Over the past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the birthday celebration of an old family friend who has been part of my entire life and a big part of many lives for a lot longer than that. As Jack McGinty turns 90 this week, his children, with whom I grew up, threw him a fantastic surprise party at the venerable Cleveland Yachting Club. I had a great time catching up and reconnecting with old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in decades.
Grown men trying to look young is tragic. Spending tons of money to fix the problem is unnecessary.
An elegy for Cyril, one of my best friends and one of my favorite people, who died today.
As a man and a brand, Tom Ford is an elegant, sophisticated and masterful curator of what looks good and what turns us on.
To most Clevelanders, the idea of going without a car is crazy. Not to me.
I get an email every morning from a popular online men’s magazine. It’s a digest of their newest content, consisting of posts about rare luxury cars, liquor, gear, getaways and whatnot. It’s bro porn.
Here’s the problem: I don’t drink, I neither have nor really want a car, and I don’t have any money. And I’m guessing that at least 99.99999% of the men on this website’s mailing list do not have the money for 99.99999% of the featured gear and getaways either. On rare occasions, the editors feature something fantastic that is actually affordable, which is nice.
So why don’t I unsubscribe? Well…
The way I present myself usually lends a bit of understandable confusion. There is often a presumption that a guy like me – a guy who likes tailored clothes and puts some care into his appearance – is on the luxury spectrum and prepared to talk about or even relate to matters of luxury, designer clothes and other expensive things. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
When fans and writers discuss Carrie Fisher‘s film career, Princess Leia gets all of the attention – and for good reason. Leia was a damsel in distress who held her own and kicked considerable ass in the company of men. Fisher herself said, “I like Princess Leia… I like how she handles things; I like how she treats people.” I grew up with Star Wars. It’s an undeniable cultural phenomenon, and Leia is major for me, too.
But people either forget or are unaware that Fisher made her film debut two years before Star Wars in a little movie with Warren Beatty called Shampoo (1975). Directed by Hal Ashby, Shampoo revolves around a promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser (Beatty) who sleeps with virtually every woman who sits in his salon chair. It also stars Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant, who play women he’s sleeping with who all think they’re the only women he’s sleeping with.
In a small but unforgettable role, a then 17 year old Carrie Fisher displayed a precocious razor-sharp wit that was beyond her years at the time – a foreshadow of the disarming and inimitable sass that would become her trademark, a savvy that saw so clearly and hilariously through the hoax of show business and of life itself. In her brief performance as Lee Grant’s daughter and another one of Beatty’s conquests (or was he her conquest?), she beautifully outmaneuvered two of the most lecherous, manipulative and selfish grown-ups (one being her mother) that any adolescent in safe, rich, white suburbia might ever encounter.
From its beginning, this blog has been about my pursuit of sartorial stealth and effective living. Comparatively speaking, the sartorial stuff is much easier and clearer to write about than the finer points of effective living, which encompasses pretty much everything outside the wardrobe.
As a middle-aged man returning home to an elderly mother who’s in the midst of a tumultuous stay in the hospital with a Whack a Mole set of medical issues, the pursuit of effective living presents a series of daunting and uncharted challenges. Put simply, it’s about showing up. Put more specifically, it’s about showing up in ways I’ve never had to show up before.
