Snake America all-Bernie Sanders-donation special (topics chosen by donors) PART ONE
shirts, death metal, SuperStudio, onesies, Italian soccer, bicep workouts
Last week I said if readers donated to Bernie Sanders’ campaign before the January-end deadline I would write about whatever they wanted. Many did! This made me feel enfranchised in the American political process for the first time. It also made me feel like I was Al Smith. Neither of these thoughts deserves further explanation. My first spate of answers is here. Expect the rest like mid-week.
Zack asks:
Write about the Carroll Gardens Longhorns friendship society.
Yes. This is a design of a shirt I made and didn't reprint.
I was on the phone with my mom one night and she said my dad was out, at a meeting of the Canada-France Friendship Society, of which he is treasurer. This was new to me. I guess he goes every Friday. It’s downtown, at the University of Ottawa, French films and sometimes drinks. Seems like an ideal society. It reminded me of sister cities, and of World/Inferno Friendship Society, an old band who I always got confused with All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors (another old band). A friend's ex-girlfriend’s (10+ years ago) favorite band was World/Inferno, and none of us ever met her, that's all we knew about her. That and she had short hair, maybe a shaved head. Like I said, we didn’t know her.
I envisioned the Carroll Gardens Longhorns Friendship Society as a real alternative to watching games at the bar or at home. I put my phone number on the shirt out of idealism, but have yet to get a call, despite selling out the complement. A friend’s old hard-core band put their friend Bill Ballard’s phone number on one of their T-shirts, in 2005, or so, and he got so many calls he changed his number. Times have changed. My other phone number is on the back of my first shirt:
But no one called me there either. The crossed flags are modeled after the 8 Ball Community Japan-USA friendship tee (can’t find a pic) my friends Nathaniel and Matt designed about five years ago. A powerlifting competition shirt I liked had mixed up fonts so I did that. And I advertised what the society was about at the bottom. La société, c’est moi. I think the design is so without style that it is blank and direct, like a late-period Richard Meier building. Of course, I would never compare myself to a great architect. The house on the shirt represents Carroll Gardens brownstones and the cow a Texas Longhorn. Thank you Zack.
Stacey asks:
Write about Northwestern:
A funny running gag is when the Northwestern football or basketball team is about to lose and people make journalism jokes about the team, like “it looks like the Wildcats couldn’t deliver their draft on time,” or, “Northwestern’s wide receiver’s real number is -30-.” I guess you have to be there. The main thing about Northwestern, I think, is the alumni magazine’s substantive interview with Ernie Adams. Adams is the guy behind the guy at the New England Patriots (who graduated Northwestern in 1975) and little is known about him. Adams does much of the backup for New England’s coaching staff. He is responsible for a measurable part of the team’s success (the Malcolm Butler interception traces back to him), despite an old owner famously not knowing what he does all day. The alumni magazine interview has a lot of great moments. My favorite is when Adam explains he sat for David Halberstam’s book about the Patriots and Bill Belichick (Education of a Coach) on the condition that he could ask Halberstam one thing about Vietnam for every three things Halberstam asked him. I don’t care about power. But I wish I had that kind of power.
Adams (left) is probably the Richard Pevear to Belichick’s Larissa Volokhonsky—or the other way around. The two former schoolmates have a facility of communication and immediate understanding that is based on familiarity, respect and (maybe) love. This creates the foundation for a sort of industry-beating success that comes around only a couple times a century. Adams wears roll-collar oxford shirts, and big glasses, maybe Persols. I have a similar pair but not the exact pair. I don’t like NFL football very much but Ernie Adams is one of my heroes, and I hope to meet him one day. Thank you Stacey.
Mark P asks:
Write about Cynic.
Cynic was a death metal and fusion jazz band from Miami in the 1990s. They broke up after touring with Cannibal Corpse. Years later one band member became a session musician for 3rd Rock From The Sun. Their first demo sounds like Anthony from Raw Deal is on vocals. Paul and Sean Reinert, the drummer, joined Death, for an album, Human, and toured it, after the demos. When they returned to Cynic things changed and the band became itself.
