Snake America Ninety Six
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eBay, pair of Apple sneakers, $10,000: I declared two newsletters ago I bid on any important auction I like, though I keep which private since deals stay secret and my own buying habits (Eddie Bauer camera bags, reversible sweatpants, etc.) are not interesting. But in the interests of full disclosure, I'm breaking my rule again for this one, and I won these garbage pair of Apple sneakers for $10,500 just last Saturday. They're five European sizes too small and the shipping price is more than I paid for the one pair of new sneakers I bought this year. What a mistake I have made.
Most vintage clothing is, by definition, garbage. Old, used clothes, stretched and stained. People are smart to throw it out. The vintage clothing that is valuable is only so because smarter people know to sift through garbage for deals. That's the first law of garbage: There's always something in there. But it's still garbage. Like these Apple shoes. Price aside -- even price considered -- these are trash. What's good about them? They are old and white, generally a bad thing, and have the discontinued Apple logo.
The best part about vintage clothing is that it's not everywhere. If it seems to be, you are hanging out with the right people. But it's still not. Old big-tag Patagonia, or striped T-shirts, or reversible sweatpants, omnipresent as they might be, are still only worn, and not on ads or on bad television shows. It's never in your face. But the the Apple logo is something you see everywhere. Why would you want to see more of it? Apple is in charge of most of our phones, but before that they built computers with no shift or arrow keys on which you couldn't run COBOL. My dad didn't buy a Mac for those two reasons and when he finally did the cursor was stuck on Insert, something he never got over. I never saw him use the Mac once. He didn't call it by name. He would say "your computer." Then Windows versions became Mac OSes and the battle was over. ... I concede it's much, much better. I looked up the logo here, which was in use as recently as The Newton. Gearpatrol.com had a story on the auction that dated the shoes to the 1990s ... but the font on the sneaker is Garamond, with serifs, which went out of use in 1992. I'm not sure if that was before or after they started rounding the corners off their laptops.
Why did I win these? These sneakers were listed a few weeks ago, then deleted, then got re-listed again. I asked the seller why the first auction got deleted but didn't get an answer. I bid on that first deleted auction and was outbid, and on the relist I bid again and assumed that would happen again. I didn't retract my bid ... whatever. Last Friday I got a ping about the auction. I figured Bruce Willis or a collector of equal magnitude had outbid me. I'm not about to look at my phone. There are so many stupid people with money in this country -- surely one of them could put me out of my misery? That didn't happen. It wasn't an outbid ping.
Any and nearly all important auctions on eBay begin and end on Sunday nights. This is the only thing that hasn't changed in the site's past 20 years. If something important is for sale, it goes up Sunday after 6 PM ET and not before. Sunday night is the best time to surf eBay because everyone's home and sleepy(1). I read somewhere that The New York Times would run their media scoops Sunday nights for the same reason. The expensive jeans Levi's bought, the Nikes Nike tries to bid on and loses, rare Hot Wheels, etc. all list on Sundays. If an auction starts at any other time, it is unimportant. There might be a couple of exceptions, sure. I've heard of outsider art, too. But important auctions in my life, say, for original baby Air Jordans that are now older than the median age at which people start having babies, or see-through fishing vests, or rare Hot Wheels, all begin and end on Sundays. I expected this auction to end Sunday and it didn't.
So I won. In my valedictory email, the seller told me he had to re-list the previous auctions because media companies -- "sneaker websites" -- kept buying them up. Which sites were they? How much did they bid? Why did they want them? Who was he calling? I happily don't know anyone who works for a sneaker website, so I can't answer any of those questions.
A couple housekeeping notes on the sneakers, from readers:
A pair of these things, or similar, were on a Buzzfeed (yuck) article about ... God knows what ... written in 2013. They were whiter and didn't have the yellow sole.
Another pair of these was on sale on Grailed.com a few years ago, for about $500. I told the seller after I won I would pay him that much, and that's what they're worth, and that he shouldn't expect more, and that I know about these things. I am awaiting a response.
