Snake America Ninety Seven
Snake is a weekly email covering eBay auctions. Leg Day Observer, below, is the last word on strength sports. This week: old sweatpants and Jordan short shorts. RIP Jim Walrod. Subscribe here and tell your friends.
eBay: 1970s Champion reverse weave gusset sweats, $90: There are two kinds of people in the world -- people who can turn back and people who can't. I once thought there were people like me and people who were wrong -- vegans and everyone else, people who love Burning Spear and everyone else, etc., but I was wrong. Tastes change and interests don't really matter. It takes all kinds, and people who felt strongly about Burning Spear at one point in their lives might feel strongly about something else now. Or they might feel nothing at all.
Progress is important. In high school I read a line in an issue of HeartattaCk, the political punk fanzine that was not fun, that stuck with me. The author, Kent McClard, the zine's editor, said taste was just taste and ended with the person. He wrote, and I am relaying this from memory, that "one day I tried to convince my mom for a whole day that Black Flag were the best band of all time, and eventually I played her a record and she disagreed." I think that happens enough and you grow up.
But sometimes you can't take progress back. When I bought used sweatpants I crossed the line and I passed a station to which I cannot return.
Grand St. Bakery on Grand St. in Brooklyn opened in 2010 or '11 and I stopped by and searched the store, top to bottom. I bought Levi's for $40 I ended up selling years later for $500, and also found Champion sweats, grey with a 1980s tag and the old logo, white with a red filled-in C, for $10. I bought them and washed them and wore them. Probably every day around the house for a few years. But these things were used and I could tell. What did people use sweatpants for in the 1980s? I'm not naive. I knew then and I know now. Characters went commando in their sweatpants in movies of that era, and I'm sure Americans did too. Champion was the desired clothing of the underclass and of athletes. It was cheap and for sports. Wearing those sweatpants, I was intimately in concordance with either a roofer, a student, or an obese person, all sweaty, most nude, all of whom wore these sweats so much before they got to me that I could feel their history for over a year.
It occupied my thoughts. I'd come home and put them on -- they looked good -- and would wonder whether President Barack Obama would win reelection, or if Japan would survive its Tsunami or whether Qaddafi was dead and could I go see Judgement play Austin, and if it was wrong I was wearing these things. I'd come home from work and watch and read the news but my mind would come back to the used sweatpants. Unlike the above auction, mine weren't gusseted -- which means they weren't triple reinforced and had no extra stitching. They were just regular sweatpants with a Champion tag and logo. Why did I buy them? The above sweatpants, in the auction, are what The Young Priest in The Exorcist (USA 1973) wore jogging; what Bear Bryant wore on cold September mornings as he watched his players do jumping jacks or whatever people thought put on muscle back then.
Are these abovementioned used sweatpants dirty? Do we know someone wore them? Why assume something bad happened? Why assume they were worn? Maybe they just look old. Eventually Obama was re-elected, Judgement played and I stopped noticing or thinking about the pants, though by then I thought about them so often I forgot to plan my vacation to Texas. Judgement played on a boat on a river and the guitarist wore leather pants. I wasn't there.
So maybe no one wore these in the past fifty years. Maybe no one wore any of the used sweatpants being bought and sold every day by the scores dozens handful. I need another pair of these. I will buy anything anyone has worn and will wear it. So will lots of other people. We can wash it, but it's still not a clean way of life. Recommended.
eBay: Jordan short shorts, $200: Never seen these before. For a hammered-into-the-ground and well-historicized clothing brand, Jordan is not yet completely exposed. Like when they found that Velvets record at that flea market in Portland 30 years later. Who would have thought that would happen. Similar Jordan stories abound. I found an Air Jordan 1 onesie listing four years ago, $200, which saw multiple relists and, for a while, no bids. It was a flight suit, the kind one takes off all the way when going to the bathroom. I had the wind pants in M and XL and neither fit, both small in different ways. No way a onesie was going to work. Another onesie sold to my friend Andy -- I won't ask him what he paid -- and the only other pair in circulation runs at $2,000, from some asshole on Instagram. Lots of Jordan gear hasn't been digitized. There are more Jordan shirt variations from the 1980s than have been accounted for. I lost a pair of cement Jordan III sweatpants I that I think about a couple times a year. There was Bacterio cement on the sides of the legs. I've never seen a photo of them, or a mention. These ... I haven't seen until six days and 23 hours ago. They look like Army workout shorts, the kind Bradley Whitford wore when Billy Madison pushed him his character over the bench in Knibb High's Academic Decathlon. I could've sworn we saw the last of the original Jordan 1 stuff years ago, but here we are. Recommended.
