Photo Shopping

See, I'd gone looking for a couple of new pairs of Nike Leather Cortez sneakers before blowing off to Singapore, but the locals could only come up with a single color on white; this silver swoosh, which ain't exactly bad if I've got something to mix it with. It's not what I'd want, though, if I could pick from a full range like I've been able to in years past. I've had one of the big mall joints deliver picked pairs of Cortez to me at a hotel across the country, paying cash on the spot in the mall and then finding them in my room on arrival. The kid in the local place was nearly thunderstruck when I pointed out what I was wearing and what I was trying to do, and why only one color wasn't quite making it. "Wow, that's really cool." "Thanx," I said, noting that I was mixing Cortez colors before he was born. Time was short though, so I made off with the single pair of silvers.

They're close enough to new, though, that I can still mis-match 'em up with something halfway really cool if I start shaking the trees, and it occurs to me that this is perfect for web-work. ("Like, duh...") And so I'm going to send off a note to someone at Nike and see what they have on hand for a dedicated Nike Cortez fan. I've got a photograph attesting to the history of this whack: 1986 --

Taken by one of the steel gang from Syracuse University; that's me detailing the headblock about seventy-five feet at the top of the roof rig for the Grateful Dead, in Rochester, New York. No steel above me, no net below. Troll Mk. VII mountaineering gear, three foot (purple) Span-Set around my neck, looks like I'm wrenching a cheesborough clamp or whatnot. Pre-Estwing, that's the old 16 oz. carp-claw hanging on the spare 'biner with the figure-8. I'm pretty sure this is spring, 1986. The 28 oz. Battle Hammer came along that summer.

Here's a photograph illustrating the headblock in context --


Left to right, that's my brother, Bryan, someone I don't recall, and me, standing on a deck just below the headblock, on which I'm sitting in the top (mixed-color Cortez) photograph. At the bottom of this shot, you can see the roof in place to be lifted over the stage. (See the big version.) About where that man is starting to climb up the scaff, you can see the large red Span-Sets; the nylon lift-webs that pick up the side ladder-beams of the roof. If I recall correctly, that roof was sixty by eighty feet, with a lift capacity of twelve tons.

So, anyway, all that was ten years into my custom of mis-matching colors of the marvelous all-purpose Nike Leather Cortez; buying them two pair at a time and keeping new ones around at all times in order to wear with a tie to dinner. Love 'em, and the color game is a great mind prober to how some people shake when they see it. Been doing it forever, but it's gotten more difficult to just run right to the nearest mall and style 'em up on the spot. For one thing, "the nearest mall" ain't what it was in metro Atlanta, that's for sure, but even so, the on-hand catalog is pretty languid.

My classic, original, mis-match is red and blue, which looks easy enough to dig up online. However, there are other intriguing varieties floating around out there, and I'm just thinking that there must be somebody at the source who knows what lurks in some warehouse somewhere, late of the loving hands of the sweat-shop workers who've sewn them for me for a generation, now.

Bless their hearts.