Snake America Forty Seven
Snake is a bi-weekly magazine covering salable items. This week: a Bulls two-peat shirt and a Morris The Cat shirt. Reading online? Subscribe.
eBay: 90s Bulls two-peat championship rings T-shirt: This thing is great. 1990s--1992--Bulls two-peat championship rings shirt. They made another a year later with three. The rings glisten and look real, almost grotesque. That election year is lousy with outstanding second-order basketball stuff. Salem Sportswear is responsible. Most Salem stuff seems knock-off but the above-mentioned is officially licensed to both the Bulls and the Association. It seems fake, in retrospect. Almost too creative, since this wouldn't sell in a team store now, and yet... Salem did the big-head tees a few years before and Olympic stuff then: shirts with the the Dream Team lockers, ones with Dream Team pairs--Magic and Bird, Pippen and Jordan, the two Jazz guys, etc. This shirt was "created and produced" by Buffalo Shirt Factory, with a 1991 copyright of Gardner Graphics. Did Gardner predict the two-peat a year in advance? Did Buffalo subcontract Gardner? How many people made money off this thing? Why 1991? Did Buffalo's smart statistical model, based off Jordan's 1991 season, successfully predict a title? Maybe they borrowed some machines from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute? Or just had good scouting? Hard to say. Good championship rings are much more hard to find than good glory-days Bulls gear. One guy online has a good inventory and his site is out of everything except $10,000 shiny pieces. Without giving advice, you wants a ring that looks like you belong to a Roman Catholic boating association, not something that confirms you and 50 other people took home a title live on TV on taxpayer-funded downtown real estate. My pet theory going into this was rings went south just after this shirt's date(1). That's not the case: check out the one on his top finger and compare to the pinky. Most of Jordan's six rings were rough, design-wise, though a couple were fine. It's hard to get a conclusion. Both look good on the shirt. The shirt's a nice Rashomon (Japan 1950) to the uncontested theory that the Bulls won six championships, and that for their efforts they received six gaudy rings. Did they? This says they didn't. Recommended.
eBay: Morris The Cat T-shirt: Described by the seller: "This true vintage Morris the cat tee is an American pop culture icon." I ask, is he referring to the shirt, or to the cat? Both could be true(2). Morris was a cat rescued from the Humane Society of Hinsdale, Ill., in 1968, then featured in advertisements for 9Lives Cat Food, a Del Monte brand, very successfully. The ads still run. After his discovery he put in a decade of work. "Morris" since his death in 1978 has been a succession of other rescue cats, all of whom have been voiced by Teddy from Rawhide (USA 1959). A culture icon, to be sure, though the T-shirt cuts just as hard an image without the backstory. The orange tabby cat above the serifed font functions as a perfect, blunt image, like the Spruce Beethoven sweatshirt from the 1960s:
Seen here on Jane Fonda and which has since been re-printed and is available in Japan(3). The Morris shirt falls between the Beethoven and those famous artist T-shirts for sale through Rolling Stone and Alternative Press classified ads. You could get a shirt with just Picasso's face on it for $18. (I can't find a digital trail, but remember them.) Also worth mentioning is the original Morris made his film debut with Elliott Gould in Robert Altman's adaptation of The Long Goodbye (1973, book 1953). Pretty good.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Sorority Paddle, crappy teal lockers (ended!) (ERRATA: It's a Delta Zeta sorority paddle. Thanks Brian.)
Snake Before That: Ended item compendium (ended!)
(1) Nowhere to link this, but what a bad story. What is going on in this thing.
(2) No questions spurred from the shirt... how could there be any?
(3) Not sure by who. Better shot of the original here, from the BerBerJin blog. There are a bunch of these, they're all great.