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chiseler · 3 years

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Maxwell Bodenheim

In Letters from Bohemia, Ben Hecht declares his friend Maxwell Bodenheim “more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read.” In his lifetime Bodenheim was at least as well known for his drunk and dissolute behavior as for his writing. Today he’s mostly remembered for the tawdry way he died.

He grew up poor and Jewish in smalltown Mississippi. He was bright but viciously boorish, physically handsome yet repulsively slovenly, and argumentative to a fault, with a genius for the insult that could end any discussion, usually with his being punched in the mouth. As young men Bodenheim and Hecht were the pranksters of the Chicago Renaissance. According to Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians, they once filled a hall for a literary debate on the topic “Resolved: That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.”

Hecht strode center-stage to announce that he would take the affirmative. Then he stated, “The affirmative rests.” Bodenheim shambled forward, scrutinized his confident opponent, and said, “You win.”

Bodenheim – Bogie to his long-suffering friends – was twenty-two when he blew into Greenwich Village with other Chicago émigrés in 1915, and instantly made a name for himself in the neighborhood as a poet of promise. Reading his facile, gaudy verses now, it’s easy to think that it was the brute force of his sociopathic presence, rather than his poetry, that convinced the best poets in the Village at the time that he was one of them, potentially even the greatest of them:

You have a morning-glory face

Whose edges are sensitive to light

And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.

Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory

And lattices its curves

With shades of golden reverberations.

Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves

Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.

Tellingly, those not directly in his orbit seem not to have been fooled by the clever romance-novel sham of such verses – and neither, apparently, was Bodenheim himself, though he would go on roaring about his genius for decades. Hecht records that after entering 223 poetry contests and failing to win a single one, he took to signing his letters to editors “Maxwell Bodenheim, 224th ranking U.S.A. poet.”

He did have a real talent for scandal, easy enough to generate during Greenwich Village’s prolonged drunken orgy in the Prohibition years. His haughty, insulting demeanor, and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses, got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees and the fauxhemian revels at Webster Hall.

Turning from poetry to prose, through the 1920s he wrote a string of best-selling, sensational potboilers like Replenishing Jessica, about a free-loving bohemian, Georgie May, about a fallen prostitute, and Naked on Roller Skates, about a middle-aged “onetime hobo, circus-pegger, doughboy, sailor, anarchist, con man, all-time sensationalist and wanderer of the world” who leaves a small town with a much younger woman who “wanted to try everything at least once.” They sound better than they read. Hecht called them “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them.” When the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought Bodenheim to trial in 1925 on an obscenity charge for Replenishing Jessica, his defense lawyer used a familiar tactic of demanding that the prosecutor read the entire text aloud to prove his case. Judge, jury and the reporters covering the trial dozed as the prosecutor droned on and on, and the unaroused jury voted Bodenheim not guilty. Mayor Jimmy Walker agreed with the verdict. “No girl was ever seduced by a book,” he quipped.

For a bohemian poet, commercial success and celebrity could bring on a full-blown personality crisis (as it would do Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Cobain). Bodenheim squandered the money he made from his novels on drink and gambling, as though he couldn’t throw it away fast enough. He preferred to demand loans and cadge drinks from everyone around him, like a true bohemian poet should. Meanwhile, his reputation in these years as a daring, risqué writer attracted a cloud of what we’d call groupies today, many of them the sort of teenagers from the outer boroughs and the hinterlands who flocked to the Village in the 1920s to throw off the shackles of mainstream morality and abandon themselves to the neighborhood’s non-stop pagan revels.

He took his pick. One was Gladys Loeb, 18, from the Bronx. In 1928, he ended a brief fling with her, adding that her poetry was doggerel. Her landlady soon found her with her head in the gas oven, barely clinging to life, and to Bodenheim’s portrait. A few weeks later he did the same thing to twenty-two-year-old Virginia Drew, who threw herself into the Hudson and succeeded where Gladys had failed. When police went to question Bodenheim about Drew’s suicide, he’d slipped off to stay with fellow Villager Harry Kemp in Provincetown. Gladys, having recovered from her own suicide attempt, followed him there – trailing her irate father, cops and reporters. Bodenheim talked his way out of their clutches, but not out of the newspapers all over the country, which had a field day with lurid tales about the Greenwich Village Lothario.

Then came Aimee Cortez, widely feted as “the Mayoress of Greenwich Village.” She earned the title by stripping naked at private parties and Webster Hall shindigs and gyrating a wildly erotic dance. According to Churchill, this display sometimes ended with her going off with some lucky male, but other times she’d stop abruptly, with a look of terror and confusion, and run off. In a later era she’d be prescribed a drug for this clearly disturbed behavior, but in the Village of the late 1920s, where “a hideous lust… pervaded the air” as Bodenheim’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village put it, she was merely celebrated as the queen of the modern-day bacchantes. Not long after Gladys and Virginia made the papers, Aimee was found with her head in her own oven, also clutching Bodenheim’s portrait. She was dead at nineteen.

Bodenheim was indirectly implicated in the sad end of another lover, a teenager from the outer boroughs with the improbable name Dorothy Dear. When she wasn’t with him in his MacDougal Street apartment, he wrote her love letters that she carried in her purse. One afternoon she was aboard a rush hour subway train heading from Times Square to the Village when it derailed at a faulty switch, killing sixteen passengers, including Dorothy. Bodenheim’s love letters were found scattered around the wreckage.

By the end of the 1920s Bodenheim was a wreck himself. From the 1930s until his death he was a fixture on the streets and in the bars of the Village, by turns annoying and sad-making, decaying before his old friends’ eyes into a stinking, toothless ghost, “tottering drunkenly to sleep on flophouse floors, shabby and gaunt as any Bowery bum,” as Hecht put it. Still, Hecht gallantly added, “Bogie hugged his undiminished riches – his poet’s vocabulary and his genius for winning arguments. He won nothing else.” He cranked out more cheap novels, drank the money, and stooped to hawking his poems to tourists in Washington Square for a quarter each. Wiseacres in the bars fed him gin and laughed at his drunken mumblings and rants, which sometimes yielded a famous line like “Greenwich Village is the Coney Island of the soul.”

