Snake America Thirty Nine
Snake is a bi-weekly email newsletter covering items for sale on eBay mostly. This week: a lucite cube of light and a homunculus-sized Beatles sweatshirt. If you're reaidng on the web, subscribe. Tell a friend.
eBay: MCM pedestal lucite cube lamp, for sale: Good-looking solid plastic cube that lights up a room for sale out of Miami. I really like these gaudy 1970s lamps. They're loud and look cheap at first. They then look better and better. And then the truth: they never looked cheap. They're perfect brutalist complements to the restrained and well-manicured trad mid-Century pieces of 10 years before. Can we call these pieces ante-joints? We can. I'd place this lamp to sometime after Jimmy Carter was discovered by Hunter S. Thompson but not before. 1974. I'm not an authority. The photos are great--especially from the front lawn--but could the lamp be older than my guess? There's a healthy probability that an accessories encyclopedia somewhere(1) wedges lucite pimp-glass 1970s lighting with sharp corners right into proper mid-Century. I saw another lamp like this for sale once, but it was shaped like a rock and was for the floor. This seller is from Miami. I've only been to Miami once and didn't look for furniture there then but in the time since my visit it's become apparent the city has a disproportionately-heavy footprint in the online collectibles industry. (Not just furniture(2).) A corner of America leads all roads to its Rome and water down its drain... There was a South Florida eBay seller who only used two photos in their auctions' photo carousel and put the rest of the photos in-body. They saved money... The first photo was of the item in question, taken badly, sometimes from across the room. The second was the same bird's eye view shot of the warehouse they were operating out of: Tulip tables stacked one on top of the other, bushels of cherry and rosewood recliners, often Eames, on top of these tables and in stacked in the corner conspiring, Bertoia diamond chairs with the little seat cushion and without, in white and metal, long couches, Dutch and otherwise, two to four seats, leather or leatherette or non, and it's always hard to find four seats, a Loewy disco bed in the background, giant teak salad bowls everywhere, etc. It was like the Nike's first ad on the back cover of Vice in like 2002 with the sack of retros, or the cover of "Record Collectors are Pretentious Assholes." (USA 1984.) Maybe one of those "Which One Of These Diplomats Drinks Sanka" ads from a 1970s Newsweek? Whatever. They never listed the good stuff but it was in every photo. Optimism was encouraged: Maybe the diamond chairs will be up tomorrow? There's a store like this, a cornucopia of good stuff, in Hudson, N.Y. He even has the Hugo Boss paper suit, but it's still not the same.
eBay: Beatles size small sweatshirt, for sale: This is point-blank one of the better items on eBay, all divisions. I love these 1960s sweatshirts. Just looking at their shape they appear better in fit and quality and even fitness(3) than all comers. Even the weird rich people sweatshirts that cost ... slightly more than this aren't as impressive. Is it the cotton? Did the seller just launder their Beatles sweatshirt with heavy starch before taking the photo? To make it look hardy, like when food photographers replace strawberry ice cream with pressed red cabbage sweepings? Maybe industrial sweatshirt ink was different in 1963, so the contrast is higher? I'm not sure. Something's changed in the past fifty years that two items--this and any sweatshirt you might be looking at now--made of identical stuff are so different. I bet one way to replicate this sweatshirt would be to go to Our Legacy and sew two of its crewnecks together. This is also a decent size for an insanely old sweatshirt. It's pretty small. That website Collectorsfrenzy.com, one of the best ever, is a daily list of what vinyl record sold for the most money on eBay the day before. Nine times out of 10 there's a Beatles record on there. The Beatles led Thursday, with an Indian-pressed 78 RPM record of "Michelle/You Won't See Me" ($2,080.55). The rest of the list for Thursday is great too:
Is Gimp in the third auction a record company, song, record collector, pressing plant, friend of the auctioneer or simply a music scene? Did the Wagner record go to a you-know-what? I also like the AC/DC seller's threat. Part of me thinks there are fewer Beatles sweatshirts than Indian-pressed "Michelle" 78s but that's an unprovable point. Even if Delhi is lousy with them, most snappy dressers are too obese to fit into 34" chest Beatles sweatshirts. We are only poorer for it if we don't spend the money. Recommended.
Thanks for reading. And look out for my business cards at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair this weekend. Head to my friend Matt Bellosi's table. Be proud to be early.
Snake
Last Snake: Jeep Mud Crawler, cartoon mailorder lessons (still for sale; sold)
Snake Before That: Rothlisberger table, Stussy 8-ball Baja (on hold; sold)
(1) Maybe my bookshelf? I said it.
(2) Lots of dancehall. There aren't enough Harvard PhDs in the world to explain Harry Pussy being from Miami. Every time I think of that I understand it less.
(3) What I mean here is that the sweatshirt looks healthy. If it were imbued with human spirit, it could bench its own weight.