A day of hunting

So my wardrobe is in a state of transition as my deathgrip on youth slowly fades with the wasting atrophy of age, e.g. the other day I wore a Misfits t-shirt to work with dress-casual slacks and shoes. I either need to drop the skulls and anger altogether and embrace my inner preppy or really invest in some high class slacker-wear and prove myself the committed lifer that the hard rock world so richly deserves. How one looks is important, after all, and the last thing I want is to appear actually how I am. With this in mind I go hunting at a couple of our city’s superlative used clothing stores.

But first a quick diversion to Barnes and Noble to buy a Latin-to-English dictionary. Think of every starving child you’ve ever seen on TV, every homeless person not sure they’ll make it through the freezing winter night, every NPR pledge-drive you’ve ever listened through unmoved – now spend eight bucks and change on a book about a dead language that you only bought to find out what the fake family motto is from Preston Sturges’ film “The Lady Eve.” Sorry kids.

And now the hunt begins. First it’s Savers, where I’m after some wearable khakis, maybe one of those zip-up sweater things that seem so popular now and whatever else I can find that’s: A) not too adult B) not too trying-too-hard-to-be-young, and C) cheap, as I’ve just come off two and-a-half months of binge unemployment. Given these choices it seems I’m taking the slow boat away from rock’n’roll lifer.

The music in this place is appropriately terrible, and one of the many jams that play over the tinny speakers is 80s staple “Land Down Under” by the ever diligent Men at Work. This crappy song provides an excellent score while I skim through racks of clothes separated by garment, color and size. I succeed with the khakis and also see a particularly ugly plaid shirt whose colors are red, tan and black. There’s something beguiling about a really ugly shirt – if you can wear it like it’s not ugly then people might mistake that for style, and style, like acai berry (more on that later), is supposedly one of those things that everybody needs.

While I’m here I also check out the shirts. Now I know that I’m definitely too old for the thrift store t-shirt look, but as I’m grappling with adulthood I wouldn’t mind some cheap dress shirts in good condition. It’s said we evolved from monkeys millions of years ago, but when I try on just about anything with sleeves I feel as though my days of swinging though the trees weren’t that long ago as almost all sweaters, jackets and dress shirts fall a few cruel inches short of covering my wrists. Bad fashion, I’m afraid, but it could be handy when I need to check my watch.

It seems Savers has, for reasons unknown, gone all Ross (more on that later) on me and managed to get a slew of new white dress shirts which hand stiffly on the rack, priced at $7.99 (less that eight dollars!) More amazingly, these shirts seem to have sleeves that can accommodate my proto-human proportions! There are about six of them and I’m not sure how many I should buy. My mind drifts back to a video department regular I sometimes chatted with at Soops who was a nice guy but definitely a little out there. He dressed pretty ragged, probably buying his clothes from the same place I’m shopping at now, but without my discerning eye. Anyway, one day he was in renting some movies and though I couldn’t say why, he looked decidedly classier. Before he approached me with his selections I overheard him talking to a friend who also noticed his snappy new look and as it turns out he had stumbled across a hibernating colony of cheap, well fitting white dress shirts at the Goodwill. Wisely, he quickly struck upon his discovery, buying up all he could, about a dozen shirts in total.

Now the thing is, he was so enamored with these shirts that he wore them almost every day. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d had enough nice pants to pair with his windfall of class, but he didn’t, and after a while he just ended up tucking them into his favorite pair of mid-thigh length, cut-off denim shorts. Not wanting my own excitement to get the best of me, I stood staring at the shirts trying to count in my head the number of pairs of suitable pants I owned. Unable to come up with a consensus I opted to buy only two. Also, though I even tried it on, I put back the ugly plaid shirt, deciding that I lacked the level of nonchalance needed to properly pull it off. Oh well.

And now onto the ARC, which like the NAACP, has had the same recognizable acronym for so long that they haven’t risked changing it to reflect more current social norms. According to their website they stopped being The Association of Retarded Citizens in 1992 when they changed their name to the seemingly less objectionable The Arc of the United States, though what significance a curved line has to do with helping the differently abled, as I believe they’re now called, is beyond me. Maybe they could pay me to write a convincing line of grandiloquent BS to draw the connection for them, perhaps playing on the stability of that noblest of arcs, the arch. Something about how the community is the keystone, maybe.

Amazingly, as I walk into The Arc my ears are again treated to those still laboring Men at Work and their one-time #1 “Down Under.” I find this utterly amazing as Savers is a national chain that does their own music and The Arc is just playing a local soft rock station. Either way, the song once again proves oddly appropriate as I scour shelves in search of gently worn, kinda cheap, mostly adult clothes. Sadly, the khakis are all pleated, the zippy sweaters are all too small (damn you holidays) and the one pair of jeans, which I’m also in the market for, that looked somewhat presentable are sized 38x30, and that just won’t do. I leave with only that delightful vegemite referencing song in my head.

