Snake America Eighty Five: 2016 in Review
Snake is a weekly email covering vintage clothing, wild ass furniture, etc. generally on eBay. This week: a look back on 2016. Subscribe.
eBay: Rolex Domino's watch, $4,000: This is a good Rolex ... I guess. Pretty bland and the best part is the Domino's logo. I bet a Domino's logo would be the best part of any Rolex, even a Paul Newman. (Paul Newmans are a type of Daytona with this fat cartoon font on the dials. Newman wore one in some photos(1).) I swear there's a photo of the Visvim guy wearing a Daytona ... the FBTs use to be $300 10 years ago and then they just raised the prices and they're not as well-made anymore and now he wears a Daytona. Visvim also sells denim bathrobes and giant backpacks. Coincidence? It's a pretty good setup. There's a good Antiques Roadshow video from last year with a private pilot selling his Paul Newman ...
The flyboy bought it for $500 new in the 1970s and used it to calculate his distance as he flew over the wilderness of South Dakota or wherever to scout fast food restaurant locations. Daytonas were sold at discount because they were too wild for their era, like Jordan 1s in 1994 or the Snake America T-shirts I printed that didn't have a front print and were not made in size medium. The expert appraised the Paul Newman for $100,000; this watch blog that John Mayer is an editor for says it's likely worth more. I don't have a PhD in economics, but no way pilots are still paid to fly over rural areas to scout burger chain locations, and I think that's why the economy is becoming rougher. The abovementioned Rolex is so new looking ... they made them for Domino's managers who made sales targets and not for people who needed exact ways to measure in fact how far a distance there needed to be between these Domino's. It is trash.
eBay: Nike Mac Attacks, ended, sz. 8, $70: Nice pair of shoes that ended for nothing. This is a pair of tennis sneakers John McEnroe wore in 1984 ... These are the best Nikes that haven't been retroed. They don't look like anything else. (A bunch of similar early-1980s basketball sneakers haven't been retroed; they are all awesome, but interchangeable.) By 1986 McEnroe was wearing the Air Trainer 1, about as nice, but infinitely less wearable. Those have air technology and are very early and even the models from a few years ago crack. The best part about McEnroe was he'd jump subway turnstiles and yell "Diplomat!" It seems air-tight. I'm not sure if the Mac Attack would be retroed correctly since the leather and toe-shape seem stuck to that era -- see below.
The shoe at the bottom left was re-released as the Nike Manor a few years ago. It doesn't look half bad but it's not all the way wearable. Compared to the rest of the Mac Attacks it's not so good busy. I think the best nugget about the Mac Attack is that lead ESPN basketball reporter Marc Stein is a big fan. He has been calling for their retro for six, seven years. Who knew?
Snake America Year in Review: The year was what it was ... I'd like to suggest here it was not irredeemable.
Metrograph theater opened in Manhattan this year, and they showed every Michael Mann movie and have a good candy section. They're screening Eyes Wide Shut (USA 1997) on New Year's Day and have been showing good Jackie Chan movies all month. It used to be you could pay five bucks and see Michael Jordan play basketball in person. We can't ask for things like that anymore, but another theater in the city showed Beavis and Butthead (USA 1995) in 35 millimeter a couple of weeks ago. That's not bad! Alamo Drafthouse opened in downtown Brooklyn, but I haven't been there yet. I bet it's pretty good. If it isn't, it's still close.
Culture and art: the 21 Savage record, a Trad Gras Och Stenar box set, Finesse, B la B, Sahbabii, Drake LP and hits, Twice aka Zachary aka Double It Up aka Lil Double Up, Young Slime Season. "Jeffery" had some hits. If you live in New York and drive a car you don't need anything except the radio. My homie Charlie continued to put out important music all year -- hits and an mixtape or a few. Boozie put out like five records and didn't lose any muscle definition and kept his haircut. I don't remember if the meme where he kicked you out of the car for asking whether you could listen to Megadeth or not was from this or last year. Megadeth played St. Vitus in honor of their new beer, which is called Megadeth. My friend Grenard says Kevin Gates, the Louisiana rapper who repeatedly made love to his cousin(2), put out a pretty good full length -- I listened to at least seven songs before I turned it off. You can do real well hanging out on datpiff and livemixtapes and Charlie's YouTube for music and art. Framtid also put out a record, and Best Show is as good as ever. We are living in a golden age as Best Show listeners ... more than anything happening today, it's like paying $5 to see Jordan. I can't praise Best Show enough. The show is so good. The callers are as bad as they have ever been. It is a gift. It will outlive us all.
Clothing: The Beams Champion hooded sweat with zippers was a 2016 special. I am not big into Beams ... I like Champion. I had this in my Ssense cart for like a month and now it's sold out in my size. What are you going to do: I have a couple of this exact sweatshirt in that color and with that embroidered C, without a zipper, and it's hard to notice at first that the zippers are also on the side, by the waist. I'll hunt this thing down but a three-zipper hooded sweatshirt might be too goth a vibe for your humble narrator. Who ever thought Champion gear would be too goth? I'm not sure what late capitalism means but it might apply here.
Snake America had a bit of a down year -- I relaxed my publishing schedule in January to master the classical lifts. It didn't happen and I don't regret it ... I never got good enough to move serious weight and I remained rough at it, despite serious progress ... it was awesome. It's great to be bad at something you love and not stop doing it. People say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I don't agree. I won't be doing much lifting going forward but I would do it again. So the newsletter hung out for a while. But we made shirts and sold out. We will make more. The first set of shirts had my phone number on them. No one's called so far, but then it's hard to tell if they did call since whoever called was probably calling me anyways. I will continue to publish Leg Day Observer, which is below.
Leg Day Observer Issue 2:
Best Of The Year: The Olympics and their lifts. A seven-day period saw two A-class weightlifting competitions every day. Many of the good lifters were banned, so some classes stunk. My favorite parts were the North Korean lifters ... they had the best haircuts. One guy had a legit flat-top:
The North Korean lifting team is a pretty mysterious squad ... it's rare to see them lifting or training. Om Yun Chol, above, had a bad shoulder and came in second in his class; he said he let his country down, he had a flattop and the best performance for a North Korean male lifter. Rim Yong Sim, a female 75kg who is the toughest athlete on the planet, won gold. One guy is named
The second-best part of the Olympics is foreign athletes' exercise clothing. The Japanese weightlifting team is Mizuno head to toe ... Poland and Iran wear cool stuff, too. You can't find any of it anywhere. North Korea's soccer team wore Legea for the 2010 World Cup and that was track-downable ... Whereas I worked out with an Olympic lifting team in Crown Heights in February and ... one guy came in after our session and was snatching maybe two red plates on each side .. he was from Kyrgyzstan and wore this Asian Youth Championships shirt and wild-ass spandex pants with a crest on them ... there's a video of him cleaning straight weight here but without a good look at his outfit. I liked the lift more than the outfit. But the outfit was something else! There's a whole swath of good clothing out there with no digital trace or civilian footprint. What's better?
Thanks for reading. Rest in peace Peter Amdam.
Snake
Last Snake: Break in Programming (Trump can suck it).
Snake Before That: Ended items, Leg Day Observer Issue One (Ended; Leg Day).
(1) This is identical nomenclature to "SSD Nikes," which are Nike Blazers or Franchises worn by Al Barile, who played guitar in SSD, a Boston hardcore band whose discography has never been in print.
(2) Please note ... this is official first reference.