And on budgets

My previous post nattered on about the counter-cultural joys of dressing up, especially in bow ties, blithely ignoring the fact that such things cost money.  Most of the guides I’ve seen to building a wardrobe assume a ready supply of cash, so here’s my suggestions for doing it on a budget.

1.  Don’t spend a lot at once.  You might not like the look you put together (or more significantly, your wife might disapprove), so don’t spend too much on it at once.  If instead you buy many of the items for a new look as items for the old wear out you’ll have time to direct where you’re going.  An obvious exception would be those who suddenly need a whole new wardrobe, say for a job change, but they’ll probably have the money for it.

2.  Shop outlet and discount stores.  The disadvantage of such stores is that you can’t always select exactly what you want.  But if you have several different gaps to fill you’ll probably get some of them.

3.  Shop thrift stores.  I haven’t had as much luck with this, but things may improve once I’m back in the D.C. area.

4.  Shop eBay.  I’ve had great success here with shoes, pants, jackets, and ties.  Suits are harder, since you have to match two pieces instead of just one.

5.  Don’t buy junk brands.  My experience in clothing matches that in everything else, if you buy at the low end, it will not last.  Even secondhand, something from a brand known for quality will likely be better than something new from the junk names.  Clothing depreciates quickly compared to other commodities (guitars, for instance), so there are plenty of ways to scoop up good stuff at a low price.  The Blake corollary to the The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Injustice is that the guy who can get the good boots secondhand at a low price is the best off.  The fact that many others have realized this and try to get the boots for free is why Commander Vimes has so much work.

On dressing up

I’ve said before that when it comes to clothing, the only thing left to rebel into is a bow tie.  And yes, I’ve taken to wearing bow ties.  Other wearers include George Will, Winston Churchill and Dr. Who, so clearly bow ties are cool.  The old counter-culture is the culture.  The counter-culture to that has been assimilated.  The Man wears jeans and a t-shirt, or a staid suit when he has to.  Join the rebellion; break out the pocket squares and man the barricades!

Err…right.  So I used to be grungy.  Growing up, my school had a dress code, which a hated.  In college I was very scruffy-looking–I once showed up to debate the College Democrats in a very battered denim jacket while they wore suits.  Employment and then starting grad school cleaned me up some, as did meeting my lovely wife.  I also felt that as an adult, it was time to grow up a bit in dress.  I didn’t want to be like a guy I saw recently who looked to be in his late-thirties but was still sporting a green mohawk.

Hats and pocketwatches were really the gateway drugs from botton-down shirts and khakis to bow ties and odd jackets.  Hats, old-style hats, were alluring to me, so I started wearing them (and for once was at the beginning of a trend).  Pocketwatches were also intriguing.  And things eventually expanded.

Now, I don’t dress up all the time.  But it’s fun, because nothing is less mainstream than dressing properly in a fun way.*

*I will note that dressing properly varies on place and occasion.  I wouldn’t, for example, wear a bow tie around the town in rural Oregon where I grew up (well, maybe to a wedding).  The old distinction between country and city dress ought to be observed.

Small doses

National Review’s latest cover story is a revaluation of Ayn Rand.  Though less damning that Whittaker Chambers’ original review of Atlas Shrugged, it’s still critical.  These pieces are eloquent enough on many of Rand’s faults, so I needn’t rehash those points.  Nor do I think there’s much need to contribute my own separate critiques.  Rand’s sins, both philosophical and personal, have been detailed often enough (amusingly, my copy of Atlas Shrugged is old enough to contain the original dedication to Nathaniel Branden).

Rather, what interests me is that so many people who have read Rand’s works and cite them as influences have taken relatively little harm from them.  The ranks of serious Objectivists are tiny compared to those whom have read and admired Rand’s books.  I won’t say no harm has been done, but certainly there has been less than one might expect.

Humans, as it turns out, are generally resistant to ideology.  Most are too caught up in their daily lives to be caught up in causes and ideas.  This is a mixed blessing, but I think it is on balance a blessing.  With regard to Rand’s books, few read them as a guide to life, society, and everything else.  They do not leave them with a philosophy, but with some sentiments and ideas that are very irregularly applied to life.  A suspicion toward government and central planning may be strengthened.  Many of the really harmful bits, like the prideful atomistic individualism, are quickly tempered by reality.  Rand’s heroes may bestride the earth like demigods, but not so those of us who are real.  Likewise, Rand may have railed against religion, but her readers are more likely to find it a helpful part of their lives than the philosophy expressed in the ridiculously long speeches of her heroes.  Lived reality and culture trump Rand’s idealized fantasies.

I can’t cheer Rand’s popularity, since she was a third-rate novelist and a fifth-rate philosopher, but I’m not too perturbed by it either.

