Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i Esquire

The Big Bite A Cultural Guide to Just Enough of Everything Kevin Bacon had some reservations when he was initially offered the titular role on Amazon’s I Love Dick. When we first encounter the character, he’s dismounting a horse on a main street in Marfa, the small Texas town turned artist mecca. He exudes effortless Marlboro Man cool in his plaid shirt and cowboy hat. Dick is a Man-with-a-capital-M: laconic, tough, alternately dismissive and piercing. But Bacon refuses to be one-dimensional. “If I’m just an asshole in cowboy boots,” he says, “there’s nothing for me to do.” The new series from Transparent creator Jill Soloway (streaming May 12) stars Kathryn Hahn as Chris, a struggling filmmaker who follows her husband (Griffin Dunne) to his prestigious fellowship in Marfa and becomes…

Notwithstanding his reputation as the godfather of contemporary Nordic cooking, the Danish chef René Redzepi has had a mad crush on Mexico for a decade or so. Restorative winter vacations in Tulum and Mérida— a welcome break from the pressures of the kitchen at Noma, his zeitgeist-shifting restaurant in Copenhagen— wound up blossoming into a full-on obsession: He has gone off on countless eating/drinking/foraging excursions all over the country. Redzepi, who is preparing for Noma’s sold-out seven-week pop-up in Tulum this spring (with chef Rosio Sanchez), offers a few tips, in his own words, on traveling through the land that cured his Scandinavian blues. Esky Wisdom Is Donald Trump a secret fan of the late economist and Nobel Laureate Thomas C. Schelling? Schelling often compared international conflict to a game of…

Irving Penn was photography’s great equalizer. He made unforgettable portraits of Hitchcock, Stravinsky, and Auden, but he could lend just as much dignity, even grandeur, to an anonymous English charwoman or a barefoot newsboy from the streets of Cuzco. Penn was interested in capturing, not flattering, his subjects. His frank gaze made some sitters, like the writer Thornton Wilder, “long for Cecil Beaton, three filters, and a background of rosebushes!” “Irving Penn: Centennial,” the blockbuster retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (running through July 30), shows how the many pieces of Penn fit together: his fearless curiosity, his classical rigor, his darkroom wizardry, and his surprising willingness to sometimes thumb his nose at good taste. A memorable example of this last tendency is his still-life series…

VS. MATT LAUER Résumé: Host of the Today show since 1997 Salary: $20 million per year Big get: Charlie Sheen Workplace incident: Ann Curry’s bungled ouster (aka “Operation Bambi”) Campaign memento: Jeers for his interviews with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Claim to fame: Cameo in Sharknado 2 MEGYN KELLY Résumé: Host of The Kelly File, next cohost of the Today show Salary: $15 million per year (she turned down $20 million to stay at Fox News) Big get: Jim Bob Duggar Workplace incident: The unreconstructed lechery of Roger Ailes Campaign memento: Death threats from Trump supporters Claim to fame: Defying Fox News’s rumored ban on pants for female anchors…

• • • Seersucker is the official Fabric of Summer,™ and for good reason. Its alternating smooth and puckered stripes help lift the fabric off your body, effectively creating tiny air ducts for cooling circulation. In the age before air-conditioning, it was the backbone of any warm-weather wardrobe, from colonial India to the American South. But now that we have air-conditioning, seersucker can feel dated—it brings to mind Atticus Finch sweating through his three-piece, or a pack of julep-sloshing good ol’ boys in Derby costume. Lucky for you, designers are really testing what the fabric can do. The darker jackets above ditch the candy-striped whiteand- baby-blue palette for a variety of tonal takes on navy. The lighter jackets are even more out there: Dubbed “French seersucker” by some, they’re not…

56, Manhattan Beach, California FACEBOOK’S eighth employee (and head of market development) knows a good thing when he sees it. Here, he talks VINTAGE VOLKSWAGENS, his coat-and-tie dress code, and THE ONE THING he can’t help hoarding. Where it all began: My dad was a beach guy, but he was super preppy. Brooks Brothers sack suit, repp tie, you know. He didn’t need to wear a suit and tie, but he always did. That was my style reference, and it’s been my thing ever since. His trademark: When I went back to tech, I wanted to be taken seriously, and so I started wearing a coat and tie every day. And I get unbelievably good service everywhere I go. A friend of mine always says, “If you’re wearing a jacket…

Denim on denim is swagger in excelsis. A don’t-try-thisat- home mistake that I always make at home, where everything looks cooler in a bedroom mirror. The first time I tried it, on a Saturday in Kingston in 1985, I looked like the one jackass in Jamaica who wasn’t aware that Halloween was an American holiday. Of course I was doomed to fail. At 14, I was cool but had no groove, and denim on denim was over before it even began. The problem was that denim on denim always walked that line between cocky and tacky. Especially ’70s denim on ’70s rock stars: open shirt, hairy chest aroar, that trouser-snake hip shake. The look needed a serious counterbalance of cool to pull off. Enter Marvin Gaye. I didn’t even notice…

Roy Cohn was once the MOST FEARED LAWYER in New York City. A ruthless master of DIRTY TRICKS, he smeared the reputations of his political enemies, helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and had more than one Mafia don on speed dial. But his most enduring legacy is DONALD TRUMP, whom he took under his wing in the 1970s. In this excerpt from KEN AULETTA’S 1978 ESQUIRE PROFILE, we meet the man who tutored the president in THE DARK ARTS OF GOSSIP, POWER, AND POLITICS. The more publicity Roy 1 generates, the more clients he attracts. Just recently he exploded on the front pages, bringing a stockholder suit against Henry Ford, charging that Ford accepted bribes and siphoned company funds for his personal living expenses. He made the…

Esquire and Hollywood’s elite honored James Corden and the Mavericks of Hollywood on February 8, 2017 at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles, CA. Guests dined on passed hors d’oeuvres and sipped cocktails as they danced to music by Grammy-nominated DJ Zane Lowe.…

Stephanie Mannatt Danler Author of “That First Warm Day,” page 78 Credentials: Author of the bestselling novel Sweetbitter. Firstwarm- day plans: Lying outside with a blanket, a book, and a bottle of rosé. Theme song: “Lived in Bars,” by Cat Power. Top road-trip destination: “Puerto Nuevo in Baja California, where they serve huge grilled lobsters right on the water.” Alexei Hay Photographer of “Mad Man,” page 70 Credentials: His work has appeared in Elle, Town & Country, and Numéro Homme. On shooting Javier Bardem: “He showed us many different faces, but he withheld his ‘Disney Face.’ ” Theme song: “I’m In with the Out Crowd,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Top road-trip destination: The Alamo. Adam Grant Author of “Mark Cuban Gets Loud,” page 64 Credentials: Author of two…

We’ll talk about speed. But first, let’s hit the brakes. There is a road in Tennessee called the Tail of the Dragon. With its 318 turns over 11 miles of Smoky Mountains, the name is not hyperbolic. If you are traversing it with aplomb, as you should this fever dream for drivers of cars as amped-up as the 471-hp Lexus LC 500 (of which I’m white-knuckling the beefy leather wheel), you need to brake as manically as you accelerate. And when you do: buh-WHOOM! buh-WHOOM! The automatic downshifting in the Sport Plus mode of this Alcantara-clad sledgehammer occurs with such bassy orchestration it would make Wagner blush. Make no mistake: Going fast is a visceral experience, too. An ingenious acoustic tunnel pumps the purrs of the silky 5.0-liter V-8 directly…

If you’ve seen the Goth futurist garments Rick Owens turns out each season, you know this is not a guy who goes in for everyday midcentury modern home decor. The furniture he’s been making since 2006 looks more like it belongs in a massive prehistoric temple. A new book from Rizzoli outlines the creative process between the designer and his wife and muse, Michèle Lamy. Stark, totemic pieces in petrified bark, alabaster, plywood, and concrete fill these pages, interspersed with shots of Lamy directing teams of craftsmen. Owens once described his dream environment as “a Brutalist fur on a Brutalist rock next to a Brutalist fire in a Brutalist cave.” You might not want to live there, but that’s the beauty of this book—crack it open and take the trip…