Poets were the main entertainment at Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard in the mid-1930s. Gordon couldn’t afford to pay them; they performed for whatever change the patrons tossed at their feet. Poet Eli Siegel, later founder of the Aesthetic Realism movement, was the emcee in the early years, but the crowd really came to see three ghosts of the Village Past – Joe Gould, Harry Kemp and Maxwell Bodenheim. They hung out there because Gordon tolerated them and his patrons were easy marks for a few free drinks. In his memoir Live at the Village Gate, Gordon describes how Siegel would call Gould out of the crowd with the cry, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvard terrier and boulevardier, Joseph Ferdinand Gould!” Gould would shuffle up to the spotlight and do his schtick, while Bodenheim, tall and imperious, would stalk the shadows at the back, “point his finger, and shout, ‘Eli Siegel! I hate you, Eli Siegel. You rat!’” Gordon continues:

Eli would wait for Bodenheim to shape up so he could call on him to recite. But it was no use. Bodenheim, swirling crazily, eyes glazed, arms outstretched, would suddenly stop and point his finger at a frightened girl who had refused him a dance during intermission. “Rat!” he’d shout at her.

Despite the frightening deterioration of his physical and mental hygiene, Bodenheim still attracted a certain type of desperate woman, usually in decline herself. He met the last of them in 1951 when Ruth Fagan bought a poem from him with her last quarter. She was thirty-two, he was a fifty-nine-year-old derelict, and within a couple of weeks they were going around as Mr. and Mrs. Bodenheim, though it’s not clear they ever bothered to make it official. They decayed together for the next couple of years, chronically broke and drunk, descending from cheap rooming houses to flophouses to sleeping in hallways and doorways. She turned tricks when she could, and he beat her when he found out. In 1952 they made a horrific spectacle of themselves at a fancy reunion for surviving members of the original Chicago Renaissance group, where he panhandled the guests while she propositioned them.

If the Bodenheim of the early 1950s was a disgusting or amusing clown to the tourists, and an embarrassment and bother to his old friends, he was something of a martyred saint to the generation of bohemians who came to the Village after World War Two. In his headlong descent into the abyss, his lust for the extremes of degradation, his lust for lust itself, he was like a dark archangel of negative capability for them, representing the ultimate rejection of bourgeois virtue and mainstream values, even to the point of total self-destruction. He comes up several times in the published diaries of Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre, from this period. One night in 1951 she and her husband Julian Beck were in the San Remo, the dark and smoky bar at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets that Bodenheim often haunted:

A ragged drunk approaches our table. In terrible shape. Ash blond hair askew. He lurches forward, his hands resting on the table. Directly to Julian: “What’s your name?”

“My name is Julian Beck.”

“My name is Maxwell Bodenheim. I’m an idiotic poet.”

And he turns and moves off before we can speak.

The late Roy Metcalf, who was a young newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, also encountered Bodenheim in the San Remo. “Bodenheim had a great face, an alcohol-ravaged face,” he recalled. “Once a guy from uptown wanted to see Greenwich Village, so we went down to the San Remo. There was Bodenheim. He said, 'Bring him over, let’s buy him a drink.’ He expected Bodenheim to say something. Bodenheim by that time was so paralyzed by alcohol that all he could do was bray, 'Aaaaargh.’”

In 1953 Malina went into the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue, where artists hung out. The food was lousy, the lighting made people look so bad they nicknamed it the Waxworks, and the other patrons tended to be bums, drug addicts, tough guys and cops. The staff was not particularly welcoming to arty boho types. So naturally that’s where Bodenheim and Ruth went to celebrate his birthday. Malina writes that a friend stole a pumpkin pie from the counter as a present for Bodenheim. “A cop sees him, but is somehow content with my explanation that Maxwell Bodenheim is a great poet and that his birthday should be celebrated. The counterman is not so generous: 'I ain’t doin’ this for love.’ We all eat. Ruth Bodenheim curses the cafeteria. Some junkies come and tell horrible tales of hospitals and arrests. One taps his eye with a knife to show us that it’s glass. Ruth Bodenheim smiles in an aristocratic manner: 'I’d never have believed it wasn’t real,’ as if she were consoling the owner of false jewels.”

“Do we not idolize Maxwell Bodenheim although we are sometimes loath to talk to him and always ashamed of our condescension to him?” Malina wonders in another entry. “What we admire is Bodenheim’s refusal to resist. We fight all the time, resisting temptation. We admire those who don’t. Even if it’s suicidal.” And later: “Even self-contempt when fierce enough is magnificent. The virtue of the extreme is its extremity. Nature loves extremes as much as she loathes a vacuum.”

In 1953, Ruth took up with a violent, mentally unstable dishwasher named Harold Weinberg. One night in the winter of 1954 the three of them wound up in Weinberg’s room off the Bowery. Bodenheim roused himself from a drunken stupor to see Ruth and Weinberg having sex. He attacked Weinberg, who pulled out a .22 and shot him through the heart. Then Weinberg stabbed Ruth in the chest. The last photos of Bodenheim show him and Ruth lying dead in the squalid room.

“The hideous death of Bodenheim blankets the Village in a funereal spirit,” Malina wrote. “Who dares confess to the wrenching excitement of seeing a companion’s mauled corpse on the front page of every newspaper, and all of us knowing that the worst has again triumphed?”

Cops picked up Weinberg a few days later. At his trial he called his victims Commie rats and shouted that he “did the world a favor” by getting rid of them. He sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he was led out of the courtroom and off to Bellevue.

Today, Bodenheim is remembered more for this tabloid end than for any other achievement. Even his memoir was a dispiriting sham. My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, published posthumously in 1954, was ghostwritten by a hack who, like everyone else in the Village, had bought him drinks to listen to his drunken ramblings. It’s a loose collection of vignettes, anecdotes, and racy gossip that was already antique when the book appeared. His old friend Hecht, who sent a check for $50 to help pay for Bodenheim’s cheapjack funeral, based his 1958 Off-Broadway play Winkelberg on him. (“There was never a man as irritating as Winkelberg.”) It ran for a month at the Renata Theatre on Bleecker Street, then sank into oblivion along with much of Bodenheim’s own writing.

by John Strausbaugh

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palmerasenfuego · 3 years

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lacking all conviction

allow my to unspool my anxieties:

a confession of crisis, a faltering confidence, the sense of being lost without direction forward. the future seems impossible yet continues to happen and connection to the past has been apparently lost, leaving the present adrift.

the problematique norman mailer wrote about how the twin atrocities of the holocaust and the atomic bomb fundamentally altered modern man's relationship to death, but i took james baldwin at his word when he said he couldn't "make any sense out of the white negro." skipping past 'hip primitivism’, the naive byronism of the beats may have seemed liberatory amid the stultifying conformity of postwar bourgeois society, but these youthful excesses were quickly co-opted and resold back to the bourgeois under the promise of self-fulfillment. know the cool music, wear the right clothes, fuck whomever, so long as you let us skim a little off the top and you go back to your job doing mergers and acquisitions with patrick bateman. bohemianism got priced out, and fauxhemianism became the aesthetic of the up & coming.

