Snake America Ninety Five
Snake is a weekly email blast covering aftermarket goods on eBay. Leg Day Observer same shit but for strength sports. If you like it, please tell your friends to subscribe. If you're reading this on the web, please subscribe. If you subscribed, email me and I'll send you some postcards.
eBay: Levi's skinhead bleach jeans, 36x32, $50: Skinheads get the worst rap. The New Yorker has a 20-deep copy desk but has published a number of pieces that used "skinhead" when "racist skinhead" was the more correct and descriptive term. Skinheads lead a rough life: many have long sideburns, or beer guts, and most work menial jobs. It's hard for them to find love, and good live music shows in the genre are few and far between. You have to wear boots and you don't eat many vegetables. Taking an L from The New Yorker is an added indignity they can't afford.
A cursory search reveals skinheads began in the 1950s as teenagers who liked doo-wop and Sta-prest trousers. Some people say it started later. There's a debate as to whether the crew of kids who became skinheads were mods first and switched it up when The Who released "Tommy," or if they just decided to go full skin out of nothing. I'm not sure -- I wasn't there. Like most rock-based youth movements from before the past decade, it was mostly white. Some skinheads were black or Asian or South Asian and some wore Levi's with bleach stains, like the ones available in the above auction. Some skinheads stopped getting short haircuts and became suedeheads -- Morrissey wrote a great song about falling in love with one. Or it might have been about trying to hanging out with one and not being able to. Their hair was a bit longer, but they still wore tailored pants.
In doing research on the subject I found that there's not a lot of good writing out there about skinheads. A bunch of books from the 1970s, mostly pulps, and some photos and that's it. Some fetishism. So it's hard to get facts. Most of the websites taking it upon themselves to write about the history of the movement abuse English and speak in worthless generalities:
Through this the hard mods and early skinheads had the chance to be exposed to ‘black’ Caribbean music as well as to the ‘rudeboy’ or ‘badman’ images of Jamaica in particular.[13];
The first skinheads appeared in England in 1969. They are born of the encounter between the Jamaican rude boys and the hard mods (1). Thanks to these Jamaican rude boys, while immigrants in England, they discover the bottom ska (2), rocksteady (3) and the reggae which are rapidly becoming the musics of the movement.
Which makes them less than persuasive authorities for journalists researching the subject for mass consumption. I get it. To be fair, there's not much debate that racism crept into the skinhead scene, and some non-racist skins became racist. Maybe it got tooken over? I'm not sure -- I'm not a skinhead. It's completely understandable to focus on the racism and for that to overshadow the other stuff. There's nothing worse than a racist. But man, it takes five minutes to find out the basic points about skinheads. It shouldn't be this hard. There's even a letter to the editor of The New York Times from an angry skinhead girl -- they're called byrds -- about how not all skinheads are racist. Did William Safire read the letter? Gotta assume he did. I bet if he knew about this stuff before whatever piece it was she complained about went to press he'd have put a stop to it(1). I don't know what's up with The New Yorker though -- maybe Peter Hessler is working on the story to end all stories about skinheads as we speak.
Of course, the charter class of skinheads couldn't have worn these exact jeans, since the abovementioned are bar tack Levi's. The outer leg seam on the inside of bar tack jeans have plain stitching, which means they're pretty recent -- 1980s. Levi's produced before 1982 had redline stitching on those seams, and are worth more. But that goes without saying. I'm not sure how bleached jeans got big or what they have to do with being working class. Maybe skinheads had to use a lot of paint and they didn't have carpenter pants in England? Not sure -- I wasn't there. Harley Flanagan, who played bass for the Cro-Mags and trains Anthony Bourdain's kid in BJJ, is considered the first skinhead in America. I figured maybe he made them popular, since he was also the first 14 year old in the hardcore scene to get a chest tattoo, but I've never seen a photo of him wearing bleach-stained jeans. I asked him on Instagram whether he ever bought a pair, and if he stained them himself or if they came pre-stained, and what year he bought them, but he didn't respond to my comment -- which had 14 likes at press time -- and when I followed up, left me on read in the DMs.
There's also a good promo photograph of Agnostic Front, the hardcore band from New York in the 1980s, in which their guitarist Vincent wears beach-stained jeans. Bar tacks for sure -- there are also photos from around 1985-6 where he has those or a different pair of bleached jeans on. He looks great. I reached out to him with the same questions, through an intermediary, but he has not responded to comment as of press time. If he listens to the voicemail Ivan left, I will let everyone know.
