Sporting Life: The Rugby Shirt, A Prep Staple Latecomer

http://www.ivy-style.com/sporting-life-the-rugby-shirt-a-prep-staple-latecomer.html

In a web post during the Rugby World Cup — which ended on October 24 when France lost to host New Zealand in the final — GQ France called modern rugby shirts “synthetic” and “grotesque.”

In contrast, the post continued, “The classic rugby, in thick cotton, with a white collar and soft buttons, had an honorable place in menswear. Especially preppy menswear. It was a simple, comfortable, colorful item, easy for students in American universities to wear. It was also a good way to display the color’s of one’s school while maintaining a certain degree of elegance.”

But if the rise of the rugby as a piece of prep wear is an American tale (as the French tell it), it’s a relatively recent one. According to G. Bruce Boyer, Esquire’s “Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men’s Fashions,” published in 1973, makes no mention of the rugby. Nor, for that matter, does “The Official Preppy Handbook,” which came out in 1980.

Boyer doesn’t recall seeing the shirts on campus when he was a student in the early 1960s at Moravian College and Lehigh University. The sport, along with the shirt, comes from across the pond. The name comes from the Rugby School, in Warwickshire, England, where the game originated.

But Richard Press, Dartmouth ’59 and also interviewed for this article, recalls the shirts in college. His roommate was a member of the Dartmouth rugby “club,” so named because rugby was not an official sport. Games were in the spring, and attracted varsity football players who couldn’t officially practice football out-of-season under the rules of the just-formed Ivy League. He remembers those games as “extremely rowdy affairs accompanied by much booze and celebration.”

The Co-ops at Dartmouth, Yale et al. carried the shirts in limited quantities. The classic rugby is made of heavy cotton, says Boyer, with long sleeves and a small white collar and placket front with rubber buttons that wouldn’t come off if pulled while playing. Those thick horizontal stripes of color are called “hoops.” They were “easy to wear and launder, comfortable, and with a hearty sporting heritage which appealed to preps,” says Boyer.

J.Press began importing the shirts from the U.K. and sold lots of them until they “went mainstream and became a department store item dumbed-down by third-world resources,” says Press.

Press links that mainstreaming — of the shirt and the sport — to the 1963 release of “This Sporting Life,” a British film about rugby that proved popular in the U.S. and earned Best Actor and Best Actress nominations. Variety says the rugby scenes have “a lively authenticity” and the overall film a “gutsy vitality.”

Flash forward nearly four decades, and one can find a good selection of non-“grotesque” rugbys at retailers including Brooks Brothers (as previewed here in February), and LL Bean.

Gant prides itself on the sportiness of its “Rugger” (another term for rugby). The collar’s “lined on the inside to protect the neck from being chafed.” The buttons are rubber, “to increase durability and safety during rugby tackles.”

And there are, of course, rugby shirts aplenty at Rugby.

On the subject of Rugby — the brand, not the sport or the shirt — GQ France waxes positively poetic. Rugby is for “the preppy on a weekend in the country….The type who visits a village pub on Sunday on bicycle, while the dead autumn leaves have covered the ground with a rust-colored carpet….The next day he’s working in the City or in a Boston law firm.”

Its advice for choosing a rugby is more straightforward: find one “in fairly vivid colors (why not green and pink, since it’s the ultimate preppy color combination)…and wear it with nothing underneath.”

A simple, durable classic, even if of a relatively recent vintage. That’s the rugby shirt. — MATTHEW BENZ

Pictured are various advertising images from Ralph Lauren.

The 10 Types of Men’s Style Bloggers

http://www.complex.com/style/2011/11/the-10-types-of-mens-style-bloggers

A while back, we picked out the 25 Best Men’s Style Blogs. Many of these websites helped shape the face of the typical menswear blogger today, as well as the interesting style choices he makes. We all know dressing well is meant to make a statement, is yours “I was dressed by the Internet?” Here’s The 10 Types of Men’s Style Bloggers.

You Say You Want a Devolution?

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

By Kurt Andersen Illustration by James Taylor

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE From the fedora to the Afro, styles have changed with the times. Unless you’re living in the 21st century.

The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a new coinage) and cell phones were still novelties. Personal music players required cassettes or CDs. Nobody had seen a computer-animated feature film or computer-generated scenes with live actors, and DVDs didn’t exist. The human genome hadn’t been decoded, genetically modified food didn’t exist, and functional M.R.I. was a brand-new experimental research technique. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had never been mentioned in The New York Times. China’s economy was less than one-eighth of its current size. CNN was the only general-interest cable news channel. Moderate Republicans occupied the White House and ran the Senate’s G.O.P. caucus.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Madonna to Gaga

Go deeper and you see that just 20 years also made all the difference in serious cultural output. New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) versus one from 20 years before (Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night) or 20 years after (Klute, A Clockwork Orange), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington). When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of another age. And 20 years after Hemingway published his war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls a new war novel, Catch-22, made it seem preposterously antique.

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

An Epiphany

The Aeron chair in which you’re sitting is identical to the Aeron chair in which I sat almost two decades ago, and this morning I boiled water for my coffee in the groovy Alessi kettle I bought a quarter-century ago. With rare exceptions, cars from the early 90s (and even the late 80s) don’t seem dated. Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the Ur-boutique hotel, in 1985. It was an epiphany. Schrager’s dress shirt had no collar and some of the hair on his male employees was a bit unfashionably fluffy, but no one in the picture looks obviously, laughably dated by today’s standards. If you passed someone who looked like any of them, you wouldn’t think twice. Yet if, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous.

There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad. Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it.

Not coincidentally, it was exactly 20 years ago that Francis Fukuyama published The End of History, his influential post-Cold War argument that liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over and done. Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so certainly feels like an end of cultural history.

Nostalgic Gaze

How did we get here? Coming off the 1960s, that time of relentless and discombobulating avant-gardism, when everything looked and sounded perpetually new new new, cultural creators—designers, artists, impresarios—began looking backward for inspiration. Some 60s counterculturalists had dabbled in the 19th century—the Victoriana of Sgt. Pepper’s and Haight-Ashbury houses, the folkish fictions of Bob Dylan and the Band, the stoner-cowboy fantasies of the Grateful Dead and the Hells Angels. But starting all at once in the early 70s, nostalgia proliferated as pop culture became fixated on the past: the 1950s and early 60s—American Graffiti, Happy Days, The Last Picture Show, Grease—and to a lesser extent the 1920s, 30s, and 40s (The Great Gatsby, The Godfather, Summer of ’42, Art Deco, midi and maxi skirts). Even the one big new Hollywood species of the mid-70s and early 80s, the special-effects adventure and science-fiction blockbusters by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, was a re-invention of the B movies of the 40s and 50s.

In the 1970s and 80s too, serious architects re-discovered history, creating “postmodern” buildings with classical columns and pitched roofs and pediments and colorful finishes, and set out to build new towns and neighborhoods resembling older towns and neighborhoods. Anti-postmodern architects in turn designed buildings that evoked the styles of modernism when modernism had been new, and architecture devolved into a battle between two fantasias—nostalgia for the 19th and 18th centuries versus nostalgia for the mid-20th-century avant-garde.

At the same time, fine art that recognizably depicted people, the way all art had before the 20th century, became respectable and even fashionable again. Ditto for orchestral music, where seriousness and ambition were no longer equated with dissonance and unlikability. And in pop music, thanks to sampling, even the last genuinely new form, hip-hop, made an explicit and unapologetic point of recycling earlier songs.

Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.

They never used to remake old TV shows, as they did Hawaii Five-O and Charlie’s Angels this past season. It didn’t use to be that most Broadway musicals were revivals (Godspell, How to Succeed in Business, Anything Goes, and Follies, with Evita, Funny Girl, and Annie due any minute) or a movie/TV-derived pastiche (Wicked, Mary Poppins, The Addams Family, Spider-Man, Bonnie & Clyde). The hottest ticket to any straight play last year? Gatz, a six-hour verbatim theatricalization of The Great Gatsby.

Loss of Appetite

Look at people on the street and in malls—jeans and sneakers remain the standard uniform for all ages, as they were in 2002, 1992, and 1982. Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier. (The first time I heard a Josh Ritter song a few years ago, I actually thought it was Bob Dylan.) In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.

If this stylistic freeze is just a respite, a backward-looking counter-reaction to upheaval, then once we finally get accustomed to all the radical newness, things should return to normal—and what we’re wearing and driving and designing and producing right now will look totally démodé come 2032. Or not. Because rather than a temporary cultural glitch, these stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new. After all, such a sensibility shift has happened again and again over the last several thousand years, that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age.

You can see a corollary dynamic operating in politics as well. At the same moment that movies and music and art and design suddenly began reveling in old-fashioned subjects and forms, America became besotted by Ronald Reagan’s dreamy vision of a simpler, happier, old-fashioned America. Today, with our top federal income-tax rates half what they were when Reagan became president and income inequality dialed back up to its 1920s level, the mantra of today’s sore-winner Republicans remains, still, Less Government … Lower Taxes. Likewise, today’s radical grass-roots political movements are remakes. The Occupy Wall Street (and Occupy Everywhere Else) protests are a self-conscious remix of the Tea Party and Arab Spring protests. And, although the Tea Partiers began by nominally re-enacting the pre-Revolutionary early 1770s, they were actually performing a cover version of the New Left’s would-be-pre-revolutionary late 1960s. Meanwhile, the thing driving all the populist rage, right and left, is the unprecedented flatlining of economic progress: Americans’ median income is just about where it was 20 years ago, as unchanging as American style and culture.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose has always meant that the constant novelty and flux of modern life is all superficial show, that the underlying essences endure unchanged. But now, suddenly, that saying has acquired an alternative and nearly opposite definition: the more certain things change for real (technology, the global political economy), the more other things (style, culture) stay the same.

But wait! It gets still stranger, because even as we’ve fallen into this period of stylistic paralysis and can’t get up, more people than ever before are devoting more of their time and energy to considering and managing matters of personal style.

And why did this happen? In 1984, a few years after “yuppie” was coined, I wrote an article in Time positing that “yuppies are, in a sense, heterosexual gays. Among middle-class people, after all, gays formed the original two-income households and were the original gentrifiers, the original body cultists and dapper health-club devotees, the trendy homemakers, the refined, childless world travelers.” Gays were the lifestyle avant-garde, and the rest of us followed.

Amateur Stylists

Likewise the artists, not so much because we loved art but because we envied the way their lives looked. In the 80s, the SoHo idea—a tatty, disused urban stretch of old warehouses and factories transformed into a neighborhood of loft apartments and chic shops and restaurants—became a redevelopment prototype and paradigm, rolling out like a franchise operation in cities across America and around the world.

Tastefulness scaled. The pivotal decade, from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, can be defined as the one that began with Alessi’s introduction of Michael Graves’s newfangled old-fashioned teakettle, of which more than a million were sold; continued as stylish retail went mega-mass-market in America, with Gap (600 stores then, 1,011 now), Target (246 then, 1,750 now), Ikea (1 then, 38 now), Urban Outfitters (a few then, more than 70 now—plus 135 Anthropologies), the Landmark art-house movie-theater chain (a dozen or so then, 245 screens now), Barnes & Noble (35 then, 717 now), and Starbucks (dozens then, more than 11,000 now) all expanding exponentially; and produced the new magazines Martha Stewart Living, InStyle, Wired (always as much about cool as useful), and Wallpaper.

Then, in the first decade of this new century, came the flood of decorating and fashion and food shows on cable TV—Trading Spaces, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, What Not to Wear, Project Runway, Iron Chef, followed by their scores of second- and third-generation descendants. What really made Mad Men so hot? Not the stories, not the characters, but the “creative class” setting, the 60s-fetishizing production design and wardrobe.