elsewhere around the same time, the Powers that Be repurposed the earnest expression of artists in an effort to make neo-imperial exploitation the world over appear Good. art has long maintained a fraught relationship with commerce, but never before had it been used as propaganda for the hegemonic legitimacy of a particular economic order. "look how great it is here in the liberal world, look at all the books and films and paintings, listen to black people's music, isn't this better than socialist realism?" surely it's mere coincidence that all those diverse voices given space for expression tended to also be critical of the soviet union.

in the decades since, the trickle down dilution of american literature by way of the CIA-backed iowa writer's workshop has evidently dissuaded large swathes of talented literary people from daring to reach for true literary greatness, instead settling for middle-brow mediocrity or arch scenesterism. neoconfessionalist bullshit that reifies narcissistic individualism. cool as death cultural criticism. stories about drunks drinking around the kitchen table. *shuddering* autofiction. godforbid someone try to actually push literature forward beyond the heights set by woolf, beckett, pynchon, or bolano. besides, even if someone did try, who wants to market that?

extra-literarily, the world seems in conspiracy against literature. let a million distractions bloom. twitter instagram netflix pornhub tinder reddit spotify soundcloud patreon newsletters. everyone always chattering past each other.

& honestly i just don't know what to do with myself

#chatter

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nevertrulyset · 4 years

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Kinda disappointed that "fauxhemian" didn't catch on as a replacement for "hipster."

#language #words about stuff #personal journey #just jess #hipsters

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interiorexteriors · 7 years

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authentic fauxhemian - https://weheartit.com/entry/227944290

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rastronomicals · 3 years

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8:57 AM EDT July 16, 2021:

Sonic Youth - "Fauxhemians" From the album The Destroyed Room (December 12, 2006)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

#Sonic Youth #The Destroyed Room #Fauxhemians

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voyagesofshanghaibrown-blog · 6 years

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Fake News hits the hi-desert!

Come on, admit it - it wouldn't be 2017 without some fake news in the mix. And for our final fake news of the year, we turn to author Ivy Pochoda and the "failing" New York Times.

Yes, after all, why should our president have all the fun (we fully intend to tweet this story out as soon as it's done), blathering on about the fake news media all the time. Those of us in the media know far more about how it gets manipulated and co-opted and bought and sold than any two-bit New York real estate developer, after all. And since we now have a legion of mindless MAGAts who know literally nada about journalism all telling us that virtually anything and everything we write is "fake" news, we thought it's high time we just jump into the cesspool with them!

I hadn't intended our prime example of late 2017 fake news to be Pochoda's lovely travel piece for The New York Times, "In the California Desert: Vast Darkness, Vibrant Music, an Oasis," but the more I read, the more it seemed this travel piece had donned the fauxhemian garb of fiction (we stole that term "fauxhemian" from someone in New York, by the way, and we're not giving it back).

Plus, and I need to disclose this in the name of journalistic integrity, an ideal we've all heard about but have rarely seen, I'm jealous. After all, Pochoda's a trendy, popular novelist, and I'm jealous, because I'm on the second chapter of my first novel, and you know what? It's hard work writing these novels. Add to that the New York Times just rejected me for some utter wet dream of a job where they pay you gobs of cash to travel the globe and write for a full year - a job that no doubt saw something near 2.3 million applicants - and hey, so much for objectivity.

Some of Pochoda's meandering desert travel epic rings true, even to these jaded hi-desert ears, though she did claim in her initial story (more about that later) that Joshua Tree was actually south of Palm Springs. Uh, no. You're thinking of perhaps, Borrego Springs, which is also an awesome place to go, and one of our favorite desert towns.

Her first paragraph about winding up in Wonder Valley mostly by accident, sounded like an authentic desert experience. After all, quite a few folks in Wonder Valley have wound up there by accident. Some will tell you they got there on purpose, but press them for details, and... poof! They can't quite recall what that purpose was, can they?

Of course Pochoda blames this accident on mistakenly booking a vacation rental in Wonder Valley while thinking she was reserving a home in Joshua Tree. This is a problem that has gotten worse since her first visit, not better. Virtually all 3,417 Airbnbs in the hi-desert all proudly proclaim themselves to be "in" Joshua Tree. Some are even (gasp!) in Landers.

But by her second paragraph, Pochoda gets down to serving up a hearty dish of misinformation - the kind of misinformation that can only be known as fake news.

First, she refers to our area as the "High Desert." Wrong, wrong, wrong, you urban elitist snowflake. Our area, the area also known as the Morongo Basin, is the hi-desert. The people who actually settled this place purposefully chose that spelling because the Lancaster/Palmdale area has always traditionally been known in southern California, as the high desert. Our wise hi-desert elders (they were wise, but judging by some of their offspring, they seem to have married close cousins, if you get my drift) wanted to make sure nobody mistook our area for Lancaster/Palmdale (good move!), and besides, hi-desert (always lower case, because we're a no-ties, informal kind of place, not at all like Manhattan), sounds welcoming and friendly (though sometimes our residents can be that kind of friendly where they'll drink all your booze, smoke all your dope, and then steal your car).

We see a lot of folks using the term "High Desert," because they're not from here and they want to make sure all of us backward folk get our spelling correct, and capitalize it like it's a proper pronoun, which it is. Sort of. Or not. We often see this unwanted correction of our area's name done by sophisticated pseudo-intellectual urbanites from Los Angeles, or even New York, who also love to refer to Joshua Tree National Park as "the monument," despite the fact that they never lived here when it was a national monument. They think it makes them sound like the fit in. They don't.

But Pochoda's second paragraph contains a more egregious error - and one the editors of the Times should absolutely have caught - that is, if they weren't trying to pass off some of that fishy fake news on their unsuspecting readers. Pochoda informs us that you can go to Joshua Tree National Park (at least she doesn't call it the monument - thanks Ivy!), and "get your mind blown by Martian red rock formations..."

Uh, no. Joshua Tree National Park does not have red rock formations. None. Monzogranite? Sure. But while you can find some red rock up in the oddly named Red Rock Canyon State Park in the northwest of the Mojave Desert, and you can find it in the similarly named Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just outside Las Vegas, and in Valley of Fire State Park, also not far outside Las Vegas, or virtually just about everywhere in southeast Utah, we have no red rock in Joshua Tree (unless Mr. Andre went and painted another boulder or something).

Who paid the fact checker to look the other way on that whopper?

