Ficke

Sartorially Screwed

Becks complained last week about the poor clothing choices available these days for women, specifically the lack of linings in shirts:

There were two shirts I would have bought had they been lined. That's one of my biggest pet peeves -- I hate that so many things come in that grey area now where it's obviously not meant to be sheer but you can see right through it.  Bah.

One might be tempted to cry "conspiracy!" and curse the names of those in the fashion-industrial complex. And it would be correct to do so. Caroline Weber had a review in the Times Sunday Book Review of Dana Thomas's book, "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," which details the increasingly corporate and profit-driven nature of the luxury industry over the past couple of decades:

Insofar as luxury has gone corporate, relentlessly focused on the bottom line, quality has disappeared. In order to keep margins high (in 2005, LVMH recorded more than $17 billion in sales and a net profit of almost $1.8 billion), Arnault and his competitors have cut costs wherever and whenever possible. The most obvious strategies involve using cheaper materials, replacing skilled artisans with computers and machines and outsourcing labor to less expensive markets like China. Sneakier tactics include “cutting sleeves a half an inch shorter” (“when you get to 1,000, you see the savings,” one employee told the author), replacing finished seams with raw edges and eliminating linings on the grounds that “women don’t really need” them. [emphasis added]

Spoon

10/22 and 10/23 at the 9:30 Club. Tickets on sale now. Get 'em before they're gone.

The Monday show, on the 22nd, seems to be the one that folks are settling on, though I am in fact going to both.

Arcane Statistical Measure of the Day

Carillons per 1000 km².

The degree to which The Netherlands and Belgium are kicking our collective asses is totally unacceptable. This carillon gap is a grave threat to our musical security.

Whoops

Apparently a bag of popcorn left in the microwave for a minute too long can set off the whole building's fire alarm system. Uh, sorry about that, folks.

Update: Oh crap, a fire truck showed up. I'm hoping this day doesn't end with me getting a large fine.

Beach Week is a Tool of the Fascists

The mandatory paid leave theme that rippled through the blogosphere a few weeks ago got an airing in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. I thought all the angles had been pretty much covered already, but Walter Kirn takes a novel approach in his case against paid leave, which might be called the "Vacation as Nazi Propaganda" tack.

Kirn makes a two-pronged assault on the whole "vacation" concept. First he argues that it is an obsolete habit:

Grasping the truth about why more Americans are taking holidays from their vacations is as easy as stepping outside your workplace...and seeing that the recuperative promises of the old-style extended getaway...are redeemable everywhere, in every form and so close by that it'€™s a wonder thousand-mile drives in gear-packed station wagons still take place at all.

Add a new verse, Woody Guthrie. This land is leisure land. Strip-mall day spas. Corner yoga studios. Suburban mega-gyms. Wholeness and Recovery Camps. And don'€™t just behold, but gape upon and shiver at the colossal gaming-dining-bowling-Omnimaxing ultra-plexes whose honeycombed, multiplanar interiors evoke the vast convolutions of Utah canyons or the seemingly exitless great basilicas and which produce in me an awe that I felt coerced into experiencing during a boyhood trip to a billboard-hyped cavern in South Dakota, but didn't experience and had to fake so my dad wouldn'€™t sulk and neglect to buy me ice cream.

Ok, so Kirn had an unpleasant family vacation when he was a kid, and has hated nature ever since. Fair enough. Pinning this view on the rest of the country is perhaps a bit presumptuous, but whatever.

The big guns come out next, as Kirn plays the Hitler Card:

The duffel-bag-lugging vacations of my youth...always struck me as forced, unnatural, compulsory. Did people take long vacations out of instinct, to quench an urgent appetite, or had vacations been consciously devised by some overbearing master-protector figure rather like my dad? The answer is that the ritual arose, to a substantial degree, from a decree. I was right, it turns out, so astonishingly right that rather than explaining what I have learned, I'd prefer to let the reader discover it for himself, and shudder. Type the phrase "€œStrength Through Joy" into a search engine, even if you'€™re on a trip right now. Hint: The motto, as its utopian terseness instantly leads you to suspect, is a translation from the German. Another hint: Lederhosen. Conclusion: Invigoration-through-vacationing is not the expression of some bursting life force but, in large part, a Triumph of the Will.

I'm not entirely sure where to begin.

First things first--I did as instructed, and indeed, "Strength Through Joy" turns out to be the name of Nazi Germany's state-controlled leisure organization. That this slogan represented the driving philosophy of the Nazis is taken for granted. I would suggest, as a rebuttal to this view, that Kirn type "Arbeit Macht Frei" into  search engine, but that would avoid the main point here which is that this is all a fucking joke of an argument. Really now, Godwin's Law is supposed to apply to rambling internet discussions, not to the goddamn Paper of Record.

Next week in the Times: a response to criticisms of bloated Defense spending entitled "So's Your Mom".