Snake America 104
Snake is a regular vintage newsletter. Regular issues this year. Party in MIAMI (lol) in a week, there will be shirts for sale. They will be here.
eBay, replacement air insoles, $20: Grifter auction here, rock-hard insoles for sneakers, looking at them makes me feel rotten. Vintage clothing doesn't look new, and you can't wear old stuff all the time. That's really the only bad thing about it because sometimes you need something new. It also decays. That's what it does. Candy red sweatshirts go pink and jeans get higes and the soles of my Nike Dynasties devolve into a torture device, rotted out like old life preservers, crusty and hard, and good though they look, at the end of a long, peaceful day of bird-watching, the wearer is worse off. Of course the shoes look good. But so do a lot of things.
I own maybe 20 pairs of pre-Iran Contra Nikes and none feel better than just OK on my feet and most feel painful. Some of this might be the after-effects of my near-death experience, about which is written in the newsletter archive. I am thinking about these insoles now and am lapsing into a negative tone ... I found ways around the pain before. Technical insoles ... which I had laying around ... I used those for years. I stopped doing that when I lost them, swiped from a pair of Nike Free 5s I bought in 2004, disappeared either a hike or a trip to New Jersey. Now I need new ones. But which? Dr. Scholl's and running insoles, like Superfeet, are a bridge too far. I'm not buying those, I'm not a nerd. The comfortable sneakers I own, late Air Maxes and New Balances, can't be used for swiping like the Frees were since their technology isn't in their insoles. The SB Dunks that Nike made 15 years ago have good insoles for swapping but you have to buy the shoe. So I have nothing left to swipe. I bought the insoles in the auction here last year. For just $20 I would have my old shoes back. Not bad. Wrong I was. Nothing about these work. They are rock hard and don't fit in a shoe, in any shoe. In the photo they look like big plastic tongue depressors; that's what they feel like, too. Living in New York (I live in New York), $20 bills get lost to the week on principle. But this one hurts.
I wonder where the insole market ranks with premium casual socks. It should be big business, I can't be the only one frustrated. When my day is over and the record I'm listening to stops, and it's quiet in my room, if I'm at home, and alone, my thoughts might start. I sometimes land on how I will never squat double body weight. It brings me down. There are also a lot of other things I can't do anymore. There are some things I never will. With every year that passes there are more. That's just the way it is. My dad told me when I was 25 that I was only too old to be a Rhodes Scholar or an Olympian. I think he was right. It's not like things are getting worse: the things you don't do give you room to get better at what you do. It's just not squatting that really gets me down. And way down the line is no longer wearing non-technical sneakers, or at least ones about as old as me. At least not until I find good insoles. These weren't them. I found bad ones, so many. Going through the bad can be the only way to find what you want. Not that I've found it.
Seiko Guigario watch: This car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro designed these watches. One of them is the watch Ripley wore on Alien (USA 1979). I think. This one maybe? The watches have a tilt-face and must look extra bad if you're left-handed like Bruce Willis and I. Seiko makes a lot of great watches but doesn't demand brand fealty. Maybe that's the way it works in horology when prices are low. Seiko charges too little for their snappy watches and in so doing doesn't inspire fear or loyalty with anyone young or with money. I'm not sure these look good on a wrist, but that doesn't matter.
Giugiaro designed these watches and lots of cars. Some Ferraris. Giugiaro helped on the DeLorean, which is a nice way to pick up a check. I finished David Halberstam's The Reckoning, his best book, about the auto industry, Ford and Nissan. Halberstam says Giugiaro is a Ferrari designer, but he only did a couple of those, and wasn't on staff at Ferrari. What else was Halberstam hiding? Halberstam also spends time with John DeLorean. DeLorean was an executive at Ford before leaving and making his namesake car. Halberstam liked writing about how DeLorean looked. Half a page on his chin implant. I told people all year I liked The Reckoning more than Powers That Be and Best and the Brightest because the writing was tighter and there were fewer discursions. He definitely went off track. The 1970s were crazy. Oil was expensive for the first time and Elliot Gould was a sex symbol. Men wore tight turtlenecks in formal settings and cottage cheese was served in restaurants. DeLorean did all of that into the 1980s and then he went to jail. Halberstam writes about Delorean:
…as head of Pontiac, he had his first contact with Hollywood, and he was seduced by it. At this point, in his early forties, he reinvented himself. He was no longer what he had been—in Detroit’s lexicon, a damn good car guy, an engineer that the old-timers would’ve approved of; he became the styled and stylish voice of youth in a middle-aged corporation. It was the sixties, and Pontiac was pushing cars for young people. He not only knew how to appeal to the new generation, he became part of it. He shed his first wife. He redesigned his hair, which became noticeably less gray… His ties disappeared. His suits, on those occasions when he dressed formally, were of fashionable Italian cut. He wore loafers without socks and carefully shave the hair around his ankles(1)…
Not bad. Like I said, I think this is Halberstam's best book. I still think he doesn't get carried away ... because it's so obvious to every reader that people wore turtlenecks and suede sport coats in the 1970s, and got chin implants, he doesn't spend as long describing wardrobes as he did in The Powers That Be and Best and Brightest. He just describes DeLorean's loafers once, at length, and gets the point across. Halberstam includes this joke:
The book is 30 years old and explicitly states why this country is broken. It's impressive. DeLorean's car was also a piece of shit. You have to be inhaling auto design for a very long time to come around to the idea of it looking good. Giugiaro watches are different. They're immediately great.
7a28s, running up the ladder from plain to wild. From just a crooked face, an extra addition, that thing on sthe side, like the one in the above auction, and the steering wheel, far right, which is the best one I think. Everyone needs a good digital watch for fishing or when you have to wear bike shorts somewhere. Recommended.
Thanks for reading. Like I said, party in Miami on March 16th, new shirts then and after.
Snake
(1) lmao