I'll overlook the fact Pochoda drops the "bohemian" bomb on us once again (the last time it was the LA Times that did it, and really, once was enough, thank you). We get that we're different than the Coachella Valley, thank God, and yes, while much of the lo desert resembles a well manicured mausoleum, we are a little rougher and in need of a pedicure, or at least a bath.

Now, if Ms. Pochoda were to have submitted her story to this somewhat less than prestigious publication instead of the old grey lady, she would have had her red rocks dug out right away, along with the screaming windmills she had to drive through to get here (they do not scream, that's hyperbolic).

Never mind her brutish depiction of our fabulous Joshua trees with their "knifelike leaves reaching up toward the brutal sun," we all know they don't have leaves, they have spiky things that really hurt when you accidentally stab one into the side of your head, it's her epiphany about the desert that really strikes out:

“I get it,” I say, “it doesn’t look like much.”

In fact, Highway 62 doesn’t even look like desert.

Really? So, Ms. I-saw-red-rocks-in-Joshua-Tree-desert-expert, the desert doesn't look like the desert? Well, it damned sure doesn't look like lower Manhattan, now, does it?

OK, so then she utterly erased Morongo Valley from the map as the first town she passed on her oddessy (yes, it's misspelled, but more accurate this way), was Yucca Valley, where tattoo parlors and smoke shops rival the number of big box stores and fast food joints. Well, she got that right, anyway.

Then, she arrived in Joshua Tree (town, not park), which she describes as "equally grim." Yes, hipsters and fauxhemians, she just completely dissed your "village," in just two words, clearly not understanding that the cool people of Joshua Tree absolutely would, under normal circumstances, kill just about anyone who equated their town with Yucca Valley, let alone refer to it as grim.

Our intrepid explorer, enduring grimness after grimness, continued on to Twentyine Palms, a "town of barbershops advertising military haircuts, more tattoo parlors and smoke shops..." and she goes on to note two bars "too divey even for me," and a worrisome number of massage parlors.

That's hilarious. Back in the early days of The Sun Runner Magazine, when it was still based in Twentynine Palms (before the good citizens of the city offered to firebomb my office, that is), not long after the magazine began publishing on January 1, 1995, Vickie Waite, the founding editor of the publication ran a quite funny piece that gently parodied Twentynine Palms in a similar manner, and it caused an uproar that resulted in quite a few canceled ads and outraged readers demanding an apology. But, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I'd have to say that her portrayal, just like that of Deanne Stillman (another author whom to this day the mere mention of her name elicits an angry response in that scrappy town), is pretty much right on.

The only thing I'd add is that the dive bars are actually pretty friendly, and Pochoda doesn't understand much about the Marine Corps because the base commander will designate any bar that's too "divey" as off limits. I fondly remember the Joshua Tree Saloon's days as being "off limits" because evidently it was too dangerous for Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to have a drink there. This was before they started serving seared ahi tuna salads and putting on airs.

Oh, and I'd add that some folks in the city keep saying they can't do anything about the happy ending massage parlors that service, errr..... serve, the Marines in town. Yes, yes you can do something about them. The Coachella Valley has had licensing requirements that have fully regulated the massage businesses there for years. If they can do it, so can you.

Soon, Pochoda passed the "sturdy" (she loves that word) adobes and emerged in Wonder Valley. She drove by the famous "Next Services 100 Miles" sign (it's famous because artist Andrea Zittel once gave an interview to some big city paper with no fact checkers where she said she lived past that sign - yeah, going the other way, back in Joshua Tree). She bravely drove on through the "savage terrain that seemed to stretch on for a nerve-racking distance." Give her a medal!

Now, honestly, I love it that Pochoda does "get" a lot about the desert, and she appreciates what it has to offer. But snuffling beneath the deck? What desert animal with any self respect snuffles? Was that just a literary device? If so, why do literary devices snuffle? Allergies, probably.

No, I think I've found the answer: wolves. Wolves snuffle. Especially the ones in the original version of her story (that has been edited since our first reading). Apparently we weren't the only ones who caught the fact that wolves had been included in the story, despite the fact that there are zero wolves here. Maybe when sloths roamed the countryside, munching slothfully on the tasty knifelike leaves of our Joshua trees, wolves may have howled, but not for quite some time.

Note to NYT editors who replaced "wolves" with "dogs" in this story: we do have a problem out here with people abandoning their dogs, and those dogs forming packs, and those packs occasionally bringing down a desert bighorn sheep, or threatening and attacking a human. One pack had been really going after our local bighorn sheep, until, a national park ranger explained to me, "we took care of the problem." No, they didn't round up the doggies and take them to the pound.

But while it appears the fact checkers may have awoken at the Times and realized that wolves are not included in our entertaining selection of wildlife, they missed the subtle clue that followed that tipped us off that Pochoda had engaged in time travel as well.

Time travel? How could that be?

Simple. Pochoda's description of the 29 Palms Inn gives it away. She talked about her trip nearly a decade ago, and the wall around the Inn's pool area being painted in "gradients of purple" on the pool side of the wall, and gradients of orange on the exterior. Well, they just painted the wall in those gradients in the past year, so clearly, Pochoda time traveled during her first visit.

But on a later visit to the Inn (which is well worth repeated visits, by the way - we go as often as possible), she understands that being at the Inn in the Mojave is somehow the equivalent of being in a U.S. consulate on a small island in the South Pacific. Minus the South Pacific, of course, or the tall coconut palms replacing our squatter, native palm trees. If you spend enough time at the Inn, you may find yourself thinking it's similar, however, to a consulate somewhere on Alderaan, before the planet's untimely demise.

Her depiction of a night at the Inn is hilarious, with its "rugged tourists" and "resident artists and musicians of a rougher cut." I'm trying to visualize the Inn filled with "rugged" tourists. Were they all wearing lumberjack clothes? Big beards? Those are hipsters! The only thing rugged about them is their desire to make big bonfires during 45 mph winds when they're getting a craving for s'mores at some Hipcamp, doing their best to burn down our homes.

Pochoda's description of the Campbell House is about as shallow as it gets for travel writing, entirely ignoring, well, the Campbells, who really deserved more of a mention, especially in light of their contributions. No. We're not going to tell you more about them. Go ask the New York Times. They're the ones hiring people who don't know anything about the places they write about.

