Final Friday, I spent a part of the night not watching lacrosse, however at a gathering celebrating an Web journalist named Paul Lukas.
Lukas has turned a weekly column on sports activities uniforms, first printed within the Village Voice 25 years in the past this week, right into a wondrous physique of labor spanning not solely uniforms, however different kinds of aesthetics, together with classic tin cans, outdated report playing cards, numerous enterprise catalogs, and a sort of dwelling known as a “Futuro.”
This week is the final for Lukas as a contributor/editor/Grand Poohbah of the Uni-verse, as he’s turning over the publication of the positioning to others and beginning on different tasks.
I really feel sort of a kinship with Lukas, in that we each began our journeys a quarter-century in the past, with micro-focused content material and having to be extraordinarily cellular when it comes to internet hosting and distribution because the markets for discipline hockey, lacrosse, and ladies’s sports activities have modified and grown through the years.
There have been occasions when these worlds have collided: Dartmouth’s discipline hockey throwback jerseys of some years in the past being a first-rate instance. One other time, we noticed a few of the uniforms worn by a few of the Seven Sisters schools when taking part in basketball underneath the principles of the early twentieth Century.
The theme of the day was the Purp Stroll, which was fittingly held in Baltimore, the place the town’s fashionable soccer workforce wears purple jerseys at house.
A part of the day was additionally dedicated to the celebration of a specific municipal quirk in Baltimore: the salt field, a service of the Baltimore Division of Transportation. Salt bins function a distribution community for the town to get rock salt to individuals to be able to unfold as wanted to soften icy patches on metropolis streets, sidewalks, and the ever-present marble stairs in entrance of many properties on the town. Salt bins have develop into an area outlet for artists to stretch their creativity, making kaleidoscopic types of outer decorations for these normally ephemeral wood bins.
That’s the sort of aesthetics that Lukas, and his readers, have been gobbling up over the past quarter-century.
And I’ve been fortunate to be one among his every day readers.
