Snake America Thirty-Three (in 2014)
Snake is a bi-weekly--not last week, maybe not this week (holidays)--covering yesterday's joints of tomorrow, today. eBay, Craigslist, etc. Subscribe.
This week--the year's best.
1. Best price discrepancy:
Three red Eddie Bauer 1970s-ish parkas:
Unsold Kara Koram, $340
Active Sunlight down jacket, $150
Sold Kara Koram, $30
These three parkas, some Kara Korams, some not, saw wildly different fates. One that's a Kara Koram was listed for $340 and didn't sell; another, also a Kara Koram, sold at $30 with just one bid. A Bauer "sunlight" (the logo) parka that's functionally identical to the first Kara Koram remains at auction for $150. The Koram that sold for $30 is hideous and is identical to the "poor man style" tan/brown Eddie Bauer parkas from the Carter 70s and through the '80s, which replaced the Kara Korams. (This piece of garbage.) .The $150 I have been watching for at least a year. No one's sniffed it. The expensive one is the real deal and was a good price for a cool jacket, but is plainly a bad price since a jacket with identical labels sold for 1/10th its asking. So if you hate wasting money it's not the jacket for you. The $150 one looks the oldest of the three, but it can't be. The sunshine logo is a great one:
I want to say that Japanese moto brand Undercover ripped that logo off 10 years ago. Maybe Neighborhood? I can't tell. Karakorum was Mongolia's capital under Genghis Khan, and the Karakoram is the mountain range near all that. The current iteration Kara Koram:
is apparently more mysterious than the finer points of the above-three jackets. I think this is why there's no real price for a Kara Koram. No one knows what a Kara Koram is--current, real, red, green or otherwise. The green one, in most of the photos above, is the genuine artifact, but after that it gets hazy. Something with that tag? Something that looks like it? If so, how much? Are they short or long? I have three of these. There's a store in the East Village (right by the coconut ice cream place that shut down and next to the Italian pastry place that hasn't) which has one in the window, and I was wearing mine--the exact same one--and had a moment with the store guy. I bet it's still there. No one else is going to buy it. They had another one in there for a year. There are as many variations of the Kara Koram as there are American stamps. Shouldn't they all sell? They don't. It might be the fit. My three parkas are sizes small, large and extra-large. Two of them, but not the large, fit me.
2. Best auction, straight:
eBay: error lot of 200-odd Fire King Jadeites plus some other stuff, $1,400, unsold: This was a tremendous auction that ended because of an error in the listing. I think they relisted and sold the bunch for $1,100. Sometimes one cup sells for that much. The main photo is real aspirational--looks like the Finn Juhl house. They wrote a book about that thing. I wonder how much dust is on those plates and how often they were used? Was there good China? What set the seller off--what made them want to get rid of it all? How many years did it take them to amass this collection, or was it a one-shot buy? Maybe they grew up in New Mexico and that's all they had. What are they going to put in those shelves with the plates gone? Is the seller's significant other behind this all? Are they moving to New York? What if they put some Bearbricks in there? That'd suck. Just a nice set of dishes. Accumulation comes piecemeal, and after a while. Thorough, year-long browsing of these plates' kanji-equivalent hashtags on Instagram hasn't yielded a collection half as good as the above.
3. Best diminishment:
Not being able to search by bidder anymore. Scene is crumbling? Through 2004(1), clicking on auctions' bid history brought up who bid what and who won. Doing so in, say, 2001, allowed one to take notice of luminaries like trash-s, a (reportedly) Bulgarian heavy metal record collector. He might have been from Japan or Hungary. He won every important U.S. vinyl record auction of [genre redacted] for a good 18 months. A year later, this dude named Golub won everything. Word spread that he had a really good job in computers and lived in Santa Clara. At that time I was buying sneakers and clothing with pocket change on the Edward Bay and a guy named Schtoops1 kept winning things I was after. I saw that name in the bid history and then used the advanced search to find out what else he(2) was looking at. He had good taste, a deep pocketbook and was my size. I bowed out. Bidder search lingered after eBay got rid of bidder details in auctions. It also did the same thing: in advanced search, one could search one's name and see who won. So, nothing changed. It was removed off the advanced search homepage maybe a year ago but it stuck around. I must have bid $500 on 5,000 items since Obama quit smoking. Now "search by bidder" re-directs you to the bidder's eBay page, not an auction history like when a mobile news article sends you to their newspaper homepage. It's a diminishment, but not a big one.
4. Actual best thing, no descriptor:
Above is a $2,500 inflatable leather telephone.
Thanks so much for reading. If you subscribed, thanks so much more. If you've told a friend, you're one of mine.
Snake
(1) ish?
(2) probably a he...