••• Damian Marley, the youngest son of Bob Marley’s eleven children, is bringing reggae into the digital era. Stony Hill, his first solo album since the 2005 smash Welcome to Jamrock, is out this month. I’ve been using Akai drum machines since about ’94. Back in those days, the Akai MPC was the premier drum machine. Nothing could compete with it. This particular model is basically a replica of those analog drum machines, but it uses a computer as the brain, which brings it to the modern times. I can play a little bit of guitar and a little bit of piano, but my expertise is really on drummachine programming. It’s my weapon of choice in the studio. My biggest song to date, “Welcome to Jamrock,” was made on an…

Travel has always been fashion inspiration for me, starting with my teenage holidays in the South of France. Was it the tasty food, the chic vacationers, or the endemic topless sunbathing that drew me most to that immortal coast? I wonder. Whatever the cause, it put the lust in my wanderlust and convinced me that travel should broaden my wardrobe as much as my mind. I call it the Abroadrobe. You see it in the traditional passeggiata in Italy, where the population peacocks publicly every evening. The sense of rising collectively to the occasion is palpable. It’s not just an Italian thing, either. It’s all over the Mediterranean. I don’t know the Albanian word for passeggiata, but I bet they have one. Rising to the occasion abroad, however, is something…

• • • The woven belt is nothing new—we’re sure your father had one—but we recently noticed it again around the waist of Prince Harry as he left London’s Soho House (on his arm: Meghan Markle). Harry’s blue braided belt ran no risk of upstaging his girlfriend, but it was still a statement on a guy whose family is not exactly known for its fashion daring. And it got us thinking: Why stop at blue? In a season when every style rule loosens up a few notches, opting for a brighter belt is an easy, eye-catching switch-up. From there, it’s a matter of personal taste. Nautica makes a red braided version that evokes classic New England. Missoni’s trademark zigzag pattern channels ethnic textiles. Or go all in with Anderson’s multicolored…

Go indigo dark or sun-bleached light, or else experiment in the middle ground. Match your shirt to your jeans exactly—per Mr. Gaye—or toy with the contrast. And whatever you do, remember that the accessories matter.…

I’m bad at keeping secrets. My safe is easy to crack. I wish it were otherwise. Don’t share with me your confidence. I won’t leak it today or tomorrow or even next month. But sometime within the calendar year—unless your secret is dire and would cause you to be fired or shamed and culled from the herd—chances are I will, absolutely without intending to, spill it somewhere, probably to another friend, most likely in a bar, with the whispered stricture that no one else must be told. I’m not the Julian Assange of my social circle. But my bar for what con stitutes privileged information seems to be set lower than some people’s. Sometimes I fear this is because I am a drinking man. I tend to heed Christopher Hitchens’s…

I carry zero cash. I’m all cards, all the time. Because I try to be Esquire-fashionable, I have one of those thin little wallets with a debit card, a personal credit card, and a corporate card. If I was going to get mugged on the street, it’d be a real problem because I have no cash to give. Twenty percent is my baseline tip. If the service is great and it’s a small bill, then maybe I’ll go to 25 or more. I’m less inclined to go higher than 20 if it’s a big bill. I also hate the taxis that force you to pay 20 percent, but that’s a whole separate issue. My wife handles the money, even though I’m ostensibly supposed to be someone who covers finance. But…

If you’re wondering how DONALD TRUMP happened, all you have to do is let PAT BUCHANAN, the founding father of Republican insurrection, beguile you with a HISTORY no one else can tell IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY exactly when the rehabilitation of Patrick Buchanan began, partly because his banishment from polite company was never total. MSNBC rather publicly fired him in 2012—over the protests of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—after the publication of Suicide of a Superpower, the latest, though by no means the shrillest, in the series of duck-and-cover, they’recoming- for-us screeds he’s been writing since 1998. With chapter titles like “The Death of Christian America,” “The End of White America,” and “The White Party,” it sounded the alarm of demographic apocalypse, offering pungent observations such as: “U. S.-born Hispanics are far more likely to smoke,…

