who needs tooth bleach when you've got fashion?

this morning i dove into a task with the trepidation of a beginning crime scene investigator: reading the New York Times Style Magazine, Men's Fashion, Spring 2006.

this is not a love/hate relationship. i don't do it--as i have done in years past-- with an eye toward finding what is manageably fashionable while simultaneously disregarding what i find abhorrent. i do it as a study of the enemy. i do it so that i will know the mind and desires of our culture's shallowest denizens.

sure, when i was a middle teen i had a subcription to GQ, and i'll admit it taught me a lot about how to be a successful white man. the most valuable lesson i took away was, by following a few simple rules, one could be very well-dressed while not spending a fortune. since i learned this all the way back then, i haven't really needed any more training. i am hip to fact that almost everything beyond a well-tailored, dark blue suit, wingtip shoes and hydrated flesh is unmitigated crap. of course, so is the dark blue suit and wingtips (but they can help one play the part in the event that the system must be brought down while acting as an inside player...)

i'm proud that i've been able to dismiss this consumptive fashion crap from my mind, to not think it matters anymore. i don't know why, but i've done an almost complete job of it. i don't even harbour little vestiges of it the way i do the lingering fear of a christian hell.

i don't secretly wish i could order 86 dozen charvet shirts the way the maharajah of patiala did, as reported in the article called "what's my line?" i find i have no desire for a $370,000 maybach automobile with its "pre-pimped old world niceties like a champagne refridgerator"--or even the suggested "alternative route" of an humble "sub-zero 424 fs free-standing wine cellar" for the utterly stupid price of $2,888.

now, don't get me wrong: i derive joy from being surrounded by pleasant things. i like objects to work correctly, and i am not at all opposed to those correctly operating things being made with an eye toward aesthetics. the concept of "fit and finish" is a sign that someone crafted a thing with care and love. like furniture-maker james krenov, i believe when a maker does work with love and care and serenity the object created is imbued with these qualities. it radiates these qualities. it is a joy to be around.

and that brings me to the central point of this post: joy. i don't know about you, but when i'm filled with joy i tend to smile. i'd venture to say that if i got marooned on a desert island for 20 years, i'd still smile when things made me happy.

so, apropos to this "style issue," wouldn't it would seem that the sole purpose of all these possible possessions--written about, eulogized, waxed rhapsodic over, researched, photographed, priced, summed-up and critiqed for 172 shiny pages of magazine--would exist to help us be happy?


why is it then, of the 126 advertisements that contained the male face in this issue of pressing male fashion concerns, there are only 8 smiling faces?*




*5 of which were in a single izod ad

Three thoughts for today

I’m at lunch right now, taking a break from working on an article, which I will tell you about momentarily.

1. The first thing I want to say, though, is that I’m working at the main campus of UMass-Dartmouth, Walter’s school, and although I am quite pleased with how accessible everything is to me, it is, without doubt, the ugliest university campus I’ve ever been on. It looks like what would happen if Le Corbusier got assimilated by the Borg. (I was going to say if Frank Lloyd Wright got assimilated, but Walter assures me that I’m not right about that—you can judge for yourself.)
2. The library here has very nice bathrooms, though. They’re environmentally designed, with antimicrobial floors and walls, and incredibly high-speed hand-dryers. I am no fan of hand dryers, but these are pretty cool: you put your hands under them, and they blow so hard that your skin waves around, like those images of people in accelerators that pull their faces back. And in about three seconds, your hands are dry.
3. It turns out that I have not lost my ability to write academic articles. Back in, gosh, June probably, I was invited to be a contributing editor to an online collection of rare and out-of-print 19th century documents. At that point I (stupidly) agreed—I was flattered to be sought out as a writer and scholar—and so what that means is that for this entire academic year so far, I’ve had a 30-page essay hanging over my head. Three extensions and eight months later, I considered reneging, but my colleague Claire wisely suggested that my agonizing over whether or not to do it was actually more stressful than just sitting down and doing it, so I’ve spent my spring break writing. And I have to say, it’s not bad. I’ve given it four days of solid work (reasonable work, though—I spend 6-8 hours on it and then call it quits for the day), and I’ve had the pleasant realization that, once again, I do have things to say and the ability to say them. I’ll let you know when it’s online.

