His Error-ness

I was out doing a little harmless holiday shopping the other day, when I was assaulted by the following fresco:


Now, I'm neither an art critic nor a basketball fan, but I do know that Michael Jordan rarely sported such a lobotomized facial expression. And have we forgotten that he was known for dunking basketballs, not stroking his own balls?

Be like Mike? Sorry, this painting be like crap.

(Painting spotted at Fashion Valley Mall, San Diego, CA.)

Evil has no name

In response to a recent blog post about the “true face of terror in gaming,” I offer another perspective, one that reveals the “true true face of terror in gaming.”


Yes, Phanto from Super Mario Bros. 2 was scary. But did you know . . . there is another . . . Phanto-like thing!

In later years, we saw Phanto successors like the evil Samus clone who would chase you around Metroid Fusion, and a freak called Nemesis who would hunt you in Resident Evil 3. There was also the ghostly and impatient Baron von Blubba in Bubble Bobble, which pre-dated Mario 2. These and even Phanto are Johnny-come-lately sissy scares compared to the scariest creature in the history of gaming . . . and life.

Some call him the “hall monster”; others call him the “green monster.” Hell, some people probably call him “Maurice,” for all I know. I have my own name for him: “evil green face.” But learn from my example: naming him gives you no mastery over him . . . or over your fear.

The game was called Venture, produced by Exidy and released on the Atari 2600 (among other systems) back when game controllers looked like calculators. Long before Nintendo “created” Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario Bros. 2 and its resident tormentor, Phanto.

Now, by putting quotes around “created,” I’m not saying Nintendo stole this Phanto idea from a crappy Atari game. Allow me to postulate a fictional true story that maybe one day, they were making Doki Doki Panic, and someone, say, Shigeru Miyamoto, says, “You know, when I was a kid, I played a game called Venture, where you grabbed some treasure, and then this evil face would chase you down until you died. And I’m going to steal that face for this game. And I don’t even care if people know I stole it. I yam what I yam.”

And then the imperialist Hiroshi Yamauchi likely said, “Yeah, do it! Steal from those patak!”

And then the enfant terrible, Gunpei Yokoi, who would later be secretly murdered by a Nintendo hit squad for his role in creating the monumental failure, the Virtual Boy console, his death faked as a car accident, probably said, “Haha, man I like to steal things like this from other games and not give credit to the yo-yos who created it.” And then one day, he was dead.

But I digress.

Venture had a main screen with four rooms you could enter. In the main screen, your character was a pixel. For those of you who were born during the Taft administration, a pixel is a small colored square.

Today, we have these silly newfangled words for it like “pixel” and “avatar,” but back in the Reagan years, we just called it a “dot.”

When you went into one of the four rooms, you turned into a smiley face. Now back when I was a sproutling, we called such things a smiley face, but only recently did I learn that the game makers gave him a name, Winkey (sometimes Sir Winkey), and you were obliged by the instruction booklet and/or box art to believe that Winkey was a big muscle-bound clod who shot monsters with a bow and arrow. I didn’t have the game box that showed this picture, so I was blissfully ignorant and untainted by this evil fruit of knowledge.

There’s a lovely phrase about how sometimes things are better if you don’t know so much. I think it goes, “You’re a beautiful retard.”

Can that “noo-nee-noo-nee” background noise even be called “music”? Good gravy. And if he’s supposed to be packing a bow and arrow, why does it sound like a laser?

Anyhoo, if I were the marketing people at Atari or Coleco or whatever, I wouldn’t tell people that you would be controlling a muscular jungle guy with a bow and arrow. That’s just misleading. I’d tell people, “You is controlling a face with a dongle on it that shoots balls.”

And that’s how Faceball 2000 was born. It’s criminal, really, how you people steal.

So first there’s a room with skeletons, and you have to fight past them to grab some blue boxes. Then a room where you shoot snakes and snag a big grape. Then a room with several copies of the robot from Forbidden Planet who are guarding the Lion King’s head. Finally, a room with moving walls that protect the Cullinan Diamond. I guess that’s where Ocean’s Eleven came from.

After you beat these four rooms, there are four more rooms of masochism . . . and terror . . . to go.

But really, you would never beat more than one or two rooms because after your first encounter with “evil green face,” you will wish you were a blind deaf-mute, with all your senses fallen away.

