Snake America is back: it is a newsletter covering vintage clothing (for GQ) and furniture (here) and strength sports (Inverse, wrote about weightless exercises last weekend(1)). Today, completed furniture auctions.
Composition bust on pedestal, $150 (lot passed): There aren’t enough busts for sale — they stopped immortalizing people in marble and bronze way too long ago, and then the material world caught up. In a way it makes sense: it’s good you can’t buy a bust of Mike Nichols. Or any other high-level nobody out there. It should only be popes, composers, generals or the fully anonymous. Maybe a Greek. It would be great to have a bust of whoever you want, but it should cost money. I wonder what the real sculptors out there are doing. Terry Allen could make you a bust if you caught him on the right day. The 2D equivalent here of ancient Greek busts are David Levine caricatures. Those are also on the way out since he’s been gone for awhile and the newspaper field is on its last breath. The David Levine universe… big head, small body… not the karmic path by any means, but one of the most artful side-effects of journalism, his caricatures. In a sense he was the sculptor of the 20th century. Or at least the last 40 years. I worked in an auction house in high school and we had a Rodin. Levine worked in paper and pen so as not to break the general/pope/composer rule. (This one of Wodehouse’s real good: check out his pants.) I had an idea a couple years ago, my face as David Levine caricature, either for the cover of the book of newsletters that’s coming out soon (me on the cover), or a T-shirt, but with Levine long dead and few caricaturists now available and reachable for that kind of work, i.e. don’t draw it like a boardwalk beach cartoon, my idea is ratum tantum. I read an Australian newspaper editorial around then with an artist’s Levine-type caricature as the main, but there were no art credits and no one at the paper emailed me back (I emailed all down the masthead) about who did the drawing. So maybe a new meme format, if you can draw faces like David Levine, text me. This lot here passed. No one wanted a bust of David’s face on a six-foot tall column. LA has 2,496 busts listed on auctions right now, 748 under “art,” lots of coins, some Davids, a Buddha made of agarwood.
I’ve expressed this elsewhere, but my favorite thing in auctions, and therefore just about in general, is when sellers put a can of Coke in the photo for size reference. They have been doing it just about forever. (The oldest auction in my favorites with a can of soda for reference is a Chanel briefcase listed in 2012, sold for $900, Diet Pepsi.) The can of red Coke is the ideal unit of measurement. It’s instantly and completely relatable and identifiable in every aspect: size, dimension, color scaling, depth, just about everything else. Nothing you list in an auction will enter a buyer’s mind before the red Coca Cola can does. But you need to service the buyer, and sell the item, so it’s the sacrifice you make, putting the Coke can for reference. See the can then the auction. Some photos the can’s not so red, and so you adjust. It’s like the clouds in The Aviator. These are things the mind does anyways, but cans of red Coke make it faster. I’ve been writing plenty about fitness lately and so I’ve been often reminded of red Coke’s macrobiotic properties before how it looks. It’s true that too much red Coke makes you fat. In fact nothing is truer. But enough about that. I figured out why I like busts. They’re gilded, fancy but smooth. Very complicated but sleek to the touch. The classic bust I mean, like this Beethoven with a can of red Coke. It makes sense that the art form was perfected in Italy. That’s the through-line between Michelangelo and Paolo Piva. On a good marble bust, even the curly hair is sheen slick, on a nice avant-garde ‘70s sofa, it’s round but ornate. They’re the same thing. The final rule of sculpture is if you don’t have curly hair you’re not supposed to be carved into a bust.
Hermès scarf, horses: Once a year or so I spend a week feet-first into Hermès scarves. I never buy them. I think about it though. One guy on eBay had a Kermit Oliver “Les Ameriques” in the original 1994ish blue (scarf is from ‘92), selling locally here, New Rochelle actually, framed (with no mat), on eBay for a respectable $1,000 buy it now, listed for months. When he unlisted the auction I messaged him and he said he still had it for sale but “am thoroughly firm” on the price. In a real asshole way…. When you clicked through the photos you could see on the back of the frame a sticker from Michael’s… that’s where he framed it. He said it was for an Hermès store opening, the colors matched up with this DC store issue on HSCI, so he’s not lying about that. But Michael’s… seemed to me off. I don’t think that’s how they tell them to do things in Paris. Talk about high and low. Despite the Michael’s, I wanted it low key and still do. It was a nice silver frame, and it’s good it’s unmatted. But the auction’s no longer up, and I don’t feel like emailing again and getting degraded.
If you dig around past Oliver there are plenty of good Hermès scarves. As one would imagine. There’s a good story on GQ from this week (and the May issue) about the brand. I wonder sometimes if anyone’s worth looking at past Oliver. As in I’ve looked past Oliver and nothing’s jumped out at me. But it’s probably just me, or how I was feeling that day. This Alice Shirley’s not bad. This one with these cats is insane. I like Hugo Grygkar, he makes some good scarves. There are plenty of others. One might ask who’s going to be better than a mailman from Texas? As a story, nobody. But in a blind Pollice verso of scarves I’m sure more than a couple of Oliver’s colleagues make scarves that are just about as good. My approaches to non-Oliver Hermès is identical to my Oliver Hermès in that I don’t buy anything. Maybe I might. I like some of them. This one’s not bad… It’s nice that this auction is monotone. The best ones seem to be equine… this one, a jacket, this bridle setup. All the Oliver work has to do with nature, so it makes sense the other scarves as good as his are also firmly rooted in the natural world.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit
(1) this was a really fascinating column for me. I went into it thinking you couldn’t really get big or put on muscle from weightless exercises. You absolutely, definitely can. Many do. Much of this is done through eccentric exercises, which are downward movements. They’re reality-altering: they can blow up your body, but don’t leave you sore. The key is you have to do a ton of reps. Doing so many reps makes it difficult. Kind of a perfect constraint. I would recommend these exercises to anyone who wants to make their joints and ligaments stronger and put on muscle. Email me if you want more information or guidance…