would be easier to see the seams and darts, but I brought these downstairs last night without thinking and I can’t do anything about it now because everyone is asleep, as I would be too if I hadn’t started blogging a while back. This may be one of those situations where you don’t want to look directly at the seam but maybe look a little to the side so that you can see it better. It’s funny how that works. I once thought that I might be able to drive better if instead of looking directly at the road I just looked a little off to the side, but that didn’t work at all.

Now you know the second easiest way to tell if a J. Press jacket is a Southwick.

Thanks to all who took part in yesterday’s discussion. You are great guys to take this so lightheartedly. We don’t hear much from the bulldog over here, but if he saw this I hope he didn’t take offense. Though he would be justified if he did.

I hinted in one of my earliest posts here that the problem with being intentionally controversial is that unless you gain the agreement of a significant minority you are not controversial at all, just a jerk (I’m reverting to my clean language policy now). I obviously failed to meet that criteria so I thank you for your forbearance and good humor.

This was a case where the quality of the ensuing discussion far exceeded the quality of the original post. Again, I thank you.

I don’t know what it is that makes the younger guys interested in trad, but for the older guys it’s pretty obviously a nostalgia driven undertaking. For me, the door was opened by a fit of nostalgia for the late ’70s, pre-OPH days on campus and a nostalgia for my younger days in New Orleans, a town where people still dress for dinner. Imagine that.

But recently, trad has become backward looking to a discomforting extreme. This all began innocently enough. Uncomfortable with the OPHish prep focus of it all, well meaning trads began to stress the fact that it all began well before that. H. began the work by searching his New Yorker DVD for interesting ads from the “the boom years.” No doubt, this was interesting stuff. But I’m going to argue that we may have taken this line a bit too far. Are we an army of grave robbers?

First off, there is something wrong with trying to get to the heart of anything by studying advertisements. Advertisements are bullshit. They are now and they always have been. And the fact that the old ads relied on line drawings makes them even more bullshit. I’m sure you have noticed that car designers release drawing of their not yet ready for market models. And when the car is released, it looks in detail just like the drawing but not nearly as good for reasons that you can’t quite put you finger on. Such is the power of the cartoon.

And movies of the day are not much better. I try to be as Carry Grantlike as my limitations will allow, but Carry Grant is no representation of the way men in the ’50s really looked and acted. For historical representation, you’re probably better off looking at a 3rd rate TV series.

My point is that there is something wrong with taking 40 or 50 year old bullshit and holding it in such reverence. It was crap then and it’s crap now. Only it’s harder to see that it’s crap because it’s difficult to remember how the world really was back then. The imagination plays hell with the past.

If you are really interested in those days you should put down the ads, turn off the TV and read some Cheever. Or O’Hara. Or Carver. There are countless others I’m sure. Reading these will make the present look not quite so bad. Pretty good in fact. And this brings us back to the trad, which is something that is happening now.

I wonder what misterman has lined up for us for the fall.

Sorry trads, but it’s hi-fi stuff that I have on my mind this morning. The hi-fi project got a huge shot in the arm this weekend when I started thinking about the Klipsch Heresy speakers that my dad used to have. My thinking went something like this: What the hell happened to those Klipsch Heresy speakers that my dad used to have? That question was answered by a quick telephone call. They are siting in his garage. And I’ll be there in about 2 weeks so the first thing I’m gonna do when I get there, after giving Mom a hug and a kiss, is take them to the UPS Store.

These are some nice speakers from yesteryear. Very efficient and should pair nicely with the t-amp rig that I have in mind. Speakers, as you know, can be the most expensive part of any system, so happening upon these is a big deal. Now all I need to do is order that King-Rex unit I’ve been thinking about.