If you linger too long in any of the rooms, he comes for you. If you stop to caress the Lion King’s head, he comes for you. If you shoot one of the skeletons and its corpse blocks the exit from the room, he comes for you . . . and kills you.

Yes, “evil green face” was scarier than Phanto. He came first, and he also had something Phanto didn’t: he was accompanied by the most horrifying and sickening staticky noise since the tipped-over television from Poltergeist.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare about being chased by a cactus man on the street where I lived. It was a Halloween type night, but without the candy, and the cactus man wasn’t wearing a costume. He was the costume. That’s kind of what “evil green face” was like, except real.

If you met “evil green face” in a dark alley in Tijuana, you’d say, “Please, I have so much to live for.” And he’d say to you, “I’ll eat you until you die.”

Remember that part in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox has just finished playing “Johnny B. Goode,” and the room full of befuddled 40-year-old high schoolers is staring at him, and he says, “I guess you guys aren't ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it”? I hope nobody at Atari ever looked parents in the eye and said that about Venture.

What in the name of Peter Mayhew is going on here?:

It’s like a documentary, a video game review, and an experiential psychological experiment all rolled into one unholy enchilada. I like the intermission where he goes to set up his Atari 2600. Notice that after he starts playing the game, the video turns into The Blair Witch Project.

My God, that is so sad. That numbnuts never had a chance. He didn’t even know he was dead!

Venture, why do you make children cry?

The Greatest Show on Earth

P. T. Barnum uttered the iconic maxim, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or did he? History convincingly says no, if only anyone bothered to check their facts. Huh, isn’t it weird how the false attribution of a phrase about people being suckers has made suckers of us all? (Hmm, is there a word for that?)

So when Britney Spears came to town last month, I couldn’t help but think of Barnum and his bogus saying. If the title and packaging of her latest album, Circus, don’t make the line of descent from Barnum to Britney clear, then surely the stage production of her accompanying concert tour, The Circus Starring Britney Spears, does. Her concert was every bit the spectacle it was meant to be:

Let me first discuss the show, then the compunctions. Britney’s Circus was actually something like a cross between a Cirque du Soleil show and an arena concert. It opened with several genuine circus acts, including a guy who twirled big glowy things above his head, a female acrobat jumping off of and landing back on an elastic beam, and a seriously disturbing legless(!) woman being bounced up and down a trampoline by a strongman:

Oh, there was also a concert wedged in there:

Britney looked shockingly great, and this is coming from someone who never liked the way she looked, even before she went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She sounded . . . well, she sounded like Britney, that is to say, the recorded, reverse osmosis purified Brit, this being an obviously lip-synched show.

Sadly, my favorite Britney song was the one that sounded the worst – “Baby, One More Time,” apparently in a remixed format. It was tediously militaristic, lacking the sparkle and flirtatiousness of the original. They didn’t bother to treat us to my other two favorites, “Oops, I Did It Again” and “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” Alas, alack, etc. New songs dominated the evening. After all, this was The Circus Starring Britney Spears, not the The Circus Starring the Barely Pubescent Sex Object Nostalgia Britney.

The songs were punctuated by the occasional martial arts display, a street dancing interlude (including a brief, obligatory Michael Jackson imitator), and most interestingly, a magic act featuring Britney as the magician’s assistant/victim, in a variation of the “sawing a woman in half” staple, followed by a take on "the transported man":

It was an extravaganza, but in the aftermath of the concert, I wondered to myself: was I a sucker for paying a big head of lettuce to see what was essentially a dancing blond girl lip-synching to a catalog of mediocre songs? I wondered if Britney were the latest in a long line of hucksters, charlatans, and flim-flam artists, a girl after fake Barnum’s own heart.

I’m sure my compunction has more than a little to do with my having to endure the scornful ire of my rock snob acquaintances for having gone to a Britney concert, and on my own dime at that. But if she were at least singing live, the critics might have relented. I guess in my youth, I would have seen this episode in similar terms. You don’t go to a live show to hear pre-recorded music. That’s what CDs (and yes, mp3s, sigh) are for. But as I’ve grown older and gone to more concerts, there’s been a sea change in my views.

