Snake America Seventy Five
Snake is a bi-weekly news letter covering after-market goods on eBay. This week: old track pants and a book about pottery. Subscribe for emails.
90s Nike Portland track pants, $25: Good old track pants have been until a couple years ago impossible to find. Things have changed since the recent rise of prestige athletic wear, but that's new stuff. Then and now one could buy old athletic pants which weren't sweats only if they looked garish or cheap, and if they were wide. I was looking for some old ones for a friend and they all look like cabana wear ... people exercised in these? It looks like that photo of George W. Bush and Clinton in the billowy suits. This track pant is a good example: all-nylon, grey white and red tag but billowy legs in the fourth pic, and slouchy. Otherwise it's pretty nasty. Subjects in photos from the pre-prestige athletic pant era don't look like their pants are like that. I spent a weekend in Amsterdam in 2005, with my sister, and saw many Arab teenagers wearing tapered track pants with boat shoes ... few in North America wore boat shoes yet that year, and it was the small sliver of time before the sun set on them for good. The kids' track pants had sweatshirt cuffs, like 1960s Champions, an inch and a quarter long, just repulsive. I went into every clothing and sporting goods store in the circular downtown and none had the pants and none of the clerks working knew what I was asking for. Where did the kids there get those pants? It's a mystery. They couldn't have gone far outside city limits, it was an Amsterdam thing. I'm not sure they thrifted them: everything was new or pretty new, like Jordans on the train. Not old stuff. How did this happen? Did they all hang out one night and break open an N.O.S. box? Could they all have been friends? I think about them and their pants once a week. Can you tailor a track pant like the above-mentioned? The answer is yes, you can tailor everything, including rubber raincoats and single-seam T-shirts. How many tailors in New York can handle cutting open a pair of track pants to modern sensibilities? Only chauvinism would make anyone think a professional couldn't do it ... if you pay a tailor money and are over their shoulder they will do whatever you want. I bought a pair of identical pants to the kids, after years of looking, but I didn't like the color so I sold them.
Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley book, SEALED, $440, 20% off: No clue about this book. My friend and colleague James says it's a good one and the author has them sitting in his garage and won't sell them for cheap or give them away or even tell anyone what's in the book. He also won't reprint them (we tried). I think he's boys with James' dad. The author Gene "H.E." Comstock is a doctor in Winchester, Va (his practice ... "employs a staff of approximately 1"). I called the number to ask about the book but I didn't get an answer, though I left a message. As usual, the only way to find out the answer is to pay money. Is there a better way to spend it? Possessions are fleeting ... in this case there's no opportunity cost.
Having not bought the book I can state for the record that Shenandoah comprises the west part of Virginia and east part of West Virginia. Its early settlers were Germans I think, and some moved west to Pennsylvania to those counties who make fancy potato chips. The pottery started early in. Lots of nature and one of the flower pots, or maybe it's a musket jug, has the American eagle on it. It looks like old tattoo sailor scrimshaw. Why did people draw like that back then? Was it the gruel? Maybe they were in a rush before their candles burnt out. If you google Shenandoah Valley pottery the third result is a store called "You Made It," which speaks for itself. The book dropped in 1994 and was reviewed in a journal--Winterthur Portfolio, the academic journal focusing on old American material culture(1)--in 1997. The review is positive:
"The study of the decorative arts is in the midst of a quiet revolution. In the past, two salient features have defined a traditional hierarchy in decorative arts scholarship: a focus on housing, furniture ..... Comstock's nearly thirty years of collecting and study have produced a remarkably comprehensive book."
I remember my dad said this teacher he worked with at his JuCo wrote at night a book of scholarship about like, commerce in Haiti in the 1700s and it became the definitive work for academics ... long story short he got a tenure-track gig at Queens University on that book, without a PhD. He had to move to Kingston, but whatever ... Comstock has his medical degree and is doing YouTube videos:
In addition to Comstock's lions, there are more online but lousier looking. They look like prisoners made them? Bad people. I don't think lions were in West Virginia but I have been wrong before. Someone might ask, "hey, is the thing on the cover any good?" If it's good art? I mean, it is. How could it not be? How could anyone think it isn't?
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: The story I broke that City Subs would be open last Tuesday (it's open and fucking rocks, I'm going tomorrow)
Snake before that: Naked KISS LP seller banned from eBay for just that, Jordan collection 50K (banned, expired)
(1) More info here. I wish I had known earlier that you could study this stuff for a living. I thought school sucked?