Style Icons: Male »Stephen Malkmus

Stephen MalkmusIt’s not like Brittany’s going to pick a Pavement song any time soon, mainly because it’s music that tends to work best for dudes. My good friend Danny‘s copy of Slow Century sits prominently on a bookshelf in our living room and whenever we have a party Marcus considers borrowing is, but he knows he’d have to watch it by himself –?hich is the main reason I’ve yet to see it.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Slanted and Enchanted are my picks (though there’s a lot to like about Terror Twilight and Wowee Zowee), mainly because the double disc editions that Matador released a couple of years ago came out out at a time when I was working in a place that sold CDs and I was able to listen to the amazing previously unreleased material all day long. But Malkmus’s post Pavement stuff is awesome as well. I’m particularly partial to Pig Lib, where I think that as a guitar player he really began to face the truth (lolz) and reflect on just how little distance there was between where his own work was going and the music of the man who, throughout the entire 1990s stood as his diametric opposite, Trey Anastasio.

But it’s not just his guitar playing, it’s his attitude that makes him one of may all time favorite famous dudes. I don’t think I’ve ever read an interview where he doesn’t put someone down – and he’s usually he’s totally in the right. On Billy Corgan:

“I don’t really know. Some people say he’s nice, but he’s full of himself. He has a lot of fans so I can see how that happens. They weren’t very good in concert, they sounded real bad.”

Other times, he’s just being a dick:

“For all the mistakes that were made marketing Pavement, it comes down to the song; and the song [Cut Your Hair] was pretty good, but it just wasn’t the song of the time. The Offspring song [“Come Out and Play”], “Cannonball” by the Breeders — those were bigger songs people could get behind.”

Kim Deal responded pretty awesomely on the last page of a magazine I am somehow subscribed to for life (I haven’t paid them in at least 3 years):

“Yeah, I liked Pavement. But if he keeps fucking smacking his mouth off about me, I’m going to end up not being able to listen to any of their fucking records again. Anyway, I thought, God, man, “Cut Your Hair” isn’t as good of a song as “Cannonball,” so fuck you. How’s that? Your song was just a’ight, dawg.”

Fair enough.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Style Icons: Female »Kathryn Bigelow

Point Breaker

Hands down, this foot chase is the best action sequence I’ve ever seen. It’s no secret that I love Point Break, but I really love its intellectual director, onetime wife of the (I assume) insufferable James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow – just listen to her discuss Near Dark.

While it’s true that Strange Days wasn’t quite what I hoped for and I skipped K-19: The Widowmaker altogether, there’s tremendous buzz building up around the Hurt Locker, and I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Desserts »Candy Corn

harvest candy cornWhenever we find ourselves at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, Brittany always pushes for candy necklaces at the sweet shop just visible beyond the central seating area. Actually, Brittany pushes for candy necklaces wherever they’re available, but this place has the candy corn I really like.

More than corn shapes, there are pumpkins and I think yams, and they’re delicious, but after a couple of days they start to harden up and go stale – which I actually find really reassuring,?particularly when I consider all the preservatives Brachs must dump into their vats of wax to turn out their batches of candy corn. Ahh, Unwrapped! You’ve spoiled it all by revealing the rubber gloves, hair nets and overhead florescent tubes that only serve to taint our sweetest childhood candy experiences.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Restaurants »Daisy May’s BBQ

Daisy Maes BBQBrittany opted for a pulled pork sandwich and, to be honest, after having one of Ed Mitchell‘s there’s really no comparison – but I ordered the brisket and it was delicious. Tack on two low calorie sides (mashed potatoes + gravy and baked beans) and you end up with a pretty full stomach.

We went on a quiet Monday night and, although it’s a bit out of the way for us (11th at 46th Street), the dude-oriented environment was quiet and comfortable, for barbecue in the city, this is a pretty good option.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Spend a Couple Hours »The Pool at the Y

Greenpoint YWe live across the street from the Y, so it totally made sense to join back when we first moved in. I’m not super into exercise classes or devices, so the pool has always been the most appealing way to burn calories.