People flock by the millions to Apple Stores (1 in 2001, 245 today) not just to buy high-quality devices but to bask and breathe and linger, pilgrims to a grand, hermetic, impeccable temple to style—an uncluttered, glassy, super-sleek style that feels “contemporary” in the sense that Apple stores are like back-on-earth sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey, the early 21st century as it was envisioned in the mid-20th. And many of those young and young-at-heart Apple cultists-cum-customers, having popped in for their regular glimpse and whiff of the high-production-value future, return to their make-believe-old-fashioned lives—brick and brownstone town houses, beer gardens, greenmarkets, local agriculture, flea markets, steampunk, lace-up boots, suspenders, beards, mustaches, artisanal everything, all the neo-19th-century signifiers of state-of-the-art Brooklyn-esque and Portlandish American hipsterism.

Moreover, tens of millions of Americans, the uncool as well as the supercool, have become amateur stylists—scrupulously attending, as never before, to the details and meanings of the design and décor of their homes, their clothes, their appliances, their meals, their hobbies, and more. The things we own are more than ever like props, the clothes we wear like costumes, the places where we live, dine, shop, and vacation like stage sets. And angry right-wingers even dress in 18th-century drag to perform their protests. Meanwhile, why are Republicans unexcited by Mitt Romney? Because he seems so artificial, because right now we all crave authenticity.

The Second Paradox

So, these two prime cultural phenomena, the quarter-century-long freezing of stylistic innovation and the pandemic obsession with style, have happened concurrently—which appears to be a contradiction, the Second Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. Because you’d think that style and other cultural expressions would be most exciting and riveting when they are unmistakably innovating and evolving.

Part of the explanation, as I’ve said, is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

It’s the economy, stupid. The only thing that has changed fundamentally and dramatically about stylish objects (computerized gadgets aside) during the last 20 years is the same thing that’s changed fundamentally and dramatically about movies and books and music—how they’re produced and distributed, not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are. This democratization of culture and style has two very different but highly complementary results. On the one hand, in a country where an adorably huge majority have always considered themselves “middle class,” practically everyone who can afford it now shops stylishly—at Gap, Target, Ikea, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Barnes & Noble, and Starbucks. Americans: all the same, all kind of cool! And yet, on the other hand, for the first time, anyone anywhere with any arcane cultural taste can now indulge it easily and fully online, clicking themselves deep into whatever curious little niche (punk bossa nova, Nigerian noir cinema, pre-war Hummel figurines) they wish. Americans: quirky, independent individualists!

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation. I’ve been a big believer in historical pendulum swings—American sociopolitical cycles that tend to last, according to historians, about 30 years. So maybe we are coming to the end of this cultural era of the Same Old Same Old. As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.

給天蠍座的1封信

天蠍座討厭虛偽討厭謊言討厭欺騙。
其實天蠍經常硬撐，即使一百個委屈都習慣用自己的方式獨自一人承擔。
真正痛苦的時候，其實沒人看得見。
他很注重公平，凡事都會分得清清楚楚不會去佔別人便宜。
他非常重感情只要他真心認定的朋友都會真心對待。

天蠍不愛傳訊息也不愛打電話，懶骨頭一個。

對特別的人會例外自尊心很強強過金錢強過事業也強過愛情。
天蠍座需要慢慢相處，因為天蠍座是個被動的星座、
慢熱的星座、放不開的星座。

一見鍾情很難發生在天蠍座身上天蠍的愛需要時間。
他們會喜歡很多人卻很難愛上一個人。

對愛蝎子的賭注總是壓得很大，如果能贏，
那麼他將成為這個世界上最幸福的人，
所有其他的都可以不在乎了。

可一旦輸了，那份痛將使得再次關閉他的心扉，
從此不再對任何人打開，
因為在他的生命中已經承受不起第二次這樣的打擊了。
也許他還會笑用笑去掩蓋那流血的傷口。

有人說天蠍心狠說他會很快忘記過去，而如果有人走進了天蠍的心裡，
他會很難轉身捨不得轉身即使帶給他的會是傷痛。

天蠍把自己小小的包裹起來，其實天蠍很怕寂寞。
他很怕自己心愛的那個人消失、怕自己太依賴那個人，
也許會覺得他冷漠其實天蠍會在心裡每天想千遍萬遍。

天蠍不喜歡爭吵，大多數情況下會用沉默來代替內心的不良情緒。
但，若遇到十分氣惱的情況，他會發威，
結果是口不擇言，不用費勁的說世界上最惡毒的語言，
說出來給對方聽中傷對方。
但過不了兩天天蠍自己會主動反省為自己的言語感到失態和後悔。

