Corduroy weather

Ah, it has cooled off enough to break out the corduroys, which for me marks the official start of autumn. Today's tie is from my favorite line of polyester neckties, Christian Dior Monsieur (previous entries here). The ribbons in the pleasantly busy pattern are disturbingly sinuous (as in, like sinews), and the flesh and blood color scheme doesn't help matters. If I keep my mouth shut maybe no one will notice.

Just one this week

I only managed to wear one tie last week, on Wednesday. This tie is from my favorite line of polyester ties, the Christian Dior Monsieur line with the oval CD logo on the front. I have previously presented one other tie from this series, and I have one or two more to bring out eventually.

In seeking out quirky music in Ithaca I discovered Inverse Room, the music project of Ithaca novelist J. Robert Lennon. The CD 100 Songs: Pieces for the Left Hand contains 99 (short) songs (I haven't found the hundredth one yet) spanning just about every genre of pop music. Relevant to this blog is the one entitled "That Tie," the lyrics of which are:

I was stakin’ out a gin joint in a rented Cadillac, when I heard a roscoe coughin’ and everything went to black. Next thing I know, Saint Peter was lookin’ me in the eye. He said, “Sorry, I can’t let you in, but where’d you get that tie?”

Maybe that tie looks like this one.

Primo Polyester

Following up yesterday's tie was a daunting task; even a great tie might seem dull in comparison. Clearly, my only available course of action was to go to the Permanent Collection and pull out a previously-worn but as-yet-unblogged All-Time Favorite. This is one of the CD-logo-embazoned polyester Christian Dior Monsieur ties I mentioned in passing last month. Every tie in that line that I've seen has a fantastic design, super-rich colors, and a complex jacquard weave providing a counterpoint to the print. Since I was raving about overlaps yesterday, this tie is a natural continuation of that theme: a melange of ovals, each with its own interior pattern, overlapping each other to create intricate new patterns in their intersections. Again, this tie provided a pick-me-up all day long, and is now tied with yesterday's tie for my favorite tie on the blog. I won't even try to match this level of exuberance on Monday; I'll use the weekend as a cooling-off period and start next week with a clean slate.

For some fun computer-generated geometric graphics, many of which are eminently suitable for neckties, here's a new link to Levitated.net (previously linked from my Verner Panton tie entry).

Piet Mondrian

It is not the previous wearing of this tie that has romantic significance, but the design. The Mondrian-influenced graphic pattern is a perfect complement to our wedding rings, the "Mondrian" from Wedding Ring Originals:


The panels are of red gold, white gold, and, um, gold gold fused onto a gold ring in a process called, fittingly, "marriage of metals." We think they're peachy.

Mondrian's "de Stijl" paintings (like this tie, but with primary colors instead of grays) are some of the most recognizable of the 20th century. They're easy to copy, too, as I see Mondrian graphics everywhere: the Artcyclopedia icon, a garage door on Lakeside Drive in Greenbelt, stained glass windows in the Owen Brown Interfaith Center in Columbia, and so on. There are those who denigrate modern art in general and minimalism in particular ("my six-year-old could do that"), but I believe it took real genius to come up with such an enduring style of composition.

The tie is of rather heinous polyester from Index. Polyester doesn't have to be awful; two of my favorite tie lines are polyester (Christian Dior Monsieur ties with the "CD" logo on the front, and Oscar de la Renta Studio ties with the signature on the front). But one can't have everything.

Next week I will be coming to you from Orlando, Florida (assuming my mobile technology holds up), as I attend a conference on Sungard's administrative software for higher education. Woo-hoo!