My Hunt Cup Runneth Over

Off a road and off another road...shopping strips, gas stations and drug stores disappear.

I stare out and see a horizon of blue and green and empty of what depresses me.

Having said that, I try to avoid looking at Andy's hat.

It's tailgating but this isn't parking at the Firecracker 500 where all come to watch a left hand turn.

There is such beauty in seeing a man or woman on a horse.  Unlike most of traditions that are forgotten, the elegance of the pairing, I'm positive, will last forever.

I'll be dead forever but today I'm alive and I will suck all this in like a Partagas Lusitania.

It's a small crowd - Is that possible?  Off the radar where crowds come only to  promenade their Lilly P and get drunk while they selfie.

Pretentious free, it's all amazingly simple.  Granted, the ethnic diversity is limited but it's so soulful.

A windswept soul. I once asked a tax attorney, what business could  a man deduct everything and keep outta jail.  "Horses," he said.

He added it went back to the early 19th century when business had a lot to do with horses.

And the laws just never changed.  But people do.

Our horses are bits of plastic and steel but we can still fly a flag.

Still, can you ever look this good in a Toyota? Personally, I don't think so.

I love watching rich old white people.

Mostly because it beats watching poor white people.  They like watching a 500 mile left turn.

When I bring a camera, I try to shoot what no one else is shooting. In this case -- the race.

For me, I love the sound I first heard at Keeneland almost 20 years ago.  Hoof on turf and I know it sounds like it did 200 years ago -- 500 years ago -- 1,000 years ago.  A forever soundtrack.

Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the horses, the wind, the cheering...It is traveling back in time when there was so much elegance despite poor plumbing and dentistry.

Special thanks to the Main Line Sportsman for the invitation & inspiration of the Pennsylvania Hunt Cup

Esquire's Subliminal Seduction

When I was 12, I had a cousin who was a golf pro, somewhere on Hilton Head Island. He drove a white Porsche 912 (he wasn't that good of a golf pro) and was dating more women than James Bond.  I worshiped him. As an only child his parents kept his bedroom, just as he left it, sometime in his early 20s. Whenever we'd visit, I was lucky enough to get his room and his room taught me a lot.

A giant plastic bottle of VAT 69, holding what must have been over $299 worth of pennies, sat on the corner of a desk with a piece of glass covering snap shots of girl friends. Steel drum albums from the Carribean waited for me under bookshelves filled with paperbacks, a few dirty,  and piles of Esquire magazines.

I would sit on the edge of my cousin's bed and stare at the Esquire pages of adults living out their happening lives as steel drums danced from a Marantz receiver.  Booze ads were everywhere.  Large breasted women were everywhere. And everywhere people in Esquire smoked.  20 years later my ex-wife would rightly observe that my idea of being a man was limited to smoking, drinking and breasts.  She wrongly attributed this to Playboy. It was Esquire and... I've always been a leg man.

When I look back at old issues of Esquire, I see where my idea of manhood originated.  Those  old Esquires, smelling of dusty years that make me sneeze, still grab the 12 year old in me --still unsure of being a man.  Of having paid the right dues, made the just sacrifices and fought the good fights to hold  onto my character.   This'll  be my 55th new year.  I still don't think I write well. I know I can't balance a check book. I have no discipline.  There's an awful lot I know I can't do.

But when I look at the January 2013 issue of Esquire  -  I'm reminded of who I am. Sure, most of the smoking is gone but the booze ads are still there as are the large breast-extruded actresses who offer up what they find attractive in a man.  Happily, it's always for sale but I ain't buyin' anymore.  A watch isn't going to define me. Neither is the scotch I drink, the tobacco I smoke or pictures of girl friends under glass.

Having said all that -- I have no idea why I just bought a bottle of Old Crow. I should'a bought the White Horse.

Trad Xmas List: Flor Rose Prosecco & French Kissing in the USA

Flor Rose Prosecco : Not for your typical Commie

As vulgarity and coarseness become substitutes for wit and taste, it's important to remember that while the Cold War losing Russians & Chinese are buying up most of Manhattan and all reserves of Krug and Cristal, wine doesn't have to be expensive to be rich.

It's been said the Soviet Union went broke trying to keep up in the Cold War. That might stem from a poor judgement of value. The best car, the best tailor, the best art, the best missile system... like a newly minted Lotto winner, the Commies always associate the best with expensive.

A quick aside.  I went to a party on Park Avenue -- Somewhere in the 70's. You know... the private elevator, 15 rooms, flowing halls...striking. The owner, with homes in Beverly Hills and Palm Beach, sold his company for stock to a much larger competitor.  Problem was he couldn't sell the stock for five years.

As the stock price tumbled south, he called the new owner. "Look, you gotta let me sell some of this now before it goes even lower."  Instead, the owner just offers more stock. This fella tells me that reluctantly he takes more stock.

 Laughing hysterically, next to his grand piano, he raises his left arm and points to the ceiling while a $22 plastic Swatch sneaks out from under his shirt cuff, "Just as the five years comes up," he says, "Up the stock goes and it just keeps going up!" I watch his Swatch as he jabs it at his ceiling, "Up! Up! Up!"

A ten million dollar pile on Park and the guy's wearing a plastic Swatch. I know a Manhattan hipster who owns four watches worth $200,000, and he rents...in Little North Korea.

This guy probably serves Flor Rose Prosecco (availability here). At $17, it comes in an even more impressive magnum for around $28. That's a lotta holiday value for the buck. Served chilled, it's refreshing and bubbly soft with a grown up after taste that contrasts against prosecco's typical viridity. If champagne is like sex (and it is), then Flor Rose is a lot like French kissing. Not in China or Russia, but here...in the USA

Sterling Hayden: The Men We Are

I was 15 when I first saw Sterling Hayden in Dr Strangelove. His performance as bat shit crazy General Jack Ripper, not to be confused with Keenan Wynn's, Colonel 'Bat' Guano, seemed wildly over the top to me -- Until I went in the Army and met General Hank Emerson but he's another story.

Here's another obscure interview with Hayden on his live aboard barge in Paris. Hayden, like a lot of actors who served in WWII, seemed embarrassed by his success and would drop in and out of Hollywood whenever he needed money or his soul. Stoic about his military service in the OSS, critical of his home land, he was in the end, light years ahead of most.

I once worked with a retired Alaska State Trooper who reminds me of Hayden.  Full of insane stories, he had an independence and insight I respected. He told me, "It's not what a man is born with that makes him a man.  We're all born with more than we need.  It's what we lose and give up in our life that makes us the men we are.

Hayden wrote in his 1964 autobiography, 'Wanderer,' " ...we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.  The years thunder by, the dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?"