First off, apologies to Gary of Crooked Tongues fame for the length in which it took to produce this piece. I got side-tracked but a large part of the procrastination was due to the potential edit job that was before me. As the title foreshadows, 5,840 words later (not including this intro) and 6 months later, I finally got around to putting this together. However, I must say, the edit job was minimal, Gary has undoubtedly earned the “unofficial, official” title belt for greatest uncanny ability to write on a Blackberry. I still cringe at the thought of writing anything more than three sentences long on a non full-sized keyboard. For those unfamiliar, Gary Warnett’s perhaps best known for his involvement with Crooked Tongues but I’d say it’d be a bit unfair to classify him as just that… but for the title’s sake it probably draws the most attention off the bat.
My interest in running this piece with Gary stemmed back to my own personal respect and admiration for his work. I hold this guy in high-esteem, he’s unparalleled in bringing a level of otaku interest to something as mundane as Champion sweaters, blank tees and sneakers. It’s refreshing to see somebody with a level of knowledge that he brings to the table all while conveying a series of complex (yes, I can associate sneaker releases with complexity at times) thoughts regarding a subculture that’s hard to dismiss. His references are often so off-base you either need to keep extremely close tabs on what’s going on, or refer to the encyclopedia of subcultural phenomenons that was never written.
There really wasn’t a whole lot of agenda to this, I just picked a series of loosely related topics, ones that I knew Gary could share his “2 dollars” on and with it I thank him. If you read it end-to-end, I commend you, as I can already hear the groans of it dragging on past this introduction, but I’m happy with how it all turned out. Re-reading it just a few hours ago proved to be an entertaining read and hopefully if you’re into this, you’ll find some interesting bits to pull from it as well.
Check out Gary over at GWARIZM and Crooked Tongues.
-Eugene
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