I can forgive Pochoda's hyperbole and odd adjectives to a point, especially since this is ostensibly a story about fake news, even the swallows carving the purple sky, our gritty flowers, and fields of cactuses, with our insistent hidden oases, but then she went to The Palms, which defies description anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love The Palms. I just can't take my wife there any more because the first and last time I took her there some drunkass local woman tried to pick a fight with her. "Yoush look like onna dem LA womenth," the local woman who is actually from LA, said to my wife, who is from New Jersey. It went downhill from there. The woman, it turned out, made her living by taking pictures of people's auras every Thursday night at the Palm Springs VillageFest, with a special (ie: expensive) Polaroid camera. What portion of the money the woman did not spend on driving back and forth to Palm Springs from Wonder Valley, she spent on cheap beer, knowing full well The Palms never 86es anyone. Not even the shape-shifting reptililans who frequently drop by on Saturday nights.

I was ready to jump in to keep my wife from being clumsily assaulted as the woman got threateningly in her face, but luckily, my wife's hairdresser at the time, Jerry, walked through the door right then and quickly intervened. Jerry lived in Wonder Valley and frequented The Palms, and had even survived a tornado that struck his home. We do have some pretty interesting, and sometimes severe, weather out here. Dick Dale, the surf guitar king, had a giant 2,000 gallon (don't quote me on this because I'm going on memory here) water tank that once was blown something like four miles away, and Jerry had his roof - and his electric meter - blown off his house and off somewhere into the desert, never to be seen again.

What was funny, was that Southern California Edison sent Jerry an electric bill while he was waiting for them to come out to replace his meter. He asked them how they knew how much to bill him. "We read the meter," was the reply. "Oh, you found it!" Jerry responded.

Virtually none of us who live here would be surprised to find out that SCE lies. Some of that might come from the fact that another agency in the line of plying power, LA Department of Water and Power, told some really big whoppers to us a while back. But that's another story.

Pochoda wrapped things up saying "big city artists and artisans and a rumored hipster hotel chain are coming," conjuring up images of change sweeping across our little wolf-riddled red rock part of the Mojave, snuffling through the knifelike leaves of the Joshua trees, and, well, changing things. But we already have lots of big city artists and artisans, and some get me called a pornographer for printing their ads in the magazine (another story, but tied to that mention of people wanting to firebomb my office), and others make me really nice stuff that I love and use, and are as sweet as can be. The hipster hotel "chain," is really just a couple remodeling (slowly) Govinda's old Circle C Lodge. Not exactly Ace Hotel Twentynine Palms or anything.

Pochoda's story in the New York Times isn't a happenstance kind of thing. She has a novel that's just come out called "Wonder Valley." I'm glad she finds inspiration for her storytelling in our sturdy, rugged part of the desert.

Oh, and this notice has appeared at the bottom of her travel story in the New York Times:

Correction: December 20, 2017

An earlier edition of this article described incorrectly the location of Joshua Tree. It is north of Palm Springs and other resort towns, not south. The article also misidentified the source of sounds in the desert. They were coyotes, not wolves.

Ivy Pochoda's New York Times story

#wonder valley #new york times #ivy pochoda #hi-desert #high desert #joshua tree #joshua tree national park #fake news #twentynine palms

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kmp78 · 7 years

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“was too over-the-top for the occasion & 2) what she thinks a rock star’s gf should look like. VK ended up looking laughably fake as fuck in those shots and came off as a total wannabe. ” actully i liked the outfit, the damn braid bothered me though and all my friends loved her outfit and so did the media. But about “over the top” i like fashion so i walk around in heels, skirt, my hair done and makeup etc. every day. i dont own a pair of jeans. only dresses and skirts. What bothers me is the “Oh this ol´ thing? I just threw it on this morning without a second thought! And this really, REALLY is my messy bed hair, I don´t even own a comb, I swear!” look that in reality takes an hour to put together. For me, her little braid represents all that. The exaggeratedly nonchalant vibes give off the exact opposite to me." – Same Anon, again. I smell some kind of bs with this. That’s all. VK looked too splashy for a simple, casual lunch with ‘Mr. Level Seventeen of IDGAF,’ just like she looked too dressed up to go to Coney Island with him for her infamous B-day dick down in 2015. I mean, since when does she do braids in that ratty weave of hers on a day off? I would bet money that she knew, that was all for her PR recognition with him, and that J was fully in on it this time. What I don’t believe is that he really loves her. And if he does, then he is the dumbest man alive. I see nothing but an entitled, insipid, smug, immature, pretentious bimbo that is stuck too far up her own ass every time I see her. But maybe that makes her supreme in a ‘vacant, vapid, stupid, perfect’ way for him and those personal insecurities that he can’t help wearing on his sleeve. He’s still full of shit, so he can eat all the dicks in the world. And he can take 'Little Miss Fauxhemian’ to dine with him at the All-You-Can-Eat Dick Buffet, 'cause I’d love to see those particular pap pics. *** Well that’s A LOT of dicks… 😨 Honestly, listening to his lyrics, the VK kinds are exactly what I would expect to be his preferred kinds. (http://kmp78.tumblr.com/post/147887250529/disclaimer-and-rules)

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starbucksfauxhemian · 6 years

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This day in history: Popeye, the Sailor Man, appeared in Elzie Segar's "Thimble Theatre" on January 17, 1929.

#Popeye #The Sailor Man #Elzie Segar #comic #cartoon #Thimble Theatre #tdih #starbucks fauxhemian

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years

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With less than a week until publication, an extract from my novel Walkaway

“They’re right to be afraid,” said Natalie. “This world, if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. If you’re in between, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, hoping you can get a better grip before your strength gives out. Everyone holding on is too scared to let go. Everyone on the bottom is too worn down to try. The people on the top? They’re the ones who depend on things staying the way they are.”

“So what do you call your philosophy then? Post-fear?” asked Hubert, Etc.

She shrugged. “Don’t care. Lots of names for it. None of that matters. That’s what I care about.” She pointed to the dancers and the beds. Another line of machines was online and folding table-and-chair sets were piling up.

“What about ‘communist’?”

“What about it?”

“That’s a label with a lot of history. You could be communists.”

She waved her beard at him. “Communist party. That doesn’t make us ‘communists’ any more than throwing a birthday party makes us ‘birthdayists.’ Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.”

The ladder clanged and the catwalk vibrated like a tuning fork. They looked over the edge just as Seth’s head came into view. “Hello, lovebirds!” he said. He was sloppy and jittery, high on something interesting. Hubert, Etc, grabbed him before he could reel over the guard-rail. Another person popped over the edge, one of the bearded threesome that had been by the beer.

“Hey-hey!” He seemed stoned, too, but it was hard for Hubert, Etc to tell.

“This is the guy,” Seth said. “The guy with the names.”