Well, not quite. I need to get a source. For that I’m thinking about two different options. One is to get a Marantz CD5001 cd player for about 300 clams. The other is to get an Apple Airport Express wireless network apparatus for about 100. I’m thinking hard about Airport Express. This will allow me to stream music directly and wirelessly from iTunes over to the rig. This seems kind of intriguing. The iTunes system supports a rip compression called Apple Lossless. Apple Lossless compresses a CD song file by about 50% without any loss of detail. These files turn out to be significantly larger than the default iTunes rip but disk space is cheap and we’re not talking about the Library of Congress here.

Yep, that’s what I have on my mind this morning.

Two weeks ago I received an anonymous tip that JJs Hat Shop might be the source of a certain hat that I had been admiring. I found the telecoco model on their website and placed an order. I thought it was a failed order and was a little relieved because uncertainty soon arose, as it often does. So take a look at what I came home to on friday. I got my telecoco after all. I’m glad it arrived before I ordered a more upscale version that had also been recommended.

I think I’m going to keep it. Getting the low end model makes some sense because I’m a little flakey where hats are concerned. Hats are one of those things that seem like a good idea at the time but really aren’t. A few years ago I bought a very nice Borsalino fedora only to find that I didn’t have the right stuff. And that I had no proper place to keep a nice hat so it began to look a little beat up even without being worn much. Since then I’ve been a bucket man. You can be accused of many things in a bucket hat, but taking yourself too seriously is not one of them.

About the hat itself, it comes off as the $50 hat that it is. I don’t thing anyone will confuse it with a $100 hat. Or even a $60 hat. It is what it is. The coconut seems a little fragile, creaking loudly when pinched, so if I really like this style I’ll probably have to replace it in a few years anyway. Especially if I don’t find a good way to store it.

Well, not really a girl. Definitely a woman. You may not have paid much attention to her because she never got out of her wheel chair in Notting Hill, but Gina McKee absolutely smolders through the 2002 remake of The Forsythe Saga. She’s been at her craft for a while now so there’s more to see. I’m hoping for recommendations.

It occurred to me the other day that 8 of the last 10 CDs I have bought were purchased at Starbucks. This was a most unexpected and disturbing realization. I knew that my days of maybe being cool were over several years ago when I started watching the CBS Sunday Morning show, but this is an ominous sign.

Funny thing is, I don’t go to Starbucks very often. I don’t believe in standing in line for coffee. And I like my coffee brewed, not baristaed. But it appears that anytime I do go into Starbucks I am very likely to purchase a CD.

I guess it’s not terribly surprising. I do best with limited choice. If given a selection of 3 anythings to choose from I’m very likely to buy. More than that and I become confused and probably won’t. So I have chosen to let some corporate fat cats in Seattle make the first cut for my future music listening pleasure. Get the selection down to a manageable level so that I can be empowered by making the final selection. Very tidy.

The truth is that it’s a system that works pretty well. There remains one traditional music store in town, up by the university. I kind of like going in there, but not all that much. It’s kind of depressing. Like a wax museum except they have plastic instead of wax.

I think this post is about done. I can’t think of a punchy ending so I’m just going to stop. It’s just Starbucks.

Summer is definitely upon us here in the southwest and I’ve been sporting my favorite J. Press poly-cotton poplin trousers. These are some great pants. I know there are many of you trads who are like no way on the pol-lay, but can any child of the ’70s, trad or otherwise, not have a secret love of polyester?

These pants are very light weight, easy and cheap to keep clean, and easy and cheap to keep creased. Sometimes when they get dirty I just wipe them off with Fantastic and they’re ready to go. Fantastic.

The season for poly-cotton poplin here is short though. At least for me. 2 reasons. One is that I wear wool socks and the other is that it is very dry here. If there is the least bit of static electricity in the air when I wear these pants I’m in for a bad day. Definitely summer only. Not spring. Not here. Maybe not a problem if you wear cotton socks, which I don’t because I’ve got big feet and zero tolerance for sock shrinkage. Or if you have some humidity, which you can keep.

I have yet to go for the J. Press poly-cotton poplin shorts. Those are a little too old man. Even for me.