2022's best pants, sneakers, tees, books & more

The Dobis Awards Grand Finale

Ayyyy welcome to The Grand Finale of Blackbird Spyplane’s 2022 Dobis Awards — our year-end co-celebration, with Concorde, of excellence across art, life & the jawn sciences. (Part one is here.)

On the subject of the jawn sciences, today we’re saluting great clothes, including a FLOTILLA of pants of the year. We’ve also got ILL documentaries, fantastic BOOKS, the finest-smelling SOAP … and poppingest Italian snack 🤌of the year ??

Wow, real “abbondanza” s**t — and there’s more on top of that.

— Jonah & Erin

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🎬 Two Best Documentaries We Saw for the First Time in 2022, Which Commune Deeply with “Spyplane Mindset” and also Contain a Ton of Monster Fits:

• “The Gleaners & I”: Agnès Varda’s beautiful, funny, sad, extremely relevant 2000 classic upturns all straightforward notions of what “value,” “scavenging” and “waste” mean. (Its 2002 follow-up is great, too.) We’d watched & loved a bunch of Varda over the years but somehow never this one — it’s probably our favorite thing of hers we’ve seen, and it’s on Criterion Channel.

• “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” Wim Wenders’s very cool, almost stream-of-consciousness 1989 Yohji Yamamoto documentary, shot by tha DP god Robby Müller on digital video in Paris & Tokyo — tip of the Borsalino hat to Spyfriend Rachel Tas(yo)hjian for putting us on. There are streams you can find with no subtitles but, while much of it’s in English, there’s some Japanese, too, so we bought a DVD for $10 on eBay.

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🧶 Sneakers of the Year that aren’t the Wales Bonner Sambas because those are tight but you don’t need us to tell you that: