Snake America Fifty Seven
Snake is a bi-weekly email blast covering after-market salable items. This week? Vintage coveralls and an evil, sinning diesel Benz. Reading online? Please subscribe.
eBay: Vintage Finck coveralls, blue denim, $999: I think there's a natural evolution, from getting dressed to dressing one's self-consciously to becoming more and more concerned with fashion, or style, labels, vintage provenance, and so on, and that bleeding over into your clothes, to yearning to do away with all that and either aspiring to wear or wearing only a onesie, every day, forever. A onesie--a one-piece coverall, like mechanics or fighter pilots or scientists or deep-sea divers wear--or a track suit or coveralls or equivalent are a slap in the face to jeans, a shirt, shoes. Jeans can function as an example of how a clothing consumer's choices evolve. The evolution might have been from Sears-level orange-tab jeans to better-cut 501s to nominally selvage and of-better-cut denim from boutiques, to older, original Levi's(1) and might have taken a few years. Now, that obvious progression becomes sliced in half. A consumer can go from one to the other in weeks. So are a pair of $420 jeans from Blue in Greene, or rivet Levi's a difference in kind or degree from whatever jeans came in the mail five years ago? I'd argue a difference in kind--it's so different, after progress, and so quick, that there's shock. Reverse dieting is a bodybuilding phenomenon that has been getting traction recently in that community. It's comparable to the story of Napoleon taking ssome poison every day and becoming resistant. A reverse dieter pushes their calorie maintenance level--the amount of food they can eat every day without becoming more obese--higher every week, or every day, incrementally. Say, 50 calories. Those calories are carbs, and 50 calories adds up to almost one rice cake, or a quarter bag of skittles, or three Haribo green frogs. If those extra 50 calories don't cause the reverse dieter to become more obese, they can then, a week later, say, add another 50 calories to their maintenance level. It's an effective way to go from a diet to more relaxed maintenance without seeing any adverse effects(2). The gulf between eating on a diet--a "cut," that maintains muscle and targets fat--and on maintenance can be 150 grams of carbohydrates, or 600 calories, a day. That's a whole bag of Haribo green frogs and two rice cakes. You can't just add that back in, every day, the day after a diet, without changing composition--without becoming obese. I think it's the same with jeans: jumping from insubstantial clothing to something more invigorating in a very short time leads to bloat. That is why people think they are sick of everything and why style can go to pot so quickly. As for the above-mentioned item: Finck's is a work-wear brand, and all coveralls are precisely that ... but these, like all coveralls, carry no such connotation. ... A coverall can be nylon or heavy or light cloth. It looks good, even if you are skinny. Clothes are decided upon at purchase and before, and then the morning of, every day, forever. It takes time and money to find the good stuff. Who has all that? Decision paralysis leads to a point, after plenty of money and time put towards what to wear, of a plain black or blue T-shirt and jeans, every day, resigned. How different is that from grabbing the nearest thing available? Decoupling from the decision of fit, material, price and style for so many different items is a natural thing. But t's better to de-load than to opt out, and that's what this coverall is.
Craig's List: 1989 Mercedes Benz 350 Signature diesel, $1,500: Stretching your dollar is only fun when it's on something you don't need, like a car. Clipping coupons is no way to live or spend time in America. It's only smart to be thrifty on, say, an important(3) credenza or for a luxury vehicle for under $2,000. Which is ppart of is a brisk market that will never be covered to the extent it should be. America is the land of cheap cars that look nice and that's a big part of why it works. You can buy a real piece of shit, write it off, run a business out of it, or just drive to fried chicken places when you're not working, and get by. If it breaks down, you buy another piece of garbage $2,000 car. One can become adept at what works and doesn't on a $2,000 German car from the first Bush administration. In America there are more than, say, just two kinds of $1,500 cars. There are like 30 good ones. I don't entirely believe it, but it's true. I think if multiple cars under $1,500 are truly valuable conveyances, every American with the space and boredom to follow through on their good ideas would own a handful to drive, depending how they felt that day. "Since it's going to rain today, so I'll drive my orange Bubble Chevy." And so on. The diesel Benz here seems like a deal. I looked into getting a diesel Benz and there aren't enough filling stations in the city. So I didn't get one. I also like the photos in the listing. They look very illicit. Is the seller getting away with murder here? Or just having an affair?
The spot on the balcony, or maybe it's a portico, the is where you stand when the police, FBI or media come to your house to find out how you've been sinning for the past 30 years. What an evil and wrong photo. Who is watching from the Benz? There's a line in this John McPhee profile about a nameless chef where the subject mentions a Chinese restaurant in Midtown(4) filled with "seedy State Department types." Can a Mercedes Benz be haunted? It only costs $1,500 to find out.
Thanks for reading. I dropped some EDM-sized flyers at Anthology Film Archives, so feel free to pick either of them up.
Snake
(1) This is, of course, just one example.
(2) Some hand-waving here. Progress isn't linear, etc. More information can be found in various bodybuilding ebooks on the subject. Adjustments are key.
(3) Design-wise.
(4) Siamese Garden, on Fifty-Third. Not open anymore, I think.