While it’s not very big (at all), it’s pretty quiet right after 7:30 in the morning and it’s open until 10pm (I think)… I just discovered that swimming isn’t very effective for burning calories, running is. Oh well, swimming in the pool, inhaling in the calming aroma of chlorine has always been a satisfactory experience for me, and I don’t see it changing.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Drinks »Chicago Fizz

Honestly, I don’t like the taste of booze that much. My taste skews away from what you might consider more sophisticated adult beverages like Old Fashioned (and wine) toward Mudslides (which are all I drink on tropical vacations) and Pina Coladas. This usually isn’t a big issue, beer tends to be on the menu most everywhere, but with the recent rise of the expensive cocktail bars, I’ve found myself in a couple of real jams.

Hotel Delmano offers St. Regis cocktails, which are certainly drinkable in copious amounts, but it was on a visit to Little Branch that I discovered this delightfully potent potable. Rum, port, lemons, sugar, carbonated water and an egg combine to make this frothy treat which I highly recommend for those of you not wanting swill a G&T.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Places to Visit »Muttontown Preserve

King Zogs Castle - Muttontown PreserveComposed of over 550 acres, the largest natural preserve on this half of Long Island boasts a well preserved estate and plenty of equestrian paths, but by far the most interesting portion of the park is the ruins of King Zog’s castle.

The deposed Albanian king bought the 60 room mansion (and walled garden –which is now hauntingly overgrown) known as Knollwood back in 1951. Since Zog fled with a substantial portion of Albania’s gold and jewels in his possession, local yokes and adventurers assumed he must of hidden great wealth in the walls of his newly purchased property. So, while Zog was negotiating with the US government to obtain citizenship for his 120 person court (which ended up being a no go, Zog settled in France), treasure hunters looted the home, inflicting so much damage that the building had to be demolished in 1959.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Spend a Couple Minutes »Mane N Tail

mane n tailSure, I realize that not everybody has a beard (yet), but I just wanted to pass along this grooming tip to anyone who is, or may know someone who is in the process of beard development.

Everybody complains about how much a young beard itches – and it’s true, there’s definitely some discomfort there – but far too often this discomfort causes dudes to abort their beards before they can grow to maturity.

Stop the insanity! This product, originally developed for horses by the Straight Arrow company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, can totally reduce early onset itchiness when used frequently. Remember, there’s no such thing as over shampooing and conditioning your beard.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

TV Shows »The Young Ones

the young onesSure, lots of sitcoms “push the boundaries”, but is there really another show you could honestly attach the word anarchist to? Four students attending Scumbag College, Rick “The People’s Poet” (a pompous twit), Vyvyan Basterd (the deranged punk), Neil Pye (the defeated hippie) and Mike the cool person (not a actually all that cool) are roommates in a filthy flat back in the heyday of Thatcher’s England. Every character is an idiot and a horrible, horrible person – but this show is truly hilarious, especially to dudes in college.

Violent and mean spirited, it wallows in squalor and fuses high brow surreal antics with the basest comedy imaginable. Marxist comedian Alexei Sayle, whose bits I never quite wrapped my head around, plays a host of characters, notably the landlord, but other well known comedians pop up as well. And it’s got the best closing music ever!

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Web Sites »Son of San Guinary

Son of San GuinaryOne of the great things about my new job (besides browsing the stock image site we use with the adult filter turned off – which has been yielding a lot of semi-erotic scantily clad moms-to-be and Santa’s helpers this month) is the amount of time I get to spend Google image searching. I don’t care what you’re looking for, after about page 18 you’re going to start getting pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to find. Following these weird images down crazy rabbit holes can be a great way to discover sites like Son of San Guinary.

It’s the home page of an Omaha monster movie show called Creature Feature that was cancelled back in 2003. A Z-level horror movie anthology, the original Creature Feature ran from 1971 to 1982 on KMTV and was a big hit back in the day when locally produced shows like this ruled the Saturday night airwaves. Alas, syndicated sitcoms soon replaced the crazy hosts and it was years before quality programs like She Spies stole back the airwaves.

Son of San Guinary sought to mine the Nebraskan TV audience’s nostalgia for the good old days of Saturday night television – but I think it’s a whole new game since the razor sharp MST3K metasized the bygone world of late night movies. Anyway, it’s not so much the show that caught my attention, but the crazy images. Here’s an awesome gallery of screen shots from the show itself; but it’s these stills of from the horror movies (located in the ARGHives) are truly something else. Hauntingly beautiful in the same way the Beast from Space trailer is (thanks again, Matthew), these lo fi effects are some of my favorite things on the internets – not because they’re cheesy (though it’s easy to feel that way once you notice the site’s background image), but because they’re actually unnerving.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Recipes »Chipotle Chili

chipotle chili homemadeMeaty and delicious with a strong smokey flavor, this recipe makes for fantastic recession era winter eating

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Songs »Scarlet Begonias > Fire on the Mountain – May 8 1977

Grateful Dead in 1977 This is it, the best Grateful Dead song ever – ask anyone, it’s true! Well, maybe not everybody agrees (quibbling and trifling sometimes may appear to the true hallmarks of Deadheads the world over) but this show, recorded live at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on the 8th day of May, 1977 is widely considered be one of the band’s greatest achievements. In fact, the show was so good that 30 years later the mayor of Ithaca declared May 8th to be Grateful Dead Day (which is not too dissimilar to a mayor declaring a pizza to be awesome).

I didn’t initially intend to write a bunch about this, it’s not like any more internet ink needs to be devoted to these particular 25 minutes of bootleg Grateful Dead history (believe it or not, this legendary show has never been released commercially, this sound-board tape has been going around for decades, but this performance will not, for legal reasons ((I think?)), appear on any From the Vault or Dicks Picks collection), and besides what can I really say…

Actually… I can’t help myself, I’ve got tons to say! And besides, I’m about to turn 30, there’s no better time to affect the point of view of an effusive 19-year-old hooked to mixed metaphors – but you don’t have to take my word for it, not only are there are scholars out there proffering far more enlightened assessments than my own, you can click here to listen for yourself (make sure your iPod has some space, it is 25 minutes long, after all). As far as live Dead sets go, it’s pretty accessible – this is the fun side of the Dead, both of theses songs create a kind of vacationy atmosphere, like the ultimate Hawaiian shirt Friday – and I’m sure you’ve heard both of these songs independently; Scarlet Begonias gets more air time than Fire on the Mountain, for sure, but (at least when I was a kid listening to WHCN) classic rock DJs are occasionally kind to these songs (mainly when they can’t find their copy of Skeletons from the Closet).

An extremely celebratory Scarlet Begonias starts with a bang, and the sky turns yellow; the sun: blue. Donna Jean adds some stylized wailing into the mix after the final chorus winds down and at around five and a half minutes the transition begins. To my ears, this particular journey isn’t accomplished so much by seamlessly transporting the audience from one psychedelic shore to another via some inter-dimensional slip stream (standard practice, pretty much), but by forceful keyboard playing on the part of the late, great Keith Godchaux (despite the fact that the shows played this season are universally acknowledged as the Dead’s finest hour, Keith and Donna Jean were out of the band by 1979 – and within a matter of months after that Keith passed away in a tragic car accident). The movement has clear beginning and end points, moments so crisply delineated that it becomes quite clear that there’s a definite destination – and Keith (for one) is in a hurry to get there.

The playing is anything but subtle (while metaphorical scalpels are invoked regularly throughout the band’s long live career as transitionalists, there are just as many occasions where hatchets are pulled down from their hooks and wielded with great ferocity), Keith marches the band along (much like he motivated the latter portion of Jack Straw earlier in the evening), which lends the lead guitarist’s inquisitive playing a preoccupied tone: even as Garcia shines his mind-light into the cosmic caverns the band hurtles past, stuttering on the precipice of exotic sojourns, the anxious pounding at the piano reminds him there are places to go, people to see, and so the passages he plays drop hints of potential trips and foreshadow the mind-blowing things to come. Even Weir, consummate colorist, seems to be chomping at the bit, then the break happens; the destination is reached right about at the halfway mark.

Familiarity is restored and Phil and the drummers slide right into place and establish a rhythmic structure strong enough to sustain the explosive launches that are coming shortly – though not too shortly, now that the band has gotten where they’re going, they can stretch their legs a bit before the real heavy lifting begins. As the signature wah wah key notes emerge from beneath emerald waves, the song takes on a bit of a submarine quality, sound waves flutter through a flooded dreamworld, watery notes reverberate off of walls of light.

As the old psychedelic warlock finishes up the story of a disaffected, lazy messenger service employee and an impotent dragon (complete with a big sing-along chorus) and begins his first guitar solo, he’s transformed into a kind of benign aural-astral educator, outlining some initial principles then wading waist deep into heavier concepts before recalling (having nearly forgotten) that there’s still another verse to sing. The crowd responds accordingly, now that they have a firm idea of what’s in store. Donna Jean throws some of her trademark hard/soft vocal stylings in and before you know it the second solo has begun.

Garcia picks up pretty much where he left off, assuming that the groundwork he just set down is still fresh in your mind and, at about 20 minutes into the piece, the mind-blowing passages begin. Everything he’d been so diligently setting up for the last however many minutes falls into place and suddenly he’s painting with solar flares?– locating the fiery mountain high in the heavens. This kind of guitar playing is typically referred to as spiral latticework, which is an incredibly accurate description. Sound helixes wind and wrap around each other, climbing ever higher into far off starscapes.

After the blaze, a reasonable holding pattern is established before Garcia launches into the stratosphere a final time, straining to reach the top of it all, the highest peak imaginable, when suddenly the explosive apex is attained and, in Icarian fashion, everything comes crashing down. Foundations shake, crystal palaces shatter and the jolting ride back down to earth comes too fast and too furiously. The band synchs up for a succinct sign off and before you even know what hit you, they’re tuning up for Estimated Prophet.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Laughs »Gino the Ginny

gino the ginnyI’ll be honest, the set up is a lot funnier than the videos themselves – be prepared for a wealth of bad titles and horrible club music. A couple of months back, my old co-worker Cody described the self-anointed YouTube sensation kind of like this (only Cody would affect a pretty good Long/Staten Island accent from time to time to emphasize the cultural criticism):

“It’s a 12-year-old kid imitating his older brother, who is a total Guido. He’s wearing a tank top and a gold chain and his hair is blown out and he talks about going to clubs, pumping mega-mixes, and taking ecstasy.”

It sounds hilarious, right? And it is, to a degree. He shouts things like, “If I’m not VIP, I’m fucking out of here!” and “Who’s DJing tonight? DJ Go-Fuck-Yourself!” Which is pretty funny; but the clips aren’t short and the lack of brevity kind of deflates the concept after a little while.

But this clip of Guido fashion police is pretty awesome: Get Juiced!

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Movies »Demonlover

demonloverNo one does corporate espionage quite like Olivier Assayas. We watched Boarding Gate a little while ago and at one point I had to pause the DVD and ask aloud, “If you could make a movie about anything you wanted, why would you choose this story?” Brittany didn’t know for sure, but what really prompts my question isn’t so much a distaste for office intrigue – which is a perfectly valid genre to work in – but the way the writer/director goes about putting these movies together. There’s something really mind-blowing about how Assayas not only over-thinks the story, but how he consistently gets the kind of banal details that many filmmakers live or die by totally wrong, then, in the next scene, spends far too much time on what feels like the actual conversations these working professionals would really have with their colleagues – conversations that other filmmakers (the same filmmakers so anxious to portray banal everyday-osity) would find far too technical and specific and would feel obligated to water down with more universal factors in an effort to restore audience relate-ability.

It happens all the time in Boarding Gate: time and again the actual work that Michael Madsen’s character does (which is central to the story) is vaguely explained; apparently it’s financial – tied to the international markets – and he made some bad discussions a while back. This seemingly deliberate lack of specificity forces me to wonder, has Assayas ever had a real job? Has he ever worked in an office? Why, if this character’s job is so important to his movie, did he choose to do no actual research and leave the details out, which tends to be fairly common practice on the stage – where common knowledge dictates that those kind of details only hold a play back – but are routinely included in films – where realism tends to trump the black backdrop stylization of the modern theater? But then, towards the end of the film, Kim Gordon appears on the scene (Sonic Youth created the music for Demonlover, which I promise I’ll get to shortly), and gives the always phenomenal Asia Argento this incredibly detailed and (according to Brittany, who works in the industry in question) incredibly accurate description of the garment production work she oversees in Hong Kong.

That’s the contrast that makes these films so interesting: the purposeful omission of details (in an almost studenty way) that would ground the story in a semi-realistic world clashes with instances where the realism become un-filmic – which sets Assayas up to do what he does best, work with structure. And that’s really what sets Demonlover apart from Boarding Gate, it’s much a more successful and intriguing film because the narrative unravels in such a complex and disturbing way.

Here’s a quick synopsis: Diane (the steely Connie Nielsen), a corporate saboteur secretly employed by an Anime distribution outfit called Mangatronics to ensure that the takeover of the Japanese production studio TokyoAnime by the powerful VolfGroup corporation does not divert Mangatronics’s current market share to its rival, the American distribution company Demonlover. The resourceful Diane quickly dispatches her superior at Volf, a woman named Karen (Dominique Reymond) who just bought a jet black Audi TT, and takes over the details of the takeover. Diane and fellow Volf account exec Herve (Charles Berling) head to Japan to finalize the deal, which, the audience is told, is barely legal (who knows why). After a long working lunch discussing the legality of characters without pubic hair, Diane and Herve are taken over to the Anime-Tokyo studio, where they are turned on to the state of the art work that TokyoAnime is making (3-D animation not quite on par with the intro to Diablo II) as well as the existing product line (our DVD is censored, and the cartoon penetration is pixelated, but apparently there’s a 2-disc directors cut out there, somewhere).

Back in Paris, events take a quick turn when Gina Gershon, an executive at Demonlover, is picked up at the airport by Karen’s former assistant Elise (the lovely Chloe Sevigny, playing a character who’s always sticking her baby-sitter with overtime). Diane makes a number of moves to block Volf from signing a deal with Demonlover that would put Mangatronics out of business while CEO Volf himself (in Paris for only 16 hours) questions the Demonlover top brass about their involvement with an interactive torture site called Hellfire Club. Desperate to thwart the Demonlover contract, Diane dresses up in the kind of tight clothes required for willowy B&E and things start to go off the rails as the consequences of Diane’s actions – and some surprising office allegiances – are revealed.

The Hellfire Club site factors prominently into the latter half of the film and much screen time is devoted to Flash-heavy site intros. I know, it’s a bit hard not to smirk at the 21st century-osity of it all, but that’s okay – even though Foster Wallace didn’t exactly nail impending technological developments, Infinite Jest certainly doesn’t suffer. As the primary themes Assayas is working with become apparent early on: desensitization to sex and violence in these modern times, how even underground pornography – which seems so independent – is now a corporate commodity, how amorality and corruption seep upward into the highest strata of corporate enterprise with the acquisition of a vice-based product line; so do the techniques: the film is shot predominantly in shakey, hand held close ups of characters that are always smoking, classic film noir tropes are employed throughout, not only are there double crosses aplenty but, as one reviewer pointed out, Diane is knocked out more times than Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe combined. Darker themes emerge in the second half regarding the repulsion/allure of sadomasochism and voyeurism and the surrender of sexual control.

