Is your home tastefully DEAD?
Is your home tastefully DEAD?
Liven it up! Plus fire new "archive bootleg" David Lynch jawnz & more unbeatable recon
One hot morning earlier this week, I opened Photoshop without thinking. I started to toggle between .png files and Image Search tabs, screenshotting, pasting and Free Transforming in a zombie flow state. Your boy was freaking the image layers in a trance, whipping that lasso tool hither and thither — it took a while for it to dawn on me what I was doing: Automatic meming.
Erudite SpyFriends familiar with modernist-mysticist strains of creativity know what the f**k I’m talking about… A hundred years or so ago, French artists who were faded off the s**t that had nudes descending staircases (179-proof absinthe??) began experimenting with “automatic drawing,” where you put ink to paper un-premeditatedly, letting the mind’s murky depths spill forth onto the page without conscious intention…
The archetypal automatic draughtsman spent his days flaneuring around the d*mn Marais in some rare FW 1914 Prada fits or maybe smoking that gazole fort and poking a little wooden boat around the fountains at the Jardin du Luxembourg. By contrast, my first experiment with “automatic meming” made it clear how deeply my brain has been colonized by an undead-parasite armada of online “joke” structures, tweet formulas, overdetermined fashion-subcultural signifiers, soyjaks, chads, and “opinions” about the new J. Crew …
I downloaded an x-y graph at random, put a tiered iceberg behind it, and populated this background willy-nilly with yet more meme-forms, plus cryptic fashion-signifier fragments…
Since we here at Blackbird Spyplane possess famously Mach 3+ insights into style and culture, we can’t help but produce things that are worthwhile even when we turn off our big, beautiful brains. So the resulting “automatic fashion meme,” above, was incoherent yet also mad compelling and dope… that’s why we’re No. 1, baby.
Afterwards, my mind felt crystal 🔮 clear. I’d inadvertently performed a “meme cleanse,” purged myself of the “internet toxins” that rot lesser minds, and was ready to link up with visionary BBSP co-pilot Erin to deliver YOU, Spy Nation, a sharp, delightful sletter.
Today we’ve got:
Intel on very limited-edition, very dank, very vibe-enhancing music.
A great under-the-radar source not only for copping beautiful home jawnz — cool vintage Sony clocks, hand-painted tables, rare ceramics, etc. — but ALSO for discovering characterful deep-cut makers & pieces AND for getting a sense of how to assemble décor in a way that feels “tastefully restrained” but not “antiseptic” …
BUT FIRST —
We’ve got my favorite cap of the year, a bunch of sick COMPANION PIECES to it that are dropping today, and some profound thoughts on what separates a mids bootleg you’ll get tired of in a month from an inspired bootleg you can appreciate forever.