Snake America Fifty Five
Snake America is a bi-weekly email newsletter covering no-affiliation buyable items. Today: Ended items. Reading online? Please subscribe.
eBay: 3-button Levi's 505-217s, paper tag, sold $799: This seller has awesome stuff but always asks for so much money and doesn't take offers. Finally someone bit. They've been re-listing some of his (or her) stock since ... 2012? The following markers, in reverse order of standing, reveal the jeans' date ... the paper tag that the belt goes over puts them to the 1970s. The selvage running down the outseam--the dark fold with red lines on the ankle--a feature that isn't consistent across 505s, puts the jean at least before 1982. The back of the button on the fly shows a 3, which dates the pair to mid-1970s or before. The LEVI'S on the ass tag has a capital E, which ekes it back to 1971. The photo is so overexposed that the tag looks white. The 42 zipper could put the 505s, the zipper 501, into the 1960s. The seller didn't upload a photo proving or disproving interior rivets, those metal buttons on the inside of pockets, or one whether there's a V-line stitch on the crotch by the fly button. But those two things have to be there because of the other stuff. Vietnam-era Levi's can be found on eBay but mostly in sizes that favor the very small or the obese. Often both. These, though, are 36x30, measuring smaller, so right in the middle of the American range of new pants at the mall--a good size. When I started following Levi's activity on eBay about a decade ago, I assumed Bruce Willis or Willis' stylist or the equivalent were who won the real good-looking pairs of vintage jeans, since what else was he going to spend his money on, since he had everything? I'm not wrong.
eBay: Len Elmore player exclusive Nike Blazers, size 17, unsold $350: No one is ever winning these. Any old Nike sneakers which don't spell out Nike on the heel counter for ELMORE, or TEMPLE, or COLUMBIA or BAMA demand any arbitrary price. (I didn't know these were called Air SMUs?) But these are really big, and no one with feet that large will the chance on looking dusty, or loud. Elmore's biography here:
Elmore, who does color for March Madness, is an eight-year veteran of the NBA, who attended Power Memorial Academy, who led Power to the city championship and "Number 1 Team in the Nation" status in 1970, who graduated from the University of Maryland in 1974 and is Maryland's all-time leading rebounder (total, and average), who was selected 13th overall in the NBA draft, who was selected to the ACC 50th-anni. team, who received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1987, who began his career as an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn, who served as senior counsel with LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, who is the president of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, also teaches at Columbia University's M.S. program in Sports Management.
If he's at a party, the only person he's not impressing is Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman. Look up Gellman's biography if you don't already have it memorized. Something else.
eBay: Prince Buster Record Shack 1969 calendar, unsold 350 Lb: My friend Rob, who runs a dancehall reissues label, sent this along. This was a promotional item that Prince Buster's Record Shack, which is his record store, gave away in advance of 1969. Record Shack was in downtown Kingston on Orange St., where all the record stores were. Buster was a producer and singer ... he was on Columbia in the UK in the early 1960s ... his song "Islam" is his hardest song and he was friends with Muhammad Ali, who converted him to Islam. The store was around for 30 years but isn't open anymore, though it's still on the block. The seller is from Belgium. There's a Juan Epstein with Mannie Fresh where a nobody hip-hop record collector guy from les Pays-Bas hanging out in the booth, since he was spending the day with Mannie. He doesn't contribute to the conversation except to offer up pressing info on one of Mr. Fresh's more obscure records, and to mention that he has it. The above-mentioned item must have been listed by a similarly-disposed and gendered European collector of dancehall, who has another one of these calendars on his houseboat.
eBay: 1970s Nike Blazers, sz. 10.5, sold $129: I don't like getting into the granular price-cycles of vintage American clothing but if you'll humor me, I'd like to speak out about what happened here. These fat-belly swoosh Nikes sold for $129 but only after being relisted when the seller's previous seven-day auction went without bids. I don't possess the facility of prose to register my surprise at what happened here. How did these not sell? How weren't they scooped up?(1) The same shoes have sold in lousier sizes--a 13, in 2012--for $700 or in that range. Newer versions of this shoe, with smaller, less obese swooshes, in lousier colors(2), have gone in the asking neighborhood or higher. (All-leather shoes do better. The 13s from 2012 had a weird foamy canvas body, different than this one, but same swoosh.) Someone really stepped in it. When things have real market values, mistakes like this are rare. I am just surprised the collective attention of liquid individuals which makes up eBay let this slip by for so little. Even for just a week: How does a fat belly swoosh go for less than an Air Jordan retro?
eBay: Reversible Air Jordan Karate Kid II shirt: People love to complain about how bad things are turning these days, but the last time I checked, the New Yorker still prints an issue a week, Peter Luger's Steakhouse sets its burger at shock prices(3), and the Instagram account BubbleChevy_World is averaging 12 photos a day in April and has picked up 100 new followers since last night. Nick Kristof says many markers of extreme poverty and disease are nearing their way out, and Frank Bruni answered my Reddit Ask Me Anything question about Popeye's. There's a paper tiger out there saying that life is easy. Who in their right mind believes that?
What's above is a great panel from Life in Hell, Matt Groening's weekly comic strip from 1977 until a few years ago(4). In the panel, Bongo, the strip's main character, who is a rabbit child with just one ear and an overbite just like Bart Simpson, who Groening invented, is writing the list in what I remember to be a classroom. A teacher probably made him write it. Look, in America we don't tell people what to do or what to think. And I'm not about to get too deep into anything right here. But this reversible, dead stock, new-with-tags Nike Air Jordan 1 shirt with Karate Kid II promotional language on the back is proof of something.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Lonnie Smith cornerman outfit, hearing test booth (for sale; for sale)
Snake Before That: Wool swim trunks; Italian clock radio (unsold and re-listed; for sale)
(1) Worth noting--the shoes are 35 years old, but their primitive pre-Air technology renders them safer to wear than some visible air sneakers produced in the past decade.
(2) Carolina blue--a decent color, but super common.
(3) It's five times (?) cheaper than the steak and just as good. What abut inflation? An egullet.org forum post has the burger at $5.95 in 2001, Frank Bruni's NY Times piece about the burger (mid-Dining Critic-reign) has it at $7.95, and Dan, who does the label with my friend Rob, said the burger was $5 20 years ago. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation Calculator, those prices translate to $7.89, $9.95 and $7.70 now. The burger is $13.95 today and with cheese, bacon and fries it's $21.90. Extra bacon was $2.50 in 2005 and it's $4.50 now and cheese is still $1.50. This 40% price hike is offset by more robust trading lunch hours since they serve the burger until 3:45 now instead of just until 3.
(4) I can't find the strip itself but it's in the omnibus.