Snake America Forty Four
Snake is a bi-weekly email covering other-market salable items. This week, Mulhauser Mr. Chair and a silk Michael Schenker Group scarf. Reading online, please subscribe.
Craigslist: Mulhauser plycraft chair, $1300: Really awesome second-best chair whose prices are creeping upward lately. Mulhauser was a Pratt graduate with deep New Jersey roots and built the above chair--the "Mr. Chair," a great name--for Plycraft to compete with the Eames Lounger. Most of Plycraft's stuff was explicitly doing that. It'd be silly to say the Mr. Chair was better than an Eames but it was certainly less trash than any of the other Plycrafts. It's a good one. (Plycraft now isn't the same company as back then.) Mulhauser worked for George Nelson ... The colors were nice, cheap and garish--walnut plywood and yellow or black semi-leather, or leatherette, not sure, or orange. Mr. Chair works best in the above-linked color, electric/hyperlink blue. When Lovie Smith was fired from the Bears and couldn't get another head coaching job a couple years back, the Rooney Rule, the NFL's requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate for a head coaching vacancy, came up in press coverage. Was the rule failing or being run around? Smith, a pretty good coach, had been passed over for lousier ones ... Later looks at the Rooney Rule showed teams would call minority coaches on the phone to schedule interviews instead of holding interviews. Something smelled. One might argue--someone did, I can't remember who--that extending the privilege an untalented white coach holds to, say, Smith, would be a more robust measure of equality. Things would be up to snuff, truly, when a lousy minority coach gets fired and inexplicably re-hired again and again. Can an outsider run in the peloton? The serious discussion brings up another question entirely if you're thinking about Plycraft chairs. Which are slightly less important and not at all comparable. But I think these chairs show the gulf between what's available to consumers who don't have limitless money or time. It doesn't mean much when the only enduring durables are what's most expensive. The realer measure of whether a consumer economy is functioning is whether the smaller, affordable lines--the knockoff crap that directly cribs whatever's leading the design pack, like the chair above--are any good. The only way, today, to walk into a store and buy furniture that hits every mark--design, construction, etc.--is by spending a lot of money. It's an easy thing not to do. Anyways, two years ago these never went over $800 and now they hover at $1,300. I think that's too expensive for this one. But the money still goes a long way.
eBay: Michael Schenker Group scarf, like $10: This seller traffics mostly in old Madonna and Michael Jackson calendars. That's a distinction in name only, but they also hold a limitless collection of 1980s satin cotton scarves. Whenever an auction for one scarf is completed, they list another. I'm left with questions. Did these exist anywhere outside England? How did people--did young people--wear them? Are these soccer scarves, or are they weekend weekend? Soccer hooligans in England used to wear mostly dowdy clothing--check out that ESPN documentary about Hillsborough, no one is shining in that one. But earlier than that they started dressing snappy--Fiorucci, Tacchini, etc. Ian Brown and the Stone Roses style. Cagoules, tan corduroy pants, Stone Island jackets, Mephisto sneakers ... it's hard to see that much style in one place, to say nothing of a Wolverhampton Wolves-Stoke City tilt in the rain. The legend is that sometime during the five-year wait between the Roses' two LPs, the FA banned Stone Island clothing, and its wearers from games. About a year after the Russian guy bought Chelsea(1), Aquascutum was banned at the bar. The 1970s had a soccer-skinhead connection. Iron Maiden came out of that ... the possible tenuous soccer connection between the scarf here and the band and music in general. I'm not sure there is one though I'm sure you could see band scarves at games if you looked. The seller's black Cure scarves don't look as weird as this one, whose brown resembles cheap 1970s suiting and the logo looks like that Westham-colored private high school in Chelsea. Is a Michael Schenker Group scarf worth $11? That's not a question for today.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: GSean McEvoy on finding Vince Lombardi's $20K sweater for nothing (still for sale)
Snake Before That: Galaga arcade game, weird chambray shirt (relisted and still for sale; still for sale)
(1) Pretty funny--Abramovich's investment company is called Millhouse Capital.