Reinert passed away last week. Focus, their 1993 full length, stands alone. Unlike most death metal records, it has clear, autotuned vocals and a Chapman stick, a non-traditional instrument, made for tapping. There is clean, warbled bass and some pad synths. It still sounds more like Possessed than Gary Burton, though. The layout looks like a 1980s new age record:
(The guy who played on 3rd Rock is the one in the lake.) Most bands grow, but like this? How? One of their high school friends says he was big into ECM (fusion/audiophile jazz label whose founder has a bowl cut). Reinert and Paul Masvidal, the guitarist and singer, went to U Miami for music. Reinert listed some of his favorite drummers:
VINNIE COLAIUTA, GARY HUSBAND, BILL BERG, RAYFORD GRIFFIN, TRILOK GIRTU, PAUL WERTICO, ELVIN JONES, JOEY BARON, PETER ERSKINE, BILL STWEART (sic), OMAR HAKIM, MANU KATCHE, JOEY HERREDIA (sic) to name a few.
So it’s what they liked. The band reunited a decade-ish ago and their first reunited record was pretty good. After I heard about Reinert’s passing I was hit pretty hard, and have been listening to their output constantly. Jason Polan, the brilliant illustrator, died just a few days later, and Hester Diamond, the most important interior decorator of my lifetime I think, died just a couple weeks ago, too. It has been a bad week for legends. Maybe they are all hanging out in artist heaven. I like this old video from 1994, where Cynic’s keyboardist, Sonia Otey (I think), does the death metal growls. Most bands back then—even now—had men do that stuff. Revolutionary! Here is Reinert (right) and his husband in May:
All this is beautiful and complements the record, which doesn’t need the help, but gets it. All the decisions that went into Focus that were shocking at the time—gated production, clean vocals, hippie lyrics, aquatic submersion, bubbly electronic instrumentation—work. We all caught up. It’s all in there. It is so sad he’s gone. Thank you Mark.
Jason F asks:
Write about your favorite hardcore shirts and logos.
There are very many. The circle of obvious shirts and logos is bigger than the circle of obscure ones, or is at least bigger than it was 20 years ago. Because many hard-core graphics are direct, and obvious, many of my choices are canon, and obvious. But here they are.
Warzone were from New York in the late 1980s and continued for a decade. Some members have passed on. One design has the bottom right of an E going through a skull’s head. The shirt is spare and white—most hardcore shirts aren’t. The skull isn’t the focus of the shirt but it might be the best-drawn skull in the genre. It’s only on this shirt and not on any records. Because the skull is already dead, he does not care about being killed by a vowel. He is dead, and being put to use by expression. So long, skull. Another Warzone shirt has a tank in USA flag colors and another says Sneak Attack: Phase 1 on the back. It is impossible for me to think of a sneak attack without thinking Phase 1.
There is this Youth of Today shirt with a realistic one-color drawing of a cow and above the cow their name and below it a request, "Go Vegetarian." It is the most obvious and brilliant hardcore shirt there is. Other pantheon shirts are ones I’m not sure are real, like orange Leeway shirts (I might be imagining these), and the NY Wolfpack shirt Dan Lilker is wearing on the Stormtroopers of Death record which no one has confirmed to me. I could talk for days about the shirts I love: the embroidered Next Step Up shirt, ones from Stout, Pressure Release’s “Prison of my Own,” Bold shirts in Hamas green, or purple, or white, and with pocket prints, and Black Flag’s “Process of Weeding Out” pocket print shirt. The AF shirt with Reagan on it, and the SST shirt with the cop car. There is the Turning Point "Hi Impact" shirt, the best shirt of all time. I remember each one I have seen.
My logo choices are as obvious. Many (Black Flag, Double O, Side By Side, Abused, DK) are so self-evidently it that they are best left there. Other great skulls are Ghoul, Crow, Neanderthal and then Bastard Noise. And reappropriated peace/anarchy signs, like Conflict, an N in a circle, GISM, an anarchy sign with a gun inside it, and Gauze, their name in that shape. Words tell pictures, like the Bulldoze “8D,” simple graffiti, and Subhumans “Douglas Sirk,” where that word is divided by some vertical lines. I like the Doom logo which looks like doom. I am forgetting hundreds, but my favorite is the Ignition diamond thing. Thank you Jason.
