Saturday we got up early and drove up to Davis to put on a quick martial arts demo. It wasn't anything special really; just Malaya, me, our gura running the show, and one other student from our school. We went or about an hour, of which maybe 10 minutes was actual martial arts by any of the students. Most of the time was gura talking about martial arts topics and Filipino issues, along with 15 minutes of audience participation, where they got to do some very basic Kali. Of the 60 people and 2 dogs in attendance, I was the only non-Filipino human, which was no biggie to me. It was ironic though, that I was one of the performers.
Demos are funny, since you'd think there would be pressure and nervousness doing martial arts in front of a large audience, but I've done two demos now, and didn't feel a bit nervous yesterday. I'm more nervous in class at times, or perhaps "excited" would be a more accurate adjective, since there I'm trying difficult things and I'm doing them in front of a knowledgeable audience. Demo'ing is easy in comparison, since we're only doing a few minutes of Kali, we're doing techniques we are well-versed in, and the audience can't tell the difference between good and bad anyway. Besides, the general public likes big flashy moves, which are often pretty easy and imprecise, and they don't even notice the difficult technical stuff that we concentrate on in class.
The best thing about Saturday's was the audience, which was about 98% Filipino sorority girls. Tiny, cute, hyper, coed, single Asian girls. As I whispered to the other guy in the demo, "I might find my next wife here today." Malaya would have kicked ass if any of the girls had started hitting on me. Subtly kicked ass, that is. And yes, she should probably kick ass on me for making this joke in print.
Afterwards we had a big lunch at a Thai place, talked for some time, then went our separate ways. On the drive back, Malaya wanted to stop in the alliteratively-named Vacaville, at the outlet mall, and since I've been looking unsuccessfully for some more cool sneakers for a while, I was game. And after navigating the single worst freeway onramp/offramp/surface street layout I've ever seen on a major California freeway, we arrived.
The factory outlet mall there is huge, almost too huge, since it's all outdoors. The stores are very large and gathered in clumps, each with a moat of parking around them. It's not like a mall, where you can walk around indoors and enjoy climate control and food courts and muzak. It's not even a strip mall, where everything is in a long row. It's like a mushroom patch, with no clear rhyme or reason to the arrangement, no organization by type, and no easy passage between stores. So in one corner's the Nike store, half a mile away is a Reebok outlet, at the other end of that parking lot is a Puma store, and so on, all of them built in clusters of luggage, jewelry, home furnishing, appliance, etc stores. Adding to the fun is a current burst of winter weather, so we were constantly leaving the overheated stores and stepping out into temps in the high 40s, with strong wind. No rain, at least, which would have made the half dozen dashes to the car, interspersed around quarter mile drives, a lot less fun.
Besides shoe shopping, we looked in clothing stores, the Wilson's Leather Outlet (of course, if only to smell the delicious cow skin products), some sort of chocolate store with gigantic walnut/pecan/M&M/etc coated-candy apples, the painfully-overpriced Coach luggage store, and several others. True to gender form, Malaya tried on a ton of stuff and sighed a lot, while buying nothing. Untrue to Flux form, I looked in most of the stores with her, and actually bought two pairs of shoes.
On the left you see
Nike Impax, in a lovely cool gray, with silver piping and a dark red swoosh. On the right is the
Nike ACG Takao III, in dark gray with orange. Both cost about $45, coincidentally, and the gray running shoes came from the Nike Outlet Store, while I picked up the orange/gray trail shoes at "Name Brand Shoes," a sort of glorified Payless Shoe Source.
There is definitely an art to taking photos of shoes. Unfortunately, it's a talent I do not possess, since I just took 4 shots of each pair, and got 2 useful photos, both of the Impax on the left. You see one of them above. All my photos of the Takeo III hiking shoes were blurry or blinding from the flash shining off of the reflective patches and they weren't any good because the flash turned the orange yellow. So I went to the Nike site and found the shoes and stole images from there, which aren't even exact since the strip of light gray above the orange insole inset is dark gray on mine.
I bring this up because 1) I'm almost as into shiny shoes as I am into shiny wicking clothing, and 2) I just visited 4 different athletic shoe outlets, and was amazed at the difference between them.
I don't know market sales figures, but as far as I can tell, Nike must be dominating the market in the US. The Nike outlet was much larger than the Puma, Reebok, or Adidas outlets we entered, and had easily four or five times as many shoppers as the other three put together. There had to be 150 people in the Nike store, so many that walking up and down the aisles was difficult. In contrast, there were maybe a fifteen total shoppers the Adidas and Reebok stores put together. It was downright depressing. Puma was doing better, but it was nothing like the Nike store, and they hardly had any clothing there, while Nike was doing a brisk business in anything you could wear.