I used to think that a concert was the definitive rendering of an artist’s music. An artist who could “bring it” on stage was not just legit, but was sharing his or her music in the most intimate, honest way, naked even. And it was one of a kind because they could never reproduce that exact performance. However, as I saw more and more of my favorite artists on stage, I started to feel that a lot of them sounded a lot better on a recording than they did live. And they weren’t even bad live; they just weren’t quite what I knew them as from the CDs. To be sure, some artists were even better live, but I realized that it wasn’t necessarily because of the music. The best live performers were just that – performers, and they could overcome a bad sound system or shabby acoustics. Passion and charisma made up for the jumbled mess of noise that concerts often became. The greatest concerts inject the feeling of the music into the audience, no matter what the actual aural quality is.

This new paradigm reaches its apotheosis with Britney’s Circus, which carries on Barnum’s spirit of showmanship. At this point in my life, I want to see the spectacle, I want to be blown away. I don’t really care to just see someone strumming a guitar and yodeling into a mic. Hey, her songs aren’t that great anyway, but they generate a manic energy that suits the big top perfectly. And if Britney has to lip-synch so that she’ll have enough energy to dance for two hours, then I say, let the girl dance! I’d rather see her moves anyway.

No, I don’t think I’m a sucker for wanting that, and I don’t mind ruffling some purists’ feathers by saying that a concert can (should?) be about more than just the music. I can listen to the music at home or in my car and be just as happy. John Lennon himself said that he “wasn’t that upset that Elvis never came to England.” He liked listening to the records. I think he was on to something. Whether fake Barnum was onto something, well, that’s another story entirely.

The Summer that wasn’t (and was)

The new Stephen “The Mummy” Sommers-directed G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra movie marked the end of the 2009 summer blockbuster season. And what a summer it wasn’t.

In, oh, about April of this year, my brother suggested to me that we had a lot of big movies to look forward to this summer. We’re talking Star Trek, Terminator, Transformers, even G.I. Joe. The first two would be the returns of two mega-franchises, hopefully to glory. The last two brought the supreme favorite toys of every young boy of the 1980s to the big screen. A big summer, for sure.

Until it wasn’t.

I’m not a movie reviewer, but feel free to gander at the hyperlinks above for comprehensive coverage. Rather, I’ll give my short takes in an attempt to understand why on earth I took for granted that this was a summer for the ages, when in fact, it was a summer for ages 4 to 12. (And yes, I know I skipped one or two of your favorites; what can I say, except that I can’t be bothered to see every movie that gets you panting, and even if I did, it probably wasn’t worth my writing about.) There will probably be SPOILERS henceforth.

I thought Star Trek was a great movie, full of emotion and relevance. The summer started big, maybe setting expectations too high for the rest of the cinema season.

Terminator Salvation was about as painful as self-flagellation. Maybe it was the mishmash of bad influences, from Mad Max to War of the Worlds, and I think I even tasted a dash of Red Dawn in there (Patrick Swayze, rest in peace in your great big road house in the sky). Or maybe it was the fact that the only good thing about the movie, Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, ended up sacrificing himself (with no logical justification) for the overshadowed and unapproachable Christian Bale’s John Connor at movie’s end.

I could legitimately have expected Terminator to be good. I like Bale, and director McG, unfortunate moniker notwithstanding, did some good work on TV’s The O.C. and my recent favorite show, Chuck, though that in itself should have made me skeptical. He should probably know his place and stick to tales of angsty young males, not somber treatments of tortured middle-aged sci-fi warrior males.

But what the Wreck-gar possessed me to think that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be enjoyable? The 2007 Transformers was a real looker, but it was emotionally stillborn, and though the tone of the teaser trailer for the sequel made it seem like a “darker” movie was in the works (maybe following the brooding example set by The Dark Knight for superhero/comics movies), by the time the movie came out, the promotion clearly marked it as more of the same. And yes, it was brutally awful. Between the obnoxious Lebeoufian schlub-stick and the skull-grinding battle sequences, I felt bludgeoned from both sides.

I cannot be one of these Bruckheimer apologists content with deafening explosions, somebody’s daughter in mortal peril, a helicopter, and a scruffy dog leaping to safety just in the nick of time to dodge a firestorm and/or river of lava. No, no, no. Substance is style, though not all audiences agree with me.

