A damn fine cup of recon
Sick outerlayers, fat bags of our favorite coffee for the low, David Lynch life lessons nobody's quoting & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Our new Home Goods Report, bursting with things to enliven the place you live, is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
The Plane, back with you, flying like a pelican.
Today we’ve got:
A Slapper Swarm of very sick new season-agnostic “transitional” outerlayers
Our favorite coffeemaker is selling fat bags of “test roast” beans for the low and the ones we got are delicious
Life-improving wisdom from David Lynch — enormous RIP — that no one is quoting
But first —
In Tuesday’s sletter I (Jonah) wrote about “Affluent Millennial Awesomesauce”-coded packaging, how it’s torched, and how it connects to a deeper change in our relationship to consumer goods.
It’s since occurred to me that, in mapping the DNA of this aesthetic — specifically, its emphasis on flat, “friendly” cartoon characters — IKEA’s iconic furniture-assembly manuals are a seminal reference point, and possibly the most important source for this entire s**t…
IKEA’s instructions didn’t always look like this, but they have since the early 2000s — right when elder millennials were starting to furnish their first apartments, and when younger ones were starting to furnish their first dorm rooms:
The simple, thick-tipped line drawings… the infantilization of the customer via friendly cartoon people… the broader context of disposability and labor-eliminating efficiencies, offset by a calmingly bland aura of Scandinavian “tastefulness”… It’s all here.
Wow —
Last summer Blackbird Spyplane named our pick for The No. 1 Coffee Out, which we have artisanally compressed into an Aeropress XL at HQ every single day since.
These beans are, unsurprisingly, not the cheapest on the market. So imagine our delight when they recently started selling fat bags of test roasts for the low. We copped two, hoped for the best… and they were excellent.