THE TINA AWARD

EVAN + GAIL

When and where did you meet Jack? What was the occasion and what sticks out to you now about that first impression?

I probably became aware of Jack in Marfa first, because I did a lot of work in the early days at El Cosmico and he did too. We overlapped a couple times out there, me doing signage and he was doing shade structures or porches for the trailers. Initially there was nothing out there when we were first going out there. Meeting him was like meeting a fellow traveler. We had the same aesthetic, not only of how we made stuff, but how we never threw anything away and believed in reusing things. That old, used things were often better made and more aesthetically pleasing than new things. And that's beyond a mantra. It's almost cudgel that you would hit somebody with. As is maybe well known I know nothing about baseball. Never played it. Don't understand it. So, our initial friendship was over what we did for a living. But we got to help make a place that was special. And I think that experience probably informed The Long Time as well because that worked. We saw what Liz Lambert did, which was take a piece of dirt that was just absolutely nothing and turn it into something.

In the early iteration of El Cosmico it was a much smaller world. I just remember they were all very organic creatives in the desert.

Making something from nothing in the middle of nowhere and making things that would last forever was something we had in common.

In Marfa, didn't they ask you to announce the game that one time?

We were out there for Trans-Pecos. Jack was driving by, I was crossing the street and he pulled up and rolled his window down and said, ‘Hey, I heard that you know how to call a baseball game.’ I said, ‘Who told you that?’ And he said, ‘I don't know, but Harry Hudson's going to be calling the game too and he doesn't know anything about baseball either, so this should work fine.’ Of course, it didn't work fine at all, but it was hilarious. I literally got between the booth and home plate where I could hear what the umpire would say, and I would just repeat it. And so, we had this double, triple delay. The umpire would say, ‘Strike!’ and then I’d yell back to Harry, ‘Strike!’ and then Harry would say on the PA, ‘Strike!’ And the crowd would go, ‘That was not a strike!’ It was a hot mess. And eventually I just quit. And then Harry quit, too. That may have been the first time I got involved in a Playboy thing, but I was not yet a Playboy.

Tell me about the first time you went to the space that is now called The Long Time.

It would have been work-related, more than baseball. There wasn't any baseball out there yet. I have stored my flatbed trailers out there for years. At the time, Jack said, ‘I need a flatbed.’ I said, ‘You can use mine.’ And he said, ‘It’s going to be the stage.’ And it was the stage for a long time.

In the early days I went out there with Evan, and I've always been one that likes dirt and fields and something organic and not fancy and put together.

You like the theater of the thing.

‘Hey kids, let's put on a show.’ And that's what it was really. It was scrappy. I still always think I'm going to do a fashion show on the field during the 7th inning stretch.

Maybe this is the year, 2024. Tell me about some of the projects that you’ve collaborated with Jack on at The Long Time.

The sign on Dunlap, I did that. I was involved in The High House planning and that's how Kirk Smith came onto the team, because Jack asked me, and I said, ‘Look, I know a guy that knows all about this stuff.’ There's a Rambler sign out there I did. I've loaned other signs that stay until they get broken and then they cycle out and something else goes in its place. The scoreboard that’s there now. I advised him on how to do it and set him up with one of my fabricators. All of which, then, is going to dovetail into what we're going to do next, which is taking this existing sign and probably shrouding it with paint grip.

Yeah, I'm still waiting to do a show. That'll be my collaboration.

What about this scoreboard you helped find in Tennessee?

Jack called me, it was after France. He said, ‘We're doing this project in Lockhart and I want to get a scoreboard for it.’ And I said, ‘They're easy to come by, but getting one that works is the thing.’ I'm not out driving around looking for signs anymore. That used to be what I did for a living. So, I called up a couple dealers I know. These are both friends of mine. I’ve gotten signs from them, and they've gotten signs from me. The Tennessee guy, Clint Griffin, called me and said, ‘I found one.’ Jack liked it. And Clint was heading to Round Top anyway so he could drop it off when he got here. And Jack said, ‘You're going to help me when it gets here, make it better.’ And I said, ‘Of course I'm going to.’ It looks like he wants to use raw paint grip with white or ivory over it, which is in keeping with what he ended up doing with the stuff we had prepared for the current scoreboard in Austin. And then, yeah, I think we need signs out at the road, at the driveway cut. And I think we need a secondary sign that shows where the park is.

