Ahead on Differential

This is the Ahead on Differential Daily Dispatch, issue #7.

I.

I should start dressing like a middle-aged Italian man. I should give an honest chance to good loafers and nice watches and linen shirts that aren’t from Old Navy. I should learn the art of sprezzatura, which is a contradiction in terms, or maybe a zen koan for the denizens of Milan Fashion Week. I should get sunglasses that aren’t from the dollar store (ah, but Billy Gibbons, the patron saint of cheap sunglasses, does kind of have a funky grandpa look about him, what with the Nudie suit jackets and big-ass beard). Middle-aged Italian men don’t wear sweat-crusted Colorado Rockies baseball caps, because of course they don’t. Middle-aged Italian mean look like they know where to get the best anything in town, from the best tailors to the best sandwiches. Middle-aged Italian men know what to do with a god damn kerchief.

II.

Despite the proclamations in the prior paragraph, I don’t follow a ton of people online whose lane is fashion or menswear or anything sartorially-centered. But “not a ton” is greater than zero, and if there’s one person who’s had the biggest impact on the way I’ve thought about clothes, it’s Percia Verlin. In all likelihood, I was introduced to her in one of the YouTube algorithm’s occasional fits of benevolence. The video that was served up to me was one of her “city boy” videos, where she discusses the subgenre of Japanese streetwear influenced by Ivy League prep and American/European workwear. Lots of denim and neutral colours. A lot of brands I’ve never heard of, can’t afford, or can’t fit in. But what it does give me is a heuristic for clothing myself in a way I think is cool, and that’s not nothing.

III.

I just shaved 15 pages off my manuscript and included three poems that weren’t in the original. Most of the cuts were either off-theme or shorter poems that just ate page count for nothing. Some nature poems got the boot, but some of them stayed on board because they had kind of a “cli-fi” bent to them. I can make that work, even though it’s not something I set out to write consciously about; I guess I just have the effects of climate change on the natural world top of min for some reason. Most of the stuff with spaceships and rockets survived. I wonder if the “intermission” with the poems about The Gambler and Watership Down will survive in their current state. My “intergalactic love song in five parts” is the one that, candidly, I’m afraid will get fucked up the most in the editing process. I know it can be better, I just have to trust that another person might know how.

IV.

In a prior post, I alluded to keeping up with new music releases thanks to a few subreddits I follow. But I also keep up with new music the old-fashioned way, which is following music critics whose taste in music is simpatico with mine. One such writer is Steven Hyden, inventor of the five-album test, late of Grantland, currently at Uproxx, and also the co-host of the recently-revived Indiecast. He’s the one who introduced me to AoD Hall of Famer Brian Dunne (dig this profile from a few months back), and now he’s introduced me to a band from Oakland called Mildred and their debut album Fenceline. Hyden frequently talks about “patio music,” and Fenceline is just that, an album of pleasant, ragged rockers that mosey along, a perfect companion to a beer or a joint on a patio.

#dd