The past two weeks, I’ve had two things on my mind, or two things that warrant comment. I ask your forgiveness, for both come from the New York Times. The first is RiffRaff, a forty-eight-year-old galah or rose-breasted cockatoo who lives near Brisbane, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and takes CBD oil to mitigate the cancer’s inflammatory effects. Perhaps you’ve seen the video of RiffRaff tapping rhythmically with her right leg when she sees the syringe approaching. Part of what holds my attention about RiffRaff’s display is how it drives home the relationship between play and the kind of exploratory manipulation of objects—stuff, in the technical sense of this newsletter—that gives rise, over developmental and perhaps evolutionary horizons, to tool use.
The relationship between play and tooling is something I want to come back to, but it’ll have to wait, because today we have more pressing business, namely, investment banker cum speculative urbanist Jan Sramek’s Evan Kinori field shirt, and omfg would you look at this bro walking the tracks in his $800 kakishibu-dyed lambswool-and-cashmere “field shirt” and, erm, maybe a pair of 501s and some kind of nubuck boot (Viberg Waxy Commander, perhaps? looks like he bought the whole Starter Pack).
Just get a load of my homeboy, with his steely thousand-mile gaze! This photo was made in December 2023 or January 2024 by one Aaron Wojack on the occasion of one of Mr Sramek’s recurring visits to Rio Vista, in Solano County, California, where, since 2016 or 2017, he’s been assiduously buying up farms and ranches with the intent of securing a zoning conversion and developing a city for 400,000, at one fell stroke solving the Bay Area’s housing crisis and providing a place to live for all the service personnel Sramek and his buds would prefer not live in the Bay Area per se. Of course he’s had help: early investors in Flannery Associates, the special-purpose vehicle spun up to manage the land acquisition phase of the adventure, not to say the bullying of holdouts, have included Marc Andreesen, Reid Hoffman, and the Collison Bros®. There is so much we could say about this, but this month we probably won’t get past Sramek’s Evan Kinori field shirt, and to explain why, let’s go to Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, named for a fictitious Lost Coast county that sits somewhere between Humboldt and Del Norte.
Vineland opens in the summer of 1984 with its protagonist, aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler, scrambling to put the finishing touches on an annual rite, born of a deal cut with the Drug Enforcement Agency some thirteen years earlier, in which he receives federal disability payments in exchange for remaining underground — save, via the disability checks, to the Justice Department — and a perfunctory demonstration of erratic behavior. For years his performance of choice has been to throw himself through the window of one or another of the roadhouses frequented by the local loggers, farmers, and handymen. But this year—
It was well into lunchtime when he got to the Log Jam, and he was disappointed to find nobody at all from the media, just a collection of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped. … Uh-oh. Wasn’t there supposed to be some loggers’ bar around here someplace? Everybody knew it was high time for the stiffs in the woods — though not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clear-cut—but even so, the scene in here was peculiar. Dangerous men with coarsened attitudes, especially toward death, were perched around lightly on designer barstools, sipping kiwi mimosas. … One of the larger of these, being among the first to notice Zoyd, had chosen to deal with the situation. He wore sunglasses with stylish frames, a Turnbull & Asser shirt in some pastel plaid, three-figure-price-tag jeans by Mme. Gris, and après-logging shoes of a subdued, but incontestably blue, suede.
The Log Jam’s owner explains to his old friend Zoyd that things have changed since Return of the Jedi (1983). Smith River, in Del Norte County, north of Humboldt, stood in for the forests of Endor in the Star Wars sequel, and no aspiring filmmaker in Humboldt County around 1990 could fail to notice the succession underway, accelerated if not instigated by the influx of film industry capital, from loggers to lumberjack chic. The aspiring filmmakers in question included back-to-the-land vibe king Kazunori Hamana, who bills himself a fisherman, farmer, and anchovy sauce brewer but has representation from Blum & Poe for his oversize coil-constructed earthenware urns. Hamana’s astute arbitrage brought him, by and by, wealth as a denim flipper and, at length, a suitably desolate spit of land on the Pacific, and that’s another part of the story. But focus for a moment on Sramek’s shirt itself. Here’s a better view of the same item, this time styled for the girlfriend experience.
The “field shirt” as we think of it originates, proximally, with the two-piece “HBT”, for herringbone twill, uniform that the US Department of War commissioned for its mobilization of 1942. Herringbone twill was favored for its pliancy in comparison with the denim used in previous uniforms. The HBT top featured the symmetric gussetted breast pockets and large-button placket we associate with the form, though the cut you see, for instance, in Kinori’s work owes more to a subsequent iteration, the P53, commissioned by the US Marine Corps in the wake of the Korean War. When you see field shirt homages from the Japanese workwear labels, such as this number from orSlow, they’re taking as their model the P56, a successor to the P53 made with cotton sateen rather than HBT.
(And, ok, I know I sound a bit snide … but, great respect to Ichiro Nakatsu of orSlow, not to say his fabric millers in Okayama. The shuttle-loomed reverse sateen orSlow uses for its field shirts and Baker fatigues is a thing of beauty.)
Consider a different take on the HBT overshirt, that produced last year by Savile Row–trained tailor Herrie Son and modeled here by her partner in life and art Kyle Komline. Herrie’s version pays its respects to the prototype with the notched collar seen on the 1942–3 HBT and the P53 and raises the ante with a silk-cotton sateen dyed avocado pink. What’s more interesting is the name they gave it: the Rodeo Shirt, which evokes not the pattern’s military origins but the anomie and grind of the post-demobilization years: Bakersfield roadhouses, Merle Haggard, the further consolidation of agriculture up and down the San Joaquin Valley and its emphasis on water-intensive cash crops for export. By and by, via the US war in Vietnam, the flight of back-to-the-landers and disaffected veterans to Humboldt County, the post-Vietnam channeling of US military frustration in the service of the suppression of marijuana cultivation by those same back-to-the-landers and disaffected vets, and the rise of skateboarding in the coastal cities of California, you get mountains of unsold rotting almonds, water depletion in the Central Valley, and an investment banker cum developer wearing an $800 lambswool field shirt designed by a former skateboarder on a trip to buy out farmers in the Central Valley. Plus indoor cannabis cultivation, which makes possible palliative care for a cockatoo suffering from cancer on the other side of the Pacific.
Wow, this has been a mess, for which you have apologies. Still, if you found it amusing, I bid you to share it.