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Our Boro Ouroboros
🕑 Added 2024-04-04 17:25:21 +0000 UTCThey say to lead with a feature image of a person, but they also say to make it a good image of an appealing person, so I was torn. Here you go, it's me sorting through a massive pile of remaindered denim.
What is boro? Read on.
Last year Ben (sukajan guy and frequent creative collaborator) drove me around LA and we popped into his favorite Little Tokyo bookstores, edge-case fashion houses, and gamified sushi-belt joints. An oft-thumbed treasure from that trip is a book he gifted me about boro, a Japanese textile genre in which worn-out denim and other indigo-dyed clothing are quilted together. Like an old telephone pole barnacled with rusted staples, screws, nails, and the rain-melted shoulders of playbills long fallen, these assemblies offer rich evidence of life — and pleasantly flummox the mind by looking like treasure though made of trash.
Hayden and I went to the Goodwill Bins a few weeks later, and picked a cart full of old denim clothing out of the grubby trolleys. (If you aren't familiar, the Bins are to human material culture what the fertilizer factory was to Jurgis Rudkus.)
The denim sat in a big blue IKEA bag in the garage at the fixer-upper all winter, which means it got soaked by the rain that flowed in slow sheets across the floor, and started fermenting. I might compare its ultimate fragrance to chicken manure.
Last week, a team of twenty mules pulled it through a long, hot laundry day, however, and so it was Saved.
Last night I spent a few hours trimming the landfill-bound Dickies and dungarees into usable panels, preserving with special care the bits bearing holey evidence of life. Next I will see if my 1979 Singer "Zig-Zag" can power its way through multiple layers of the dense material, reanimating it as a quilt, or perhaps an ugly large thing I keep in a cabinet. When this comes to something, you'll see it here.
Comments
Nicholas Williams
He leapt off the stage and made it to the bathroom before anything happened. Of course it was the most horrifying punk bathroom in all of North Carolina and afforded really no “zone of dignity” between him and the audience.
Chris Onstad
Mike Watt broomed with sloppy drawers?! “This One’s For GG”
Nicholas Williams
I played in a band that opened for Mike Watt a few times. During one performance he suffered a moment of emergent intestinal distress, and having him recount the details to me after the gig is my most intimate encounter with an admired celebrity.
Chris Onstad
Not at all. Wow, what a “wad.” And Americans get shit for Cheesecake Factory
Chris Onstad
Are there any homages in which Jeeves and Wooster are set in such a city?
Chris Onstad
That’s what I’m talking about
Nicholas Williams
I think if you look up "Jamming Econo" in the dictionary you'll see a picture of a guy slicing up old jeans for art.
P Arbuthnot Walker
I was going to apologise for hijacking your post with something so boring and off-topic but realised that you might be interested in the local cuisine of Boro, the famous "parmo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmo
P Arbuthnot Walker
Boro used to look like something out of Blade Runner when I was a kid. Most of the industry in the region shut down in the 80s leading to poverty, crime and drug use. "Smoggie" or "Smog Monster" was anyone from Teesside (I'm a snob from nearby County Durham). Here's a nice old pic: https://i2-prod.gazettelive.co.uk/incoming/article6488147.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/JS30830151.jpg Edit to previous as I'd spelt Middlesbrough incorrectly.
Julie (HiDeeHoGal)
Very wabi-sabi.
Amy Lewis
Make that three shirt-compliments. I covet.
Chris Onstad
I was hopeful a Google image search for "Middlesborough smoggies" would result in page after page of smudge-faced Dickensian urchins, but no such luck. Where do they live now?
P Arbuthnot Walker
Interesting, because here in northern England "Boro" refers to "Middlesbrough", a less than salubrious town, the denizens of which are called "Smoggies" (although not to their face).