Popping the bubble

The New York Times has a profile piece on Katy Perry, one of the current crop of pop tartlettes, whose music (such as I have heard, at least) is not only lowbrow but tasteless.*  The most interesting point for me was that she was raised as an evangelical Christian and first tried to break into the music business as a Christian singer.  That didn’t pan out, she scrounged for work for a while and eventually made it big in the mainstream market.  The price, of course, was that she became another cartoon skank gracing the gossip pages.  That devolution is predictable and uninteresting.  The intriguing bit is how it illustrates the problems inherent in the cultural bubble many Christian, especially evangelicals, try to maintain.

The reasons for the bubble are clear and sympathetic: pop culture is usually filthy and anti-Christian, establishing a clean, Christian alternative is an understandable response.  However, the problems are quickly apparent.  In order to establish one’s Christian bona fides, there is a strong tendency toward didacticism, which makes for terrible art.  On the other hand, there is also an incentive to create a crossover hit that gets mainstream attention, which results in a lot of vaguely spiritual, feel-good fluff–also awful art.  There’s some good acts, of course, but they’re few and far between, nor are they always the most popular.  Christian fiction is even worse than the music, and the Christian movie industry, some kid-oriented studios aside, is atrocious.

Furthermore, the stars of the Christian music scene are elevated to unwarranted positions of spiritual authority.  For example, when some Christian pop star came out as a lesbian a few months back, it was treated as a big deal.  She wasn’t a pastor or anything, just a girl who could play guitar and sing, but in certain Christian circles this had given her lots of influence.  Christian musicians are frequently expected to give altar calls, or at least short sermons, during their concerts.  Given that even Bono’s talks about forgiving African debt and such are an annoyance, how’s in going to go over from those who aren’t part of one of the most successful rock bands in history?  Musicians aren’t ministers, and trying to make them such only leads to trouble and degrades their art.

Christians (again, especially evangelicals) have built up an entire parallel culture, from music and movies to magazines.  Yet they produce little good art, and even less that is known (let alone enjoyed) outside Christian circles.  Thus, they have failed to provide a true alternative to the nastiness of mainstream culture.  There is a market for the art Christians favor (a different mainstream pop starlette has built her career on clean, if soppy, songs), but they have instead abandoned the culture in favor of building their own third-rate knock-offs.  Consequently there is less room in the mainstream for entertainment that is not morally degraded.

Nor does it help that the Christian bubble is very intolerant of realism or darkness in art.  For example, The Mercy Seat (originally by Nick Cave, famously covered by Johnny Cash) is an amazing song**, but it’s hard to imagine it passing muster in the bubble.  No one swears in Christian films or books.  Regarding sex, well, reality is strictly forbidden.

Consequently the bubble suffocates those seeking to create morally serious art, and those seeking to patronize it.  As for the less highbrow, when the Christian alternative is cotton-candy Jesus, is it any wonder that cotton-candy pop tarts do so well?

*Note that lowbrow is not necessarily bad.  Johnny Cash was middlebrow at best, but usually tasteful and quite good at what he did.  On the other side, a good deal of modern opera productions are highbrow but tasteless.

**

Notre Dame football predictions

The wife made her official preseason prediction of 9-3, but I’m going to play it a bit more cautiously and say 8-4.

Tulsa, Army, and W. Mich. should all be fairly easy wins, though Tulsa did come close to beating Boise St. last year, so they would be my pick for a possible close call.

On the other side, I think Stanford, Pitt, Utah and USC are teams where Notre Dame will be at best even, so I’m going to predict at least two losses in those games, possibly three.

The rest, Purdue, Michigan, Michigan St., Boston College and Navy, are teams that the Irish should beat, but not so comfortably as with the Tulsa group.  One or two losses is likely.

I think that Brian Kelly will show improvement over the hapless Weis, but I’m not going to bet on anything spectacular.  There’s no game that I think the Irish can’t win, but I doubt they’ll get all the breaks in every game.  What I really want to see is for the Irish to do a better job of putting games away.  Nearly all of their games last year were excruciatingly close.  They had two blowout wins (Washington State and Nevada) and then 10 games within a touchdown either way which ended with 4 wins and six loses.  So theoretically, the Irish could have gone undefeated with a few more breaks and a few less errors.  But by that logic they could have easily been 2-10.  As it was, things broke close to even.  Thus, in the first few games against teams in the Purdue group, I will be looking for the Irish to put those teams away by more than a touchdown.

Our yuppie president and religion

So there’s chatter over a new poll showing that 18% of Americans think President Obama is secretly a Muslim, and that 43% can’t identify his religion.  The Muslim bit is crazy and self-contradictory, given that those who believe it also think that Obama is a radical leftist.  The 43% is more interesting, since it’s probably the right answer.  Yes, Obama is a nominal Christian, but that Christianity came from a race-hustling church with an odious pastor, and he threw them under the bus when it became politically necessary.  What does Obama actually believe?  I don’t know.  I suspect that he doesn’t believe in much of anything; liberal yuppie types rarely do.  Don’t know is probably the right answer.