天蠍座的人不大會接受別人的意見，
即便是他人不停地規勸，表面上點點頭心裡還是有自己的一套。
天蠍不大懂得察言觀色，如果愛人情緒有變化，
天蠍會胡思亂想許多，認為會是自己哪裡做錯了。
然後就會招來愛人的不滿！
事實上天蠍並不想這樣，只是性格缺陷讓他容易想太多。

蝎子沒事喜歡胡思亂想。
性格與脾氣都比較極端、嗜睡、摯愛音樂、易被感動、
喜歡跟喜歡的人身體接觸，恨不得把身體揉進去那種。

有些悲觀支配欲、有較強的依賴感、偏執、苛求完美雙重性格，
一般很抗拒有人走近，不喜歡聽見周圍有人不停交談，
經常表現出對什麼都不在乎。

天蠍有時候令人難以揣摩，日常生活中他們的思維方式甚至會讓你痴迷。
他們不僅性感無比，而且還賦有精力。
他們對其他任何異性都會冷酷到底，
而對自己的老婆則是溫情綿綿。
而且蝎子其實很好哄的，
只要你的手機時時為他們開著不要不接他們的電話，
出去聚會願意帶著他們那麼蝎子絕對是最棒的伴侶。

當天蠍和自己的戀人鬧彆扭時開始的時候，
他們會很堅決大有一種決不首先向對方妥協的勢氣。
時間一久天蠍就開始想對方的好了，
於是自己主動找上門和戀人和好如初就像什麼都沒有發生過。
雖然蝎子的內心是有些氣的但一見到戀人，就又“傻”過去了。
這就是我所了解的天蠍，自我矛盾加自我折磨的天蠍。

天蠍生性渴望理解，卻不奢求理解安於孤獨更樂於孤獨。
天蠍的優勢在於對於別有用心的人，
能夠一眼看穿並完全做到視若無睹。
也許當你自鳴得意時，天蠍想的正是不和這頭牲口一般見識。
看天蠍就是這樣的心態，清高地忍讓憂鬱地承受卻酷得乾脆利落。
只要你不觸動他的底線一切都好。

天蠍座的人酷愛權力，喜歡有自己的思想方法。
錢和物質對你是不可缺少的，但從不用它來束縛自己的手腳，
你對那些對自己的事業工作有過幫助的人總是念念不忘，
肯為你們慷慨解囊。

天蠍座的人需要經常不斷地處於忙碌之中，
喜歡親自動手去做喜歡改善自己的工作和生活環境，
喜歡更新自己的想法。

天蠍座談戀愛時容易胡思亂想，
不能忍受被忽略忽視的感覺，一點點也不能！
如果另一半不理他，
他就會自己胡思亂想一堆鑽進死胡同後出不來。

然後另一半一個電話又瓦解了所有了胡思亂想。
想要控制，卻又下不了決心。
天蠍座表面堅強內心軟弱想要佔有，
卻又怕太過火不停地自信與自卑交雜。

天蠍不會輕易付出愛她們會保護自己。
如果能經受住天蠍百般的考驗和魔鬼式的訓練，
那麼他會幸運的成為她的愛。
她們怕太認真，怕她們太強烈不愛的時候，冷的像冰，
愛的時候熱情似火讓你很難適從。