G.I. Joe was far better than it had any right to be, and it salvaged a pretty meager summer for me. It wasn’t the G.I. Joe I remembered from my childhood, lacking the mythology in particular, and substituting its own half-baked origin story. But it was fun and breezy, and it made me want a sequel. In short, it was everything that Transformers wasn’t, even if it didn’t necessarily do right by the original cartoon. Memo to the eighties: Stay just the way you were.

Interspersed in the four months of summer were other gems like Harry Potter, the Johnny Depp and Christian Bale-starring Public Enemies, and Pixar’s Up. All dogs. Am I alone in thinking that the shine is wearing off of Pixar’s “can do no wrong” image? And were it not for the assurance of another Batman sequel, I’d be very worried about Bale becoming the next Russell Crowe, intense actor turned misanthropic nutjob. As far as Harry Potter, I didn’t understand half of what they were saying in the movie, so I just kept playing over and over in my head my own fanciful rendition of Harry as a Dickens novel. (Dumbledore dragged the whelp by his ear, saying, “Harry! Harry Potter! Bring me my dinner, Harry! Heed my words, or it’ll be the stables for you tonight!”)

The summer’s best movie stood far outside the blockbuster paradigm (“no duh, Sherlock” you’re probably thinking, but just stay with me here). (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordon-Levitt and my blue-eyed heaven, Zooey Deschanel, won me over with its charming understanding of that old hand – the “failures of the human heart.” It had moments of flippancy and a few comedic misfires, but throughout, it maintained its focus on the quiet way that love can break your heart.

And your bird can sing

In a previous life, when shaggy hair and round-framed glasses were more my bag, I received two of the odder, more flattering comments I’ve ever received.

The first was from a girl I met through ballroom dance. One day, without prelude, she told me I reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t remember whom. “Someone famous and very good-looking?” I fished. I got it half right. After dance class, she finally conjured the name: “John Lennon.” She suggested that it went beyond the glasses and hair; there was something in my demeanor.

The second comment came after I had parked on the street one night, on my way to the Casbah for a show (undoubtedly, it was a sub-Beatles-caliber band). Just as I stepped out of my car, a (presumably homeless) man approached me, crying, “Hey, hey! You got a cigarette?” I was mildly alarmed, but right when I turned to face this figure emerging from the shadows, it was he who was taken aback. “Whoa! You look just like . . . that guy!” I shook my head, “Who’s that?” “The Beatles guy!” he said. “John Lennon?” (There’s not much chance of people mistaking me for Paul.) The guy seemed very pleased, but unfortunately, I couldn’t pay him back for his compliment, seeing that I tend not to pack death sticks.

This coming just a few weeks after the comment from my dance friend, I wondered if I had subconsciously been cultivating Lennon’s look. I certainly had him on the brain, having recently seen a TV documentary about his death and life. This was also around the time when the Working Class Hero two-disc compilation of Lennon’s best was released – my first serious exposure to Lennon’s post-Beatles work.

Hearing the music 30 years after it was made, I marveled at how humane it sounded, especially compared to most of the mindless aggression that clogs the airwaves today. In his songs, I heard a man obsessed with personal freedom and in love with love itself; fitting, since between love and freedom, when one is absent, the other soon withers.

Some time after my two interesting encounters, I had a chance to travel to New York, and I visited Strawberry Fields, a small garden on the western edge of Central Park, just across the street from the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and died. Strawberry Fields commemorates his life and dreams, and on the day I visited, the Imagine mosaic at its center was particularly inviting:


Without any premeditation on my part, I think I just naturally gravitated to John more than the other Beatles. I’m not saying his songs were the best in the band (not all of them anyway), but only that I empathize most with the way he seemed to be. I think of how much we miss him now, not just his music, but the hopeful vision it fostered, and I hope that my similarities to him go beyond looks.

* * *

As much as I admire John’s solo work, he’ll always be a Beatle first in my mind. Today, September 9, 2009, is the big release day: all of their original studio albums REMASTERED(!) in two sets: 1) a stereo box set, and 2) a mono box set containing those albums that were originally mixed in mono sound. (Oh, and a little thing called The Beatles: Rock Band also comes out today.) It’s fitting that a band that took 22 years to remaster their music should issue it exclusively on a dying technology – the compact disc. (To be fair, the original 1987 CDs were “remastered”; it’s just that the 1980s tech sounded older and worse with every passing year.)