Tim F (no relation) asks:
Write about flight suits in music, “a la bassist of Gauze.”
I want to treat this subject with the ultimate respect. Gauze have been around for coming on 40 years and they play shows without openers, and recently played like 60 songs in a row without stopping. I heard some of the guys in the band have grandkids. They are not affiliated or associated with Yakuza, which some hard-core bands in Toyko are, but get treated with respect nonetheless. None of this stuff makes a band good, of course, though it is all very interesting. Luckily Gauze are very good to begin with. The drummer, Hiko, plays solo shows around Tokyo. Shin, Gauze’s bassist, wears a flight suit, a boiler suit onstage. The word is he is the only salaryman in the band. It is too good to check. Here is a photo of his outfit:
From a record from 1991. Every photo I have seen of them from the past 20 years, he’s been wearing this jumpsuit. Albert Einstein wore the same Air Jordans every day until they fell apart. Because Shin wears this jumpsuit to every show, he can think about more important stuff, or not at all.
Now and then a new Gauze record just shows up, though it has been 13 years since the last one. The music is not always very fast (it sometimes is), but almost always seems fast. This is because the drums are very busy. They don’t keep a strict 1-2 tempo like a lot of hard-core or punk music. But they are busy and fill up the sonic space and hurry the songs along. It’s a frenzy. The best analogue to Gauze’s drumming is how in City Lights (USA 1931), everyone in the background, and all the cars and horses and elephants, move around very quickly. The speed makes The Tramp look like he is a world apart—which he is. Thank you Tim.
Drew writes:
Please write about Charles Poliquin’s daily arm cure.
Charles Poliquin was a trainer, strength coach, and shirtless public intellectual. He passed away, much too early, a couple years ago, from genetic heart disease. He was born in my hometown, and trained the NHL athletes Chris Pronger and Joe Nieuwendyk, and therefore reached the highest peak of success anyone from Ottawa could ever hope to have.
Polinquin ate a lot of meat and wrote about working out. In 1998 he wrote an article on T-Nation headlined “One-Day Arm Cure” that was a 12-hour long bicep and tricep workout. Poliquin wrote that if you did all the reps and steps he prescribed each of your arms would get 1” bigger, and at least 3/8” bigger. The article starts off:
We live in a world of "instants." There's instant pudding, instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant everything! Speed is God, and our language is peppered with high-speed words or terms like FedEx, fax, 56.6 modems, and 300-megahertz microprocessors.
And gets better from there. It is deranged. There are four exercises that you do hundreds of times. During your workout you are expected to eat one lean steak, 2 chicken breasts, 1 yam, 1 slice of bread, 1 orange, 1 green salad, 2 servings of fish oil, 6 grams of Vitamin C and drink 5 servings of Plazma and 2 of Mag-10, the last two being carb/protein blends that are sold through T-Nation’s web store. (The T stands for testosterone.) I guess that is what the people at my gym who wear backpacks are carrying. Working out your arms is so stupid. Imagine wanting to have big arms—wanting big arms is stupid.
Much of the philosophies and ideas Poliquin was spouting forever—meditation, negative reps, organic food, eating organ meat—have been adopted by more mainstream fitness people and then people outside of fitness. He was right about almost everything and his body of work is staggering, but not intimidating. It is pretty tragic he’s gone. It is sad that all his literature on heart health, which he seemed to have followed, did not let him outrun his genetic history. It’s just not right. But what a legacy of information he left behind. As advanced as his training methods were, they were pretty clear. Train hard, eat well. Even here, it’s explicit: over the top, yes, and impractical, and pointless, but not confused. How impressive. The best strength coaches and trainers are among the smartest people in the world. Underestimate their intelligence at your own risk: even Charles Poliquin wasn’t born with giant muscles. That’s not how we start out in Ottawa. Thank you Drew.
Nick L asks:
Can you write about 1990s Serie A fashion? A specific item of clothing.
