If you’ve got a player piano these are stacked up at the Value Village in Southcenter.
Menswear is a popular social media topic. A lot of guys, young and old, wish the world had a little more style and taking a care in your appearance has a reverberative effect. Every well-dressed person can be like Johnny Appleseed, sowing elements of style.
I’m going to do a little fit check every day, just to put it out there. In the PNW the one person not in a puffy jacket is the best-dressed person in the room.
My whole wardrobe is vintage, mostly thrifted (although lately from eBay as well), and I love the way every item has a story. Thrifting clothes requires you know your sizes, your body’s architecture and the basics of fit. Finding clothes that fit properly is a constant struggle and unless you have everything tailored to your body from scratch you will always be making compromises. That’s just another element of the sport of it. For jackets always start with the shoulders, that’s the place they need to fit best.
Today’s blazer is a 44R wool/camel hair blend by André Vachon, an extinct mid-level tailor from the 80s and 90s. What intrigued me was the “Tailored in Japan”, very unusual for the brand and in general for blazers.
The tie is by Façonnable, a super French label and Nordstrom staple in the 80s and 90s. Most of their early shirts were made in the USA and their fabrics and tailoring is all great. This tie is from France, which is cool. It’s wool rather than silk so has texture in addition to pattern.
The shirt is Robert Talbott, another older Nordstrom staple from Carmel, CA. They make really nice ties. When I saw this made in Portugal label at Goodwill it stuck out. The little archipelago of Japan, France and Portugal in this outfit is fun.
I put only momentary thought into this because outfits thrown together are usually better than outfits carefully thought out. Started with the shirt, liked the light blazer with it and it needed a dark tie. I think patterns enjoy being juxtaposed but texture can knit things together. The light blue in the shirt catches the silver in the jacket, the paisley is usually found in silk ties so the wool clicks as slightly coarser.
Anyway, then I was out the door.
As per my last post, I highly recommend shopping the vintage market for clothes. I’ve recently taken some of my gently used vintage items to my old friends at @barn.owl.vintage in Georgetown and a bunch more to my new friends at @creatureconsign on 15th Ave. on Capitol Hill. The Barn Owl folks have some workwear, sweaters and boots I’ve known and loved (and they could probably tell you which ones were mine) while Creature has a big selection of dress shirts and blazers, all size XL. I recommend both stores for having very clear aesthetics.
Seattle has many great small consignment and vintage stores. They’re not only a great place to find cool clothes they’re also a way for some of your really nice old stuff to find a new home. All good vintage stores are picky about what they take but you might have things in the back of a closet they’d really like to see. The thing to do is shop in vintage stores, that gives you a chance to understand what vintage buyers like.
Wearing vintage clothes isn’t for everyone—sometimes a jacket that’s 60 years old costs more than a new one would—but it can also be a labor of love and an expressive language. Amazon has made it so easy to consume a torrent of pure garbage. Vintage shopping for clothes, furniture, housewares, hardware, it’s slower, more thoughtful, and the things you find aren’t just miles better in terms of quality, they come with stories. Most stuff is still less expensive than new garbage and, importantly, it’s a small part of punching out of the frenzy of cheap consumerism that’s doing real damage to the world on a dozen fronts.
And it’s fun, a great first date!
Don’t be intimidated, just be sure to try stuff on because old sizes can be different.
So go to Creature and Barn Owl and see if you can tell which shirts and sweaters were mine!
Sigh. End of an era. My dad actually knew Eddie Bauer the man. The old stores were real northwest outfitters, full of sturdy gear, a lot of it made locally. In college my friend Bob Wood and I went through a phase where we just wore Eddie Bauer.
Then the familiar story, the corporate ownership, the off-shoring of production, the outside management, gradually they squandered everything they’d built. They became a mall store, a poor-quality version of North Face, itself a poor-quality version of its former self. Eddie Bauer went all-in on the 50% off sale: lure people in with fake savings on outlet-grade outdoorsy fast-fashion.
I always kept an eye on Eddie Bauer because it held a revered place, like REI, Filson, Pendleton, Danner, Pacific Northwest companies that were more than brands, they were emblems of the region, the Alaska gold rush, the summiting of Everest.
I went to a Pendleton store at the outlet mall in Tulalip yesterday and asked, straightaway, “How many things in here are made in Oregon?” She was very informed: “The wool is still milled in OR and WA, but shirts are sewn in Mexico and overseas.” The labor costs for garment workers are so much lower that they ship giant bales of fabric out and finished garments back. That’s the business model, but it’s a suicide pact and a cash grab. It’s not sustainable, environmentally or ethically.
I’m really on this Where-Are-Things-Made? kick. Turns out Sri Lanka has the best labor-protection culture in Asia and really strives to keep their workers from being exploited. Not so other countries, many of whom turn a blind eye to terrible conditions. At the same outlet mall, yesterday, I visited several stores, Burberry, Polo, Brooks Brothers, J. Crew, just looking at labels, and overwhelmingly the clothes were made in Vietnam where labor exploitation is rife. These brands are meaningless, the clothes all come from the same tiny country where people are slaving away.
When we say, “Manufacture locally” it’s not xenophobic, it’s not snobby, it’s serious stuff. Our present dystopia is reaching sci-fi levels and it starts here.
Look at the labels and think about where your things are made.
Watching the Olympic downhill and Super G with my sister. I was only a middling ski racer as a kid but Susan was very gifted. We both were coached A LOT growing up and still feel skiing very viscerally. Susan quit racing before she was old enough for the downhill, and I only raced downhill a handful of times (including one spectacular crash) and the Super G was only invented just after we both left racing, but watching the races together we are non-stop commenting on every skier, “Whoa, he’s got his hands a little back.” “Look at that line!” “He’s not focused,” “God, he’s so compact!” Even though neither of us was an elite athlete in the end we’re both natural coaches and our color commentary is pretty good.
Susan flinches when skiers get off balance where I tend to wince. You can feel it in your body, even though neither of us ever hit those speeds or competed at that level. It’s as hard on me at 40MPH as it is on them at 90MPH. When you do something long enough you’re able to discern subtle differences in technique so that watching the sport feels like it has real consequences.
We don’t have many things like this, where we sit and watch a sport and it connects us to our youth, our dad, Alaska, a through-line of our whole lives. We both have friends that skied and snowboarded at levels way beyond, and when they were on TV we armchair-coached them too.
Go #Seahawks
Young Dads Social Club meets again. We agreed it was our last meeting and the club is adjourned forever. That’s been our regular resolution since 1994
Enjoyed talking with Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck on @kuow Week in Review with Bill Radke and KIRO radio’s David Ross. Councilmember Rinck holds Position 8, the citywide council seat I ran for over a decade ago!
I’m on the Week in Review on KUOW IN ONE MINUTE!
FYI, these four bad boys are waiting for someone at the Shoreline Goodwill on 145th tomorrow morning at 10AM.
These are AI-generated videos. The world we grew up in where photojournalism played a role in forming our opinions is gone. This is true for entertainment as well. Facebook and Instagram will be straight garbage in a year and we face a choice of whether to continue to consume video content or to shut it out. There's no middle ground, you either DRAMATICALLY curtail what you watch or you submit to watching dreck. We're at a turning point.
Ok Redditor @vinylnovelrunner has posted this picture of the bandbox Long Winters LPs having arrived at their door, the first confirmed sighting. After many, many long months of wondering whether these LPs will ever see the light of day we can now confirm at least ONE set of them exists. Hope this bodes well for anyone else who submitted a claim. For the record, no one has received any clear communication, the records are just marked as “shipped” in USPS tracking. Fingers crossed!
Our family tradition is to make “cheesy biscuits” on Xmas. We don’t eat it any other time of the year except sometimes on my birthday. My mom was the keeper of the cheesy biscuit secrets until she taught me, and now I’m teaching my daughter. At one point said daughter decided I needed an apron so she tied this one on me. She got it at @prettyparlors and, needless to say, she was wearing a much more elaborate apron with many frills. She would have probably kept taking photos but we had to get back to making cheesy biscuits.
LOL, #Washington
Lindsey Vonn is the greatest American athlete.
I think the kid that went to Caltech designed the sticker for the kid that went to MIT.
I like to pop into @barn.owl.vintage in Georgetown now and then to visit my friend @jpdand and see what new treasures they’ve found, but this week was different. They had one of the all-time holy grails of Filson gear, the legendary Golden Cruiser.
