A Shirt with a Very Unusual Backstory

A gift I gave to a now-deceased friend 30 years ago is up for purchase in a digital estate sale, which raises some interesting questions. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup, and more.

The things I’ve written about here at Inconspicuous Consumption over the past year or so have included vintage artifacts (including vintage clothing), collections, music, estate sales, and receiving a very special gift from a friend nine months after his death and 28 years after it was supposed to have been sent to me. All of those tropes have now bizarrely converged, as a T-shirt that I gave to that same now-deceased friend 30 years ago has been listed for purchase in something akin to a digital estate sale.

Let’s start here: As you may recall, earlier this year I wrote about how I had received a personalized copy of a rare album by the Chicago noise-rock band Shellac, which was fronted by the punk iconoclast Steve Albini. The album had been made in 1997 as a gift to the band’s friends, but a bunch of copies, including mine, were never mailed out to their intended recipients until after Albini’s 2024 death from a heart attack. Receiving my copy after Steve’s death — and less than a year after I’d published a long, wide-ranging interview with him — was powerful and moving, like a getting a gift from beyond the grave.

Now Albini has sent me another posthumous signal flare. The story begins in 1995 (or maybe late ’94?), when I went to see Shellac play a show in Manhattan. I’m pretty sure it was at a now-defunct venue called the Thread Waxing Space. I had learned that Albini was a fan of the zine I was publishing at the time, Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption (I no longer recall if someone had told me this, or if Albini had mentioned the zine in something he’d written, or what), so I brought along a Beer Frame T-shirt and hoped to give it to him as a way of introducing myself.

I made sure I was near the stage for Shellac’s set. During a break between songs, I yelled up to Albini and tossed the shirt up onto the stage. He picked it up, looked at it, and then immediately strode to the lip of the stage and reached down to shake my hand. That’s how we “met.” (Two years later he’d end up writing the foreword for my book.)