Snake America: Sweet 16
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Green Nike Cortezes, 1990: First off, these things are unwearable. But they're important. Cortezes, the shoes here, have had a curious couple of decades of association. They were the Forrest Gump (America, 1994) marathon shoe, the white, red and blue leather ones, and a few years later, when Cortezes were the only widely-available early-80s non-Jordan Nike sneaker ('99 to '01), wearing them, which I did, drew reactions like, "wow, Forrest Gump (America, 1994) shoes," or, "are those high-tops?" etc. George from Seinfeld (America, 1989) wore them on the show, and so did the low-rider aficionados of Los Angeles. The leather jewel ones, from 2000-ish, are trash, and the standard nylon ones are barely available now, and don't look as good against the ground as a flat Nike sole. But I guess they are not entirely unwearable. These are 1990 on the nose--Nike more or less kept this shoe in steady production--and the emerald green is an important color since that used to be the rarest Air Force 1 color in 1986ish, when they started retroing those. I want to say Rakim wore them on a cover of one of his 12"s, and that he bought two pairs when he did, and told Bobbito Garcia about both those things in Garcia's Where'd You Get Those book* (USA, 2001).
**
There's a lot of choice available now, so it's weird to think an assembly-line sneaker that happens to be green stuck out so much to so many people. But it did. It's no coincidence Nike hasn't retro'd these shoes in this exact colorway. The lone green shoes are like one of those Ad Reinhardt black paintings: deep and simple, and not different at first. But they are so radically different. No Cortezes outside these look like the forest, and no Nikes either. Nothing with nylon and leather comes in this exact, precise color. These are truly old. Older than the originals they ape. They're silver age, the best age, the kind of sneaker you could meditate on.
YouTube: PJAY on shooting PG3: I wanted to find something cool for Edge Day (today), and I can't include my contribution for Jesse Stand Hard's Edge Day Programme (in association with Stand Hard Zine), since it doesn't come out until Saturday and I don't want to dishonor the embargo. I guess I could mimic the Sunday-night media news drop and post it here now, but I revere Mr. Hard's publishing empire too much to go against my editor. In any event, I was thinking, "Maybe I can find a cool Youth of Today YouTube and discuss how great a band they were, and that Ray Cappo's 'Break Down The Walls' haircut somehow became the Parsons art school Bad Fade, and because of that I have actually seen everything, and I remember hearing about how Ryan Gavel was this close to getting that fade for his prom over a decade ago--but he didn't do it, and if he had done it, he really would have crossed the line into obsession. And, also, that The New York Times' profile of Cappo from last year, about his second act as a sought-after Yoga instructor in New York City, contains errors, like the wrong name of his band's records, a thing which that paper, God love it, should get right."
But I decided against it. I don't want to overload anyone whose tastes don't veer towards a certain type of music or aesthetic with any sort of aural assault, or worse, proselytization. And, besides, I don't listen to it that often. You think Edward Mendelson, a Pynchon scholar of Columbia, who has edited a collection of essays about the guy, reads "Crying Of Lot 49" (USA, 1996) before he goes to bed? Probably not***. He plays his Gameboy. So here's this really cool graffiti video. Not even today am I about to tell anybody what to do--no way.
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Snake
*This book really disappointed me when it came out, but it holds up incredibly well, and is a more comprehensive resource on sneaker history and models than any Japanese magazine or catalog, like Men's Fudge or Sneaker Jack or the Japanese Nike catalog/magazine. A full third of the book covers 1970s canvas sneakers. When it was published, the warm press reception mostly ignored that fact, happily. I'll go so far as to say that it shames all sneaker writing since. That's not saying much, if anything at all. But the book is not bad.
** NY Times review of his show from last fall.
*** This book looks cool, though.