“You’re Etcetera!” the new guy said, arms wide like he was greeting a lost brother. “I’m Billiam.” He gave Hubert, Etc a lingering drunkard’s embrace. Hubert, Etc had dated guys, was open to the idea, but Billiam, beautiful tilted eyes aside, was not his type and too high to consider in any event. Hubert, Etc firmly peeled him off, and the girl helped.

“Billiam,” she said, “what have you two been up to?”

Billiam and Seth locked eyes and dissolved into hysterical giggles.

She gave Billiam a playful shove that sent him sprawling, one foot dangling over the catwalk.

“Meta,” she said. “Or something like it.”

He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance – a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miserable lot. In his day – eight years before – the scourge had been called “Now,” something they gave to source-code auditors and drone pilots to give them robotic focus. He’d eaten a shit-ton of it while working on zepps. It made him feel like a happy android. The conspiracy people had said the same thing about Now that they said about Meta. End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro-status quo.

“What’s your name?” Hubert, Etc said.

“Does it matter?” she said.

“It’s driving me nuts,” he admitted.

“You’ve got it in your address-book,” she said.

He rolled his eyes. Of course he did. He rubbed the interface patch on his cuff and fingered it for a moment. “Natalie Redwater?” he said. “As in the Redwaters?”

“There are a lot of Redwaters,” she said. “We’re some of them. Not the ones you’re thinking of, though.”

“Close to them,” Billiam said from his stoned, prone ironic world. “Cousins?”

“Cousins,” she said.

Hubert, Etc tried hard not to let phrases like “trustafarian” and “fauxhemian” cross his mind. He probably failed. She didn’t look happy about having her name out.

“Cousins as in ‘poor country relations,’” Seth said, from his fetal position, “or cousins as in ‘get to use the small airplane’?”

Hubert, Etc felt bad, not just because he was crushing on her. He’d known people born to privilege, plenty in the zepp scene, and they could be nice people whose salient facts extended beyond unearned privilege. Seth wouldn’t have normally been a dick about this kind of thing – it was precisely the sort of thing he wasn’t normally a dick about – but he was high.

“Cousins as in ‘enough to worry about kidnapping’ and ‘not enough to pay the ransom,’” she said, with the air of someone repeating a timeworn phrase.

The arrival of the two stoned boys sucked the magic out of the night. Below, the machines found a steady rhythm, and Rule 34 spun again, blending witch house and New Romantic, automatically syncing with the machines’ beat. It wasn’t pulling a lot of dancers, but a few die hards were out, being beautiful and in motion. Hubert, Etc stared at them.

Three things happened: the music changed (psychobilly and dubstep), he opened his mouth to say something, and Billiam said, in a tittering sing-song: “Buuuusted!” and pointed at the ceiling.

They followed his finger and saw the flock of drones detach from the ceiling, fold back their wings, and plunge into a scream¬ing drop. Natalie pulled her beard back on and Billiam made sure his was on too.

“Seth, masks!” Hubert, Etc shook his friend. There had been a good reason for Seth to carry both of their masks, but he couldn’t remember it. Seth sat up with his eyebrows raised and a smirk on his face. Tucking chin to chest, Hubert, Etc swarmed over Seth and roughly turned out his pockets. He slapped his mask to his face and felt the fabric adhere in bunches and whorls as his breath teased it out and the oils in his skin were wicked through its weave. He did Seth.

“You don’t need to do this,” Seth said.

“Right,” said Hubert, Etc. “It’s out of the goodness of my heart.”

“You’re worried they’ll walk my social graph and find you in the one-hop/high-intensity zone.” Seth’s smile, glowing in the darkness of his face, was infuriatingly calm. It vanished behind the mask. That was the stupid Meta. “You’d be screwed then. They’ll run your data going back years, dude, until they find something. They always find something. They’ll put the screws to you, threaten you with every horrible unless you turn narc. Room 101 all the way, baby—”

Hubert, Etc gave Seth a harder-than-necessary slap upside the head. Seth said “Ow,” mildly, stopped talking. The drones flew a coverage pattern, like pigeons on crank. Hubert, Etc’s interface surfaces shivered as they detected attempted incursions and shut down. Hubert, Etc downloaded countermeasures regularly, if only to fight off drive-by identity thief creeps, but he shivered back, wondering if he was more up-to-date than the cop-bots.

The party had broken up. Dancers fled, some holding furniture. The music leapt to offensive-capability volume, a sound so loud it made your eyes hurt. Hubert, Etc clapped his hands over his ears just as one of the drones clipped an I-beam and spun out, smashing to the ground. A drone dive-bombed the sound-system’s control unit, knocked it to the ground. The sound went on.

Hubert, Etc pulled Seth to sit, pointed at the ladder. They let go of their ears to climb down. It was torture: the brutal sound, the painful vibrations of the metal under their hands and feet. Natalie came down, pointed at a doorway.

Something heavy and painful clipped Hubert, Etc in the head and shoulder, knocking him to his knees. He got to all fours, then to his feet, seeing stars behind the mask.

He looked for whatever had hit him. It took him a second to make sense of what he saw. Billiam lay on the floor, limbs in a strange swastika, head visibly misshapen, an inky pool of blood spread around it in the dimness. Fighting dizziness and pain from the sound, he bent over Billiam and gingerly peeled the beard. It was saturated with blood. Billiam’s face was smashed into a parody of human features; his forehead had an ugly dent encompassing one eye. Hubert, Etc tried for a pulse at Billiam’s wrist and then his throat, but all he felt was the thunder of the music. He put his hand on Billiam’s chest to feel for the rise and fall of breath, but couldn’t tell.

He looked up, but Seth and Natalie had already reached the door. They must not have seen Billiam fall, must not have seen him crash into Hubert, Etc. A drone ruffled Hubert, Etc’s hair. Hubert, Etc wanted to cry. He pushed the feeling down, remembering first aid. He shouldn’t move Billiam. But if he stayed, he’d be nabbed. It might be too late. The part of his brain in charge of cowardly self-justification chattered: Why not just go? It’s not like you can do anything. He might even be dead. He looks dead.

Hubert, Etc had made a concerted study of that voice and had concluded that it was an asshole. He tried to think past the self-serving rationalizations. He grabbed a bag someone left behind and, working gently, rolled Billiam into recovery position and put the bag under his head. He was propping Billiam up with a broken chair and a length of pipe, eyes squinted, head hammer¬ing, when someone grabbed him by his sore shoulder. He almost vomited. This was the day he’d known was coming all his life, when he ended up in prison.

