Bring back real obsession
Dignified clothes, day planner season, vibey alarm clocks, going scholar mode & more
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Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Sarah Squirm, Cameron Winter and Geese, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, Patrick Radden Keefe, MJ Lenderman, Evan Kinori, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Kate Berlant, Clairo, Steven Yeun, Conner O’Malley & more are here.
The 2025 Slappy Awards, our year-end excellence celebration, is here.
Last year was The Jacket’s Year — the 21 best are here.
What’s up — in today’s Spyplane we’ve got:
Day planners: mysterious cool ones & identified greats
Humble, swaggy, dignified clothes
A vibey alarm clock recon report
But first —
Online discourse has debased and trivialized the concept of obsession.
People love to post about how they’re “obsessed” with a pair of jeans, or with Flossie the world’s oldest cat (respect), or with something else they will forget exists within minutes of posting about it. They love to pretend they “can’t stop thinking about” Bolivian neo-Andean architecture, or a .gif of Furio* dancing with Carmela or, even more preposterously, the Japanese-language Superman poster hanging in Sensei Sergio’s dojo in One Battle After Another.
*Correction: We initially referred to the character from this Sopranos arc as Flavio. We regret the error.
They do this, of course, while engaging in zero genuinely obsessive behavior as relates to any of those things. Simply doing an image search for something and then posting a slideshow is not obsession, baby!
This pantomime, however, reflects what I think must be a widespread yearning for the real thing. Because faced with the flotsam and jetsam of the feed, it feels good not merely to discover something you admire, quickly mark that admiration, and move on, but to drop anchor and turn that admiration into love by drilling deeper into it, to the point you begin to feel the consuming yet nurturing heat… of actual obsession.
Why not watch every short in (for example) the amazing Maya Deren pack that just dropped on Criterion Channel, then watch every interview with Deren you can find on YouTube, then read a biography… and then, if you really want to hit champion status, poke through an archive of her letters??
That last path is doubly dope, because no one sends letters anymore — they can barely be bothered to text — but back in the day all kinds of people, including Deren and untold other GOATS, couldn’t stop writing f--king letters. They filled correspondence with their innermost thoughts, profound and trivial, angry and happy, magnanimous and petty, and in those miraculous cases where the letters have been preserved and collected, you are free to just snoop through them.
I love P.G. Wodehouse. He may be the finest and funniest crafter of English-language sentences that’s ever lived. I’ve read a bunch of the Blandings and Jeeves & Wooster books, some multiple times. A few years ago, Erin sweetly got me a book of Wodehouse’s letters. Why haven’t I opened it up and read any of them yet?
Dig in, draw connections. Get a little scholarly with it. That’s obsessive behavior of the kind we could all use in these flitting, superficial times, when it’s never been easier to know less about more.
Speaking of obsession —
The other day, Spyfriend Natalie So (who was part of our Cool Mom Style Guide) posted a screenshot to IG of a thread in the r/planners Subreddit concerning the mysterious and very sick-looking German day planner you can glimpse onscreen during the tailor scene in Tár.
Since Natalie is a real one when it comes to obsessing, she has not only checked back in on this thread regularly over the course of the past 2+ years, where the mystery “has still not been solved.”
She also attempted to get in touch with the Tár propmasters — alas, “to no avail.”
What we have here is a classic Spyplane Uncopped Mystery. Does anyone — perhaps one of our European Spyfriends— recognize this attractively austere planner, if it actually exists and wasn’t created expressly for the movie?
I bring it up, of course, because early January is New Planner Season.
And in the meantime, Erin and I are once again sticking with our trusty go-tos…
Handsome colors, unimpeachably clean design — these rock. We had the foresight to cop the 2026 editions a couple months ago, but you can still find them in a few colors: