Snake America Thirty-One
Snake America is a bi-weekly newspaper covering the State Department with minor detours on stupid eBay auctions. This week: Pet Sematary (first press) and a BMX. Subscribe
eBay: Stephen King book, Pet Sematary (USA, 1983) first press hardcover ($459.99 asking, no bids): I don't know much about first edition book pricing, but I understand that the better the book the more expensive it is So this seems like a fair price. I think this was the book which King made into a movie. The Ramones also turned it into a good song on Brain Drain (USA 1989). Was Drew Barrymore in the Ramones video or in the film adaptation? Or was it a mini-series? Like I said, this is a good book. I haven't read much Stephen King, but here's what I know about him:
Has a perfectly square face. Not a jaw, but his whole head. And a nice head of hair, too. He looks like Brian Downing?
Wrote that Red Sox book with some other guy during 2004 and got some fortuitous luck when the season turned out to be an all-timer. I leafed through it ... I lived in Boston at the time. I often think of a line he wrote in there after catching the Varitek-A-Rod fight that turned the season around (in July, right before the Democratic National Convention). He wrote something like, "I'm driving through the Fens(1), the sun is shining(2), The Shirelles are on the radio and the Sox are hitting .350 with runners in scoring position, winning fistfights and starting to turn the corner. This is as good as it gets with pants on." I'll be frank that I clearly only remember the last sentence, but great line.
Admitted to writing all his early books while tuned out of his mind. Not the best way to do it but he doesn't look now like he spent a decade drinking then. I bet alcoholism doesn't lead to best-selling novels for 999 out of 1,000 people.
Takes a stance on clowns. Many don't.
This dog cat on the cover kind of looks like Raymond Pettibon's dog (a Brussels Griffon) which he draws a bunch? I think, though, the starting price is less dependent on the quality of the writing(3) than on the autograph here. He autographed it. Pretty rare. Still, a quarter-million first editions, so this is overpriced. But ... getting an autograph is a pain in the ass. Its hard to pull off. Getting your favorite author/athlete/etc to sign their book/jersey/ibid. is not exciting. (It'd be cooler for Robert Caro to sign my O'Raptors jersey-T-shirt than Master of the Senate: Means of Ascent (USA, 1990) and Charles Oakley vice versa, than them signing their own stuff.) Because of this, I can see autograph-featuring items and similar (player-model shoes, sample-size clothings, test presses/acetates of vinyl records, metal shirts with Dio's signature, etc.) will become as cool as they are valuable. The same thing happened with wearing a band's shirt to their show. We're near that moment. My friend Luis limits his T-shirt collecting to unworn 1980s punk shirts, of which there might be a dozen out there. I like the idea of some idiot having an all-autographed Stephen King bookshelf somewhere. It's eventually worth doing things all the way.
Craigslist: Chrome Mongoose BMX "rare project" -- asking $225: Yeah, I am not sure about this one. But this stupid listing is a good marker that we've reached the monetary nadir of BMX collecting. The guys who collected this stuff have been growing older and now they're too old. BMXes, short for bicycles moto cross(4), are small little bikes that adults, then kids, raced down muddy hills, and then adolescents raced them to the mall, and then rode them slowly to the mall futzing around on them, at which point doing so became an identifier. And why not? Collectible bikes, the likes seen on BMXMuseum.com and eBay, hit their price peaks about 10-15 years ago. I'd say this peak lines up with the first wave of riders, kids who grew up on BMX, becoming adults and reaching the "good job in the city" stage of their life--some money, grad school over, free time, no mortgage or kids, etc.--and began to spend indiscriminately, on, say, a 1982 Harry Leary:
Or the equivalent. (Fuzzy math, but the generation of '80s BMX is demarcated by ... anyone immature enough to get excited when GT Bicycles started up in 1979 until any cohort/colleague of Tim Strelecki(5), 14 in 1990 or so, riding around mostly in parks and not on dirt. Defining a generation is tough, but this is anyone born between 1960 and 1977.) So that's why prices went up. It's also how bikes became unearthed. No more MBA homework and not yet changing diapers, these guys began hitting flea markets on the weekend, etc. You have about four years of free time before the future starts coming at you. I'd say bike values started going south when a bunch of these guys got laid off in 2008/9 from whatever jobs they held (our narrator's anecdotal evidence has many aficionados living in New Mexico, Denver, etc. and leaning their bikes against their garages, so they probably worked in software or for their respective cities). Also, many had to start seriously thinking about Skylar and Cody their childrens' college educations, so the market became flooded with Quadangles, etc. The seller here comes off like an asshole(6). I'm not sure about this bike frame--is it something? is it nothing?--and I'm less sure he's been lowballed. I'd offer him $5, which wouldn't make my cheeks flush. This is more than a project. I keep expecting the old BMX bikes to get popular since they're so nice to look at, but regular bikes are, too, and they're twice as fast. If you read Lightning, Men's Fudge, etc. magazines(7), you'll see a lot of Kuwuhara BMXes in their editorials, but that placement makes up the genus' highest profile since Gator blew it(8). So it's a good time to buy low. Just not this one.
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Snake
Last one: Number 30: Tape, a lamp, Le Corbusier
One before that: Number 29: Eames La Chaise, snowpants
(1) "You can't drive through the Fens, stupid." -- Triple-A
(2) debatable, since the game ended around 6, dusk--magic hour
(3) Here's the synopsis, helpfully included in the auction, which I assume King wrote: Pet Sematary: The road in front of Dr. Louis Creed's rural Maine home frequently claims the lives of neighborhood pets. Louis has recently moved from Chicago to Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their children and pet cat. Near their house, local children have created a cemetery for the dogs and cats killed by the steady stream of transports on the busy highway. Deeper in the woods lies another graveyard, an ancient Indian burial ground whose sinister properties Louis discovers when the family cat is killed. My thoughts: There should be a (in Maine) after Ludlow, a comma after wife, and children in the next sentence should be replaced with "kids," since one must never repeat the same word in two sentences. Never the less, the cat and stuff about the highway sounds cool.
(4) Legend.
(5) Not sure who this guy is, but he got written up by The Times (peep link right after footnote), and then in Transworld, so he's a good generic description of an 80s-baby BMXer. I think the party was over sometime after Mike Carroll lost Skater of the Year
(6) Brisk description here.
(7) Japanese fashion/kinda magazines. Some are pretty good, some just have good names
(8) 16 minutes in, when Jason Jessee talks about how he wanted to tell Gator what an asshole he was...