Snake America: Edition Three
Snake is a regular email (twice a week-ish) where I write about eBay auctions, videos I've come across, ephemera, errata, macronutrient ratios and caloric breakdowns...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/301270382757 Each spring, coming on four years now, I think it'll be the summer of 1950s-style boy-wear striped T-shirts. (The ones Leave It To Beaver used to wear, etc.) Labor Day is around the corner, and I'm not sure it's ever going to happen. Of course, clothing companies have been making more concerted efforts at accurate striped shirts each Spring/Summer. They show up, but not often. The retros are inexact: The shirts veer too close to nautical cuts or straight ape Hang Ten. The insane exact aesthetic I'm seeking is never captured. Many of the fancier retro executions--LVC, the one from the first link, is a good example--retain, in sailor-trash fashion, a wide neck and thin cotton, even when successful. Cheaper-priced shirts look like Gotcha, or worse. The real thing has a stupider intent than it's given credit for. More or less children's wear, they have tight, thick stripes, the occasional piping, in primary colors, and since they're meant to be worn in mud, forests, to the Car Wash, around hot dogs, etc., they must be durable. The best ones, like the pair here, have high necks and primary colors and no side seam--made by Sears, Arrow, or whatever. APC and LVC's attempts, even when they succeed, are too delicate. They look like they should be worn by candlelight. People can see your collarbone when you one. eBay will feature decent shirts only a few times a year, since people wore it tight back then and were smaller. Searching "50s/60s striped shirt" mostly gives you Banlon. As far as art goes, there's Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (USA 2011), where Brad Pitt's kids wear variations of the Sears shirt. (They also wear spot-on jerky-tag Levi's and then Lee's, and the clothes change as they get older, kind of like in Hoop Dreams (USA 1994), how his older brother looks less fly every scene). It makes you want to tip your hat to the wardrobe coordinator, but then again it's pretty easy to find this stuff if you're a baby.
https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/storage-case-pieces/cabinets/rare-george-nelson-guestroom-unit-drop-front-desk-on-102-platform-bench/id-f_784253/ - the best scene in Tree of Life was at the beginning when Brad Pitt is sitting on the Nelson bench crying about how much he sucks and how he failed his son Sean Penn. The scene really draws the viewer into how nice Brad Pitt's house is. When I saw it in theaters, on Memorial Day 2011, it was a couple minutes into the scene before I noticed the bench propped up against the wall, him sitting on it, holding his hands in despair thinking longingly about how bad of a guy he was and all that time he spent at the mill... Later in the film we see exactly how he's a workaholic asshole, drinking workahol and being mean to his subtly-dressed kids, listening to classical music, but the thought creeps, with the image of that Nelson bench and his dream house, that he made the right decision in his life to put family second. Just as his sons, Sean Penn and the actor who played his younger brother, wear pristine bacon-tag Levi's 505s and 1930s Converses and Healthknit striped T-shirts in the full bloom of their youth, Brad Pitt sits on his beautiful Nelson Bench, growing old in dignity, enveloped by a different kind of breathtaking beauty, and cries. George Nelson was a man who made the bench for his office (they say at Fortune) slatted, to save money, and his time: the benches aren't comfortable and his guests would rouse up soon after sitting. Slatted wood or not, Brad Pitt's character is probably not a guy who would spend a lot of time crying about his son Sean Penn, so I'm confident he probably brushed himself off and made a sandwich as soon as the camera cut out. The scene would have been even better if he was sitting on the bench in question here, and then after his cry pulled his gym clothes out of the appended cabinet and went for a run around the park or wherever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DrZlyhJToc - Looks like Blue Gold Blues (USA, ???), the documentary movie about the place jeans hold in the American mind and marketplace, is happily happening. It features interviews with vintage sellers and buyers, designers, store owners, etc. Who knows about wide release, though, but it looks good. This trailer, though, is a Rashomon (Japan, 1950) to a Vintage America, a reality show treatment about the same stuff from the same time (http://vimeo.com/37622214), that's unfortunately* not happening. Both the movie and the show feature a guy named Eric Schrader, a vintage sourcer/store-owner from Idaho who gets into the vintage racket after selling some Levi's he found in a barn for $30,000 to someone. Schrader says the story in both, but only the show dwells on the bad man. Blue Gold Blues intersperses Schrader's interviews with sit-downs with Adriano Goldschmidt--he's the guy who makes the vodka with bits of orange in it, I think. I'll see it in theaters if it gets to that but they could do better. I mean V.A. was just on Schrader. He's like 250 pounds and has spiky hair and he kills it--he gets Chinese with his kids**, drives a new Chevy Express to The Rose Bowl, delegates studding Lil Wayne's post-prison sneakers to an all-girl office, prices a paratrooper to some old freak, finds and then sells a box of deadstock Air Jordan I satin jackets, negotiates over a wabash jacket***--but it's not happening. Who dropped the ball? I guess if you're making a reality show right in my wheelhouse it's not going to get picked up. But Schrader the coolest white person to ever live after Bez or something. This one that's heading to theaters is half Euros, half Schrader. What are you going to do?
Thanks, again, for reading. Questions, hate mail, fanzines, creatine monohydrate, Naugha-monsters and tailored sweatshorts can be sent at your leisure, discretion and by registered mail. Thanks again.
Snake
* Prolly
** Not in this cut. Maybe here
*** I thought when he got $4,500 for the wabash it was out of control, but they would go for $10K, so....