I bought the stereo box today. It may be the first time I’ve ever purchased a CD on the release date. It’ll also be the last; these are the last CDs I’ll ever buy. Well, until I can get my hands on the mono box.

Quiet Desperation

The other day, I was driving through the Parkway Plaza shopping mall (a Westfield joint) to get to the movie theater, when I passed a spot that had burned itself into my memory about five or six years ago.

It was, let’s say, the Christmas season, and I was driving down the back alley behind the mall, when I saw a huddle of burly cops tackling a guy on the sidewalk behind the JC Penney. Three of El Cajon’s finest pinned the schmo down while a fourth bruiser called it in. Called for what, backup? I don’t know. That poor idiot chewing concrete wasn’t exactly built like a pro football player (speaking of criminals), unless we’re talking about the punter.

The guy was clearly nabbed for shoplifting (which, according to shopping mall operators, is the second most heinous crime in the history of the world, after what Hitler did). I couldn’t tell how far he had run or how long he had been chased, but it ended the way these things inevitably end: the guy was dogmeat.

Not twenty feet away stood a woman, probably dogmeat’s wife or mistress, shopping bags dangling from hands that had risen to cover her quivering mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her body trembled with fear for her man. She looked like a wrecked, heartbroken puppy dog in “beg” position. As shocking as it was to see someone being put down and more or less bagged like a trophy kill, I was far more disturbed by the sight of the woman, powerless to help him or herself, and probably caught between the twin agonies of “Why’d he do it?” and “Please God don’t let them hurt him.”

What could this guy have possibly stolen that was worth this violence? Maybe a pair of Arizona jeans, or something from the Izod collection? No, judging by the universe’s sick sense of humor, it was probably a 14k gold electroplated necklace for the lady in his life. A Christmas tale worthy of Dickens, or maybe O. Henry, if one of them would deign to come back to life and write it.

To quote another writer, Thoreau states in Walden that “thieving and robbery . . . take place only in societies where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.” I think Thoreau’s blunt idealism may be a bit much, but I do see his point.

Whatever it was that this man so desperately needed or wanted, I can’t help but think that it might not have seemed so important if only there were more things going right in his life.

Touched for the very last time

As I walked down Michigan Avenue on a recent trip to Chicago, I saw a familiar building bearing unfamiliar nameplates. The Virgin Megastore at the corner of Michigan and Ohio, long one of my favorite stops along Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” is no more, and has been replaced by a Forever 21 (aka, “XXI”), the ubiquitous young women’s fashion store that specializes in designer knockoffs at Walmart prices.

Here is how the building looked during my college years:

Here is the same building on June 4, 2009:


Along with the old Tower Records store on S. Wabash (and to a lesser extent the still extant Borders on N. Michigan), Virgin was one of Chicago’s premier places to browse for music, especially classical music, which evolved to become practically the only music I listened to in college.

I can trace my love of classical music to two sources: 1) my father’s enjoyment and regular playing of it at home while I was growing up, and 2) my time at the University of Chicago, where my friends introduced me to their favorite music, got me hooked, and led me to my own discoveries. Very quickly, borrowing CDs from friends just wasn’t enough. I had acquired the thirst, and a bite here and a nibble there would no longer satisfy. So I went shopping.

Tower had an immense selection, but Virgin was arguably as good, and it had Tower beat in terms of presentation. Tower was housed in a gritty building under the El tracks. The classical section was on the top floor, and though there was an escalator up, there was none going down, so when I was done poring over Beethoven box sets and woefully pulling my pocket linings out of my pants, I had to walk down along a steep and winding side staircase that emptied into a filthy corridor adorned only with a stack of Chicago Readers and the smell of fresh urine.

Virgin, on the other hand, was an immaculate prestige store right on the Mag Mile. In contrast to the raucous downstairs selection of rock, pop, and hip-hop, with music blaring from above and played by a live DJ, the classical section upstairs featured quiet contemplation among the glimmering rows of CDs, as well as an entire wall of opera recordings. This was the real McCoy, unlike the token classical sections of off-brand “100 Greatest Hits of Mozart” CDs found at your local Best Buy or the late, unlamented Circuit City.

