Bad Joke Friday
Something for Thursday
Are you there, collar?
Here’s a weird thing about me: In general, I hate collared shirts.
Now, this might seem slightly confusing since to anyone who pays attention, I clearly own a number of collared shirts. But I have some specific preferences thereof.
Growing up as a kid, I detested collared shirts and I never wore them unless I was specifically ordered to by my parents. I seem to recall that this occasionally vexed my father. In third or fourth grade there was a time when he thought he’d add flannel shirts to my wardrobe, and I resisted this with some vehemence. It wasn’t so much the flannel – although they were brand new shirts, very scratchy – but the stiff collars. I probably wore those shirts a total of twice, both times when I was under orders to do so, and that was that.
What’s my issue with collars? Well, I don’t think that collars generally work well with people who don’t have long or slender necks. My neck is neither of those things, so a collar is always this stiff, annoying thing that’s rubbing all over the sides of my neck and my chin hits it and so on. Plus, collared shirts tend to be made of stiff fabric that doesn’t give terribly well, and they’re mainly designed to be worn with ties, an article of clothing for which I have zero use.
(Seriously. I own, I think, a total of two neckties, and I haven’t worn either one in over thirteen years. In fact, at this point I’m not sure I’d remember how to tie one. I can’t stand the damn things. They’re a useless long triangle of cloth that dangles over your stomach, that always has to be adjusted and fidgeted with, and serves no purpose at all. Ties, in my opinion, can all go to hell, except for bow ties with tuxes. Those look good. Oh, and screw other bow ties too.)
And I hate polo shirts too, because their collars never ever ever look good on me. They’re either too stiff or they lay weird and yuck.
My general feeling is that regular collars and polo shirts don’t look on me so much like these guys…
…as much as these guys.
Not that there’s anything wrong with those fellows, but nobody’s purposely dressing like Archie Bunker or Jed Bartlet, is what I’m saying.
Now, I do make one exception to my hatred of collars: button-down collars don’t bother me. In fact, I’ve come to like them rather a lot! Collars that are buttoned down tend to be a little narrower anyway, so they do tend to stay in position and maintain a shape better, and they don’t tend to rise up and rub my chin. Here’s the outfit I wore the other day when The Wife and I were in Ithaca. I bought this shirt for a pittance at a thrift store, and I quite like the way this turned out.
And I have several other button-down collar shirts, either denim or twill. Denim tends to be a special case, and I am willing to wear non-buttoned-down collars in denim or in a nice twill. Regular shirt fabric, though? Not so much.
I have a green plaid-stripe twill shirt that I haven’t even photographed yet. I’ll be wearing more of this stuff as cooler temperatures arrive.
And that brings me to my newest thing: collarless shirts! Yup, that’s a thing, and I love it. I know, I know – you’ve all been aware of this kind of thing for years, but bear with me. With collarless shirts I can have the nice look of a button-up shirt without the annoying discomfort of a stupid wing collar, and I can look nice without the annoying necessity of a necktie. I’ve recently bought three collarless shirts on eBay, and I like them all. I have a red plaid one, a white one with pinstripes, and a pleasant yellow/peach one. These all make me happy and I look forward to wearing them more, moving forward!
(I’ll have a better photo of that one eventually…the lighting in the hotel room where I took the photo was ghastly for this purpose.)
And then there’s this flannel button-down, which I also got for just a couple bucks at the thrift place. I haven’t made up my mind on this one yet, but it was three bucks, so hey, why not?
So basically, I hate collars except for when I don’t.
I’m glad I took an entire blog post to say that….
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Tone Poem Tuesday
I found this while searching for recordings by Sir Neville Marriner for yesterday’s post on his passing. Marriner seems to be best known for conducting Baroque and Classical-era music, but he was far from limited to those periods. Frederick Delius lived from 1862 to 1934, and this work, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, premiered in 1912. Delius’s work defies easy classification. He is more Impressionist than anything else, it seems to me, but even that’s not a totally fair way to look at his music. This work has a very English feel to it, but some of its melodic material is based on Norwegian folksong, and Delius had many other influences in his music. He accomplishes something very atmospheric in a mere six minutes here.
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Sir Neville Marriner
Conductor Sir Neville Marriner has died. I first heard his work, as I suspect did many, in the context of the film Amadeus, but over the years since, I have heard a great deal more of his wonderful music-making. Marriner lived a long and fine life, and the music world is all the richer for his having been here. Thank you, Sir Neville!
A few selections:
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Symphony Saturday
OK, so I didn’t get my post written on Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 done, so in the meantime, we’ll go back in time and back to good old Ludwig van Beethoven. We heard the mighty Ninth Symphony a while back in a remarkable performance from the BBC Proms, but here’s the work as it well might have sounded around its premiere. This orchestra performs the Ninth on period instruments, using performance techniques and tempi that were likely in use at the time. I’m not always totally excited or satisfied by period instrument performances, but they can be a fascinating exercise in noting how music has changed in ways not just related to compositional styles. Music is an art that lives in time, moreso than any other. A person in 1716 looking on the Mona Lisa likely saw the same thing that we see when we look on the same painting, but a concert hall patron in 1816 (or later, whenever the Ninth was actually written) is most certainly not hearing the same thing that we might hear in 2016.
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Bad Joke Friday
Something for Thursday
Thoughts on being 45
Symphony Saturday
Alexander Borodin only wrote two complete symphonies and fragments of a third. In discovering this wonderful composer of late, I’m at the same time heartbroken at his relatively small output, but also amazed at its quality. This is a man who seems to have pulled in so many different directions in his life of only 54 years that he’s lucky to have got any work done at all, much less work this good.
Borodin’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat was premiered in 1867, after Borodin spent nearly five years working on it, after his initial training by Mily Balakirev. The resulting work shows the seams of an inexperienced artist at work, and various critics have noted a debt to Robert Schumann in terms of style, but Borodin’s melodic gifts and knack for exotic color in his orchestrations is already evident.
Here is Borodin’s Symphony No. 1.
Next week, the Symphony No. 2.