See-through Columbia fishing vest, eBay, $15: Man, what an amazing piece of clothing. This has the old Columbia logo from the 1950s or so. I couldn't find any info on it. Columbia is cheap mall jackets now but they used to be a real outdoors company. I bet changing the company's business from good, invisible worthwhile fishing vests and warm boots to mass-produced jackets for children and New England crossing guards took a lot more work than it appears from here. It would seem Columbia's logical business is to sell garbage everywhere, since that's what they do. But they didn't always! I bet every small company in the world wants to do that and can't. It's not like a company's real spirit is in continually making products in obscurity and to mild profitability. Maybe some, sure. But are they Shokunin? No, they are trying to sell trash to idiots. And it's harder than it looks. People get MBAs for this very reason. All this work, just to make garbage...
I can't find info on the logo but this is a really 1950s style script -- Champion used the same font that decade, and swapped out logos in the early 1960s, though the script stayed on windbreakers and sweaters past that ... the gold buttons are a nice touch, too. The only album I can think of on which someone wears a fishing vest is Emperor's "Equilibrium IX." What a record that thing is. Trym, the drummer, who played in Enslaved, wears a tan, non-perforated vest on the back cover. You can't tell from the photo if there's stuff in the pockets. Even though it's just tan, it's wild. Isahn the guitarist is wearing chain-mail sweatshirt and has a programmer beard and Samoth, the other guy, is just wearing black. Also has a programmer beard. Trym's vest was the first thing I noticed when I bought it. Was he into fishing, or was he just wearing it that day? I think of how Ray Cappo wore sweatpants and Doc Martens on the back cover of the Disengage 7", and how that's not even a crazy look anymore. And how I saw a guy walking down Court Street wearing overalls with a Break Down The Walls haircut. But then I keep thinking people with interests are going to start wearing fishing vests and I've yet to see one living in New York for a decade. Recommended.
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Leg Day Observer
Instagram: Mohamed Ehab stretching: Really incredible photo of a guy stretching. Mohamed Ehab Yousef is this Olympic lifter in the 77 kilo category who won Bronze at Rio and who I'm told meditates before every lift. His Wikipedia name is Mohamed Ihab and his competition name is Mohamed Mahmoud. His Instagram is equally divided into videos of him lifting, supporting children by either teaching them or lifting in front of them, and doing stretches and tricks with the bar, not dissimilar to the above. In one of them he had five empty barbells threaded through his body and looks like Kali the Hindu goddess of war. Each bar weighs 20 kilos.
Around a year ago the setting in his videos changed from a dusty gym with few amenities, plain bumper weights and makeshift platforms, to a high-tech facility with new barbells, plastic squat stands, red plates, etc. Egypt built this new weightlifting center ... they had a pretty good showing in 2012, a silver and a bronze, with this one fat guy doing especially well. Yousef's videos and photos have been less exciting since the move because there aren't kids in the background of his max-out days anymore. Indeed, there's only one leftover piece of shit in his new training hall -- when he snatches off blocks, he uses old logs. Actual logs, cut from trees, dusty and everything. Maybe they were his lucky snatching logs? I've never heard of that before.
Some of Yousef's videos are at this gym, Steven D's, in Cincinnati. A bunch of medal winners do seminars there. I guess they are homies. Apti Aukhadov, a Russian lifter who lost his 2012 silver for using turinabol and drostanolone, went to Cincinnati for a seminar last year, and Steven took him out shooting beforehand, and they took video at the range. There's a video of Aukhadov working up to weight and it's hypnotic. There's another video of Ehab trying to jerk 200 kilos behind the neck 20 times -- he failed the first 19 times. Steven uses pound weights instead of kilos so everything is a pound and a half off, and I hate it. There's also one of Ehab saving a 20 kilo weight from a soccer net like a goalie saves a soccer ball.
The abovementioned photo is cloying because he's as flexible as a Yogi. Yousef squats about 560 pounds and gets under weights, in a split second, that hover around 400. He weighs 170 training and a hair less at competition. How is someone whose spine gets so compressed, who is so weathered from volume and heavy weights so ... not stiff? Selection, sure -- he's talked in interviews about being a stud wrestler as a kid -- and not sitting at a desk helps. Some has to be the hour-plus of daily warmup and cool-down stretches he and every other weightlifter do. But some is being under the bar at heavy weight, and muscles stretching that way. There's less literature on that, but who's to say you can't do yoga when 300 pounds is at the other end? If he can do it, why not us?
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) You should look every day honestly...