Everything from Italy is more interesting than anything else from anywhere else. Except for the way they play soccer there—it is too defensive. But in the 1990s the teams dressed well. I think the most representative item of clothing from that era is the Inter Milan Pirelli jersey, from the late 1990s:
This fall news broke Inter was replacing Pirelli as its sponsor, or looking for more money from the tyre company. Is it the end of an era in sport, or just a business decision? I think the former. Because business is part of athletic competition it should be visible. The logo is the biggest thing about the jersey and the logo is crazy. The P is so long. Better to acknowledge how integral a tyre company is to a soccer team than to sweep it under the rug and flail against sponsorship.
The Pirelli is associated with a great era of Serie A football and some of my favorite players: Ronaldo (the real one), Javier Zanetti, other guys, etc. Closer to this email’s beat is the Parma Champion jersey from the same era, which is the most obvious use of Champion’s logo in sport, even more than the 1990s Bengals jerseys with the C on them.
These were better than the Bengals’ since the C was bigger, and ran down the shoulders, like the Kappa Gemini twins. And since no one in Europe leaned on Champion, so it’s all very mysterious. All the Serie A uniforms back then had long and fat sleeves and billowy shirts. It was all very beautiful. I would rank the brands Umbro, Kappa, Lotto, Errea, Kelme, Macron then Champion. Grazie Nick!
Ambrose asks:
Write about Montgomery county, Maryland.
I know very little about this county. Bill Cosby is in prison there, which is good. He should stay in jail. Gaithersburg and Takoma Park are there too, so is Silver Spring. There isn’t much to do there except go to the movies. The Takoma Park farmers market on Saturdays has these empanadas. They are really good, and there is also a story behind them. I’m afraid that’s all I feel comfortable divulging about the empanadas and whoever it is who sells them here. I read that 1/3 of the American gold medal winners from the last Olympics were from Maryland, but I am not sure how many were from Montgomery County. I guess counties are pretty cool. I don’t think we had them growing up in Canada, and they don’t really make movies about them (most movies are about independent cities), so I don’t really care about them. Thank you Ambrose.
Rachel asks:
Write about composting in New York.
My building doesn’t have a compost system, so composting is therefore naturally hard to understand. I think the brown garbage thing is small because people eat less fruits and vegetables than they should, and the mayoralty, in its wisdom, is not trying to change people, but work under our current nutritional constraints. Looking deeper at the city’s composting plan, it appears to be an abject disgrace.
Big Reuse does composting. There are a couple in New York, in Red Hook and Astoria, and they have a Viking ranges for cheap. Its true function is as a repository for used (and therefore affordable) luxury kitchen equipment. Because I only used my oven once in six years in my apartment (I baked a pecan pie for Thanksgiving 2017), the effort to upgrade to a Viking would be absurd. Thanks Rachel.
Laura asks:
Write about SuperStudio.
Thank you Laura. SuperStudio is this Italian furniture collective who wrote a manifesto about what design/architecture should be (60s) and made furniture, both works becoming the groundwork for Italian Radical Design. Pretty ahead of their time, against consumption, and for sustainability, for use, all this in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Some of the stuff they did is just so good, like the Misura M desk and the Olook and Passiflora lamps. The main brains behind SS wrote it all down when they were young. I once was skeptical of theoretical artistic statements: I felt like because they came from people who were ambitious early and cynical late I couldn’t relate. I think I took the opposite path. I am all for it. SS’ output works theoretically and aesthetically, and the founders were lucky enough to find something they loved early then find fault in it. It’s important for artists to demand what they want even when it’s not around yet. And if we afford that generosity of thought to artists then we should also afford it to ourselves.
With furniture, like with movies, you need the money up front to make something. If Scorsese didn’t have a check from Netflix he wouldn’t have made The Irishman and if SuperStudio didn’t have a couple bucks from Poltronova the Sofo Sofa would’ve stayed in the sketchbook. It’s not really that way with newsletters. You can write whatever you want in a newsletter and no one has to pay you in advance. Except in this case. If no one had donated to Bernie Sanders, I wouldn’t have written anything. How great.
A bald eagle from Vermont. Again, thanks to everyone who donated. And thank you for reading, more coming this week.
Snake