The Band Owl held an auction and it sold for an eye-watering $10k, which has to be close to the record for a piece of Filson gear, so I just had to see it before it went on its way to the new owner. Much to my eternal devastation it fit me like a glove, a most beautiful piece forever out of reach. Still, a pleasure to wear around the store however briefly.
Thanks to Barn Owl for adding to the lore and having so much fun with vintage clothes.
It’s 10PM on a Wednesday, raining, 55 degrees and windy. I’m leaving a holiday party full of musicians in Georgetown only to find that under the highway bridge these folks are fully committed to a soccer scrimmage.
It takes all kinds to make a world. I’m sharing the world with these folks and we have less than nothing in common in this moment, but I know I could sit and talk to any of them for an hour and enjoy it.
Which are you, musician holiday party that ends at ten or rainy soccer game that goes into the night? It’s probably a spectrum.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when my kid organized my ties? She said, “I LOVE ORGANIZING!” and it warmed my heart.
Now daddy has a NEW project, let’s see if she REALLY loves organizing!
Adults argue until they’re blue in the face! Does she go strictly alphabetical? Separate by genre? By era? I have a bunch of 78s, some with her great-grandmother’s voice. My sister bought tons of euro and Japanese import 12” singles in the early 80s, do they belong together? Rock EPs and jazz 13”s? I don’t have that many 45s but some box sets for sure.
I don’t think everything will fit in these shelves so THEN what will she do?
(Remember, my CONTROVERSIAL parenting style is to sit with a coffee and watch her work, so there may be street protests.)
I also expect to hear some opinions from @nabilayers @easystreetrecords @easystreetguy @gibbstack and others about best practices but I’m going to let her make this call and hopefully we’ll be listening to records as we go.
Because these crates have been in storage she’s become a teenager in Streaming Times and has never really sat with albums. I think she’s ready, but is she ready for Martin Denny’s Forbidden Island? Ahmad Jamal’s Chamber Music of the New Jazz? MC Frontalot’s double album D-20? Is she prepared for how many Alice Cooper LPs she’s going to find? What will she make of a 12” dance remixes of Union of the Snake or Malcom McLaren Fans?
A quick glance at a bin the was once organized a certain way finds The Challengers>Captain and Tennille>Cheech and Chong>Cheap Trick>Cher>Chicago>Chipmunk Punk>Clash>Elvis Costello>Cream>Creedence>CSN(Y)>Cult>Cure
That’s all pretty normal stuff for a person my age but it would be a nutty playlist. I’ll keep you posted!
Hi friends! I want to alert you to some movement on the Bandbox saga. I’ll be traveling today so won’t be monitoring this closely but the site bandbox.sucks is preparing to open a claims process for people who ordered Bandbox editions of The Long Winters. The site says it opens today, Dec 5th, although as of this moment the link is not live. Technically it is still Dec 5th somewhere until 4AM Pacific when it’s midnight on Baker Island in the US Minor Outlying Islands.
Only people who weren’t refunded by their credit card companies are eligible so if you got your money back after Bandbox folded you shouldn’t apply. That means, hopefully, they have plans to sell the remaining LPs and there will be an opportunity for people who wanted them and did manage to get their money back to still acquire these editions.
We (Barsuk Records, The Long Winters and me personally) have zero insight into the process or control over the outcomes. If we can buy any of the remaining records at cost we will certainly do so but I imagine the folks at bandbox.sucks will sell them first. I have no indication either way.
As I’ve explained before, we (Barsuk, The Long Winters and me personally) were also ripped off by Bandbox and kept in the dark. We have no stake in this process and can neither influence it nor profit from it. We just want everyone to get these records and for this whole episode to be resolved. I cannot answer any questions because I have no more information than what I’m posting here.
If you are part of this group, or know someone who is, (ordered the records, paid the money, didn’t get a refund), it is up to you to monitor bandbox.sucks and fill out the claim form when it goes live. After that, it is in other hands. There will only be a two week window to submit your claim.
For those of you in the back with your hands raised let me say it again, I don’t know anything more than this, have no contact or connection with this enterprise, cannot influence it or explain it, and make no guarantees. I have hopes that in the end everyone will get what they want and I am an optimistic person. Bless you and good luck to all bands!