But it’s not the contemporary themes and the use of film styles that make this movie so dynamic, it’s Assayas’s use of his own technique: the inversion of these relatively commonplace elements by focusing the audience’s awareness on the surface level, requisite plot, which at time feels so paper-thin that there are moments where the lack of any kind of realism is actually distracting (at one point Diane is trying to reach Volf by phone but he’s unavailable, “tied up with that real estate thing again”; the first floor of the Volf corporate headquarters is a stock boiler room full of young men with telephones in each hand yelling, “Buy” and, “Sell” arbitrarily, while the second floor is reserved for too sexy executives working diligently on contracts for web sites like sexslavelaracroft.com; there’s a scene where a DJ is playing with faders on a mixing board like an over-enthuisiastic extra without any knowledge of the impact that such toying would have on the floor of a Japanese club), which forces audiences to recognize the plot is purely superficial – then Assayas hits back with a scene like the long lunch meeting (a scene that’s too realistic), and the resulting reality discord is an ideal set up for the way that the plot breaks down, not so much in a typical surrealist fashion (comparisons have been made –negatively – to Lost Highway and – positively – to Videodrome), but more along the lines of Blow Up or Glamorama, where the plot folds in on itself and all the topical content falls away to reveal something much darker and unsettling than could ever be reached through the straight addition of its parts – like Easton Ellis and Antonioni, Assayas practices a bizarre form of narrative mathematics; like Lynch and Cronenberg, he wields technological dread and sexual anxiety to create the atmosphere of a nightmare that’s gone on too long.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise so please, check it out for yourself. While I can’t promise you’ll like it (it was booed when it premiered at Cannes), you’re not likely to see anything else quite like it.

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Posted on December 8, 2008

Books »Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest This book takes place in the future (the future Wallace envisioned in the mid 1990s, the future we envision today is a bit different, there's really no place for the Clean Party in the coming years), in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which I think is 2009. Set in the Metro Boston area, about half of the story takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an elaborate campus atop a scenic hill offering a view of the massive catapults that hurl waste north to the Great Concavity, while the other half of the book (it's a massive tome, 1000 or so pages including the copious foot notes, which you really can't skip) focuses on a halfway house half way down the same hill. A number of unforgettable characters populate the pages, the entire Incandenza family (including the long departed patriarch, the “Mad Stork” James Orin Incandenza, who visits Don Gately in wraith form after Gately gets shot by the Canuck with the “Moose” shirt after the coke addict who kills the dogs… it gets complicated.) The book is excellent, the first fifty pages or so may not be exactly easy going, but soon the book opens right up and you< do not want it to end. Which it does, eventually. Kind of. Oh–and there's Eschaton and the wheelchair assassins and the Madame Psychosis radio program and the Whataburger invitational and Pemulis buying that DMZ...

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Posted on December 5, 2005

Style Icons: Female »Goldie Hawn

Goldie Hawn No matter where she's appearing–from Laugh In to the one where she's rich and gets amnesia and Kurt Russell and his kids take care of her until she gets her memory back but she still loves them–Goldie Hawn has an awesome style. Not like that so-called daughter of hers, the one who married the stoned brother from the Black Crowes.

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Posted on December 5, 2005

Style Icons: Male »Robert Evans

Robert Evans In this picture it looks like Roman Polanski's come by the house because he's dating Evans's daughter. I don't know if Evans has a daughter, but if I had a daughter, I wouldn't let Roman Polanski anywhere near her, even if he is 85. I don't know if you've seen “The Kid Stays In the Picture”, but it's a marvelous showcase of all these awesome outfits Evans wore in the old days. Lots of pink polo shirts and nice fitting trousers. The good stuff.

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Posted on December 5, 2005