And so it’s next door to Ross, where they have actual new clothes, reputedly at discount prices. Ross is the best place in the world to buy socks, because there you can pick up a three-pair pack of designer socks at Target-sock prices. And who wouldn’t want their feet to be ensconced in the rich elegance of Calvin Klein or Chaps by Ralph Lauren? My feet deserve it. The opposite is true for jeans, though. Looking for a pair of understated jeans at Ross is like looking for an understated drag-queen. Did you even know that they make rhinestone studded, silk-screen graphics laden jeans for men? And according to the tag the twenty bucks that Ross charges is thirty to forty dollars lower than the original price, but none of the tags say what store was charging that higher price. Curious.

And so I head to where those jeans will one-day end up, the discount rack. These racks are like the sub-basement of hell, where the things too garish to sell at even half-off department store prices sit and languor at $9.99 (under ten dollars!) and will no doubt eventually end up on the same refugees I failed to support with the money I bought my dictionary with. Sometimes things fall through the cracks though. To my pants-purchasing delight I find a pair of modern cut Dockers, sans pleats, in an acceptable color for only $6.99. Seven dollar pants! Sweet Mary, mother of god! Seven dollar pants are what our boys are over there fighting for right now! Deciding to leave on a high note I take my cheap, nice pants and my designer socks to the checkout and head for home.

Almost. Cruising north on College I’m drawn into a 7-11 by my inborn love of icy sugar water. Having no cash I need to pick out a Slurpee size that is costly enough that it won’t be ridiculous to charge it and small enough that it won’t send me into a diabetic coma. I go with the 32 oz. cup that, with tax, carries a price of over a buck and a half, which in my mind sets it safely in the debit zone. Now what to fill it with? The eternal standby, Coke, just isn’t doing it for me. Neither are cherry, a supposedly new and improved Mountain Dew flavor or the Pina Colada. I pass over the token blue flavor on first glance as well, thinking it to be merely the usual tongue dyeing Blue Raspberry but my disinterest in the other flavors causes my give it another look and I discover that, yes, in their perpetual trend hopping foresight, the store that never closes has paired blue raspberry with acai berry! Now the certain harm that this Slurpee is doubtless doing to my various organ tracts can be marginally offset by that wonderfruit from the deepest reaches of the Amazon. Or at least the flavor of it anyway.

Sic erat in fatis – So it was fated

Why Britney Spears' "3" cheapens an already cheap thing...

So basically every performer has a total monopoly on one thing, themselves. This can be seen by the countless tribute bands in existence, which is to say you can spend $20 on a KISS cover band, but to get the real deal, pyrotechnics and all, you've got to shill out big time, and Gene Simmons knows this.

And whereas KISS, or GWAR for that matter, has a monopoly on shocking and astounding fans in their own unique way, Britney Spears' niche has always been the prospect of having sex with her, and "3" cheapens that.

Subtlety has never been her thing, and so even on her breakthrough at the supposedly naive age of 17 she was selling the idea of having a go with her between the sheets - or, as the video teased, after home room. It's appealing because she's very attractive, and she parlayed it into a ton of money. Good for her.

And yet as time wore on and coquettish gyrations became overt vulgarity, she was still careful to protect her brand, which is to say, when you got a Britney Spears album it was still being sold on the idea of shtupping her, and that's what your 9.99 to 14.99 was going for. Man or woman, it didn't really matter, as access to her sexuality was her stock in trade, so whether you were fantasizing being in her, or merely being her, the Britney brand still sold records.

And then "3" was released and suddenly it wasn't enough to just want Britney anymore. Whereas she had been selling access to brand Britney for your pleasure/entertainment/morbid interest, by making a song about doing her and another guy/girl she's effectively saying, "I'm not enough anymore and I know that, so you can have me and someone else, too."

It's like saying, "Buy Monopoly and we'll throw in Uno!" Or that your new Chevy Malibu comes with a Ford Taurus, just in case driving a Malibu by itself isn't fully doing "it" for you anymore. And how does she come back from this? Will her next song, which will inevitably also be about doing her, have an explanation about how she's once again the gold standard in libidinous fantasy? Or will she put out a song called "Baker's Dozen," an entendre laden gem about her and 12 friends?

I like to think that, since she's already sullied her brand image, her next song will just be about shagging whoever the latest it-girl is, like if it came out soon it'd just be called "Megan Fox" and the whole thing would be Britney singing about how great it would be to have a roll in the hay with the sexy chick from Transformers. Only time, and relevance related desperation, will tell...