Snake America 111, on GQ.com
Ohio State football necklace, Violent Cop church pants, Ted Ginn who's got the 10⅔ lathe cut
The newest newsletter is now live on GQ.com, please read it at the link below:
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
Two items being discussed. Below are additional thoughts on the items, best read after reading the story. These thoughts complement and live off the article, like plankton does a whale.
Zanella church pants: The first auction is those speckled church pants they wear in Violent Cop and which you can’t really name. A reader messaged me and said they might be called “neppy.” That’s close, but it seems to apply to denim that’s slubby/freckly—neppy wool isn’t exclusively anything. Those church pants are best black. Brown is no good because brown speckled pants look extra-vintage in the bad way. They look like you all the way have no money (it is good to look like you don’t have money, but not all the way). P sure Martin Margiela did speckled brown wool pants at Hermès, but they were more luxe (obviously) and cut for women so the danger of being mistaken for a ragamuffin/hobo/entry-level sales professional whose suit doesn’t fit but it’s the only thing they could buy was much lower. Maybe he just did a lot of brown there. There exist a couple instances where it’s always better to buy new or designer than vintage, honestly only a couple, and the first is brown flecked pants, and the second might be … all sweaters. The goal with brown speckled pants is looking tweedy and well-kempt, like the Celine (no accent) culotte skirt Rick Owens sees every day in Paris (great interview BTW, yesterday). The antipode but usual result when wearing old brown pants is looking slovenly, like you’re at a Camper Van Beethoven show, or a poorly-attented whale murder protest in the 1990s. Those two things are the most universal examples of what old brown pants call to mind. Not ideal.
Anyways, the cops wear those pants in black—and grey—in Violent Cop, and they look so good. The main cop wears black-such pants with a Hawaiian shirt in Boiling Point… usually you need to be endomorphic or covered in tattoos to make a Hawaiian work, but the speckles’ loudness creates a similar effect to rotundity. (Presence.) Orvis makes a pair with great speckling, but they’re light grey, which is too light.
Sonatine also incredible… Yamamoto did the clothes(^) for those flicks. I really didn’t like the Adidas stuff he did 15-20 years ago (or any of it since tbh) but I’m sure it’s due for a reappraisal. Like I said in the GQ piece, if a cop is wearing a sack suit, you’re going to trust them. I sure hope no one gets this information to a police department because I’d hate to see sack suits used in support of the prison-industrial complex.
OSU Gold Pants: These are so sick, I wish the Longhorns had trinkets this cool to honor their players with (if they ever beat Oklahoma again) and to trickle down to their fans (like me). The team that wins the Red River Showdown wears a gold cowboy hat after the game, it looks great(1), but a hat on a chain isn’t as cool as tapered pants on a chain. I wonder where former Ohio State assistant Tom Herman(2)’s pants chain is? I know where I would like to put it.
This pants chain is the best thing to ever be affiliated with Ohio State University, definitely better than Herman. David Letterman also makes these shirts that say PANTS on them, since his production company for the show is/was called Worldwide Pants. I have a shirt somewhere. The OSU pants are better than a championship ring, mostly because championship rings have gotten gaudier by the year and these pants-chains have remained simple, almost anachronistic. I really like the 1971 Orioles championship ring, it might be the last really good one. CDG makes good championship rings too (they made them again two years ago, they first made them a decade-ish ago). The pants-chain is yellow gold, which is tasteful, I think. I wonder if the chains would be different were amateurism repealed. Maybe whoever is making these necklaces, or writing the checks for them, is stopping short of rubies and such because the players are functionally broke. Wearing colored jewels and being on food rations would’ve been in bad taste. Perhaps. Much to think about. The bounded simplicity of OSU’s gold chain is the best thing to come out of forced amateur sports this decade after the accepted usage of the term money-whip:
An impolite if accurate phrase featured in a lot of college sports reporting, and little place else. I feel about the phrase what Noam Chomsky feels about the Financial Times. It is more stark and honest, and therefore better. Also I like the Columbia bonehead shirt.
I think that shirt is the third-best thing about NCAA sports because it is designed for fishing. Again, the real writing is on GQ.com, so read it here:
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-ohio-state-necklace
Thanks for reading.
Snake
RIP Murray Bowles, who took photos of Bay Area punk/hc shows for 30-plus years. He worked at Dell as a programmer his whole career. His photo of the crowd at a GBH show in the early 1980s is one of the best photos ever. Like, ever. He never used the zoom when taking photos. What a mature artistic decision(3). I hope he gets celebrated in the future as a great photographer, and not just a punk photographer. His work will endure forever.
(1) only when Texas wins
(2) who is a disgrace
(3) Also, this photo of Crucifix.
Also Immortalist’s remix of one of my songs is out. Check it out here:
https://ontherunusa.bandcamp.com/track/may-7-10-14-p-m-track-25-immortalist-remix
Check out all my other stuff here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit