Snake America: Number Seven
Errata: Sal Barbiers, the skate shoe SIX named a quitlife, isn't. Quitlifes are puffy 1990s-era/influenced skate shoes, which signify what you think it signifies. My friend Rob notes the Barbiers may be the slimmest skate shoe of the era. (Released in 1995, they had the 23 on the side, all black. They look like a fatter Common Projects maybe.) I concede the point. That said, they're the most immediately identifiable skate shoe. I'd have mentioned The Muska but I don't know what it looks like.
Snake is a regular email (twice a week-ish) where I write about eBay auctions, videos I've seen, ephemera, errata, stationery collectors, retired high school principals... Reader AJ wants a discussion of the Jordan Future... Nice (?) shoe: http://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pd/air-jordan-future-shoe/pid-1555204/pgid-1555194 - AJ had the following questions about the Jordan Future: Who pulls these off? What are the good colors? What is their lineage? Why are they $180? Is that price point good or bad? What kind of pants would I have to wear with these? How much would I have to change overall to wear these? How are they for balling? What's the word on the streets? What does Woj think?
I can't add to the discussion beyond these questions. My answers are below.
I'm not sure these would look good on anybody outside an NFL offensive lineman or Keith Haring, but in the spirit of positivity, a European guy in his late 30s or a young kid in a sweatsuit theoretically pulls these off. My thinking is to succeed, there are a few ways. You either set the bright colorways off with muted tones, like a sharp Donegal tweed suit. All black doesn't work unless you have bleached hair and can bench four times your weight. Wearing the white pair with, say, a Department of Sanitation onesie is the best-case scenario. My thinking is in addition to the baked-in benefits of employ under the New York Department of Sanitation**, it helps, when wearing technical footwear, to be morbidly obese. They would look pretty affected on a skinny person.
The good colors are: The sold-out colors, Gym Red and Iguana. They are objectively the best because they're not available for sale anymore. Iguanas are also funnier than people give them credit for. The 3M is also a good color because it's limited. White/Black/Sport Blue looks like the new Jordan XIV in those colors which my friend Bryan says are great. Black you can wear to the mall. Electric blue is the only really worthless colors. The real bright asshole-green, Hyper Jade, is the shoe's most representative shade. If you're buying in an archival capacity, maybe get Hyper Jade. Multi-color is also cool because it looks like the Bill Murray joints from that Japan movie (USA, 2003).
They are not $180, they are 150.
$180 is a bad price point (see above). If anyone tries to sell you these for $180, hang up the phone. But--$150 isn't that bad. I mean, it's obviously bad because you can spend $150 better. I can buy a Dieter Rams monograph and 10 lbs. of dried apricots and get free shipping through Prime. Or these two chairs, sike I own them and paid way less than what this guy's asking, or this garbage can, etc. But in the real world we live in where Nikes are sold for whatever they're sold for in stores, $150 is pretty good. $110 fits it better, but Jordans don't sell for that little.
In a perfect world, there'd be a legal requirement for linen pants. In my world ... they could work with Wrangler Blue Bells, I think. The socks are the hardest part here--either Oxford University rugby socks, NBA socks or George Bush socks.
The best pieces of clothing one owns--shit, not just clothing but furniture, records, books, anything--changes a person into the participant in a catch-up race to live up to the aesthetics and glory displayed by the thing you bought with just a bit of money. A good pair of pants will make you want to go to the gym and squat five times your weight to properly wear them. Levi Strauss, the inventor of Balmain jeans, was quoted saying as much--he wanted his models to resemble 1970s bodybuilders. I'd say to truly pull off the Jordan Future style requires some evolution from the wearer. What sort of evolution? A wardrobe that compliments the Future would require suspension of taste and restraint--$5,000 on Acronym jackets and v-neck T-shirts or something. To perfectly antechamber counterpoint the outfit would require $3,000 worth of hay-baling jeans with rivets, blackwatch patched-up sweatshirts, a King Jammy shirt with Creamsicle stains on it, etc.
Their balling capabilities fall somewhere between The Sheed and the the Air Jordan XIV***.
Only families live in my awful neighborhood so I am recusing myself from this question. Hypebeast.com commenter maestro303 says "The Jordan Brand really is skiing the slopes these days." Comments on the burgundy pair don't concur with the author's assessment that the shoe is "clean."
AJ answers his own question here: "He thinks they are too expensive, I asked him." I texted Woj twice and he hasn't responded.
AJ also notes that it's "cool to name them after the best rapper of right now. Future's record, Honest (USA 2014), is the only record that came out in 2014 that I listened to all the way through more than once (besides Step Forward 7" [USA, 2014])." I'll add that the Jordan Future initially looks identical to the Nike HTM Air Woven boot from 2002. It's as if they gave the Melo 5.5 treatment ("Inspired by the Air Jordan V (Jordan 5) and the Air Jordan VI (Jordan 6), Jordan Brand combines the best of both worlds once again") to the XIV and XIII but with Woven materials. When he was on the Nuggets and Jordan Brand he got made fun of for not being able to decide on his favorite Jordan, and now here we are. Nice tool: http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/msg/4617108852.html - The Recognitions (USA, 1955) was for a long time the fourth book on the Year of Flawless Reading quest that only one of my friends finished. About 10 years ago, right after we discovered this through-line of fiction, my friend Jason read JR (USA, 1975), Gravity's Rainbow (USA, 1973) and Ulysses (Ireland, 1922) in that order after finishing Infinite Jest (USA, 1996) earlier that year. He said he hasn't had as good a year of reading since, and the accomplishment made the upper-left-hand corner of his namesake blog, around 2005, soon after he finished. I actually don't remember if JR was on the list but I know The Recognitions wasn't on it. It was going to be the fourth book. In the book, the forger and jewel thief team up to create a painting identical to Hieronymus Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins (Netherlands, 1501)**** and they more or less do it, no one can tell the difference and some character development happens. There are a handful of brands of electric guitars made in the 1970s that go by Lawsuit, most of which resemble the Gibson Les Paul so closely in superficial matters that Gibson's parent company sued them to stop production. (There are also Fender Lawsuits, etc.) They petered out. True guitar knob-head freaks will tell you there are differences. There are. At the risk of repeating themes from previous emails, I'd wager the gulf between a better '70s Lawsuit and a '70s Paul is narrower than the one between the a '70s Gibson and a current model. A decent reading of The Recognitions has Reggie, the main forger, making rip-off art to pay tribute to Bosch's work, and to Bosch. Surrendering his better judgment and morality to art is a truer form of appreciation than can be found in a dead gallery. Even though he was ripping Bosch off and splitting the money down the middle with the jewel thief, Larry. I think of this:
In the car one day, as we missed another turn, he said, "I love to ask people what their favorite product is."
I couldn't think of mine immediately, so I asked him what his was.
"Um, gee," he said, and he looked out the window and laughed. "I guess I don't know." He thought for a moment. "There's a tool that I bought that probably ought to be my favorite product, because it's very elegantly designed. It's a pair of pliers, it's a knife, it's a screwdriver. I love it. But I never use it." He looked out the window again. "The most bang for your buck would have to be LSD, I guess," he said. "Don't you think? Because it's, like, five bucks, and then you go crazy, and maybe you'll even jump out a window. Can you imagine? It might change your life, and it might make you drop out of society That's really a lot."
The Lawsuit Les Paul is maybe the best product of all time. You are only paying for the guitar's guts. A guitar of similar quality could not exist at a similar price today. It only exists because of bad intentions, and is a vestige of an old world where you could do bad things and get away with them for longer than you can now. It's also a musical instrument for use in America, a consumer item in name only, something which makes an LSD packet look like a Swiss Army Knife.
Hate mail, requests, corrections, tips, a bunch of New Yorkers taped together in a wheelbarrow labeled "Summer Vacation," mini-Vitamixes can be sent to me here. Thank you for reading.
Snake
*He's still very popular.... He may be the Six Finger Satellite/Tapestry (USA, 1971)--the representative artifact of the 1990s skate scene... He's no Billy Pepper.
** Those guys always come in to NY Noodletown on the Bowery when I am eating there and make the longest and widest line (three wide, two deep) when they are picking up. No one can get in or out. Dep't of Sani workers' restaurant approval is one step above getting the police takeoutstamp. It's better for moral, aesthetic and gourmand reasons.
*** I can't find it online, but this dude Professor K used to review sneakers for ... some maagazine in the '90s-early '00s and his review of the XIV may be the most deservedly glowing in the history of criticism outside Matt Zoller-Seitz's original Rushmore (USA, 1998) review in Dallas Magazine (I think), which I also can't find. They were really great for hooping and the first iteration, if I remember right, of an Air Jordan playing as well as it looked.
**** ;)