Snake America Eighty Seven
Snake is a weekly email blast covering vintage clothing, furniture, etc., aka the good shit. This week: a Pierre Cardin credenza, shoes and this lousy squat video. Subscribe
Pierre Cardin burl credenza, $3,200 (half-off), 1stdibs: Auction suggestion from life coach and Friend To Snake Royce, who wants stuff on furniture. Nice coked-up and shiny credenza by Pierre Cardin here. Cardin's furniture, the best of which he made in the 1970s, is the most successful side hustle outside Wallace Steven's poetry career. (Stevens had a day job in insurance...) Cardin started designing clothes in 1946 ... he made the first ready-to-wear collection in '59 and was nude shirtless on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1969 a year before starting in furniture. The TIME cover he's naked without shirt, in a sarong that matches the upholstery on the chair in the photo, and is also wearing black socks and no shirt. The shoes look like Hender Scheme Air Forces. Cardin is a clothing designer ... he made a lot of sweaters and grandma gear. I think he makes suits. I also think the space age stuff that Austin Powers (USA 1997) wore in his movies is modeled after Cardin's wilder 1960s design stuff. And then he started cranking out credenzas. I guess when you've reached the top of your profession at 48 you have to pivot. A 2006 LA Times retrospective about his furniture says he was one of the first designers to do that. One quote has his stuff reminding a woman of Studio 54. I feel like if you're running a nightclub you shouldn't get cool furniture, because who'd notice? It'd just get covered in drink, would get rings on it and stabbed with keys or nails when people sit down on it, and it's hard to get cocaine and steroids out of leatherette. Or you go all out and just get Wendell Castle stuff floor to ceiling for your nightclub. Or all teak is a good look. I bet you could outfit a nightclub with George Nakashima where everything gets ruined before 10:30 and it's an art installation. Fly a bunch of Euro-trash in and they ruin it. They don't care about Nakashima in Belgium. What good is furniture unless you ruin it? If you have a Nakashima headboard with b.b. gun holes, or creamsicle juice stains, I'll buy it. The best stuff Cardin did was this bed:
Which is a masterpiece ... This credenza is half price, down from 6500. It's not as good as the above bed. Or these ones, or this one. Not into credenzas without legs. But the abovementioned is a pretty nice piece of trash. The kind of furniture that Ray Liotta's girlfriend had in Goodfellas (USA 1990) is coming back. It would be great to fill this with comic books or pots and pans or something.
eBay: New Balance 1600s, original, BIN $30 (ended): Hard to explain how ugly shoes over size 10 are until you come face to face ... but these get to that idea. Actually ... anything over 9. On feet it's different. But a shoe store's display is the smallest size pair they have. If you see something on the wall over a 9, the store is running low. There's a store on Smith Street, in Brooklyn, that has a "cheap wall" in the back, but everything is in a size 11.5 or higher. It's disgusting to look at. It looks like what The Freak Show looked like at Coney Island 100 years ago. It brings to mind the cheap wall at the Flight Club stores' front doors. Those went away in about 2009. Flight Club is a Japan-style consignment sneaker store in NY and LA that sells, to teenagers and tourists ... a number of shoes, with the display foot wrapped in Saran. The foot (always left) corresponds to the other half of the pair. No full size runs. Before Flight Club grew into itself they had a hodgepodge selection of cheap ($120 and under) shoes at the front ... Pump Furys, weird New Balances, Sock Racers ... all stuff that back then no one wanted. It was the best part of the store. Every couple of weeks the cheap stock flipped outright. The stuff either moved, since it was so cheap, or was thrown out because no one bought it. They don't have that anymore.
It's unfortunate ... the abovementioned might be the best pair of New Balances. They even look good in 13, which is the size shoe clowns wear. New Balances are up for debate because of the what-have-you with the President. It's a coin flip whether the very rich, which include the owner-operators of New Balance, LL Bean, and a number of New England-related business, have allegiance to the garbageman in the White House. The clown who runs New Balance definitely does. I think boycotting anything and everything is fair game and the bar for cutting off companies might as well be very low if it exists at all. Any bending or anything by any company to the White House .... cut off. Thousands of people leaving New Balance alone until they prove themselves a decent company is a pretty good market mechanism. The football team playing tonight is also allied with the White House in some way ... These shoes ... look orthopedic. There was a New Balance exhibit at Ubiq, in Philadelphia, last summer ... all the stuff was from Richie from Damage and Damage II's collection ... his Instagram is NewBalance365 and is incredible. The 1600s on display I believe were the originals, but may have been the retros from 2006. Doesn't matter. Both look great. When they came out they cost $180 and you can't find a displayable pair now for under 350. The old versions crack and are unwearable. The most recent retros occasionally pop up on eBay in the abovementioned colorway. All the other colors are not original, and bad. The only time I saw a pair in my size was during the election, the week before. They ended a couple days after, and in the hangover from our country flushing itself into the toilet, I didn't pull the trigger. I don't regret it. I can't wear these things, man. I definitely wouldn't wear them today. Looking forward to either an impeachment or a presidential suicide so I can spend money on old garbage again.
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Leg Day Observer Issue 4:
Video of Texas Longhorns prospect doing some squats here. With the caveat that Longhorns prospct Max Cummins, is a minor or close to it and is stronger than me ... and that he will eventually get proper training from Longhorns strength coach Yancy McKnight, who likes the Olympic lifts and is homies with Mark Henry, and puts his players through good workouts ... there are a couple things off here.
Squatting is very difficult for people over 5'11 or who are not morbidly obese ... Cummins is not obese. His knees cave in the first rep. He fixes it and bounces off the box. It kind of smells, though. Box squats ... are when you squat down and touch your butt onto a box and bounce up. Unlike pause squats, where you squat down, hang out and then squat up again. .... Box squats give you a fake experience of being in the hole(1), upon which you power out of it (force yourself) and stand up. Sometimes people squat onto the box and relax, and then squat up. That is wrong and will kill you. You have to brace for a punch the whole time. You can do more weights with box squats than with paused squats. Maybe even more weight than even a regular back squat. If you're 17 or 18 with a strong core, almost within reason can fuck you up. I don't know if people do paused box squats and I don't want to know. I'm not sure who invented it ... Smolov, the guy who invented Smolov, says box squats during the switching cycle. I don't know about all that(2). I just wish college football teams and athletes would release more of these videos.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) lowest part of the squat
(2) Smolov is a squat program from the 1970s that requires steroids, that got popular. The switching cycle is the part in the middle when you change over from doing lots of volume (i.e., many, many squats), to intensity (fewer, but heavier squats). The tapering cycle is at the end, when you do less weight. It's before competition. But it can also be a nice way to ride off into the sunset.