SNEAKERS’ LAW EXPLAINED BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS


8-BitSneakers (3X File, Kick It Recordings, 2010)



All text from “Bomber’s Law” by George V. Higgins (Henry Holt & Company, 1993)


The unusual man also tried to walk with the loose-jointed gait that gifted young athletes either possess from birth or acquire by considerable practice, but he couldn’t bring it off, despite all his obvious planning and effort and someone’s fairly considerable expense. He wore premium-grade high-top sneakers. Dell’Appa recognized them as a brand of footgear he had seen aggressively and repeatedly advertised by relatively-young and highly-muscular, to-him-generic celebrities, during prime-time network telecasts of professional sports. They wore the sneakers and pretended to glide through heavy workouts while shouting provocatively, superciliously, or contemptuously at each another and also anyone who might be watching.”


HondaladySneaker Mon Amour (Citron Recordings, 2010)

Those lithe people on TV mildly annoyed Dell’Appa. They were apparently known and admired so widely and well (though not by Dell’Appa or any one of his friends; Gayle said he had only to be patient, predicting that when Roy was a year or two older, he would update Harry’s education much more thoroughly and often than he could possibly wish, “at eighty or a hundred bucks’ tuition per pair,” she said, “every time his feet grow another half-size or some kid who’s two years taller takes a rebound away from him”) that their full names, cavalierly unstated in the ads, had obviously been deemed superfluous by the sneaker-maker and his advertising outfit.


Tiparrakers
Luego Estamos (DIY, 2012)

“This meant that the advertising people had talked the manufacturer into paying the performers truly enormous sums of money for the antic services filmed for the ads that in turn cost so much to broadcast. And those combined expenses of production and broadcast exposure explained why the sneakers had to be priced at retail out of the reach of anyone except celebrities so recognizably richly-famous (except by Dell’Appa and his friends) that they didn’t have to buy them; according to the sports pages in the newspaper, the sneaker-manufacturers who hired the scintillating people to make the ads also gave them carload-lots of the footwear for nothing.”


Painfield
This Time (Good Head, 2003)

“Which in turn meant that Harry was right and the whole exercise was a charade. The manufacturers had no reason to care at all what sort of people wore the sneakers out into the real world, what they did once they were out in it, or even if anyone actually did put on those fancy shoes and go out. For the manufacturers it would be perfectly all right if all the flashy damned things that were purchased for real money, or shoplifted out of heavily-insured inventories, remained forever thereafter in the gaudy boxes, shoved ’way to the backs of darkened shameful closets, so long as the well-funded escapees from reality and normally-functioning sanity in sufficient numbers first underwent mood aberrations sufficiently severe and persisting long enough to cause them to march in columns of bunches into mall-stores and cough up the listed prices that not only paid for the stars and the ads, but made the sneaker-people very rich indeed.” 
George V. Higgins
From: Bomber's Law (Henry Holt & Company, 1993)

Foghat
Tight Shoes (Bearsville, 1980)


 

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