她們的思想是比較偏激的要嘛愛要嘛徹底的不愛。
所以天蠍的愛永遠都是轟轟烈烈的。

給處女座的1封信

處女座有時很憂鬱。也許在外表上嘻嘻哈哈，
但當自己一個人的時，也許會故意找傷心的事回憶。
感嘆命運的悲慘，然後第二天再抱著飽滿的精神，面對朋友們。

那種氣氛也許是可以營造出的，悲慘給自己的脆弱找個理由，
告訴自己可以堅強，的確很堅強至少不願讓別人看到眼淚。

處女們不愛說話，外表冰冷高傲讓人無法接近。
他們似乎是天生的悲觀主義者，因為理性的完美主義，
而瞻前顧後他們總是低頭默默地自卑，卻永遠沒有害人的勇氣。

他們絕對不會在你困難的時候，離你而去。
會堅強的陪你度過難關他們在面對痛苦挫折的時候，
往往勇敢得令人佩服。

處女愛一個人的時候真的是“死了都要愛”
充滿羅曼蒂克的愛情藏在內心深處，一但你通過考驗，
他決定付出時，壓抑的情感都將爆發出來，他會變得積極而大膽。
所以能被處女座選中的人是很幸福的，只要你是真的誠實知性負責。
那麼處女座人寧願犧牲自已也不會勉強所愛的。

處女為人知性，冷靜，理智顧全大局知性的代表
面具下處處們也是很敏感的，又多疑還超級的悲觀。
神經纖細甚至還有點神經質。
像個孩子一樣只要一感覺到不安全了，就會內心彆扭糾結。
表面看起來對很多事情都不在乎，其實內心糾結得要死，
需要別人哄著逗著。

處女對任何事都要求過高，極其挑剔。
但實際上處女本身也是最沒底，最矛盾的人。
外表強悍到沒人真正敢融入進去，他需要很多關愛。
需要有一份堅定的安全感來鞏固內心的不安。
處女最大的毛病就是缺乏安全感。
就因為常年把自己保護得死死的，
處女內心就是希望有一個人能看穿他全部的脆弱。

喜歡在傷心的時候，聽傷心的歌。
喜歡在開心的時候，和在乎的人分享常常口是心非。
想拒絕卻開不了口，朋友挺多，但懂的不多。
不喜歡主動聯繫別人，但絕不是不在乎。
不喜歡欠別人，也不喜歡別人欠自己。
很安靜也可以很瘋。
不要覺得他沒心沒肺，他只是對很多事看得很開。

處女的情緒，來自內心深處。
所以一旦發洩出來，就會像火山爆發一樣一發不可收拾。
所以處女需要與了解自己的人在一起，
這樣才可以每隔一段時間就抒發一下自己的心事，
把悶在心裡頭的不愉快全部掏空。

對處女而言，抱怨是有益健康的。
請愛處女的人接受他偶爾吐吐苦水發發牢騷。

Belgian Shoes

 http://00o00.blogspot.com/2011/10/belgian-shoes.html

one of the shops on my “to visit” list for new york is belgian shoes. odd that the shoes were belgian but i had to cross the atlantic to search for it, london stocklist is just very limited. i featured belgian shoes a few times on here and always wanted a pair. i bought the green lizard embossed calf skin loafers, which i really really love. could easily match my green lizard skin anya hindmarch wallet.

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A Note on Closure in Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups

A Note on Closure in Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups
http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_02/section_3/artc3B.html

Closure in film has generally been understood to be the opposite of open-endedness. For example, Bordwell and Thompson write:

 

In a mystery film, if we learn who the criminal is, the film has closure, but if it leaves a doubt about that person’s guilt, it remains relatively open.[1] 

Note that closure and open-endedness are viewed here as mutually limiting options, so that the more (or stronger the) closure a film is given, the less open-ended it will be. A film left open-ended is likewise assumed to have weak closure. Again, Bordwell and Thompson suggest that

 

most classical narrative film displays strong degrees of closure at the end. Leaving no loose ends unresolved, these films seek to end their causal chains with a final effect. We usually learn the fate of each character, the answer to each mystery, and the outcome of each conflict (p. 83). 

