Boing Boing brings us news that the heartless communiss cretins running the Shanghai outpost of the police state are going after fashion-forward citizens who wear pajamas in public. An iron curtain descends! Meanwhile, in a blow for sartorial liberty, I went out this morning to buy bread at a bakery down the street wearing sweatpants and the long tunic part of a shalwar kameez that Julie bought me for kicks when we lived off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. True, I had a leather topcoat on over it, but the tunic’s tails flapped like Old Glory in the breeze.
“Yeah.”
“People are going to think you’re a character. Oh, maybe that’s the point.”
I prefer to think of myself an avatar Ignatian aestheticism (Walker Percy: “Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of–slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one–who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans ….”) — and now, knowing what the dirty Chicoms are up to, consider my pajama promenade an exercise in Philadelphia freedom!