Grab your seam ripper
Sick collabs, DIY de-badging, the coolest band & more recon blossoms
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Our brand new Home-Goods Recon Spectacular has intel on shower curtains, dish racks, rugs, ceramics and more.
Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
Today we’ve got:
Exclusive intel on two collaborations from one of the best Japanese labels out
The coolest band out (it’s not Geese but shout out to them)
A brilliant proto-Lynchian 14-minute short from a filmmaking master, which you can stream for free
But first —
One of the unexpected delights of buying a used book is discovering some vibey decades-old piece of ephemera tucked within its pages by a previous owner — a yellowed Greyhound Bus Tri-State-Area timetable, a ticket stub from an Ornette Coleman concert, a handwritten receipt for clothes dropped off at the tailor, a Polaroid from a seaside vacation, etc.
Here in 2026, as QR codes eat everything and physical ephemera declines, these kinds of discoveries are, of course, less & less common. Why not do your part to keep the tradition alive when you sell or donate a book? Nestle some trace of your life between its covers, and send it off into the unknown like a message in a bottle.
Book inscriptions are similarly wonderful to receive, and wonderful to stumble across, too, as a third party. Look at this fantastic illustrated inscription from 1966 that Erin found on the flyleaf of a secondhand Gauguin book she recently yopped for peanuts at a flea market:
Lytha, wherever you are 60 years later: You freaked it with the watercolors to an inspirational degree with this one.
We’ve written about hand-drawing birthday cards, and giving people $10-$20 cash in a gift bag along with a book and some chocolate.
That advice was good, but now we realize it was incomplete: We should do those things for people we love and bless them with an illustrated inscription for good measure, too.
Next up —
One of my very favorite Japanese clothing lines, which seems to be at the peak of its powers these days, has two sick collaborations on the horizon — and we have Spyplane Exclusive Intel on both.
One is a footwear drop. The other is an unexpected, highly intriguing link with a haute-GORP label…
We secured pictures of, and info on, the pieces, which look great, though they do raise a burning question…