Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Ra Ra Riot’s Mathieu Santos: Uni-Watch

RaRaRiotLogoLong before Ra Ra Riot performed a single note of its dancetronic third album, Beta Love (Barsuk), the band talked at great length about the need for a change. The viscerally charged chamber-pop outfit had maintained a steady course after the tragic 2007 drowning death of beloved drummer John Pike, blossomed on its 2008 Barsuk full-length debut, The Rhumb Line, and flourished with a variety of subsequent beatkeepers, but everyone felt the inevitable tug of creative evolution after 2010 sophomore album The Orchard. The roles of violinist Rebecca Zeller and guitarist Milo Bonacci changed the most dramatically; with the dominance of the synthesizer on Beta Love, Bonacci was forced to radically reimagine/rewrite his guitar contributions and take on more expansive sonic duties, while Zeller was freed up to explore new approaches with her instrument and the spare strings the band utilized. Bassist Mathieu Santos will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Ra Ra Riot feature.

paullukas

Santos: I love sports for many reasons. I grew up playing them both competitively and recreationally and learned a lot of important lessons about basic life stuff like teamwork, self-sacrifice, pain and loss. Then there’s all the strategy underlying the physicality—the mind and body working together, what fun! And, of course, there are the riveting social aspects: the shared banter and collective memories, the histories, the regionalism, the rivalries.

But there’s perhaps one aspect of sports that sort of ties everything together, at least for someone who’s very visually oriented, like me: the uniforms. I am obsessed with sports uniforms—their varied histories within each team, league and sport, their balancing of form and function, their beautiful distillation of information, their incredible historic and social value, etc. And luckily for me, there are other people out there who share my intense interest in what one blog calls “the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics.” That blog is called Uni-Watch, and it is edited by a man named Paul Lukas. (Also worth checking out: The Hockey Hall Of Fame Book of Jerseys, by Steve Milton (it’s on my coffee table forever); Mitchell & Ness (a Philadelphia-based sports-apparel company); Ebbets Field Flannels (an manufacturer of incredible historic uniforms); the Baseball Hall Of Fame’s Dressed To The Nines online database.