Not like Burma-Shave?

We could do that. What made you think of that?

I don't know. You said that we need a series of signs. You're going down the road and you see at 10 miles The Long Time, then at 5 miles, and so on.

Do you know what she's talking about when she says Burma-Shave? There's no reason you would.

(Interviewer shakes head, ‘No.’)

Burma-Shave was an aftershave product. It's long gone now. But they came up with a form of roadside advertising which nobody had ever seen before.

Not like high billboards.

They weren't billboards at all. They would do a series of small signs and it would be a poem in four lines. And they were short because you're driving past it. First one could say ‘Captain Jack.’ And then 50 yards ahead, ‘Neck In Pain.’ Then a little farther, ‘May Not Throw.’ Then the last one, ‘Purple Rain.’ Except with Burma-Shave the tagline was always Burma-Shave. So, the second line would rhyme with shave and it’d be like ‘Didn't Get Kissed  - At The Rave - Probably Should Have Used  - Burma-Shave.’ Most of these signs were already gone even when we were growing up, but it was something that MAD magazine would reference and that’s how we learned about it.

The closest thing we ever saw like it, and I think you should do this in Lockhart, was The Thing in Arizona. They have those signs up and down I-10. And you're driving, and you’re like what is it? ‘The Thing 50 Miles Ahead.’ Then you see, ‘Stop To See The Thing In 40 Miles.’ Then at 30 miles it says, ‘Have You Seen The Thing?’ Oh my God, by the time you get there you don’t want to miss it.

These signs, the idea that you're using the movement of the car as a vector to tell a story over time rather than have a single visual. That has passed from the landscape. I think we could get away with it guerrilla-style.

It's a little country road where you can go 30 or 40. So it seems like it makes more sense on that.

Yeah, I think side road, you could do almost anything. You could say, ‘Baseball, Poetry, Music - The Long Time – Bar, Food, Art - The Long Time.’ And just as people are approaching and they’re thinking, ‘What the fuck am I getting close to here?’

It should be a jingle like Burma-Shave.

Start writing your jingles, guys.

This one is for Gail as an apparel designer: What is the ultimate Long Time look?

I think they're arriving at the ultimate Long Time look. It’s a community, so you want to have an identifying feature, and from the waist up, the players have that. And what I love is, from the waist down, you've got somebody wearing jeans, somebody wearing baseball pants, somebody with orange socks that go up to the knees. It's where each player puts in their signature look. I'm focusing on the players of course. People ask me about styles a lot but I'm actually a clothing designer, not a stylist. I would rather not tell people what to wear but rather see people create their own look. And so, for the team, the fact that they have those signifiers from the waist up and then from the waist down, they do whatever. Like when Evan runs out in his Moroccan Babouches or his cowboy boots, whatever their thing is.

Not stylistically, but if you were creating a line of clothing inspired by The Long Time, what would that look like?

I like lasting recreation of things that are, like Evan, I like to take a piece of clothing that's about dead and bring it back. Taking The Long Time as a concept, I think it already relates to my work. Some people, especially my students, they are by and large perfectionists and try to be so precise. I’m a proponent of what I call organic wabi-sabi. I believe in beauty in imperfection, and that's what wabi-sabi is. It's that broken plate that is just so gorgeous, that has a chip out of it, or that backstop that's got a hole wired shut, or between home plate and first base, maybe there's that divot that somebody trips in or something. That's what I love. When I design clothing it's not about the precision, it's about the organic, tactile beauty that just comes from being an artisan and realizing that humans aren't perfect, and they have faults and from those faults comes beauty. So that would be, then, the basis for The Long Time line. It's not brand spanking new, polished. It's not built in a factory.

When I first became aware of the Playboys, there were no uniforms. And the closest thing they had to uniforms were these jerseys that had been made by Alabama Chanin.

Natalie Chanin.

And Gail knew Natalie and had met her and followed her work because she does similar things of using old materials and unfinished edges. And you still see occasionally somebody wearing one of those Chanin jerseys. But if you didn’t get one you were encouraged to just make your own uniform and come as you are.