As an example of an open-ended film, they cite Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups:

 

The boy Antoine Doinel has escaped from a reformatory and runs along the seashore. The camera zooms in on his face and the frame freezes. The plot does not reveal whether he is captured and brought back, leaving us to speculate on what might happen next (70).An ending can be relatively “open” as our example from The 400 Blows suggests. In other words, the plot presents story events that leave us uncertain as to the nature of the final consequences (74).

 

Bordwell and Thompsen’s argument could be taken one step further, since not only are we in the dark as to Antoine’s immediate future, but we are even left uncertain as to how to interpret the look on his face as the film ends. This can be demonstrated by the fact that readings of Antoine’s facial expression in the freeze-frame shot diverge considerably, and range from happiness (Baroncelli 1959)[2] and hope (Katz 1982)[3] to uncertainty (Insdorf 1979)[4] and disillusionment (MacDonald 1960)[5].

Yet other commentators take into account the fact that Antoine is looking into the camera, and therefore at us. For some, the film ends with an indictment of society (Allen 1974)[6], for others with a child’s bewilderment and pleading (Crowther 1959)[7] or questioning stare (Houston 1963)[8]. And one commentator has suggested, in a manner that would gladden the heart of any French intellectual, that “At the end, you are no longer looking at the film – the film is looking at you” (Croce 1960)[9].

Other readings attempt to account specifically for the fact that the action is stopped in a freeze frame. For one commentator, this suggests paralysis or suicide (Kauffmann)[10], for others, Antoine’s entrapment (Insdorf,[11] Greenspan[12]), a police photo or death (Thiher)[13] and dehumanization (Shatnoff).[14]

Finally, there are commentators who simply state that the ending is deliberately left open or ambiguous (Sadoul 1959[15]; Rohde 1960[16]).

It would seem, therefore, that virtually everyone would agree that Les 400 Coups ends with weak closure, at least as that concept has been defined in the past.

However, as Richard Neupert has argued in his recent book, The End – Narration and Closure in the Cinema (1995)[17], an important distinction must be made between story resolution and closure of the narrative discourse. For Neupert, the story in Les 400 Coups is left open but the discourse is closed, largely through the freezing of the final frame and the use of the musical score.

In describing the frozen frame, Neubert wrote for example that Antoine is transformed

 

from a solid body moving through space into a figure of the arrestation of the film’s driving strategies. The “stilled” Antoine becomes an image of termination; the optical zoom approaches, turning him into a static spectacle. There is nowhere for the viewer’s glance to wander. The point of view structure has changed the spectator’s look into a fixed stare, freezing the action codes and closing the narrative discourse by giving a final, impossible view of Antoine (99). 

Whatever else it may be taken to signify in relation to the story (entrapment, paralysis, dehumanization, death), the freeze-frame image is a strong and innovative closure device, signaling that nothing more will happen in this film and giving us a moment to adjust to the fact that we now have to let go of the fiction.

Curiously, Truffaut himself thought of the freeze-frame neither in terms of its possible story meaning, nor even as a means for providing closure – at least if his reply to an interviewer was entirely frank. When asked about his intentions regarding the freeze-frame, he replied: “the final freeze was simply an accident. I told Léaud to look into the camera. He did, but quickly turned his eyes away. Since I wanted that brief look he gave me the moment before he turned, I had no choice but to hold on to it; hence the freeze.”[18]

Truffaut’s original intention was thus for Léaud to continue looking into the camera in live action, presumably for the same 10 seconds the freeze-frame lasts. This ending would also undoubtedly have provided adequate closure. But the stasis embodied by the freeze-frame is even more striking. And considering how open-ended the story is, and even the final image of Antoine – susceptible as it is of radically divergent readings – it is probably just as well that Truffaut had to find an alternate and even stronger closural device.

This example illustrates the fact that closure and open-endedness are not mutually exclusive nor even mutually limiting options, as was previously held. It could even be argued that the more open-ended a film is with respect to story, the more important it is to provide the strongest possible closure within its narrative discourse.

 

Quality Peoples

 

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