I don't know about the quality of these company's respective shoes, so maybe everyone's an idiot as they buy Nikes that fall apart in a month while Adidas and Reebok last for years and wear in perfect comfort, but damn the styling is different. And while I hate to go with the masses on anything, I'm certainly with them on this one. Nike shoes look so much better than anything Reebok or Adidas are making. Puma I'm not really including since they don't sell much in the US, as far as I know. I never see any types of Puma shoes on display at Foot Locker or Champs or Finish Line or other places at the mall, but if they did they might sell some, since they've got some cool looking footwear.
Here's a big page of
current Puma styles (FYI, the official Puma site is horrible; script-heavy and very slow loading.), and I like
these and
these and
these enough to wear them in public. I don't own any, and I can't see buying them for those prices, (they're charging about twice what I'd consider reasonable), and I don't like them nearly as much as various new Nikes, but they're pretty nifty, albeit universally in the "colorful plastic moccasin" style. Is there even any padding? I don't think they'd be very comfortable if you were actually on your feet for a long time, unlike the marvelously-cushioned Nike Shox I prefer.
Also, I don't see them on that selection, but the coolest ones I saw today were about
like these, but the rubbery spike texture on the bottom wrapped around the outside of the shoe on top, up to the laces. Just on one side, though, and if you ignore how much they look like
doggy chew toys (and can convince your canine companion to do the same) they might be fun to wear.
Those Pumas fall under the category Malaya and I refer to as "pengu shoes." Why we call them that I'm not entirely sure, but it undoubtedly stems from the "
go little pengu" game I used to play. And since she's got little girl feets, and several pairs of flashy, brightly-colored shoes that look very fast, (like
these) they're pengu shoes.
Other companies make shoes like this:
Asics has a bunch, though they tend to be too "busy" in style, with all sorts of colors and lines running all over them. Adidas used to, under their
Daroga line, but fittingly-enough, they've been discontinued.
I say fittingly, because as we saw in the outlet stores yesterday, and I'm seeing on the Internet right now, Adidas shoes just suck. Here's
a full page of their current styles and honestly, there's not one on there I'd wear. I'm sure they're serviceable and give nice support and such, but they're just such boring styles. Like they're about a decade behind the styling curve, and sure, retro is in for some, but why make 500 versions of the shoes I wore in 6th grade? Nike has a line of
those type of shoes, but they don't limit themselves to a fashion that was at its apex when Run DMC wore it
in that video that brought back Aerosmith's career... in 1986.
Reebok isn't doing much better than Adidas in styling, and
most of their shoes look like they're new for 1994, and they seem to have a dangerous over-reliance on B-list "urban" celebrity models, but at least they're trying to modernize. Check out the
Pump Opus or
Mega Lux. Yeah, they're pretty clearly just a poor man's Nike Shox, but if you lived in a universe without new Nikes, you'd probably think they were pretty cool.
And yeah, taste is subjective, and lots of people just want plain sneakers. Hell; they're still selling those prehistoric
canvas Converse All-Stars that give about as much foot support as a paper bag. But judging by the crowds in the outlet stores we visited on Saturday, Nike might just be on to something with their whole, "make shoes that actually look cool" strategy. Malaya and I certainly like them, and honestly, if money were no object, I'd order just about one of every single shoe
on this page.
Those aren't all Shox, and I don't even like all of them that much, color or style or both, but they don't look like anything else, and they're very bold. And rather pleasing, to my jaded eye.
Most shoes I see are like
these Asics running shoes in the upper thumbnail. Not horrible, and some even have decent color schemes, though they're way too reliant on white. But I don't like any of their designs, since they're just so busy. All sorts of stripes and lines and textures run in every direction, overlapping, clashing, and diminishing each other. There are just too many colors and designs crammed into the same small space fragments the image. You've got $100 to spend on a new running shoe; which are you going to pick, if fashion even enters into the equation the tiniest bit?
I've never cared much one way or the other for Nike's swoosh logo, and when
I ridicule sneaker and other clothing purchases, it's based on brand lust and price. Most of my shoes are Nike Shox, (The Shox I have all fit great and offer great support, or I wouldn't keep buying them.) but that's because they look so cool, and are priced competitively. I'd happily buy Reebok or Adidas or other unknown brands, if they looked cool and felt good on my feet. Very happily, if they priced them under Nike.
The swoosh is a key to Nike's look though, simply because it can be any size, and located anywhere on the shoe. It can be the design, or it can get out of the way of the design. Compare it to the spiderweb of overlapping lines on all Asics, or the three-stripes on Adidas, which are recognizable, but which also dominate the design, greatly-limiting the styles those shoemakers can employ. Time for a redesign, guys. It's long overdue, at least judging by the crowds you're not getting in your Northern California outlet stores.
Labels: kali, shoe porn
