Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
In the past few years, I’ve bought eighty-one leather jackets. Dozens of boots and leather gloves. I’ve purchased pants that cost $5,000. I own a $22,000 coat. This winter I took a tour of Milan’s Fashion Week (all expenses paid by Gucci, in appreciation of my many, many purchases), where I spent tens of thousands more and began to seriously grapple, once and for all, with a compulsion that could cost me more than just my life savings. My name is Buzz Bissinger. I am 58 years old, the best-selling author of ‘Friday Night Lights,’ father of three, husband. And I am a shopaholic.
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I once had a college roommate who took all of my shoes except for one boot and one sandal. He stashed the rest of my shoes in his friend's room.
Remember when Bissinger supposed to be the vanguard of the old-time mainstream media?
If you believe that NYU-Abu Dhabi exists, then I will give your favorite team Yuni Betancourt.
They've got a website.
monty's #7 is where i am as well.
It wasn't clickable.
Bissinger's fetish is a particularly hilarious one, but, whatever.
This is an early April Fools joke.
I have no intention to read the many pages of this article; I have no intention to ever care about Buzz Bissinger or the twisted things he's into. If he tells me he has spent $600,000 on Gucci clothing or whatever it is (I thought they just made bags), I will believe him.
(Or not. I don't care about Bissinger either - I haven't read his supposed good stuff but have seen many of his screeds - but the GQ article is interesting.)
Love this guy!
NYU-Abu Dhabi is a real college and not something from Garfield. Also, sending someone to Kenyon does not refer to the (initially thought to be a deliberate misspelling of) country of Kenya; it is also a legit college.
This is still messed up though:
Because middle aged guys shouldn't have the same mindset that pageant girls have.
There's nothing about what Bissinger is talking about that's healthy. Healthy people don't drop half a million on clothing. But that's part of what needs to be talking about.
but Lady Gaga has questionable feet...
What's interesting about dropping 600K+ on clothing?
If you're that insecure about your appearance, then you are essentially a pageant queen wannabe.
Why does this "need to be talked about"? Who cares? It's an utterly harmless obsession, save for the fact that now a lot of people are laughing at Buzz Bissinger. (Though walking around with the name "Buzz" is probably more mockworthy.)
The article is long as hell and pretty well written by Buzz.
It was going to be published somewhere. Why not GQ? They want to promote excessive spending on clothing.
Since when has it been the magazine's job to provide "help" to a writer?
Thanks Sean. We realize that now, but something this fantastical this close to April Fool's day will always come under scrutiny.
Hell, he could have published it himself. Just as I am publishing this post. How does GQ not being involved stop this from being published, and why does it need to not be published?
It's not just athletes that blow their money.
Why in the world do you keep talking about "this close" to April Fools' Day? Do you understand the concept of April Fools' Day? Jokes for April Fools' Day - as lame as they are - occur on... wait for it... April Fools' Day. Which is April 1st, not March 27th.
I have friends who like to spring early April Fools jokes on me.
so, i'm gonna say it has to be some kind of send up of some athlete spending obscene sums of money on jewelry or cars or drugs or hookers or shrunken heads or mail order brides from uzbekistan.
This week, I cannot even open a car door without worrying about honey being under the handle.
My friends are dicks, they wouldn't do this on the obvious day.
As a general rule of thumb, never establish a reputation as being "the gullible guy."
You will get screwed over.
Those aren't April Fools Pranks. They're just pranks. If you don't do it under the cover of April 1, you're just being a jackass.
it's his writing style, and it is his personality. to a Tee. only thing surprises me is that he didn't develop a fetish until he was 55
Your brain thinks your feet are right next to your junk according to this picture on the internet.
The Sidd Finch article was released in late March, though it was dated April 1. Likewise, this article is dated "April 2013."
n
It might be from living in northern Wisconsin, but everything associated with the end of winter will be celebrated.
I am still not convinced that it's not a joke.
The linked photos above are from his radio show days last fall. Should remove all doubt.
Wow, I figured expensive clothes would make you look good.
I own about 8,000 books and some people think that's crazy. I knew a woman (a lawyer turned psychoanalyst) who literally had an entire closet filled with nothing but shoes---not clothes, shoes. I know actual adults who still collect baseball cards and / or comic books, and spend inordinate amounts of time playing video games, not to mention the millions of people with a fetish for sports cars, strip clubs, dogs, cats, craft beer, and / or wine that costs over $100 a bottle. Is there anything wrong with them, too? What would our economy look like without people like that to keep the money moving?
And male fashion fetishists are hardly a new phenomenon, or restricted to narrow classes of people. In fact the first time I read anything like this was in the old leftist magazine Ramparts, when a writer named Gene Marine wrote an article called "My New Clothes". He covered the Black Panthers and then started dressing in the neon-colored solids that were the hallmark of black street fashion in the late 1960's. Bottom line is that we're all a little weird in our many different ways, even sportswriters. (smile)
1. You're kind of being a killjoy here. Bissinger is an asshole and any opportunity to mock him should be seized. If George Saunders has confessed to a Gucci addiction, I'd probably seriously consider that I was missing out and I should also start buying Gucci. I want to look hip and dangerous, too!
2. The clothes thing is just funny and ridiculous, but the sex club humblebrag in the essay is gross.
I just learned that Buzz Bissinger isn't a character from the Tank McNamara comic strip.... so that's something...
toss in the imagery of the article and I will just say that if this is the new trend in pranks count me out
Holy cow. (no pun intended)
2. The clothes thing is just funny and ridiculous, but the sex club humblebrag in the essay is gross.
This probably just reinforces my own weirdness, but I barely even know who Buzz Bissinger is or who he writes for or anything else he's written, and as I said, I didn't read the entire article.