It would be a great thing to give everybody a jersey base and do an afternoon workshop where they had to put their own number on and create their own jersey. That would be amazing.

For you Evan it seems scrap is not scrap, but the bones of your next piece. Scrap may not be art, but it’s on its way to becoming art. The Long Time certainly has the same ethos, recapture, reuse, upcycle, dumpster dive, construction site dive, whatever you want to call it. One person’s trash is another person’s neon sign or baseball field. How do you think about this dialogue between the old becomes new becomes old becomes new again?

Because of our age, I grew up with parents and grandparents who'd gone through The Depression. And it was not just my ethos to keep and reuse everything, it was everybody's. Every truck that had ever come onto the ranch was still there, slowly being picked apart. They were lined up next to the barn, and the parts for them were keeping the other ones going because they were all Chevys. I was raised with that. A lot of it was just lying around on the ground under a shade tree next to this structure. And I watched, when I was probably eight or ten, the foreman on a weekend, walk around looking at the stuff on the ground and in the dust right in front of the door. He drew with his cowboy boot in the dirt a working sketch of a full-scale trailer. And he built it that weekend. And I helped him because he said, if you're going to stand there and watch, don't look at the light and hold this. And I'd never seen something literally rise from the dust, rise from the dirt, out of durable materials that had been there who knows how long. But you used it all and you never threw anything away. So, I was already like that before I ever started making stuff in my chosen field as a sign maker. I was channeling that past. I was collecting old signs, reusing old cans, repainting them. A lot of my early work were just signs that I'd gotten and repurposed. The further I went, that became more and more unlikely because people wanted what they wanted, and I couldn't necessarily find something to adapt it. As signs got harder to find, I started making more of my own designs. But even when I make stuff new, it tends to look like it was made in 1940. Everything I do is trying to make it look like it's been there forever. And in every sign I make, I tend to use some old piece of steel, almost like grafting onto a plant, to change the DNA of the thing, to be hardier and to perform like the old stuff. It'll be an old nut or something that I cut off something else, a square nut from the ‘40s. I'll weld it in some joint just so it'll produce a voodoo effect. That's an ongoing devotion of mine, to do work that not only looks like it could have been from the past, but that lives up to the standards of the past. And part of doing that is to use anything from the past I can either visually, in the design process, or in the actual structure, in the metallurgy of the thing.

Years ago, when I was painting signs for you, you'd say, paint like you're an old man in West Texas. And it doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be a little scrubbed and a little uneven.

Streaky is good.

Yeah. Streaky is good. Wobbly is good. And I'm like, okay, I'm getting in my old man mode.

I create a backstory for everything I do. And the backstory for that old man, you got to have a jumpsuit.

A ton of jumpsuits.

He's old. He's been doing this a long time. He doesn't care. He'd rather be out fishing. He's going to get this done quick, and he's doing it himself because he don't want to pay a professional to do it. And some of the best signs I ever acquired had that kind of overpainting done by that old man after a professional had done the original thing. And I love the tension between that and between decay and new, between earlier forms of communication and what we have now. It comes down to me wanting to tell a story, because I'm on a mission to convert people, which is what Jack’s doing too. We want to enhance how people look at the world.

You're trying to give them maybe a depth of view. Enhance who they already are. I think it's about deepening richness. Enriching. Making everything you have richer by having this organic experience.

You’re trying to present something that is beautiful and compelling. One of the things I tell people is that it’s not that much harder to do a good job. In France there’s this idea of patrimony, which to me is everything we make contributes to the soul of France. This doesn’t quite exist in America anymore; we lost that here. Everybody's short sighted, going for the profit. Planned obsolescence. It’s not about overthinking it – it just needs to look right, work, do its job in an aesthetic, meaningful, authentic way. And the only way you can make something look authentic is to make it that way. I used to joke that my signs look handmade because they are handmade. No computers were harmed in the making of this sign. I can't quite say that anymore.

Going back to France, I love what you said about work contributing to the soul of a place.

And that was why I was very excited when Gail and I together came up with this idea of, let's get the Playboys over here. This will be fucking theater. It's going to blow their minds. The whole thing went great. We were a traveling circus and it went flawlessly. And it was exactly what I wanted it to be and thought it could be both for us and for them. The town's still talking about it over there.