But it wasn’t a cop – it was Natalie. She said something inaudible over the music. He pointed at Billiam. She knelt down and made a light. She threw up, having the presence of mind to do so in her purse. Hubert, Etc noted distantly that she was thinking of esophageal cells and DNA. That distant part admired her foresight. She got to her feet, grabbed him again by his bad arm, yanked hard. He screamed in pain, the sound lost in the roar, and went, leaving Billiam behind.

http://headofzeus.com/walkaway

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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The Best Dressed Footballers In The World

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-best-dressed-footballers-in-the-world-2/

The Best Dressed Footballers In The World

Like the gladiators and medieval knights before them, footballers are larger than life characters and therefore should dress appropriately. While chainmail chic isn’t likely to make a comeback this season (linen is so much more breathable you know) footballers should understand that with great adulation and that £200,000 a week pay cheque comes the need to dress a bit differently from Paul eating a pie in row Z.

“Don’t confuse player style with what the fans are wearing in the stands,” says Simon Doonan, creative ambassador-at-large of New York City-based clothing store Barneys and author of Saturday Night Fever Pitch: The Magic and Madness of Football Style. “Players should always be over the top and outrageous, wearing head to foot designer looks. They wear them on the runway so why can’t a player wear them. It’s important to have those stand-outs for the culture of football.”

Doonan argues that footballers’ style can be whittled down into five tribes. You have the ‘label kings’ like Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi, famed for his outrageous and ostentatious Dolce & Gabbana suits whenever another Ballon D’Or awards ceremony rears its head. There are the ‘good taste ambassadors’ such as former Liverpool and Real Madrid midfielder Xabi Alonso, who eschew the gaudy tailoring for a more muted look.

Then there are the ‘psychedelic ninjas’ such as Neymar, whose cartoonish style can sometimes border on the ludicrous, ‘hired assassins’ like Alex Oxlade Chamberlain who favour a gritty leather jacket and some rugged denim jeans and finally the ‘bohemian fauxhemian’ pack, led by gritty Everton left back Leighton Baines, whose mod-led style is more flouting bassist for Oasis than gritty Lancastrian raised on a diet of two-footed tackles and boggy Sunday league pitches.

“Just like the fashion pantheon, you need your Ralph Lauren so you can have your Comme Des Garcons. They’re juxtapositions that make the firmament.”

With that in mind, here are the 15 best-dressed footballers to have walked the hallowed turf.

George Best

The pillar on which all footballers’ style stands, George Best was the mercurial talent who started the tradition of Manchester United number 7’s becoming style icons back in the 1960s (a line that includes Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo).

“George Best took all the elements of rockstar style at the time and refined them,” says Doonan. “It was all turtlenecks and medallions and cuban heeled boots, but more in the way a hip Californian advertising executive might wear them, with a safari jacket over the top. It was the start of footballers navigating their anti-flamboyant working class roots with a desire to dress up and have fun in velvet jackets and massive collars.”

Best’s interest in fashion led him to launch a number of clothes boutiques in Manchester and was an early champion of Sir Paul Smith’s designs.

David Beckham

Taking the torch from Best was David Beckham who swept to fashion super stardom in the 1990s just as the footballer as an otherworldly source of worship and celebrity hit overdrive.

“Beckham was right there when fashion and celebrity culture was gaining steam, just as it kicked on when George Best was around in the 1960s,” Doonan points out. “Suddenly you had the Premier League and all the money that came with it, and right there in the middle you had this very good looking, accomplished player.”

Beckham’s style has matured with age. The cornrows, his and hers all-black leather Versace outfits with wife Victoria, and that sarong from the 1990s have been replaced by impeccable tailoring with subtle touches of flair and understated smart-casual looks invariably with a pair of distressed denim jeans.

“Beckham’s fashion trajectory is perfect,” says Doonan. “You’re meant to be playful when you’re younger and not worry about what people think. Then when you’re older, you want to be taken seriously. You’re opening a big football stadium in Miami, so you need to wear something that suits the occasion.”

David Ginola

Along with Beckham, French midfielder David Ginola dominated screens in British football’s new era of near constantly televised football matches. Galavanting around the pitch with his flowing long hair, deep tan and piercing blue eyes he looked like a Pre-Raphaelite playboy who would murder you in a duel and become step-daddy to your family of 15 children.

“Ginola was the first player to grab a L’Oreal ad,” says Doonan. “According to folklore, they took the contract away from Jennifer Aniston to give it to Ginola. He knows he is good looking. If you’re going spend every week charging around a field in front of 60,000 people you’re going to need that confidence. He’s not an avant-garde dresser but he knows his audience. A little bit of Bruno Cuccinelli, a little Zegna. Tailored suits with the dinky pocket square. He looks like he could be in McMafia.”

Pep Guardiola

In the early 2000s a surge of “Euro-fabulous” managers brought some welcome continental style to British touchlines, led by the irrepressible Jose Mourinho and ending with the ever-stylish former Barcelona player and manager Pep Guardiola.

“English managers like Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew do the Savile Row bank manager look which says, ‘I can be responsible for large sums of money and big decisions’,” explains Doonan. “It still has gravitas in England, that look, but Guardiola has a Prada store manager look or a very chic, high-end undertaker.

“What you’ve got there is a Italian version of English preppiness with the school uniform of those V-neck sweaters and a narrow tie. He’s wearing a few more blouson jackets lately and you don’t see the tie so often anymore, although I think if the team started doing badly the tie would come back very quickly.”

Paul Pogba

Manchester United playmaker Paul Pogba’s style traverses three tribes – the psychedelic ninjas, the hired assassins and the label kings. Pogba has now released two collections with sportswear giants Adidas, and sportswear meets streetwear reigns supreme in his look. That said, he favours more earthy neutral tones in his wardrobe than the colour riots of ninjas Dani Alves and Neymar, usually in a pair of slim fitting joggers as opposed to jeans with a snazzy bomber jacket up top.

And while the hair is constantly changing between various colours and emojis (what next? the aubergine?) Pogba knows how to match it with his outfit – take the gold flecks in his 2015 Ballon d’Or tuxedo matched by his bleach blonde dyed hair as a prime example.

“Pogba believes that personal style is about creative expression,” adds Doonan. “He was the first player I saw rocking the Givenchy Rotweiler T-shirt. He has fun with his style but he is still an elegant guy.”

Cristiano Ronaldo

When every part of your body right down to your knees has an 8-pack you’re going to want to wear clothes that show off your rippling figure to the full. Therefore the chances of catching mega ripped current world player of the year Cristiano Ronaldo in a baggy tee is about as rare as papping him munching down on a Big Mac.

