chicote

I might have shared tracks from this album before but have been sucked in again these last few long hot and slow summer days… extremely sick blues and related music from Mali. The whole album is on youtube here. enjoy!

Congrats julian! hope you get some time off to go celebrate with a quark… i mean pint… 

Cool tie @CSL!!

@MJF9 these 129s are my third pair of tenders; i started with a pair of 132s that i wore alongside my sugar canes when I lived in Ecuador. They were great for being up in the mountains, hiking, doing construction, and looked sharp in the city, especially alongside the irregular and extravagant denim styles popular in a lot of Latin America, but at the time I had closer to a 28” waist and they were just way too big. After a year of somewhat frequent wear they’d hardly faded and I ended up giving them to a friend who’s a motorcycle mechanic in eastern Oregon. Last I’d seen, they were all thrashed and patched up, he loved them. So, anecdotal point 1 was those 132s fading extremely stubbornly. The earlier comparison made to SDA denim feels apt, I’d say, given how those are known to fade very slowly.

My second pair were the 128s, those are the ones with square patch pockets on the front and back, and no yoke, hence a very short rise. I wore those about 6 months before deciding they were just too low-rise for me to wear comfortably. I ended up cannibalizing them to make a weird pair of overalls that never fully got there, lol… not sure what I was thinking really, but anyway, they live on in my scrap pile so you can see a comparison with the 129s below.

Lastly came the 129s, and I’m really not sure how much wear I’ve put into them, but probably close to or slightly over 2 years. They’ve been put through a lot; I wore them from 2018 thru the first half of 2020 while working in an auto garage and at a powder coating factory, alongside tattooing, so they got put through the ringer daily and were washed at least once every couple weeks. Despite that regimen, they have held up beautifully, besides the aforementioned stitching issues, and the fabric is just something else. Heavy washing does it a lot of good; the texture this pair achieved is hands down my favourite of any pair I’ve owned in 10+ years of being into this hobby. Anyway, here are some quick comparison pics of the 128s and 129s:

That’s a really great fit and looks like it worked out well to size up. Stevensons break in pretty quickly in my experience, I bet they’ll be settled nicely soon. Hope the move goes well!

@oomslokop woww those look amazing! i really see the similarities between the two fabrics. sdas seem under appreciated nowadays but that denim fades beautifully and seems to be holding up really well too. what were u painting? 

@oomslokop Definitely tender denim is my all time favourite, and now that you mention it it is pretty similar to the sda 103s i used to have, which even had a blue selvedge ID just like the tenders. I used to get jeans specifically for the denim which is how I ended up w these three pairs in particular, plus the twisted-weft hemp fabric on the red clouds, but now fit and durability have become my main priorities and sadly the options aren’t always quite as interesting. tender denim or any of the 50% sugarcane denims, for example, those are the kind of fabrics that put you in a trance. but the sugarcane fabric got so thin that it’s started shredding at the thighs, and the real weak point of the tenders is the stitching… which although its part of the philosophy of the brand n i wouldn’t want william to change it, it’s started feeling incongruous having this monstrous 17oz denim with all cotton stitching, n trying to force the split yoke thru my sewing machine for the 3rd time when the fabric itself is hardly worn at all made me realize sadly they might not be the best-constructed jeans for my application. but u asked about the fabric and I def agree with u that tender stands alone in that regard.

Agreed, that’s a really nice buckle, and great colour choice on the leather too.

We could start by dissecting forum members first 

I know nothing concrete about Roy as a person, have only gotten the chance to wear a pair of his jeans in the context of a world tour (it was the big bro 2s which, who knows what happened w those??), so don’t really have any skin in the game here, but from my distance I see Roy as someone who’s obsessively devoted to his craft, perhaps to a greater extent than most other craftspeople nowadays, to the point where things like socializing, marketing, building his “brand” in that way might feel wholly outside of his field of interest, expertise or even capability. I mean, working alone in an empty warehouse every day, surrounded by dozens of ancient machines that you might as well be the world’s foremost expert on repairing, or at least hardly ever come across someone who understands them the way you do, plus already having a strange and eccentric line of work… if he wasn’t already an antisocial person at the start of this career, I could see how quickly this lifestyle would make him one. I have a lot of respect for Roy just because of the image I have in my mind of him as someone who’s wholly passionate about what he does, and not in it, at least on the surface, for fame or wealth or personal glory. If he has an ego about his work, I greatly prefer his quiet way of showing it to the self-obsessed peacocks we see all over the internet nowadays, even if his interactions with people might not be as polished as what we are used to.

Members of the American Indian Movement, c. 1968:

Wow, so sick @scooby! Warehouse makes some tough looking jeans, those all look great.

Those fit you great!! I really like the long vertical crease fades too, guess that’s from the dryer?

You can wear them with a belt just fine! I’ve seen the 20s fabric in person and tried a pair on, they’re really nice. The rivets can definitely be hammered down, or even filed to round off the nipple, I imagine. I passed on a pair because I was into slimmer cuts at the time, but now I’d love to try them.

@srudy they’re the “ragtime hi back trousers” in the darker-coloured linen & cotton blend. I also got a shirt in the same material thats’s great, really soft hand and lovely cut that’s trim throughout while retaining an excellent range of motion.

duke, mjf, cultpop thanks u all!

That’s great it’s been so trouble free maintenance wise; if I hadn’t found my w650 I’d be sold on an interceptor… actually test rode one in the exact same colour the week before i went out to LA to get it! i scraped the pegs a few too many times on that ride lol, it was just so fun and the center of gravity was so low, that interceptor really seems like a perfect no-worries bike. i’d love to see some more photos of yours some time!

the Himalayan valves were just annoying; they had a locknut on the top of the rocker that would inevitably tighten the valve a random amount as you cranked it down, and a lot of people online seemed to get frustrated with the guessing game involved to get it within spec. hopefully your twin was less trouble. regardless, these new Enfields are excellent machines and i dream of having another someday!

I used to lust after an interceptor with that exact 2 into 1 exhaust. I bet it sounds amazing! And hope the valves are easier to keep in place than they were on my old himalayan lol. Looking forward to your jeans update!

I love your lettering!