Snake America 80: 2015 IN REVIEW
Snake is a bi-weekly newsletter covering after-market goods sold on eBay. This week: my favorite crap from 2015. Subscribe.
Best video of the year: Chinese Jerk Training, posted by hookgrip, March. Nice and representative video of the Chinese weightlighting team's jerk training. The jerk is a weightlifting move ... I'll back up. Olympic weightlifting involves two maneuvers. The first is the snatch, where a bar with weights is on the ground, you squat down, grip it wide and then lift it over your head in one movement. The second is the clean and jerk, which is two moves, a clean, where the bar is lifted from the ground to the shoulders with a medium-wide grip, and the jerk, where it's lifted overhead. Lifters are divided into weight classes, and whoever lifts the most weight in their weight class wins. One of the greatest weightlifters ever was a Turkish guy who was nicknamed The Pocket Hercules who was 4'11.
In this video, the coach helps an unnamed weightlifter fix her footwork for the second half of the second lift. This is done without weights. It's hard to tell when in the training cycle this is--how far she is from competition--since all Chinese weightlifters practice a lot without the bar and without weights. Is she even part of the team? Is she a junior, or a prospect, or coming off injury? Nike sponsored the team through 2014, and Anta now, and she's wearing neither shoes, so she's likely down the list. The coach is a retired junior world champion and is under 30. So he retired in his prime to coach. Or maybe he peaked early. He's showing the weightlifter how to jump and land correctly. She keeps landing in the boxes the Chinese weightlifting federation has drawn on the ground to perfect their lifters' footwork, but she's landing wrong, with her front toe out and her back heel in. These small cues will help her lift more weight over her head when the time comes. The coach says she's jumping forward and not straight up. If she jumps straight up then her back foot and ankle will point appropriately out and her forward foot will stay straight. This presumably gives her a more solid base. The philosophy is to get the form right with no weight so that it won't In the video she does the drill 11 times. After the sixth try he lays off her a little. After the eighth try he tells her to "think up, and you will go up," and she does on the ninth try, with only her back ankle a little in. He kicks it, but doesn't do much else. After the final try in the video, the coach, who is sitting on a bench to her side drinking something, looks as she points to the bar on the ground and asks if she can practice with it. The coach says there's no point and she should keep jumping.
In current weightlifting, championships in every class(1) go through the Chinese. Part of that is because Olympic weightlifting is a big-deal sport in a country of 1.357 billion people so there's an unparalleled talent pool. Another part is that the difference in training elite, pretty good and really good lifters in China is defined by how much time a lifter spends working with weights. The elite lifters do the same drills as the lifter here, they just get it right the first time and spend less time on it ... The lifter here ... is already pretty good, singled out as someone who win something, the federation assigning a retired junior world champion to get her there ... You wake up and think you're going to go into the gym to lift weights and you get there and he spits in your face while you do jumping jacks. That mean you're not the best. It also means that going through the unsatisfying ringer is what it takes to make something out of nothing. I really think this is one of the best videos I've ever seen.
Best house: Jean Pigozzi's crib, Paddle8, November: Not sure what this site is. This Pigozzi guy is a legendary partier or something. He is French, went to Harvard and his dad founded a car company over there. He apparently has the best collection of African art in America. The spread prominently displays his Ettore Sottsass cabinet, which is so good it makes me want to vomit, and mentions a Steve Jobs figurine, stuff by Murakkami, and skateboard art that isn't an original skateboard, the last bunch of things being subjects I will not discuss within the confines of this electric magazine. He also has a Sottsass lamp and the red typewriter, and wears a going-out shirt and weird-colored Stan Smiths in the photos. And he has this cardboard box that says The Rolling Stones on it. And those BapeSta toys that Marvel made a few years ago. Those two things are just cool. There's a nice line from his 2010 Vanity Fair profile:
Pigozzi had been recommended by the artist Sol LeWitt as the guy we should hire to take pictures of an upcoming trip to China that a group of art-world luminaries was planning.
Can you imagine getting dapped up like that? In one of the Lewitt monographs there's a few pages of photos of all this Lower East Side graffiti he took in the 1970s. Stan Smiths--all Adidas--should be burned on sight, but life isn't fun if everyone does the same thing. The Vanity Fair piece says he likes to buy stuff at JimmyJazz (sic) on 125th, and that Harvard thought he was a girl, so they registered him at Radcliffe, and that he started Spy Magazine and is a photographer. Most of the photos on his Instagram are making fun of kale, the vegetable. The main photo of his toys in the Paddle8 article features what appear to be two identical fax machines, and the Target mascot dog. Looking at the article again I notice than me and him have the same collection of Russian parliamentary matryoshka dolls.
Thanks for reading this year. I am in your debt.
Snake
Last Snake: Christmas gift guide (Christmas is over.)
Snake Before That: Completed Items compendium (completed!)
(1) Except for the men's superheavyweight classes, which are dominated by Russia and Iran. Even though the women's superheavyweight group includes Holley Mangold, whose brother played for the Jets, and is American, the title goes through China. That doesn't mean they win every time, just that they're in the mix and on the podium every time.