Not that I have anything against weed/rolling doobies but seriously, if I have to smoke to ‘earn’ your so called respect i.e. put myself in a position where I’m doing something I do not wish to do (with the proper ethical and statistical knowledge attained beforehand prior to my decision) then what the fuck does that say about our friendship?

That you would prioritize your gratification of seeing me do something you want me to do over my personal desire to abstain. Mind you I’ll hang with you while you roll swishers, and nobody said anything about condemning kush smoking. But for you to act like I’m not worth your time because I said ‘no’, well that says everything about where we stand don’t it?

TRC

It’s a Bad Religion…

..I try not to post rants these days, despite the title of this blog, it seems that TRC has basically become a visual inspiration dumping ground for what I can’t fit onto styleternity.

And the last time I posted one of these rant format articles (admittedly poorly phrased, and inadequately explained) I was accused of being a misogynist. 

This is however one of those rare exceptions in which I must absolutely vent, otherwise I’m in danger of taking a blow torch to the inside of my nostrils. 

Recently my parents both suffered horrible accidents: the bulk of the damage occurring during the end of semester exams in Australia (for me), sometime between October/November. My father suffered a minor stroke - right because there’s such a thing as a stroke that’s simply ‘minor’ - while my mother has been feeling the effects of two fissures to her left patella, most of the subsidence is gone now but she’s whell chair confined for a couple more weeks.

Needless to say, as a direct result of these accidents that both of my parents have had, at the rather fragile ages of 60 and 68 they wandered to religion in order to cure their pain. This decision, in its isolated state gives me no grounds for worry: with their only son off at uni, nearly a whole life behind them and grievous injuries suffered I understand that they would turn to our local Chinese Christian community for a little comfort (NB: I should add that my parents have not had anything resembling a social life for over 4 decades, working hard to secure the future of their child and helping- in a way - to bring China into the 21st century, so joining a church and going out for food with people who aren’t their family is like a landmark moment for them).

Initially I was supportive: the community church seemed fairly moderate, it was clear access to a social support structure made my parents very happy and with me out of commission studying for legal exams I now remember absolutely asspig all about it was good that they were ‘keeping busy’. 

And then as the people say…shit started to go down. 

Select members of the Chinese Baptist church my parents attend began telling my mother that she had suffered her accident/and concurrently my father had also suffered because for years prior my mother had been a devoutly ACADEMIC student of Taoism. As I recall, she also studied Chinese folk Buddhism (the not-very-serious-and-not-quite-Shinto-kind) concurrent to this, and upon telling her new Church about these highly objective/non-worship related studies they still berated her for ‘straying’. 

THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY!? 

Basicallywhat these scripture thumping moral mountaineers were stating was that my parents had suffered near irreversible accidents as a result of God’s intervention. Now mind you, I’m not terribly well versed when it comes to New Testament scripture et cetera but I’m fairly certain the whole Christianity angle centres on a forgiving and compromising deity who welcomes all into his house - the lost, the ‘saved’ (what does that even mean!?), the sick, the healthy blah blah blah - but here we were, with a group of people who were purporting to be there for my parents in their time of need and they were manipulating my highly fragile family into guilt and self loathing. 

…and here we are 2 months later.

I’m on holiday in China atm, and things have gotten infinitely worse. My mother is now a ‘self proclaimed disciple of Jesus’ and my father a ‘re-discoverer of his faith’ (some background: my father’s family were quite outspoken Christian doctors back in the old days who helped a large number of refugees who fled mainland China in the wake of the 1949 communist party takeover). And I’m in the middle: a moderate, objective, agnostic who seems to have suddenly become Lucifer’s lamp bearer. Ad nauseam I have argued with my family about the ills of organised religion, my mother continues to assert that our family are in these times ‘not religious, but faithful’ and then will go and do something which totally contravenes that fucking statement. 

The faithful do not canonize the Israelites as ‘those dicks who murdered Jesus’, the faithful do not trivialize the customs of other cultural dispositions (case in point: you don’t blame the suffering of young Americans of colour on their ‘lack of God’, you blame it on poor fucking social security, the absence of any uniform education system and the sheer inadequacy of legal accountability) and they certainly do not FORCE themselves on individuals who inhabit the neutral ground. 

However, all of the aforementioned acts are synonymous with organised RELIGIONS. 

