The Elegance Report

Old is New vol. 1010239191

If there’s an hierarchy of desire when it comes to chasing clothing—when it comes to chasing an aesthetic—then the vague objets on this website, their dubious provenance and the quickly flattening lust they engender make up the bottom. Slightly above that, front of book ads, and then what the wigger on the train is wearing. New stuff can be a wrench. 

But it’s not all bad: these above shoes are decent, despite originating from Japan and “inspiration” from a story about the Sperry guy’s dog. The vulcanized finishing is done there, but the rest of it here. Do it really matter?

The real artifact, older than my dad, look better. But they’re not and never on sale and when they were, they cost more.  But there’s not much wrong with the new shit except for the price. I’d say that’s enough to excuse the post.  

 

Worst Thinkpiece in a Minute

Not really sure what criticism is to be leveled at this wad of half-cocked, long-gestating dogmeat from today’s Seattle Weekly, but… 

I don’t have the time or inclination to point out what’s misinformed, just what’s embarrassing, and the short tally is bad opinions and bad writing. The premise—a bitter, naive 40-something in a honky tonk band disabuses himself, after what seems like a lot of thinking, of the false notion that a three (four? eight? 25? 10?) year period in aggressive rock music did not hold a monopoly on creative, rebellious human endeavor—is, if you’re an adult, winceful.

But, for fun, here are his five worst sentences:

• 1. The Beatles’ cover of “Roll Over Beethoven” is more punk than 90 percent of all punk rock.
• 2. What started out as teenage piss-taking at baby-boomer onanism quickly morphed into a humorless doctrine characterized by acute self-consciousness and boring conformism. 
• 3. Punk didn’t end racism, sexism, or homophobia; it didn’t stop factory farming, the New World Order, or the massive success of Creed. 
• 4. Punk rock is their raft and their friend Jim.
• 5. Punk rock’s anti-everything stance turned inward and personal in the Northwest. 

I am sorry about that—they are just five random sentences.

Everyone—everyone—with so much as a onetime interest in aggressive rock music (if you use the word punk in 2013, shame on you and your older brother) has been lured then sunk into dashed-off writing of this kind. The subject has been covered so ignorantly by so many different people that it throws into doubt the whole journalistic endeavor. (Even The Old Gray Lady can’t get it right.)

I’m sure there is more coming, but I am not about to defend anything, either. The better part of our endeavor speaks for itself.

The writer and editor here have taken away, and offered, much less than they could have. It is no sweat off my back and I’m proud to have no shared experience, just a misnomer of bad association. 

Best YouTube moment of all-time?

My friend Charlie—BKA on the roundabout as drugmoney—said this Stevie Nicks video, where she’s singing “Wild Heart,” while backstage in makeup for a photo shoot, is the best of all-time on YouTube. I have as deep, judicious and unmentioned a love for Fleetwood Mac as does anyone of my generation—not saying which that is, and that’s my point—but don’t entirely agree. It’s absolutely on the list, though I have my own suggestion. 

It’s this.

From the wrong decade—the 1990s—it’s too grainy, past fuzzy into annoying. A produced story is not music and can’t loop two hours. This report is limited visually, unlike the jeans documentary starring Eric Schrader, sourcer of Boise, Idaho, and has no timbre, unlike Burning Spear singing “Jah No Dead” in Rockers.

It’s just an archive of a big-deal 1997 news piece with a short shot of the man that CNN decided against highlighting during air. It has interviews—not with him—and good insight and reference to the Unabomber theory. It’s the imperfect first checkpoint of understanding part of a life of a cultural contributor who outclasses two other important figures from that decade.

I’ll admit this is a long-shot take. This of Trouble, the Christian, heroin-dependent White Metal band of 1980s Chicago, is more immediate, and Nicks’ zoetrope is prettier. I don’t feel like weighing in on a small island of words about the author—3:25, in the red hat—or his circumstance. But the video, blurry and uncommented on, is still up, and his face is unclear and who he eats with isn’t elucidated. The truth is both congealed and kept. Deep-down things are not secrets, but ones which are held, and that’s a note which holds. 

Vintage Bata Jungle Combat Swim Shoes

Seller JoeyMest has been trying to get rid of this irreplicable pair of Truman-era (I don’t buy the 1940 pedigree) casual athletic footwear for the better part of two years on eBay, for $1,125. I have been watching them for that long, if not longer, and in that time, public—and critical—attention has snaked towards acceptance of an military canvas sneaker such as this. Unfortunately there have been no reasonable facsimiles since the disputed date, and, so, for some, Palladiums will do.

The subject is infinitely better, despite an unclear—Bata’s patent, the wearability, details otherwise— provenance. Still, it’s confidently old enough to look old enough. How does the Wimbledon grass get so green, they used to ask. You start with 5,000 years of rain. The same goes here, but with an different element: the sun.