Dovetail demo

I'm in Massachusetts right now, and due to a fortuitous twist of fate (the downtown library, where I'd planned to do some writing, required proof of Massachusetts residency to use the internet, so I left and went to Walter's studio to get his truck keys), I got to see Walter do a demonstration of how to make dovetails.

He was standing in his work space, surrounded by about ten undergraduates, and although a dovetail demo could easily become pretty boring, he had those students' full attention--and mine, too. He was great! He seemed completely at ease, effortlessly masterful. You know how sometimes you'll see a presentation and you'll be nervous for the presenter, feeling like they're holding it together, but just barely? (Random side note: Jay Crockett lives for this kind of anxiety in the theater--he holds his breath, waiting to see if something will go wrong so that the actors will have to improvise.) I didn't feel even a hint of that codependent anxiety because Walter was so clearly in his element, telling stories, making jokes, and offering really clear instructions. The handout he gave the students said, "Relaxed, calm, and happy" at the top, and that's how he seemed, like he was meant to teach students how to make dovetails.

New Cottonelle slogan

Here's what Walter and I think Cottonelle's slogan should be:

Life's too short to walk around with crusty pieces of shit in your butt hair.

Walmart caves in!

Apparently Walmart has decided to carry emergency contraception in its pharmacies. This is great news--I actually stood up and cheered this morning in the living room of my parents' house when they announced it on the Today show. I'm still no fan of Walmart, of course, but since they're one of the biggest pharmacy chains in the country, what they do matters. And how on earth some people can consider emergency birth control a bad idea is beyond me.

Here's what I said to my dad: if our goal is to reduce the number of abortions, then the way to do this is to make contraceptives and information about contraceptives widely available. Many of the folks who are strongly anti-abortion are also strongly anti-contraception and anti-sex education. And although a big part of anti-abortion rhetoric is about saving babies, the states that have the most restrictions on abortion rights are also the states that spend the least money on services for poor children. So that leads me to wonder, what is their real agenda?

My dad, in a moment of clarity, said, "Power and control."

Well, there you have it.

But the good news this morning is, if the condom breaks, you can go to Walmart and get Plan B.

Stomping grounds

I'm in Nashville today for the briefest of visits. Right now I'm sitting in Fido, one of my old hang-outs. Charleston has a strange lack of good coffee shops, so I'm enjoying a few moments here, in a space that still feels so familiar--and yet, in the edges of my consciousness I do feel like a visitor here. It's a weird doppelganger effect (like the scene in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell where Childermass sees Lady Pole both in the sanitarium and in Faerie simultaneously).

The perils of blogging

It's time for a new posting, and since I can't think of anything going on in my life to blog about, now seems as good a time as any to post about the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article about blogging.

The pseudonymous Ivan Tribble is "a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college in the midwest." In his article, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," he advises job seekers to beware of having blogs. He refers to experiences from his department's job search, in which the search committee googled candidates, found their blogs, and read them. He cites the bad examples of candidates who bitched about their current jobs on their blogs, or who revealed on their blogs that they'd misrepresented their research in the job search process. Okay, so we can probably all agree that these are bad ideas, since the blog is a public forum. Although Baxter Sez sometimes feels like an intimate conversation among friends, we've seen here that lots of other folks may be hanging out among the friends. So I try not to say anything here that I wouldn't want my dean, or the parents' of my students, to read. It's a good idea for folks searching for jobs to be mindful of blogging responsibly.

However, Tribble goes on to say,

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Okay, so he's suggesting that having any kind of public forum is a bad thing for a candidate looking for an academic job? The fact that a candidate might have a life that extends outside the walls of the university--that the candidate might at some point in the future voice an opinion that represents a "lapse of professional decorum"--is reason not to hire a person?

Come on, folks. I mean, yikes. What do you all have to say about this?