I’ve tried as best I can - through my limited intellectual, moral and oratory means - to tell my parents to take things down a notch, to remain objective and open minded but all my pleadings fall on deaf ears. They’ve even started to disseminate Church material within their business, and I know for a fact that in Australia at such acts could be considered (at the very least) highly inappropriate in a vocational context. 

Ultimately I personally feel that faith is a highly private conceit. What you believe in, and how you worship/experience it is for you alone, and no good can come of having constraints enforced upon you in this area. The moment I left high school, I shed the veneer of organised religion: so many things about it are fundamentally - and intentionally - flawed, a systematic attempt to enforce the status quo. I mean as it stands my family are now a bunch of Han Chinese worshipping a middle Eastern male portrayed historically as a well manicured Western European. If it sounds absurd that’s because it is. 

Conversely I am not naive, I DO believe there are powers yet unknown to us in this admittedly big universe and that there’s something beyond this mortal coil. But that’s for me alone to experience, I shouldn’t use this base conceit as a reason to demonize people of colour  differing creed or sexual orientation. My family’sinability to treat my decisions with respect when I tell them ‘I don’t wish to pray at table’ is a ready example of why this whole organised religious thing is bollocks. A majority of responses from its proponents fall into one of two categories: (a) violence; and/or (b) contempt (it usually presents itself as condescension, smugness or a sense of ill deserved moral superiority).  

Now I’m not saying that the die hard scientists, human behaviourists and philosophers of the world don’t react this way to all the moderate people of religion either but their brashness is at least partially rooted in the grounding of logic/reasoning.

One of organised religion’s greatest assets is its ability to attribute with absolute discretion. When an event occurs that benefits humankind in some way, they attribute it to their version of God/or whatever, while conversely when the same event, rendered in the same environment with the same properties and same results in disaster it is attributed as being an act of man.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME!? THIS IS TANTAMOUNT TO CALLING A MAN A CHAMPION AND A WOMAN A WHORE WHERE BOTH PERFORM THE SAME ESSENTIAL ACT OF HAVING LOADS OF SEX. You can’t just change the standard where you feel its appropriate, it has to be immutable for you to possess any credibility when proposing your ideas.

I’m honestly so lost: I feel sick and yet so full of anger at the same time. Its been clear in the last couple of months that my parents have become awfully sad about their age, death is on their minds alot (it would seem) and as their health wanes the last thing I want to do is renege on my filial obligations as a good son. I’m not a very good person - there’s no denying that - but I’ll be damned if I won’t at least try to accommodate my parents and be a half decent child to the people who’ve clothed, fed and (for the most part) given me an excellent education. At the same time, I feel myself slipping away, the more I endorse these toxic lies, these structures and edifices built on bigotry and corruption the more I can’t live with myself: strong personalities and all that shit.

Sigh…I really need a fucking drink, like badly. Hell a drink, a cigarette and a sexual partner with standards low enough to tolerate such physically perceptible self-loathing. 

TRC

Despair All Ye Who Hear: Park & Bond are closing down…

This is incredibly sad news, apparently P & B are being folded into Gilt Man and the awesome sales we’ve been having over the past month or so are in fact due to P & B shuttering its digital doors.

Personally, I think this is a move motivated by sales. Although nothing has been said about Park and Bond losing money, I’d be confident to put my finger on financial interests being the main reason for its closing. Although I’ve always felt that what Park & Bond were going for has been done better by MR PORTER (editorials, curated items for sale blah blah blah) the online retailer has had a distinct identity when it comes to dressing customers. Providing buyers with a range of very North American-centric menswear, they were among the few online sellers who stocked some coveted brands that are otherwise- largely - unattainable (looking at you Ovadia & Sons).

The fact that P & B is being folded into Gilt Man is not an ideal sign. I’ve always felt Gilt Man’s sample sales lack a sense of creative direction (there are exceptions obviously, I’m just speaking generally in the interest of time). Additionally the product on offer hasn’t always been the best: think Calvin Klein collection, mainline Tommy Hil and Trafalgar. Frankly most of the retail I ever did on Gilt Man was tied to their Park & Bond end of week sales: where Gilt brought over product from P & B and advertised it with other sample sales. I’m probably overreacting: there’s a good chance that as a result of P & B closing its doors that Gilt Man’s editorial quality will spike significantly. We might even start getting better flash sales, and who’s to say Gilt won’t continue to push the product they did on P & B but move it all over to its menswear section.

What will become of the P & B tumblr? There’s another question that I’d be curious to see an answer to. Regardless, P & B has been a constant for me in the last 2 years, and as I sit typing this I consider the fact that 3 of the 5 things I’m wearing today were purchased from there.

Oh and they were also cheaper than MR PORTER, by a LONG SHOT.

R.I.P Park & Bond
You are gone, but not forgotten….

I like music that’s not very sophisticated…and that’s okay

I love Russell Howard, the hyper-kinetic comedian seems to be a strange man upon which to premise a rant but the lad touched upon the consent of ‘inventing your own misery’: the domain of people who’ve given up on enjoying anything in life and who have thus resolved to let others share in this dubious privilege.

Arguably the most prolific and ubiquitous of the ‘self-inventing misery’ tycoons is the music hater. You know the one, the guy who stands around in the club languishing in a veritable pool of his own contempt, raging silently at the fact that there’s a man talking about having a hangover while you attempt to catch up to said description of ‘drinking too much for sure’. 

He (or she) will say things like “oh, this music is so stupid” or “do you remember when music used to be good” or my personal favourite “there’s just no way that anybody could enjoy this”. Except fuck, fuck and fuck you because I have a pretty textbook response to all 3 of your ridiculous attempts to guilt people into your music elitist zeitgeist. 

All art is by nature subjective, you can sing the merits of something as much as you want and quantify its advantages as articulately as you want but at the end of the day this merit is given worth only by the fact that you enjoy whatever it is that you are praising. You can spend all day telling some dude on the street that it is imperative his jacket be soft shouldered and have a hand rolled lapel, but the fact remains if someone is not interested/predisposed to enjoy what it is that you enjoy that they might disagree with you. And that’s fucking okay. 

Secondly the ridiculous concept of nostalgia has been jacked and hacked to pieced by hipsters, curmudgeons and pessimists. The idea that ‘things were better back then’ is ridiculous when taken relatively. All time (in my opinion) is relative, and when our spoilt, loathsome, uncaring children come into this world they too will annoy the fuck out of us with their electronic-post-pop-apocalyptic-chillout music and if we respond with ‘things used to be so much better back in <insert wankerific historical reference here>’ only then will the irony dawn on us: that we never truly embrace things of our time because that’s just a little too conventional for us. And please, if I’m going to be absolutely out of this world individual I have to hate on every single thing that characterizes the period of my young existence (dub step anyone?). 

Finally, plain and simple, what trumped up music snobbery comes down to is elitism. The intellectual delusion that you’re somehow ‘better’ than other people because you empirically know what is shit and what is not. Its a bit like spitting on people because they can’t tie a four in hand or because they don’t know the difference between a sous chef and a demi chef. You’re not better than anybody else just because you like something that they don’t and you sure as hell have nowhere near enough experience (just mathematically unless you come from the future its not very possible) to make an objective and credible judgement about your shit being better than their shit. 

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to listen to some more Nicki, and if y’all haters know what’s good for you, you’ll shut your cunt mouth and dive back into a pile of old Pixies albums buried at the bottom of your mildew stained vintage Moravian closet. And you know what? I’m not into that, but that’s absolutely okay, we all gotta do our own thang’ 

A different kind of spoilage: a retort to unreasonable buyers and customers’

Its very difficult to explain hefty purchases these days…in an age of faux political correctness and whiny entitled consumers, it seems like charging anything above ten measly dollars is some sort of sin tantamount to advocacy for Gordon Gecko style greed.

But let’s just be real here for a second: life is all about proportionality. If you expect to waltz away with something that will benefit you without first having paid a proportionate price/done a proportionate amount of labor, then you are one entitled, deluded, self-enabling cunt. Sorry, that’s just what you are.

Oh of course you shouldn’t be expected to pay $1000 for a hand crafted, bench made, ostrich leather Northampton shoe, how silly of me, I’m sorry, that’s simply robbery, its not like the cobbler and the stitcher and the fucking tanner who build the shoe need to make a profit or anything, and clearly even if they did the logistics of building such an elegant and sophisticated product don’t necessitate at least a couple hundred dollars of profit. Oh wait, they do, you’re still a cunt, and you see my point.

The point is: if you want to cop’ nice things, be prepared to fork out some dough. Now where retail up-sale and slave labor are concerned, I happily concede the principal is non-applicable. No you shouldn’t pay $500 for a glue fused sweatshop made sweater (seriously, you don’t even fuse sweaters) which justifies its price point by the reprehensible college style ‘Abercrombie & Fitch’ logo on it. BUT if you know better, if you know that much love, craftsmanship and sweat goes into making and building your product and you still demand that the price sellers ask you for is ludicrous, then you’re basically an arrogant jerkoff looking to benefit himself regardless of the cost to the people helping you in this endeavor.

So the next time you decide (you know who you are) that you want to make fun of me for my decision to spend MY MONEY on MY GOODYEAR WELTED SHOES because they are empirically worth that much, I am very simply put going to skullfuck the living balls out of you.

Oh and yeah, there’s this one time in a artisinal product maker’s calendar where they have an attack of concious and decide to be generous about things: that’s called ‘sales season’. That’s as close as you’re getting to haggling with them, because seriously if you don’t jack that quilted down jacket by Moncler Gamme Bleu because you think its a serious affront to the concept of ‘thrifty living’ (and why would you be buying Moncler then in the first fucking place?) then rest assured, some appreciative and much less whiny customer will do so.

TRC

From the moment I was born, I was born into debt. I shattered my mother’s body and her spirit, and left a beautiful woman a broken and ultimately embittered spectre. My whole life I’ve tried to resign myself to this fact, and shift the blame onto factors beyond my control. “I never chose to be born” (such an awful appellation wouldn’t you agree) is a common one, but the more and more I think of it I was the herald of suffering. 

Now I’m just writing it all out in space, attempting to reconcile the fact that I was an awful son, a bratty child and a fucking unhelpful part of my family unit. I always resented the fact that I was the cause of my mother’s suffering, her degrading health and her pride brought so low. And as much as a host of blathering, bleeding heart liberal enablers continue to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, it was very definitely all my fault. I’ve watched as my mother’s beauty as faded away and she has transferred malice for such de-ravelling threads to my poor father, who I in turn very ironically attempted to protect by being an absolute and utter cunt. 

I look at all I’ve achieved in my life, and I realise it meant nothing. The meaningless academic excellence, the cultivation of unique personal style, the construction of a carefully manic public personality…none of these mean anything because I can’t right the wrongs of my birth (not even by inflicting violent self-murder)…to this day I’m still that tiny mewling child who looks up at the horrid toll his birth took on his family, realising that its too late to do anything. 

What a goddamn mess…

…we’re hated by the people we long for, while we hate the people who long for us…such is the way

Physical beauty is a dime-a-dozen phenomena. All too often we’re consumed with the surface facade, we use it as the only gauge upon which we judge another person’s worth (oftentimes we won’t even bother getting to know somebody truly and honestly unless the wrapping is pleasant). This isn’t some holier than thou shit either, everyone does it to some extent in their life, we’re so wired into a system that champions vanity, that celebrates perfection and physicality that we sometimes forget how hard it is in this world for the ordinary person to be appreciated, to feel like their existence means anything at all. Nay the ‘ugly’ person, simply those of us (the majority) who are imperfect and all too real.

And frankly it is hardly difficult to deduce the motive behind obsession with the physical. Everybody wants to feel love, to be fought over, to be fantasize about and to be the center of another’s visceral, violently sexual desires. For those of us who don’t inspire those feelings, we aspire to be all that would inspire said feelings because we’re tired of hearing ridiculous consolations like ‘oh but you’re adorable’ or (God fucking forbid) ‘you’re a great friend’.

At the end of the day though, the beauty of the body fades. Our biology dictates that we must wither and wilt, and in the salvos that follow it is up to us to really confront what we did with our physical beauty (or lack thereof). You can stave off the inevitable, but the fact remains that the physical goes away, and if all you can summize from your youth and beauty is that you were arrogant, callous and cruel with it that which you prized so highly will destroy you. For us to truly attain beauty we must appreciate the gifts we have been given, we must recognize that we are not an ethereal other worldly deity’s greatest gift to this universe (we were merely born genetically lucky) and we must always remember that what we have been given: a great ass, luscious curves, macaroon delicate eyes blah blah blah is not a right, but a privilege (and if you recognize that you’ll treat if with the respect it deserves). All of this coalesces in a personality that ostensibly exudes humility, restraint and generosity…hopefully

TRC

What I really want is to love, to feel what it might feel like to lose everything but at the same time to have it all, what it might feel like to grasp chaos from order…

Living in a spiral of short term routines is so pointless, the senses grow dull, your appetites wane and soon you’re on the verge of slipping into catatonia: crawling through the days with all the vigour of a broken stead, its tortured soul hanging…I would do whatever is necessary to bring the flashes of glory found in love back to this greyness, this darkness, this absence of all that matters…