The skinny jeans are almost permanently spray-on, but the natural punk stylings of the denim contrasts itself well to Ronaldo’s usually safer upper half. Up here he dresses in a series of lightweight jumpers, cool jackets cropped to just above the waist and plain tees hemmed around the mid bicep so we can all get on those gun show tickets.

Hector Bellerin

The Spanish defender is now as much of the London menswear crew as those influencers who actually make it their job to be seen around town when fashion week rolls by. Whether he’s been shot street-style, arm-in-arm with Oliver Proudlock or alongside his front row partner in crime, Neymar, Bellerin is always adorned in some of the trendiest brands in the world, including his personal playmakers – Fear of God and Balenciaga.

Bellerin favours the less wearable oversized silhouette in his jackets whereas the jeans contrast with a slimmer fit and cropped just above the ankle, while he also enjoys accessorising with an arsenal of beanies or off white scarves to draw the attention of the street style snappers.

Lionel Messi

Arguably the greatest player of his generation, maybe of all time, Leo Messi’s style evolution is the most substantial on this list. When he arrived on the scene at Barcelona he was a gawky, long-haired lover from Rosario, Argentina, but over time the hair has been shorn and styled, with a befitting rugged beard to match. We don’t often get to see his clothing choices unless he is picking up yet another Ballon d’Or, but his tailoring flits between outlandish and expressive to demure but effortlessly classy.

“There was a period where he really dressed up for the Ballon d’Or,” notes Doonan. “He had the burgundy suit and the bright red one, which were both Dolce & Gabbana and worn with a bow tie. Unfortunately the two times he wore the most outrageous suit at the ceremony were the two times he lost to Ronaldo, so I was worried that he wouldn’t wear a fun suit after that. The spotted tuxedo was the one exception, he won that year. I loved that suit and went and priced it at Dolce & Gabbana. It was $10,000.”

Neymar

Yes, the stratospheric pay packet on offer must have been tempting but you can’t help but think there was a reason beyond the football and money for Brazilian trickster Neymar to make the move to the fashion capital of the world last summer. Neymar is a rampant hypebeast, devouring Parisian brands like he does defenders on the pitch. “Neymar has his own look,” says Doonan. “It’s very unusual, almost like a Manga character.”

Two of his favourite brands are Louis Vuitton and Balmain, with the striker seen sporting a jacket from the latter brand at the Ligue 1 football awards. Black with a glitzy gold dragon trim emblazoned all over it, the look – a cross between a samurai’s dinner jacket and something Michael Jackson might dress up in – was peak Neymar. Gold is certainly his colour but for more dressed down affairs Neymar is more inclined to wear all-over denim, but with a loud bandana wrapped across his forehead because workwear is a little too workmanlike for this ethereal superstar.

Let’s be honest, it’s not for everyone, but there’s no-one quite like him, on the pitch or off it.

Xabi Alonso

Through his career, Xabi Alonso was an elegant and safe pair of feet in the middle of the pitch for successful sides at Liverpool, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. And just as the skills and tricks of a George Best or Neymar are echoed in their sartorial choices outside of the stadium, Alonso is the definition of a good taste ambassador, favouring well-cut and pristine grey suits or lounging cardigans over the streetwear of his younger peers. “He has been very vocal about his disinclination to wear jewellery and he only wears a watch,” says Doonan. Think of Alonso as the Johannes Huebl of footballers and you won’t be far off.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain

“He has the hired assassin look, but he also has a range too and probably thinks quite strategically about what to wear,” says Doonan of Liverpool and England midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. “He might have a big-boy meeting so he thinks that he should put on a jacket. To accomplish what he has accomplished at that age you have to be pretty put together.”

At 5ft 9in, Oxlade-Chamberlain opts for slim fitting jeans that work better at balancing out your upper half than skinnier options with a cushy sweat when off duty or a well fitted blazer when contract signing time in the boardroom rolls around. Roll necks also come into play in the colder months as do loafers on the Ox’s subs rotation bench.

Thierry Henry

“Footballers are the perfect sample size for clothes, and Henry is the best example,” says Doonan about well-proportioned former Arsenal goalscoring hero Thierry Henry. “He could have been a fit model. It’s not him to be an avant-garde straight off the catwalk dresser, but he is very suave and looks fab in a suit.”

Henry is a good taste ambassador as befits his current role as a pundit and assistant manager of the Belgium national side, with an army of natty suits to pick from to work into one of his myriad of TV appearances, ranging from jacket-trouser combos with a check in them, to slim fitting three pieces. Out of the box Henry is more of a casual dresser in a dressed down tee and denim trousers, but it’s his suit game that really warrants his inclusion on this list.

Leighton Baines

When you’re good mates with Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and Miles Kane from The Last Shadow Puppets then you’re bound to pick up some rock and roll stylings along the way. Think Liam Gallagher’s heavy duty parkas and oversized shades and you wouldn’t be too far away from Baines’s style.

“He has the classic mod look,” says Doonan about Baines. “But more like the 1990s revival, with Oasis and Britpop. I love his hair do, but its very hard to maintain. It works well for rockstars because they travel with hairdressers, so I can only imagine he has one at Goodison Park.”

Andrea Pirlo

Another one of the good taste ambassadors, former Italian international Andrea Pirlo was voted as having the best hair on the team when playing for New York City FC late in his career. When asked why he thought he had won, Pirlo, poe-faced as ever, replied that it was because it was his. “Long hair on the pitch is challenging,” says Donnan. “There’s a few people who have made it work and Pirlo is one of them.”

Away from the locks, Pirlo’s go-to outfit is distinctly Italian – luxurious shirt with sleeves rolled up the forearm, designer shades, chinos or a pair of dark wash denim, and some cushy loafers. He might throw a blazer on over the top, but its more likely to be a chunky knit cardigan, because looking made up and elegant when you’re from the country of sprezzatura is that easy.

Dani Alves

“He’s a very accomplished player who has won just as much as Ronaldo and Messi,” says Doonan on former Barcelona man, Dani Alves, now playing for Paris Saint-Germain. “If you’re him and you have won what you have, then you can wear a Givenchy kilt. Who cares? Plus someone is making all these clothes so someone has to wear them.”

Just like his pal Neymar you can’t help but think Alves emigrated to France for the fashion (it can’t have been the level of competition on offer in the French league). Their styles are very similar, so underneath the extravagant blazers, you might see Alves dabbling in a wraparound karate-like tunic, or in more casual looks, a gleaming gold print bomber with drop crotch trousers. While we would not recommend you try this look at home in the world of football, a considerable amount of Dani Alves style bravado is needed to stand out from the label flashing, cash splashing pack.

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