Well, this is thematically coherent and strategically batshit
Like, “a social license to operate from Vox-reading types” is antifa’s biggest asset right now, “a unified high-low, streets-suites coalition based in gentrifying major cities” is the only thing checking the right at all right now
Donald Trump: I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.
Mike Pence: We will put American boots on the face of Mars.
David Shulkin: Long will be told our legend, the words of our bloody reign staining the walls of the crevices and foul caves where outpatient surgery backlogs gather.
This is my favourite ancient meme ever and I’ve been dying (haha) for merch of it for ages, but luckily I am an artist with the power to make my dreams come true. Be cheerful and live well with this delightful skeleton reminding you of the transience of life, in apparel, or homeware, anywhere!
A blessed image. Super Chill 2000 Year Old Skeleton is genuine beauty.
Picked this up from Powell’s. It’s a 1986 book drawing from jailhouse interviews with “Sam”, a burglar-turned-fence active in “American City” (from context, Philadelphia).
Sam had a secondhand/antique store, he’d buy things he knew were stolen, and then he’d sell them on the shop floor, at auction, to other shopowners, or to private buyers. dead_dove.jpg, I don’t know what I expected.
That said, there’s plenty of interesting stuff in there. Like, Sam talks about the Mafia (and lesser-known Greek and Jewish organized crime) as a force in the underworld but not a ruling one, that’s interesting. They reserved monopolies on some categories of stolen goods - cigarettes and, interestingly, sugar, and taxed the crews doing truck “hijackings” (almost all inside jobs with drivers paid off), but didn’t otherwise bigfoot around. Really, Sam was happy and proud to have the opportunity to bring them in on deals – they’d take their cut but effectively guarantee things, allowing Sam to confidently make bigger, riskier deals than he could otherwise.
Two things jump out as necessary conditions for Sam’s operations that no longer hold and explain why “the fence” isn’t a familiar figure today.
For one, the corruption. It wasn’t just that high-profile lawyers and judges would defend and acquit guys despite knowing they were “really” criminals. It wasn’t just that they would make and accept four-figure bribes for acquittals. These pillars of the legal system would tell underworld figures when a rich client was leaving town so they could hit his vacant house, in exchange for help building their private collections.
Sam paid off beat cops by offering them goods below cost (writing off the difference as haggling or encouraging custom), but any given cop, if he hadn’t been paid off by Sam, had been paid off by someone, and had no interest in bringing the system down. It seems the only thing that could make a dent (what got Sam, after all) were State Police investigations combined with too much press attention to quietly bribe out at trial or on appeal.
Second, in a pre-electronic, pre-database, pre-chain retail world how much easier things fall through the cracks.
Sales were in cash and receipts were handwritten - or not, one source of margin was selling without sales tax - and if Sam got a load of stolen Hi-Fi equipment, he could buy a clutch of junk at auction and if the law comes asking who’s to say those “radios x 5” on the receipt didn’t establish his legal ownership? Hell, who’s to say the receipt wasn’t written up and signed by his buddy in the back room?
When a law required secondhand buyers to record purchases for the police, Sam dutifully carted boxes of index cards to the precinct house, who told him to chuck ‘em ‘cause what, they seriously expect someone to go around to every station and riffle through a few filing cabinets whenever some old biddy gets her TV swiped? C'mon. And for stuff “warm” enough to draw actual police effort, Sam could just truck it to auction over state lines; with the crime in one jurisdiction and the evidence in another, there was no entity with the scope to put 2 and 2 together.
The overwhelming share of product didn’t come from guys crawling through windows but shrinkage - factory, warehouse and loading dock guys, stevedores at the pre-containerized docks, delivery drivers on rounds who stopped off to let a few items fall off their truck and then shrug to their boss it must’ve been misloaded. Sam says the hardest work there was getting the guys to stay under the radar and not to take too much too fast too regularly.
Part of it’s that there were mom-and-pop stores to unload to, that used the no-questions-asked prices as an edge against department stores and chains. Even if you got a load of great hot TVs today what would you do with them, drive to Best Buy and try to flip them to the floor manager?
(The real answer today is “eBay”, or maybe combine with fake/scavenged receipts for return fraud. Also sometimes professional shoplifters – “boosters” who put Tumblr “lifters” to shame – unload through the newer ethnic crime syndicates. I remember in LA seeing one tobacco shop in Little Armenia that had nowhere near enough product for its floor space, a sign offering heavy discounts for paying in cash, and three tracksuit-and-cigar types talking in the back office and like, hmm. Also at the meth level there’s a thriving market in stolen Tide detergent.)
obvs they came from Foster, which for a while there’s been stenciled anti- signs up in the businesses, which are basically all taking advantage of the cheap irregular lots (Foster cuts diagonal to the grid) to serve builders of LMC housing - tile, fixtures, furniture, lumber.
not gonna be LMC housing any more, that’s the point
the more important thing is it’s a commuter route from Clackamas but that can’t last as things build so may as well pull the band-aid and shove them to 205->82 or the MAX already
interesting it’s an obv. outlet for gentrification but unlike Division or Glisan the lots are triangular so that might slow things, in clusters you’re already seeing the twee stores that obviously couldn’t make rent unless developers were subsidizing them as plants
but there’s that cluster of sex businesses at the mouth, the strip club, modeling studio(/brothel), adult store(/scum brothel), they just put in the “sex-positive coffeeshop” and I bet they’re gonna make the developers buy them out DEAR
But oh, the bike YIMBYs. Is that your radical ~activism~? That was what Matt Yglesias made his name on, repeating the Harvard conventional wisdom of 2003, you fucks, somehow you’re worse than Shepard Fairey, worse than Banksy, than fucking Adbusters, fuck you you millennials you found an axis to be worse on than the Boomers, fuck you fuck you fuck you
the most horrifying thing i can think of is waking up in a futuristic emergency room operating table and your whole body neck down is now translucent plastic prosthetics with madcatz logos all over
