Snake America Ninety Three
Snake is a weekly magazine covering vintage clothing, furniture, etc. Leg Day Observer covers Leg Sports. Tell your friends and subscribe.
Safari Archizoom sofa, eBay, $18,000: Nice-looking $18,000 enclosed sofa for sale here. You definitely can't eat chips in this thing. It's only for game tape, maybe some light lovemaking. I don't know how you get this in the house -- you take your door off the hinges, like they did with that obese woman in that Spiderman (?) movie Young Pope penultimate episode who wouldn't get out of bed. I want to say there was a Joe Colombo internalized room -- a full apartment -- for sale in the 1970s. Research reveals ... the Joe Colombo Total Furnishing Unit. In the TFU: a couple of Murphy beds, tables both coffee and dinner, a microwave, these halogen lamps, what appears to be a second microwave, a stainless steel fridge-dishwasher combo ... which in the '70s was like having the Dallas Cowboys practice on your front lawn ... pull handles on the cabinets and a toilet designed in the style of the time.
I think if you have a loft you just throw the Total Furnishing Unit in there, like the scene in Silicon Valley where they walk out of Gavin Belson's garage to his bigger garage. Researching the TFU was confusing. Everything Colombo designed sounds the same, though looks different. There's the 'Living Center': a rock-hard recliner with holes, for cold cans and magazines, and the Additional Living System, just a sofa. The Wohnmodel looks like the nightclub in ... a Bond movie? That movie where they go to Dubai and buy the guy a Lamborghini in the middle of the night so he'll cooperate with them. They get the car dealer out of bed, too, but find the spy or drug dealer in the nightclub. Was it Zero Dark Thirty?
The abovementioned Archizoom is louche in a way well-designed furniture never is. It is more gaudy than Colombo's furnished room that looks like a nightclub! It looks like the height of Miami. The item for sale is in Pawtucket. All these sellers all over the place selling all these cool things. You drive down any city in America, and you don't know what's behind those doors. Most of the time it's garbage. But not everywhere. Whoever says the party is over isn't working hard enough to find the inspiration they so sorely need.
Adidas Trefoil ring, eBay, $80: Adidas is having a moment right now, and the time for rings has passed. I used to think a lot about how Adidas went from garbage to fine in a matter of of years. I haven't found the answer, and why keep asking the question? It's their time now. Not that bad, pretty good, and I wore team Sweden Adidas track pants on a bodega gum run Tuesday. I've been wearing them so much that they pilled, and I have a second pair.
But they're still Adidas. Let me run down the company's indignities: their popular runners, the Boost models, all look the same. And they only come in black or white, which is cheating. And their toes point up, like these boots, which people in Los Angeles the East Village wear. These are the same boots that the orphans in Oliver Twist wore to their malls, and the Warner Brothers frog wore after he lost everything. Stan Smiths ... not even worth discussing man. Put those things in the trash -- they are quitlifes. As for Adidas' sins regarding vintage ... every one of their shoes in the 1970s are the same, and everything thefrom the 1980s is also the same. All they made in the 1970s was stripes either closer together to each other or further away. Sometimes they would experiment with purple suede or a gum sole.
Despite all those things, Adidas rocks now. Maybe because 1990s vintage gets worn by so many cool young kids that it actually starts to look good. And while everything Adidas did in the 1990s sucked, they're definitely not alone on that one. So what's that bad? The regular track pants look nice no matter who wears them, and are awesome on anyone under 25. All the clothing worn in Russia, etc. forever ago looks better than ever. The three stripes are so loud. So loud ... Adidas' bad association with the rave and DJ scenes of the '90s has reversed itself into a selling point, since that shit is pretty cool now too. Sure, every old Adidas shoe looks identical, but the company's archive is so overwhelming they probably haven't found the good shit in there. Maybe, just maybe, they made a shoe in the early 1980s that isn't purple suede with a gum sole and ridged stripes. Maybe it's the archive's fault that Adidas released 900 different purple suede low tops during the Carter administration and now they're drowning in them. But things are messed up now is the point. The important part of the newspaper is reporting that up is down and down is up. So Adidas works now? That's the least of it. We should all pray and exercise as much as we can.
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Leg Day Observer:
Instagram: Ilya Ilyin was in New York like a weekend ago and was working out in Long Island City. Here he is power jerking 190 kilos (400 and change pounds) at JDI Barbell there. Ilyin is the best athlete of the past decade in any sport(1) and was just hanging out in Midtown buying egg and cheese sandwiches and dancing to EDM and riding the 7 train. I have friends who do that. Living in New York can be pretty whatever if you just ride the train, but man it's pretty cool we were both just buying egg sandwiches within half a mile of each other last week. Everything he's been doing is on Instagram, and he's been lifting heavier weights each week. Two months ago he was snatching 160 with strain and now it's smoother(2).
Ilyin did the same thing in 2014 before World Championships. This Russian dude from Boston Yasha Kahn hung out with him and wrote about it. Ilyin took a year off after winning the 2012 Olympics and when he got back into it, winter 2014, he added 100 kilos to his clean and jerk in 10 months or whatever. He broke the world record at Worlds that November. He became really wide and strong. (He was vegetarian too ...) Strength doesn't go away. Talk about proof of the existence of God. An optimistic read is that what worked then for Ilyin should work now, and that he'll set another record at this competition or next. But Ilyin is banned from competition for maybe forever. He got pinched for steroids in two Olympics and is cooked(3). So he's just working out for Instagram. Which sucks man. But at least we're not missing out on it.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1)that requires athletes to flirt with obesity
(2) look ... the first video might have been on a bad day and at the end of a sesh, and the second video of the more recent 160 may have been at the start of the workout so it looked better. I concede that the weight hasn't gone up, and it looking better isn't everything. BUT ... athletes don't usually post single-set videos of lighter-weight volume work on IG, so I'm calling this progress.
(3) I have a big piece in the can on this where I talked to coaches, athletes, etc. that's been in editing since Labor Day. Hoping it might come out for next Olympics... publication withheld