How’d y’all like that first newsletter? TBH was kinda easier for me…structured, not open-ended…easier for me to layout and just run with. Let me know if ya’ll like it as is or if I should break it up into multiple emails (ie: by section). Kind of a pain but it might be easier to digest as an ‘every other day’ kind of thing…
4/5 - Dunk SB ‘Polaroid’
I love the swoosh they pulled here…even the white heel. But I could *ALWAYS* do without a white sole. After 1 wear, white soles look like trash. Lame.
4/6 - Adidas Wotherspoon x EQT Support 93
I think this is another good-looking shoe from everyone’s favorite neckbeard. I wouldn’t mind a couple of different colorways, but for whatever reason, I’ve been diggin’ some of these colorful shoes. And it will be more than accessible to anyone who wants a pair…hell, with Adidas’ release habits, I bet you’ll be able to snag a pair for under retail if you’re willing to wait a few weeks.
4/7 - Union Dunk
Nothing about this shoe interests me. No colorway can save it. I like ripstop, and now that I know that logo has something to do with Sidney Poitier from ‘Raisin in the Sun’, you’d think that’d give me something to be interested in…but I could go the rest of my life without seeing any more renditions of this shoe. Just let it go, man.
4/8 - Off White Blazer Low
IMO the most interesting release (since the last Virgil release), the Off-White x Blazer low’s are finally dropping. I know it’s been 6+ months since we first saw these and I really didn’t know how I felt about them then and I still don’t really know how I feel about them now. I want to say ‘they’re ugly’, but the thing I dislike most about vulcanized soles (too flat) has been given a sleek treatment with this model. Like…the look less like a shoe for standing around in and more like a shoe for running really fast in (in a cartoonish way). I don’t totally get it…and it’ll probably be a few years (or wears if a pair manages to fall into my lap) before I can finally make up my mind on them…but this is what I like about Virgils designs: they’re never easy for me to pinpoint and they almost always make me think.
Adidas Crazy 1 ‘sunshine’
The big banana. This shoe just brings back so many memories. I’m glad they’re still releasing this one…but…who is buying these? Who is wearing these?
What did I buy/sell this week?
I sold a few pairs of shoes I didn’t care about and didn’t make much money. I did sell this old Polo jacket I copped a couple of years back for a nice, lil’ profit.
I bit the bullet and bought a pair of Air Max 1 x Concepts ‘Heavy’. I wasn’t up on the release for these (I rarely, if ever, try for new releases), but having seen a couple thousand pics of these, I realized if I didn’t cop a pair now, I’d be regretting it in a couple of years when prices are in the $500+ range. The world might fall apart and all that, but I still think these are going to command some pretty heavy prices in the future. I don’t know why, but these really make me think of my parents - a lot of materials from my childhood…I swear my mom would have made something like this for my dad and I’m here for it. With retail around $170+ tax, $230 didn’t sound too bad to me.
I submitted a bunch of trade requests on tradeblock.io (seriously will they ever fix their ‘search’ function?) the other day but no one bit. I want to trade my Lot 23 dunk (sz 8.5) for some of those black Off-White Virgil 2’s (sz 9).
I made this long-ass post on IG (below) about whether or not this was a shoe to cop despite the fact that I have more pairs of 1’s than I’ll wear in a year and I finished the post off with ‘decidedly, I will not be attempting to cop these…’ and like 15 minutes later I attempted to cop. I am a dirty liar. No luck. That aside, it’s just a really good-looking shoe.
What have I been working on this week?
For the last few weeks - me, @byshoef and @sonsofblackmaria have been working on some super *special edition* cards that have yet to drop. And we finalized a few things this past week and are ready to start executing. I want to tell you all about them…and I will…soon…but right now is not the time. No matter what anyone tells you, it takes time and money to fulfill your vision. Nothing that is public-facing is easy. But we spent a lot of time on these cards this past week. I really hope they pan out!
Speaking of @sonsofblackmaria - he and his brother had the opportunity to speak on a local IG live about the cards we’ve been creating. They were on for a good 90 minutes, but I don’t speak Spanish so didn’t catch more than a few words of it. If you do speak Spanish and are interested head on over to his profile and take a look.
Speaking of (speaking of) @sonsofblackmaria - we’ve finished up designs on 197 out of 200 designs on the 90’s basketball card set. And we’ve shopped out our quotes. And we’re ready to sign our contract for this set. This one should take a shorter time to produce, but we are going to be putting more effort into marketing this set than prior sets. Look for an October release (to coincide with the start of the NBA season). I also shopped out a few parts of this massive project to a handful of people who are involved…
For the first time ever, as the sneaker savant, I processed more than 1,200 sneaker authentications during the month of March. Without a single complaint.
And I had a long, fruitful discussion about the direction of the card concept with this dude I met through the ‘Ducks of a Feather’ NFT project…it gave me a lot of excitement and direction.
What did I watch/read/listen to this week?
Top Boy - Season 4 hit Netflix (but it’s called ‘season 2’) and I can’t get enough of this show. Because the seasons are kind of confusing and if you don’t know the story about how this show came to be - let me give you a brief summary…quotes may or may not be true (so don’t fact check). This show originally came out in the UK in 2010 (or 2011) and was canceled after two seasons. Drake, (yes, that Drake), saw it ~8 years after it was canceled and said ‘this show is too good, why was it canceled?’ And someone told him ‘because we ran out of money’. So Drake said ‘I’ll pay for y’all to keep making this show.’ So he’s been bankrolling the past two seasons, which picked up exactly 10 years after they left off. Legendary. The beginning of the show is called ‘Top Boy Summerhouse’ and the newest seasons are just called ‘Top Boy seasons 1 & 2’.
‘Top Boy’ is just too damn good. I love London and I love grime (or drill or whatever it’s called) and I love the accents and I love the style and I love it all. The mood. The storyline. Everything. In the first episode of the new season, a bunch of gangsters are traveling in a tiny little car and they get pulled over and the leader is being as disrespectful as possible to the police officer who pulled them over and says ‘FAM you’re disrupting my journey’. British vocab is the best.
An American Marriage - Tayari Jones
Being back in California, I don’t really read nearly as many books as I used to when I lived in Brooklyn. I probably consume 5x as much media in general, but spending an hour and a half a day on the subway used to give me ample time to read and I’d run through 100+ books a year when I lived out there. That being said, I try to set aside a few minutes every night to read a bit…and this book turned those ‘few minutes’ into half-hour sessions. The best way I could describe this book would be as ‘gripping’, but it was just a really relatable story. Not relatable in the sense that I know what it felt like to be a character in the book, but relatable in the sense that I actually felt like I knew these people. IMO the best books are the ones that spend a great deal of time on character building, and this book does this. It was just a really good story and on more than one occasion, I lay in bed wondering how things would turn out. 5/5 easily.
Anyway, I’ma keep working…Enjoy your week!