Men in hats

So for once I’ve been on the leading edge of a fashion trend.  Hats (real hats, not baseball caps) are apparently the cool thing right now.  If this continues, we’ll see articles on a bow-tie revival in a couple years. At the moment, I’m happy to see hats coming back.

Of course, as the article observes, most of the men who have taken to wearing hats have no clue about the etiquette associated with them.  I’m all for trying to instruct new hat wearers on the rules and guidelines of wearing hats, but I think there needs to be some perspective about this.  First, many of those who have taken to hats will ditch them as soon as the next trend comes along.  Retention will largely depend on convincing new wearers that hats are more than just a way of being hip this year, but part of dressing in a mature, manly, and fun way.  The fun is important.  Cranky geezers complaining about kids not wearing hats properly will only turn people off.  Hat etiquette needs happy warriors, not scolds.

*For those readers who might be interested, here’s a basic rundown:  Take your hat off when the national anthem is played, you are in a church, or eating (unless you’re standing around outside at a BBQ or suchlike).  Also, when indoors it’s polite  to take your hat off (exceptions are public areas like hotel lobbies, airports terminals and mall concourses, and perhaps also short errands indoors).  As for doffing your hat during introductions, entrances, and when passing ladies, play it by ear.  I think some of the old rules in this area have become much looser.

Gender, bodies, and soccer

I’ve just returned from a trip to the family homestead.  Good times.

While there I joined one of my younger brothers in a game of indoor soccer (his team was short on players), which was fun but also painful.  I’m not in the physical shape I once was, which was made painfully clear as I had to try to keep up with high-school kids with plenty of subs on their team.  Obvious lesson: I need to exercise more.

However, after feeling a bit better I started to reflect on our relationship to our bodies.  My soccer intelligence or whatever you want to call it was still good.  My touches were also fairly sound–trapping, dribbling and passing had held up well over the years.  What was lacking was conditioning.  It did no good to know that I should mark back if I was too tired to do it, or to beat a defender if I couldn’t move quickly enough to take full advantage of it.  The physical discipline needed to kick a soccer ball with reasonable accuracy (for the level of competition) remained, but the discipline to physically condition myself had been lacking.

This prompted me to think about other forms of bodily discipline.  Eating is obviously connected to the issue of physical fitness, but there are many other points where the mind has to assert its will over the body.  Shaving or getting a haircut is a rudimentary form of physical discipline, controlling and channeling the libido is a much more complex matter.  All of these may bring the mind into conflict with the body, but only as part of an integrated and holistic understanding of body and mind.  That is, body and mind are seen as part of a whole person and must be brought to cooperation for the good of the whole man.

In contrast, a modern understanding frequently sets the components of man intrinsically against each other.  For instance, with regard to sexuality the message is to indulge in the most gratuitous fashion, but with regard to gender biology is to be ignored.  In the first case integration and disciple is set aside, in the second the body becomes an enemy of the mind.  The vision is not of a cooperative, if sometimes contentious, relation between parts of the person, but rather of thorough enmity.

A tip on tips

One of my pet peeves is restaurants where you pay before you eat but are expected to tip.  I hate ordering at the counter and then getting a receipt to sign that asks for a tip.  I haven’t even gotten the food yet, making it hard to tip on performance.  It’s especially annoying in places where a tip is clearly not deserved (i.e. an airport fast food place that just hands it over the counter), but I don’t like it even when there is some service coming (i.e. orders are taken at the counter but food is brought to where you sit).  I try to have some singles on hand for a tip on the way out, but sometimes I don’t have them or I forget.  So restaurants, figure something out.  I don’t like being the jerk who doesn’t tip, but I also don’t want to tip before you’ve done anything except ring up my order.

We need fewer college graduates

Bob Herbert’s latest column is idiotic but illuminating.  According to him we desperately need more college graduates, etc, etc…  If only we had more graduates in women’s studies and interior design!

What America actually needs is fewer college graduates but more rigor at all levels of education, a vocational-training track in high school, and fewer third world peasants with no education and little culture of academic achievement.  Unfortunately, America’s leaders, especially its educators (which have become a class distinct from mere teachers and professors), are fools who believe their own propaganda.  The reality is that plenty of children will be left behind in academics, the solution is not to pretend otherwise and penalize those who cannot change reality, but to drill into those children a basic education and then prepare them for a useful trade.  They would be much happier that way, but our educators insist that everyone be like them and enjoy school (not learning or thinking, most educators have mediocre minds at best, but school).  I think those high school students who cover for their lack of intelligence by neatly writing whole paragraphs when a few words would do are the sort of people who become educators.