You can feel it. The resistance is afoot. After years on the margins, the true believers have grown in number and have planted their flags in the soil. Dismissed no more, the rebel forces have conquered entire regions of Europe. Most of Copenhagen and several ar- rondissements of Paris were liberated long ago, and if you listen attentively while you linger at certain bars in New York and the Bay Area, your ears might just pick up maxims from the movement’s manifesto. Should you express an interest in joining, the first thing you are likely to hear is this: “What took you so long?” There are idealists, and skeptics, and those stuck on the fence. As everyone knows, we are living through a politically charged moment. We speak, of course,…

CAN YOU FEEL IT? Warm weather is back—time to ditch your beat-up winter clodhoppers and turn a page on your style. From clean white sneakers to suede double-monks, there’s A FRESH SHOE for EVERY OCCASION this season.…

I remember Stephen Malkmus, the previous generation’s indie-rock hero, addressing the audience on a blazing afternoon at Coachella in 2008. He was wearing the kind of sun hat that signals you’ve given up on being cool. Sound sludge from Cold War Kids and Boys Noize bled over from the neighboring stages. “Hey, guys, make it count!” Malkmus said into the microphone. “You’ll only get to go to, like, 34 of these in your life.” What a vibe killer. He’s not wrong, though. To be clear: I love loud music. I love the kaleidoscopic sensory attack. I love the unmistakable communal surge of We came all this way, and here, now, in the sweet spot— something’s happening! And Coachella is a primo platform, a really event-y event, particularly after nightfall. But…

Deep breaths now. The image at left may leave you confused. Concerned. Angry, even. And we don’t blame you. You’ve been told for years that white socks are a mistake outside the gym (and not even cool there, really), that the stylish man’s socks and pants should match. The rule’s been drilled into us so relentlessly it feels about as immutable as the law of gravity. But listen: Down really is up. For years now, we’ve been expressing ourselves on our ankles. Socks in argyle and stripes, vibrant colors and novelty patterns, fill our dresser drawers. Sometimes we skip them altogether. It was only a matter of time before we took on the untouchable: white socks. Worn the right way— with cuffed trousers and a chunky loafer—they have minimalist appeal,…

• • • There’s something to be said for the milestone watch— one that might cost a couple paychecks but proves you’ve made it. Hold on to that, if only to remind you of the time you thought you’d “made it.” But once you’ve got a few good watches, get one you can use without treating it like a 401(k). A knockaround watch you can wear to the beach, or in a game of pickup basketball. Something plastic that’s as bright as the paint job on a ’70s-era Porsche and something that says you’re not about to enter a, um, “tick-measuring” contest over the size of your hardware. When Bill Gates sports a Casio, the smart money says there’s power in plastic. But don’t wear one because he does—wear one…

• • • Fat ties have seized power in Washington— those overstuffed slabs of silk favored by our CEO-in-Chief. No wonder guys with a good eye don’t want to wear them. Beyond the obvious, they’re not very comfortable. Before ties were stuffed with wool for a power-sausage look, they were available with barely any lining. Take this RRL version from a few years back. It’s finer, lighter, and cooler in every sense. Because the last thing we need is more hotheads.…

Team Trump is looking tired. Consider U.S. Defense Secretary General “Mad Dog” Mattis. At his confirmation hearing in January, the bags under his eyes looked overstuffed. Has he been losing sleep? Maybe. But bags aren’t just a symptom of nights spent pondering our nation’s embattled future. (We feel you there, Mad Dog.) They’re mostly a product of age and genetics. And no one wants them. In 2015, eyelid surgery was the second-most-popular treatment for guys after that old reliable, the nose job. “It happens to everybody, though some are more predisposed,” says Manhattan-based plastic surgeon Darrick Antell. “And if you start looking tired, people think you can’t do your job well.” If you’re in the early stages, some filler just under the circles will even out the gradation. If you’re…

