Snake 121

Completed Furniture Auctions

Snake America is a newsletter covering vintage clothing (for GQ) and furniture (here) and strength sports (Inverse). Today, completed auctions.

Kraut Killers ashtray: I can never really tell what kitsch is… I mean, I can… but it’s an ambient, hazy thing, which is all about context, and at the edges, bad taste and good meet, and sometimes become one another like when the guy turns into liquid metal in Terminator 2 and becomes a thing… anything old and funny can be kitschy, but might not always be… things which involve fast cars, too… sometimes… are kitschy. Rock and roll, in a way… jeans are kitschy… I wear my new jeans every day… except to the beach, but it rained all weekend… and we might look back on the mid 2000s era of initial forays into raw denim, and salting them in sea water, as kitsch. The director Walter Hill said he made “Streets of Fire” (1984):

as a way of making what his teenage self thought would be a perfect film, full of things that were "great then and which I still have great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honour.”

Which, I think could be kitschy under another director. Say, John Waters or even Wong Kar-Wai. Ashtrays, in an age where smoking is outlawed indoors (except for casinos in Atlantic City and Basement if you go on the right night), are theoretically kitschy… but since they’re one of the few cheap entryways into purposeful, beautiful ceramic or glass design… so they might not be. Though individual ashtrays can be, certainly. Anything from any era can fail, if it’s executed incorrectly… this one, for an infantry registry, may be kitschy… I don’t think it is… it’s built right. But how it looks depends on what else is placed in the room with it. If this ashtray was in a garage… there’s a custom shop on my street, down the block, past Sackett, and I pass by it a few times a week, sometimes on the way home from my friend Bennet’s apartment, when we used to watch Formula 1 together, there’d be an M series or two out on the curb, and sometimes one on the post lift, the street cars collecting dust, old Michigan Wolverines-colored New York plates… much further down the street is a toilet supply store with dusty venetians and a tap display on the corner and they’d like this ashtray more than the import shop would.

If I can throw down my grand theory of vintage design — or maybe just hint at it, since I will address it properly in SHEER DRIFT: THE COLLECTED BOOK OF SNAKE AMERICA NEWSLETTERS, coming soon on Shining Life Press — then there’s a way this ashtray can work anywhere, even if you have a Felix clock on the wall, but that you shouldn’t have one to begin with. But this is all theoretical, and academic, and I don’t like writing about things in the air with respect to things people buy, so for the purposes of today, right now, I think that one Kraut Killer ashtray is badass, two is worrying, more than that means you’re a collector, hustler, or on military pension and placing one next to a giant inflatable stuffed animal or chair with fins on it is kitschy.

Coca Cola icepick: What if you got murdered by a Coca Cola icepick? Then you could be buried in a KISS coffin. KISS sell coffins… they say that there’s no good political art anymore, but maybe the piece of fiction that gets us out of our mire is a noir-type tall tale where a researcher for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the CIA equivalent in Germany, runs in, at Spitalfields on vacation, to someone employed by Booz Allen Hamilton (basically CIA), they get along and then they really get along — is it a heteronormative relationship? sure — despite both being standoffish because of their obvious security implications. But they’re tired and give in. Who’s juicing who? In a sense, it’s not so different for spies… Eventually there’s betrayal, and the German spy gets shanked with a Coca Cola icepick, the very icepick he was looking for at Spitalfields, and which he collected… you’d have to think him collecting Coke stuff meant he was a double agent of some sort… how’d these icepicks end up in Ottawa, Ill.? In fact that’s exactly where they should be. If this story were made into a film, and it could be, it’d be very important that the spy wear a 3/2 roll suit and not something too obvious…

Thanks for reading.

Snake

Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit