Snake America Forty Five
Snake America covers salable items not in stores. Today: a ended-item compendium. Reading online, my friend? Maybe subscribe.
eBay: FUCK Minnesota Vikings T-shirt: Good--maybe great--piece with a lot of questions, sent in by Frich, an offensive sports T-shirts from the 1980s that are now hard to find. A few things went wrong here. First, the colors. After-market sports merchandise tend to take either the put-upon franchise or its biggest rival's colors. No Vikings purple and no NFC Central opponent takes a primary red-maize scheme. Is it a Golden Gophers shirt gone wrong? Were students mad? Today they're not ... the Vikings, an NFL team, has been playing in TCF Stadium, University of Minnesota's home field, since September. The pro team's seasonal rent is $3 million and Sunday fans have noted that their colors aren't well-represented during games. I like the idea of Gophers fans printing these shirts in protest of an inferred deference to the professional game and getting the colors wrong but it's a decent time to be a UM undergrad. The bank paid $35 million for 25 years of stadium naming rights. Where'd the money go? I'm not sure but in 2012 the Gophers' football coach (and its basketball coach) was the state's highest-paid public employee(1) and the state and the college split the stadium's cost 40/60. But ... Minnesotan undergrads' tuition has been frozen for two years now, since '13. .... The Screen Stars tag dates the shirt to the mid-late 1980s but the graphic looks newer. A typoglycemic scan reads FUCK MINNESOTA VIKINGS in a very brutal Eastern European grammar. Some offensive-shirt contemporaries can be found at that vintage store on First next to the bagel place that keeps closing down, two blocks from the GNC. Recommended.
eBay: Nike high-top Aqua Socks, Sold, $200-ish: How much better does a high-top aqua sock function than a low-top one? Probably better if you're mucking or with shorts. Did these sell well? The website Arkamix.com has photos of the aqua boot and places it in a four-year period that's the length of George H.W. Bush's presidency. These shoes' design, impressively dumb even for the era, makes one imagine only a dozen were made and sold. How could something this insane be in every store? That's not the case. Anyways, the abovelinked auction was on eBay for a few months. I'm surprised it sold and also surprised it went the asking price and not an offer. That's called a maximal outcome for everyone. We won't be seeing this one again soon, though I hope I'm wrong.
eBay: Panton bear lamp, sold 40 Euro: I'm glad someone bought this bear lamp for children since the seller kept lowering the price by a couple dollars and then relisting it in different colors. It was the same lamp ... though radiation green is worth five €s less than bright, bright blue, but here we are. This lamp is by Lumibar, and there's a Panton lamp on auction right now that's a baby with the cord coming out of his butt. The list price on that was $399.00.
eBay: Star Wars immunization posters, unsold: Not sure what these are or why the seller thought he'd make any money off of them. But I guess people will buy Star Wars anything. Those Lego Millennium Falcons are the most expensive Lego and the biggest one after the Lego cruise ship, I think. They were on sale new for $500 and sold out in 2010. I remember seeing them at that Lego warehouse store on Court St. next to the fruit stand that closed down. The seller should be giving away these posters to those in need. "It was a collaboration with 20th Century Fox & US Health Dept. A very sought after poster," says the auction. That's empty English but undeniable? Whichever Star Wars Inc. negotiator convinced the Health Department to go through with this collaboration needs to be discovered and mentioned with the ESPN ad-sales team that sold a commercial break to Coors Light. Awe-inspiring.
eBay: Diehl "Time" Clock, sold $100: Man, what a sick clock(2). They put Colombo in the search term but this isn't his... Colombo was head of one of the five families and a Dyker Heights homeowner, and also an Italian furniture designer who made "living systems," entire rooms. Two different people ... Searching Colombo on eBay shows both the boss' Time magazine cover (July 12, 1971) and Colombo-related but not affiliated furniture. The New Yorker, a magazine, celebrated its 90th anniversary with a double issue (on newsstands now) which features a profile of Jony Ive, the iPhone (but not Newton) designer. The article said the designer was "best known for his round-cornered Kartell storage carts." I'm not sure that's true? Colombo designed those colorful caddys as something between bar carts and artists' studio carts. But his Tube Chair was as popular--it's on postcards. My friend James agrees with the profile so I defer to the two institutions, but would appreciate some clarity on the editorial decision. Later in the article, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, tells the reporter that "Jony has better taste than anyone I ever met in my life." Ive wears, in his apple.com executive bio photo, a G-Star T-shirt. The profile also mentions his "abiding taste for dance music," and the friendship with Digweed. History will not look kindly at this period of genuflection.
eBay: Vintage quilt, sold $25: With things, first you don't understand them and then you do, and until you do it's a grope in the dark. Until the switch turns on it's easy to make mistakes. I don't know much about quilts--I'm trying--but when I see an auction end like this I wonder how in the dark I truly am. I don't understand anything that happened here. I can't tell if this quilt is from last year, 1985, the North, World War II, Kentucky, before the dawn of baseball--anything. Inspecting it, it doesn't look old. The swatches look cheap and bright, the bad kinds of both. My assumption is America is lousy with both priceless quilts and cheap people filled with particular knowledge about their provenance. And that two people walked away from this transaction satisfied. It's easy to know about quilts, or anything else sold for money in public, but it feels confusing when you can't tell north from south.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Mulhauser chair, Michael Schenker Group silk scarf (still for sale; still for sale)
Last Snake: GSean McEvoy on finding Vince Lombardi's $20K sweater for nothing (still for sale--$24K now)
(1) From a 2013 Deadspin article. More recent data isn't in yet.
(2) Comes in white.