• • • Way back in 1997, before Acne sold everything from briefs to blazers, cofounder Jonny Johansson started out with denim, making 100 pairs of jeans that would come to define the brand. Twenty years later, he’s starting all over with the Blå Konst collection: a denim overhaul with three cuts (baggy, skinny, and straight) in a range of washes. “I wanted to purify our denim, edit the range, and refresh the pieces,” Johansson says. We say Acne has you covered from hip to cuff.…

THE DOSSIER Age: 58 Net worth: $3.4 billion Schools attended: University of Pittsburgh; Indiana University Bloomington First big thing: Sold Broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. Philanthropic efforts: The Fallen Patriot Fund, which helps the families of U. S. military personnel who were killed or seriously injured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. You probably know of Mark Cuban in one way or another. As an entrepreneur, he was a pioneer in streaming radio over the Internet. As a venture capitalist, he was an early investor in Box and makes lots of unconventional bets on ABC’s Shark Tank. And as the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, let’s just say he isn’t shy about speaking his mind. I’m an organizational psychologist and Wharton professor. In my book Originals, I…

JAVIER Bardem is on his knees. “Look at my face,” he explains delightedly, pointing to his iPhone, which displays a photo of him backstage at an AC/DC show. In it, he is genuflecting at the feet of the band’s lead guitarist, Angus Young, his muscular arms wrapped tightly around the diminutive rocker in a way that recalls Koko and her kitten. “Look at how little is Angus,” coos Bardem, who is six feet tall with the Incredible Hulk’s hairdo, an Easter Island statue’s head, and an enormous grin on his face. “He came into the room, and I fell to my knees,” he says, getting a bit misty at the recollection. “I almost cried.” He laughs. “He was probably like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’” The point is, Javier…

Spring is in full swing, which means YOU NEED A BOMBER JACKET. The perfect guard against random acts of weather, it’s LESS STUFFY than a blazer but just as POLISHED. And with jackets in nylon, canvas, and leather (guess Justin Theroux’s favorite), THERE’S NO WRONG WAY TO WEAR IT. EASY RIDER “You can’t walk down Rodeo Drive without laughing at some crazy thing,” says Justin Theroux, parsing where he finds inspiration for his screenplays. “It’s just whether you choose to find it funny or not.” He need look no further than ten feet to find a bounty of blue-chip source material. We are sitting outside at the Hotel Bel-Air, which once hosted the likes of Dean Martin; now gaggles of septuagenarians shuffle about its stone pathways like monks. It’s also…

“YOU DO UNDERSTAND that the center of the earth is extremely hot,” a friend said when he saw me packing Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. “The center of the earth is uninhabitable.” The geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous states is Lebanon, Kansas. For years, I had wanted to see it. Not to see it. To stand at the center. All of my friends knew I wanted to go. I had this routine I did after dinner where I balanced a plate on my finger and said the plate was the U. S.A. and the point of balance was Lebanon. “That’s you, all right,” my friends said. “Mister Point of Balance.” Lebanon, population 218, is 108 miles east of U. S. Route 83: nineteen hundred miles…

Sprung from the considerable depths of David Lynch’s id, with an assist from cocreator Mark Frost, Twin Peaks, one part detective show, one part soap opera, was a surprise hit in the early nineties, running for two seasons—one nearly perfect, the other hit-or-miss. Thank Showtime for bringing it back for a belated third, along with its unlikely protagonist, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by actor Kyle MacLachlan. MacLachlan has served as something of a muse for Lynch, having also starred in the director’s adaptation of Dune (1984), a famous misfire, and Blue Velvet (1986), one of the most memorable films of the 1980s. Filling out MacLachlan’s résumé: the notorious Showgirls (1995); appearances in dozens of films and television shows; a fifteen-year marriage; and a recent second career as the…