God bless you Sorel and North Face, makers, respectively, of my new low-top slip-on and high-top lace-up winter boots.
It’s eight degrees here in Park City, and, for once, I’m not about to lose my toes to frostbite. Which is, perhaps, the best news of the fest so far.
Spurred on by an Israeli clinical study citation from my father, I returned this morning, albeit with much ribbing from Jess, to the nostril blow-drying. Being immediately out of the shower when I did, I decided to see what I’d look like with my hair blow-dried as well.
In short: like Sonic the Hedgehog. Should make for an interesting business dinner tonight.
Right: Redken Pommade
Left: Neutrogena Shaving Cream
Guess which one I smeared through my hair this morning after shower number one, and, resultantly, before shower number two?
This morning, I took my first trip on New Jersey’s PATH train, out to Hoboken, where my uncle Robert runs an optometry practice. A quick look at my glasses – whose super-glued right arm evidences their seven year age – reminded me I hadn’t had my eyes checked in three-quarters of a decade. So, Jersey-bound, I contemplated the possibility that I might actually be far blinder than my outdated, rather pansy prescription would otherwise indicate.
Fortunately, after much consideration of number one vs. number two random letter line readings, it seems my eyes are still pretty much exactly where they were before (a piddling -1.75 diopter), though with just a touch of newfound right eye astigmatism.
So, this morning, after forty-five minutes of letter line comparisons, I spent at least as long considering frame after frame after glasses frame. There are few accessories as omnipresent as a pair of glasses, and so I tried to balance out the demands of indie film cool with the need for something I could wear, day in and day out, for at least the next year or three.
The pince nez, therefore, fell by the wayside, as did a number of other options that seemed the optical equivalent of a joke that’s funny the first time, but gets painfully old when frequently retold. In the end, I settled on two frames, aiming to switch back and forth between them as whimsy might dictate: one slightly retro, the other a touch fashion-forward, though neither so bold as to become the first (or only) thing one might notice upon my entering a room.
Doubtless, the girl, my mother, and any other style-conscious female friends and family will disdain both choices. But, fortunately, as I can still glasses-less pass the driver’s license vision test, at very worst, I can always drop the glasses (and the faux-intellectual air they lend) entirely, and stumble through life only a short squint away from seeing things exactly as they are.
Watching the sixth season of the West Wing on DVD last week, I was struck by a scene in which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman heads over to the office of Republican Senator Arnold Vinick, to find the Senator enrapt in shining his shoes.
“Mr. Chairman.”
“Shine your own shoes, Josh?”
“No. I can’t say that I do.”
“My father used to say, you can’t trust a man who doesn’t shine his own shoes.” Looks down at Josh’s feet “Does anyone shine those things?”
“Not really. No.”
At this bit of dialogue, I flashed on my own shoe rack – brown boots and black oxfords slowly descending towards the same scuffed blur of grey. And I thought, perhaps it’s time to start shining.
So, earlier this afternoon, I picked up a brush and a stack of polishes at the local Duane Reade. And, in between chipping away at the huge stack of emails in my inbox (Oh in Ohio, T-minus five days), I set about shining my shoes.
Thus far, I’m hugely pleased, both by the finished shoes – which look surprisingly good considering my rookie shiner status – and by how I feel. Perhaps it’s just the inhaled polish fumes talking, but, in a line of work that seems always a nebulous, swirling mess, there’s something remarkably gratifying about getting something finite, real, noticeable and concrete accomplished, just within the space of a single afternoon.
Do any of you guy readers wear tank-top undershirts? And, if so, can you explain what the hell that’s about?
So far as I’ve always understood them, undershirts are meant to keep you from sweating through into the outer shirt. But I – and I think I’m not the only one on this – mainly sweat from the armpits; that’s why we put deodorant there.
So, if a tank undershirt specifically doesn’t cover your armpits, than what, exactly, is the point?
For the past four or five years, I haven’t bought a pair of jeans. Instead, I’ve shopped in my younger brother’s closet. Unable to resist buying new pairs, my brother David has happily passed along his ‘hand-me-ups’ as they’ve been displaced by newer editions.
The problem: my brother’s waist is about an inch and half larger than mine. And while I’ve taken to simply cinching down the excess with belts, a slew of female friends have recently pointed out that, in short, it looks retarded.
So, I set out to buy a pair or two of new jeans. And, in the process, I discovered I’m no longer really a 30-30, and closer to a 29-30 instead.
After extensive searching, I made a second discovery: while 30-30 jeans are easy to find, 29-30’s don’t seem to exist. Drop to a 29 inch waist and everything comes solely in 32 inch length. So, realizing I’d already spent embarrassingly long on the jean search, I quit while I was ahead and picked up two 29-32 boot cut pairs from Banana Republic.
Which sent me, after washing each pair twice to counter initial shrinkage, off to have the jeans tailored.
Previously, I’d simply taken any about-right length as good enough. Now, faced with the chance to trim to perfect size, I could angst about a whole brave new world of jean fitting concerns.
Shorten them to fit with a pair of oxfords, and a set of flat-bottomed sneakers drags the back of the jeans an inch and a half underfoot with each step. Flip things around to fit the sneakers, and the jeans look like high-waters with anything else.