You didn't follow the Buzz wars we had here a few years ago? It's the only reason this article was linked as there is nothing baseball related in the article. It turns out the reason Buzz wanted us all to get out of the basement is because he wanted to stock it with assless leather chaps and his collection of Chinese sex slaves.
I wonder what his kids think reading this article. Well, I'm going to inherit a fortune in tacky Gucci clothes that may be valuable if we can scrape off all the crusted ejaculate!
Good ol' RDP. I haven't had cable since early 2005, go out to the movies maybe once a year, have never seen (& have no interest in ever seeing) such BTF cinematic touchstones as Animal House, Caddyshack, Princess Bride , Ferris Bueller's Day Off et al., don't read a newspaper, don't read non-subcultural magazines other than SI, haven't even had radio in my car in 6 months & think "celebrity culture" in general is an argument for resurrecting & importing the Red Army Faction & tweaking its mission statement ... & yet Ray makes me feel like I immerse myself in the pop culture seas 24/7.
You didn't follow the Buzz wars we had here a few years ago?
If I did, it's long slipped down my memory hole, and anyway if you've read one stupid sportswriter you've read them all. "Buzz Bissinger" is one of those thousands of names that sort of float around in the space occupied by "Justin Lieber", "Justin Timberlake", and "Britney Spears", meaning that I've heard them mentioned often enough to figure out that they're probably all real people in a technical sense, but beyond that they just all kind of blend together in one big blob of interchangeable nothingness. About the only affect all those Justins have ever had on my subconscious is that for about a year or so after he first came up, I thought that Justin was the first name of the Red Sox second baseman. Of course now I know that his first name is really Petunia.
It's the only reason this article was linked as there is nothing baseball related in the article. It turns out the reason Buzz wanted us all to get out of the basement is because he wanted to stock it with assless leather chaps and his collection of Chinese sex slaves.
And he wants to be our Latex salesman!
I wonder what his kids think reading this article. Well, I'm going to inherit a fortune in tacky Gucci clothes that may be valuable if we can scrape off all the crusted ejaculate!
TMI, son, TMI.
I just noticed my iPad autocorrect changed "Kreayshawn" to "Keyshawn". No wonder I couldn't start a successful hijack, Keyshawn isn't even a member of the White Girl Mafia.
I don't think the clothing part is that interesting - it's the weird mix of self-awareness, cluelessness, narcissism, and desperation ... a mid-life crisis writ large. (Believe me, I also see the appeal in Shooty's call to mock a very public jerk.)
zonk, have you not been reading Tank McNamara: Crisis of Insolent Pervs?
As usual, Shooty gets right to the heart of the matter. The difficulty is that Bissinger has pulled a clever jujitsu move and set up so many targets for mockery that I am paralyzed by indecision about where to begin. I've narrowed it down to either his terrible aesthetic taste or his need to sing his own praises of his own sexual prowess.
Damn! Shooty's managed to nail both targets at once! I can't top this.
I think even Smitty* would recommend pants for Bizzinger, & probably a one-size-covers-all tent.
At first glance this (if true) would appear to me to be a compulsion, not an addiction. There is no chemical dependency like with nicotine, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, etc. He's not going to get the DTs if he stops, and I doubt he's buying leather goods every single day like a true addict.
He seems to have a psychological compulsion. More like OCD than an addiction. I'd say the same thing for 'sex addiction', in the cases where that's not just a cover for a powerful, rich dude caught with his pants down.
But, I'd like to hear from anyone with actual medical knowledge.
And you would know, wouldn't you?
(Kidding, obviously!)
It's going to be hip, brash, rock and roll and badboy-ish!
What if you're the king of France?
What about a leather car coat or bomber jacket? Those are pretty middle of the road.
Don't let Buzz Aldrin hear you say that. He will punch you out.
Some of the discussion in this thread is a bit reminiscent of my research at the moment. Where the Duke of Buckingham's frilly clothes (French, Spanish and Italian styles) "make the handsomest man look like another thing". Though velvet more than leather is what they were most worried about back then.
A grown man shouldn't be wearing a bomber jacket, leather or otherwise unless of course you somehow find yourself flying the Memphis Belle and it is 1944. Car coats are perfectly acceptable just don't wear a leather one. Leather is for bikers, celebrities, and kids.
#74: Being sans pants is VERY fashion forward.
eta: still disappointed that the Girl Talk hijack failed.
There must be places where wearing leather all the time is not noteworthy. Bissinger's mistake, among many other mistakes, seems to be staying in the suburbs of Philadelphia while undergoing his metamorphosis into a high-maintenance fashionista.
Well, Buzz is a celebrity of sorts, so there you go!
Regarding your distaste for leather jackets: well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Milan during fashion week or Sturgis during the first week of August.
The issue isn't about whether it is noteworthy or not but whether or not a man looks ridiculous. Grown men wearing leather look ridiculous.
Now you're just being ridiculous.
Celebrities that try to project youth and while they are "performing". Meaning when they are on stage or on the red carpet or whenever they are "working". Some 45 year old celebrity (like say Vince Vaughn) simply sitting at a Starbucks dressed up like how Buzz is in those linked photos would look just as ridiculous as Buzz did.
Regarding your distaste for leather jackets: well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Sure but it is a rather common one held in the fashion field.
http://www.aeroleatherclothing.com/product-detail.php?id=1391
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