Leg Day Observer:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Strong eagle, ESPN: Nice story about Brandon Graham, an lineman for the Eagles and his feats of strength. But I am not sure about some of this. It says Graham is a compact 6'2, 265 -- not sure what's compact about that, even as a lineman. Also he can "bench press over 500 pounds, squat over 600 pounds and power clean over 400 pounds." I am not sure why anyone would push their bench press -- I just don't like that exercise. If you're benching 5 you should be squatting 7. The photos are supplied by Barwis Methods -- I am not sure about that, either.
Mostly I'm not sure the extent to which he is the strongest guy on the team. This is through no fault of the story, which I'd read every day. There's just no knowledge out there. I wish the Eagles and other teams streamed or tape these weight room competitions and/or kept ledgers regarding Leg Day. Every team in every sport, but mostly football. These team records are mostly lore. There's an amazing story in the Wall St. Journal from four years ago about then-White Sox ace Chris Sale's appetite. It says:
I re-read this article a couple times a year. I have so many questions. When did the record get broken? Who set it first? What are the other visiting clubhouses' food records? What are the visiting clubhouse foods? Do only the Phillies serve cheesesteaks, or do the Eagles? What crab dish do the Orioles dispense? Which baseball clubhouse has the best curly fries?
Similar questions arise for unofficial team weightlifting records, which are more important than food. Who has the best power clean in the Big 12? Does the SEC squat high-bar or low-? If Dave Racaniello out-ate Bartolo Colon, can we not assume that Reggie Hemphill-Mapps out-power cleaned Saquon Barkley? Barkley cleaned 405 last year and broke the school record the year before at 390. But who had the old record? Who has the conference record? Association? Texas? Tom Herman? Who's cheating?
If teams handled gym records the way powerliftingwatch.com handles records it wouldn't suck. It would be less fun than running across these videos now and then but it wouldn't suck. I need to know who on the Jaguars or Longhorns can outsquat who on the Seahawks and whether they are wearing squat shoes and whether they are maxing out. If I don't know these things I won't be able to function. There is so little information on this stuff. It's 2017.... what the hell are we doing? Why do I have to wait for a squat rack to see someone quarter-squat 185 but I don't know what Reggie White powercleaned? Who's in charge here?
Thanks for reading.
Rest in peace Jim Walrod. Language cannot express how insanely next level Jim was ... Jim, who lived in New York and passed away Tuesday, was to furniture and cool shit what Robert Caro is to Lyndon Johnson ... among other things, Jim found furniture for the Beastie Boys in the 1990s, started his career (at the Fiorucci store) after meeting Andy Warhol on the street, did set design on Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (USA 1997), lived in Mark Gonzales' old crib, discovered the connection between Nicola L the sculptor and Bad Brains -- she lived with the band! -- wrote this super sick book about New York, had a $50,000 cabinet (not sure what kind), opened a lamp store with Fred from the B-52s in the 1990s, had more knowledge about Memphis/Italian/Mid-modern/gutter furniture than anyone in the world, wore mostly Levis, put out some painfully flawless photography on Instagram, ate trash food. Very sad and much too young. I never met him or anything ... I don't feel like I know him but was mostly in awe. Like my departed friend Mark Baumer, his Instagram stands for itself as a piece of media and should be studied. He kept discovering insane old stuff long after it seemed there was none. There's a really good profile of him from 15 years ago in NYT Magazine and an Apartmento interview from about 10 years later that is also illuminating. Bad month for legends -- New York is low-key super wack now. RIP, Jim.
Snake