So, after a week or two of serious consideration, I simply gave up, had them tailored at some arbitrary length mid-way between the sneaker and soled-shoe ideal, and set about re-convincing myself that the whole thing isn’t even vaguely important in the broader scheme of my life
For borderline obsessives, too much choice is a dangerous thing.
[As running two companies seems to have been eating into my writing time, blog entry ideas have been piling up, unposted, for the past week. I’m hoping to start chipping my way through the list over the next few days. To wit:]
Mark Twain once famously observed, “clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Which is the primary reason I get dressed in the morning. And, more to the point, why I try to do it well.
As countless studies have shown, the way we dress deeply impacts what others think of us, how likely they are to listen to us or to do what we ask. Sure, we all occasionally chastise ourselves for so blithely judging books by their proverbial covers. But, whether or not we should, we most certainly and subconsciously do. Which makes pulling clothes from the closet a strategic exercise. How does a given shirt make me feel? How does it make me appear in the eyes of others?
It’s important enough that, spending my days the past week bouncing between meetings with filmmakers and meetings with investors and corporate execs, I’ve even stooped to mid-afternoon changes, pulling from two disparate subsets of my wardrobe.
Most business books, on the subject of clothing, advise that you dress to match the people with whom you’re meeting. Which, like most advice doled out in business books, is hopelessly misguided. Far better, instead, to dress to match their expectations of how someone in your position is ‘supposed’ to look.
The jeans, blazer and vintage button downs, then, come out not for the filmmakers, but for the staid execs, a group for whom sunglasses worn indoors bespeaks a certain desirable level of cool, rather than suggesting total douche-bagdom, as it would to fellow filmmakers. Similarly, then, the suits come out for meetings with screenwriters or prospective key cast. Without a tie, certainly, and perhaps erring towards DKNY shirts rather than Polo Ralph Lauren’s, but still formal enough to say, “yes, I’m intimately familiar with the finer points of GAAP and SEC filing laws.”
This ‘dress like they want you to’ rule is not a recent discovery. Instead, it’s something I stumbled across my freshman year in college. Having just launched SharkByte, I quickly found that the odds of success in a new-client sales pitch were directly proportional to the number of electronic gizmos I clipped to my belt for that pitch.
Or, as I so tastefully summarized the idea to the Wall Street Journal: “show them a laptop and they’ll wet their pants.”
After shaving off my beard for the Homecoming ’96 photos, I went for about a week clean-shaven. During that week, I was carded more than I had been over the rest of the last two years. Which, together with interested looks from middle school girls, convinced me that, in an effort to look old and wise and vaguely capable of running a company, perhaps it was time to regrow.
So, last Sunday, I put away the razor and let my facial follicles follow their course. As I hadn’t grown a beard in from scratch for quite some time, I was surprised to rediscover that – likely due to my fast metabolism – I can go from zero to past seriously scruffy in well under a week. Normally, at the one week point, I’ll then start whipping out the beard trimmer every few days, evening things out and keeping purposefully at the at-least-sort-of-indie-hip short length. This time through, however, my beard trimmer is boxed away amidst plates and CDs and spring sweaters, stored somewhere out in the far reaches of Brooklyn by the crazy Israeli moving company that won’t be delivering my things back to me until I move into the new apartment on the fifteenth.
Which, basically, leaves me with two solid weeks of unchecked growing ahead. By which point, I’m fairly certain, I’ll have passed well past ‘scruffy’, through ‘full’, and into the early reaches of ‘polar expedition’. Santa Claus, look out.
Over my pre-film years of running companies, I managed to accumulate thousands of dollars of dress clothing, most of which now hangs full-time in the back reaches of my closet. Every so often, however, I have occasion to whip some of it back out, to don suit, tie and cufflinks for a serious meeting or three.
Usually, it’s for meetings with corporate lawyers or investment bankers – people who don’t trust a CEO without a power tie. But, while I suit up intending to have the world view me differently, I find it leaves me viewing the rest of the world slightly differently as well. In pinstripes, I can spout legalese, discuss exit strategies and negotiate sticky deal points. But I can’t, for the life of me, brainstorm new, exciting, outside-the-box ideas. The tie around my neck, it seems, strangles blood-flow to the right half of my brain, letting the left take over completely.
Judging by the attire at companies I admire most, I don’t think my be-suited experiences are unusual. All the world-changing, gee-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? ideas of the last decade or two have all sprung from a jeans-wearing crowd. Even at stodgier companies with standing dress-to-the-nines policies, the real thinking happens once people toss of their jackets, roll up their sleeves, loosen their ties, and get down to work.
I know that runs counter to today’s trend, where companies that once went ‘business casual’ during the go-go nineties are ramping back up to stricter dress codes. But I can’t help think those companies are making a mistake. Sure, take the foosball table out of the conference room. Confiscate the Nerf toys. And, for god’s sake, repaint the pipes to normal, non-primary colors. But don’t make people get dressed up. Or, maybe, do. It leaves all the more room for those corduroys-clad innovators to start taking over the world once again.