Some more: The jeans in question, without the bleach stains, are the best low-key deal in American vintage clothing. Orange tab Levi's 505s from before the 1990s are made of as good denim as any pair from Japan, Zimbabwe, North Carolina, etc. They're tapered too. Bleached jeans never really took off. Magazines and fashion houses tried to make them happen and they didn't. 2001 and 02 saw these weird Diesels that had bleach stains and were low-key boot-cut. There are all these really awesome photos by Wolfgang Tillmans in the last issue of Arena Homme Plus, some of which are very skinhead. The last couple years there have been a few editorials where fashion skinheads -- higher cheekbones, no underwear, no beer guts, definitely no sideburns, sometimes some eyeliner -- would wear them and look pretty good. But they were never good enough to start a youth movement. Recommended.
eBay: Tangerine Dream baseball hat, 16 pounds: Man, what a piece of merch. There's finally a hat out there for the best European band to ever release 125 albums. I'm not super into band hats from the past 25 years because most are constructed on the low-quality dad hat profile that's popular right now. It's too on-the-nose to wear a style that's at Moma PS1 and in GQ, and which pulls a band out of left field. What happened to the underground? And then hats from before the 1990s have high crowns and make you look like a truck driver. But man, what a band. Tangerine Dream is to me what the Grateful Dead or Metallica or Stern are to others, in that at least 3/4 of my non-Finebaum musical listening is them and side projects. (I'm now at the stage where I know when on The Official Bootleg Series: Volume Two, during Paris Set Two, 6th March 1978 -- Live at Palais Des Congres, Paris, that the synclavier solo hits -- it's at 11:44. My friend Leah says this is not how you're supposed to listen to Tangerine Dream, that they're an ambient band and you should just be aware of their chunes. But since when are there rules for listening to music?) Anyways this thing is pretty cool. Recommended.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leg Day Observer
Klokov jerking 230 kilos at the Arsenal training center: Really cool video of Klokov going to the Arsenal training center and fucking around with the bar. They gave him his own bathroom and appear to have kilo plates. Arsenal is really the team to believe in -- the Chelsea owner guy should have really made this happen but didn't. Klokov walks out 500 pounds and jerks it pretty easy. like Klokov has been in Los Angeles for a week and a half doing seminars. He says he mostly does snatches as opposed to clean and jerks at these seminars because they're easier for him to train. It looks like his muscles are even bigger now. Some might say they are too big.
I have to wonder what sort of barbell training Arsenal requires its players to do -- one would think squatting to max every day, before and after games, since they can't use their hands. As an added bonus, if you get caught doing dumbbell curls you're off the team. But there's not a lot of that at Arsenal or in the EPL. There's a Telegraph story about soccer players doing suspension training -- messing around with cables -- and Man City's head of sports science says he's bought in.
Another in Four Four Two is by Tom Cleverley about his workout. Cleverley is an former Everton midfielder who's now on loan to Watford, and he starts his workout with bench press. Somehow he's on England's national team. I asked Snake America number one subscriber and Ringer soccer and articles editor Ryan O'Hanlon if he's any good and he described him as "trash."
A Men's Health UK story about Fulham says they start off with squats during the preseason; a 2013 piece says Sunderland's training starts with a porridge breakfast -- "no bacon sandwiches allowed" -- but makes no mention of Leg Day or squats. Sound like they're living in the dark ages. Cleverley's former England captain Steven Gerrard describes his diet in another article from Halloween 2014:
'My diet is heavy with protein and carbohydrates on a match day to provide energy. That means lots of chicken, fish and eggs for the protein and pasta, rice and potatoes for the carbs. I also eat yoghurts.'
Not bad! Anyways, probably a good idea to sign up for a Klokov seminar. I bet he has a good first touch and can probably also spin a basketball on his finger. I can't imagine anything better than living in LA and seeing Klokov do either of those things.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) There's also this one time The New York Times described Youth of Today as a metal band and misquoted him, saying he yelled out "Tear down the wall," which is the wrong record title and therefore something he would in a million years never shout out. The article also mentioned Behemoth, a metal band, and Chain of Strength, a fake straight edge band from Inland Empire whose singer flunked out of cop school and runs a phlebotomy clinic I think now and is now pro-Trump (puke), as hard-core rock bands, which do not exist, and if they did, that descriptor, including both of them, would be too broad to hold any meaning. Sick Of It All, which is a band, appears in the next sentence in quotes. Do they have editors over there? I read in a piece the other day that each Times story goes through two and-a-half edits. Did this one get stuck on one and-seven-eighths? How does this stuff happen? And how does it stay up? There's no such thing as a reader being too hard on a publication when it comes to unimportant facts, but man. On a bad day I'll say there's a through-line between getting the facts wrong about a Youth of Today album title and getting issues like Iraq wrong. But I'm sure they were just pretty slammed.