Snake America Eighty Two
Snake is a weekly email newsletter covering eBay and related ephemera. This week: a cigarette penguin and some Air Max 97-360s. Subscribe for emails and BUY SHIRTS NOW HERE | http://snake.bigcartel/snake-america-t-shirt
eBay: Kool Willie the Penguin statue, $700 BIN: Tobacciana is both a genus and species on eBay. There's tobacciana as a category, then "other tobacciana" underneath it. It's encouraging, from an aesthetic perspective, that collectible mementos of domestic American death aren't going away, even if, in our country, smoking is. This penguin is 14" tall, which isn't tall enough to be mistaken for a real penguin or totem pole but is a good height from which to hang keys or a dog leash or measuring tape. Cursory internet research reveals that Kool (KOOL) was started in 1933 by Brown and Williamson, the Winston-Salem tobacco company where the guy Russell Crowe played in that movie worked. KOOL, when it started, was the first Menthol cigarette, which is impressive. I had dinner last week at a place that served Coke and wine together ... I've never had a drink in my life but I wonder why anyone would drink anything else? That's how I feel about menthol cigarettes. Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar are two excellent books about butts in America, the latter also focussing on snack foods. Helyar wrote Buster Olney's favorite baseball book, Lords of the Realm ... the best part about Barbarians is how the main guy, the Canadian CEO who merged Nabisco with RJ Reynolds and then took the company private, was the last person to consent to an interview, and when he did he invited the authors over to his crib, ordered pizza and wore a company sweatsuit even though he had been forced out ... Kool is more boring than the RJ Reynolds stories in Barbarians so its tobacciana sells for less. The most expensive tobacco store display sold for $570--a mis-titled humidor. The priciest sign, a 4' cigar-branded thermometer, went for $14K. Translating these things to a house is harder ... old cigarette machines are cool but in an apartment or house they'd look like a Valvoline pump or something:
It's tough. Even if the butt-machines were re-purposed and filled with snacks I wouldn't go near them. I do think they should make a vape cigarette that looks like a cigarette. Or red with the Coca-Cola logo on it and then everyone's happy. (TY to reader and friend of Snake USA Jack for the item.)
eBay: Nike Air Max 97 2006s, sold, $70: These are the best shoes. Nike makes a different Air Max every year. That shoe is an Nike Air Max through December and when the year is over it gets the previous year's name at the end. So the Air Max, at midnight, Jan. 1, 2007, became the Air Max 2006, the sole of which is on the abovementioned. Nike prints a batch of new boxes with the year on them, so that the old shoes don't get arrested. It's wrong to refer to old Air Maxes by their year during their current year. The 1990, with a stacked heel design and an air bubble inside, and the 1995, whose sides look like fire out of a blowtorch(1) and the 1997, which is skinnier, were just Air Maxes those years. The only real Air Maxes are the ones in whatever year we're in. The 2006 wasn't referred to as such until the start of 2007. The whole situation makes me think of Vaclav Havel...
The 2006 model came out before the retro run when just its sole was included with Nike's thorough reissue of the more popular years--1987, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997. Or it might have just come out as that. Was the 2006 a "big shoe"? The 2002 and 2004 models seem to have been released in cover of night. The 2006 certainly had the promotion ... A GQ piece that year styled Yankees hitters and a reliever drafted or signed by Stick Michaels in the early 1990s in Air Max 2006s, and I thought that they shouldn't be hogging all the good sneakers ... an all-gold model had a brick pile on the heel and was released in Europe, with no photo evidence surviving ... The 2006 model is considered the most uncomfortable of the line of yearly sneakers, stiff and with a hard toe. They are no less comfortable than the 1997s, the best of them all by every other measure, whose compromising fit a friend once compared to feet a goldfish bag full of chicken bones swimming in water.
The abovementioned "One Time Only" shoes are a combination of the company's two most uncomfortable running shoes, the stiff 2006 air meeting the narrow 1997 sole. Sadistic, and, a decade later, contemporary in its design. The clunkiness could have these worn in i-D, with a technical orange shirt ... I feel like two mistakes deserve another. The 1997 upper is such a flawless work of design that you could stick anything on it and it'd work. Like here. Recommended.
Thanks for reading. Buy a shirt, especially if you are nude: http://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/snake-america-t-shirt
Snake
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(1) oft-quoted design inspiration is the human skeleton...