Both Tower and Virgin had all the labels: Decca (formerly London in the U.S.), Philips (now joined with Decca), Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, EMI, Teldec, Naxos – all your favorites, each with their more or less exclusive stable of legendary performers.

My favorites were the box sets. These were a cost-effective way for a college student to amass a library of classical music, and they were the fundamental building blocks of my collection. I had little patience for browsing new releases by the latest diva of the month or the “next great violinist,” sold at a premium price. I preferred the classic recordings, superlative performances that had endured over the decades, and every label had its archive series, boxed and priced to move. DG’s 9-disc complete set of Dvorak string quartets played by the Prague String Quartet set you back about $70, a hefty sum, but also a relative bargain when you consider that it’s just $8 a disc. Decca’s 13-disc set of the complete Chopin solo piano music played by Vladimir Ashkenazy cost about $95, a veritable mint, but still, that’s about $7 a disc. The bargain sets brought great, sophisticated music into the hands of a college student who was only just learning how to pretend to the high life.

Sure, it could be argued that no one pianist’s interpretation of Chopin, no matter how fine, could really tell the whole story of the composer’s work. That’s true enough, and I’d love to buy multiple recordings of my favorite works and compare the nuances that each performer brings to the music. I’d also love to be massaged by Russian princesses while eating foie gras seared by my manservant, Witherby. . . .

Eventually, we’ll have clueless generations who won’t remember a time when people actually bought music on shiny discs in a store, rather than online from a degenerate corporation clad in whiteface. That is, if people buy music at all. Hell, even I can barely believe that I once took for granted that you had to pay money for music. How stupid was I? (For the record, it was during my college years that the mp3 downloading revolution and its attendant piracy were born, but that’s a story for another time.)

As a commercial venture, the Virgin Megastore chain was a much bigger success for Richard Branson than, say, The Rebel Billionaire. With the way the world is going now, I don’t know if either Branson or anyone else could, or would even want to, replace it. Borders and Barnes and Noble are okay. Amazon has the volume, but the interface is so 1997 (and not in the good way). And classical music is comparatively difficult to find in the downloadable world (though this will certainly be the answer one day). For all our technological advances, one thing seems obvious to me: Browsing through thousands of CDs in a store is fun. Browsing through thousands of links and web pages on your laptop is . . . mind-numbing.

* * *

As a side note, I wish there were a men’s version of Forever 21, a store that carried highly fashionable and “of the moment” menswear that could be bought with the change stuck beneath your sofa cushions (if you could afford a sofa, which I can’t). There is H&M, the super-popular Swedish chain that slowly crawled across America and has only in the past two years penetrated the West Coast. H&M carries a full men’s selection, but overall, they are more like the sartorial analogue to Ikea than a place for imitation couture. They specialize in a Euro-minimalist aesthetic, rather than the more diverse dabbling in trendy styles that characterizes Forever 21.

Indeed, the bigger Forever 21 stores now have a men’s section, usually occupying a disgraced corner of the store, like the unruly kid forced to don a dunce cap. And while the prices and material are in line with the ladies’ selections, the “designers” at XXI apparently believe that men like to wear only gray, black, and white, and have an inordinate fondness for shapeless hoodies over skintight jeans. The lady’s side showcases pop tarts, faux vintage princesses, and cute tomboys; the men’s side perpetuates slob chic. Why the disconnect?

Though I know many women would disagree with me, it is entirely obvious to me that cheap, good men’s clothing is much harder to find than cheap, good women’s clothing. At Forever 21, girls can buy a t-shirt for $5. They can buy a skirt for $10 and a dress for $20. I’ve seen $16 jeans there, and they weren’t on sale. The only place I could find prices like that for men’s clothing is Old Navy, and I swear their stuff is made from crumpled newsprint.

Until some visionary fashionisto brings us a Forever Dudes Be Stylin’, you can find me in the clearance racks at the Banana Republic Factory Store. Yeah, the shirts say “Banana Republic” on them and are emblazoned with your typical fake golf tournaments and bogus yacht races, but come on – they’re $3! Even Witherby has to eat.

Now about those Russian princesses . . .