I feel like one of G-d's favorite children
Elite-tier NYC recon will do that to you!
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
On my very last night in New York City, as the final notes rang out at Mk.gee’s phenomenal sold-out concert at Irving Plaza, Spyfriend Oneohtrix Point Never spotted me (Jonah) in the VIP, gave me a big hug, and shouted — with 100% accuracy — “That was great!”
Mk.gee is a favorite young chunesmith of ours, he takes photos stanced up with swords and owls (see below), and he was wrapping up a national tour of mid-size rooms that sold out instantaneously because there is nothing mid about this man!! He has a way of making his music feel intimate and enormous at the same time, like an arena show someone figured out how to stage in a bedroom.
Some people in Mk.gee’s camp are Spyfriends so after his set I went downstairs to dap him up — he was very chill, and very soft spoken, to a degree that was a bit surprising given the guitar-shredding blowout he’d just whipped up…
It was a beautiful capstone to a week in NYC that made me feel like one of G-d’s favorite children: a week full of cool s**t both planned and spontaneous, meaningful hangs with friends & family, serendipitous bump-ins, and “unbeatable recon” into exciting developments in the arts, clothing, food & more — for you, the beautiful & blessed members of Spy Nation.
On that note, when you see a “📀” below, that’s a DVD-ROM: Dope Vibey D*mn Recon Ordnance Marker, flagging something cool.
Let’s get to it —
The first thing I did upon touching down was, of course, take the 📀 AirTrain to the A train into NYC, past slivers of beautiful Jamaica Bay wetlands — a cab or Uber into town is a total chump’s move most hours of the day. The second thing I did was hit up an ATM so I could leave 📀 cash tips throughout the week. This is a policy I’ve followed instinctively for years, and my conviction only deepened after reading Spyfriend Malcolm Harris’s 📀 eye-opening piece at New York Magazine about the wack perils of a fully cashless society.
Speaking of Harrises, James Harris of Throwing Fits texted me while I was on the subway. He told me to come hit Cobble Hill in Brooklyn that night for the friends & family opening party at Spyfriend Geoff Snack’s 📀 Wrong Answer Gallery (below bottom left), where Chandigarh furniture, Gaetano Pesce clocks, and too much incredible art & fashion print-matter ephemera to count all commingle in Geoff’s showroom / apartment. (Erin got an advance peek of the place in February and wrote about it in Concorde.) Among the people in the mix were Sami Reiss of the estate-sale-trawling sletter 📀 Snake America, who I got together with for coffee a couple days later, and whose vintage Japanese 📀 Land Cruiser watch is amazing.
After the Wrong Answer party I bounced with a tight lil crew including Spyfriends Jacob Gallagher of the WSJ, Bijan Shahvali of Mach 3+ vintage-gem clearinghouse 📀 Intramural, and Sameer Sadhu of Nettwerk. We hit one of my 📀 very favorite pizzerias in Brooklyn, F&F. Normally I just go “Margherita Mode” at pizza joints, because it’s the single best indication of whether or not a place is fire. But this time, on the homies’ encouragement, I went for clam — a high-risk move that paid off when it proved to be one of the slappingest slices I’ve had there.
There was a faint drizzle so I began the process of pan-searing my new 📀 Stòffa suede slipper boots (as seen above bottom right on Stòffa’s own Agyesh Madan). These are my personal choice for going Dogs on Dainty Mode, a.k.a. pairing low-profile footwear with big pants. Stòffa just opened a flagship store in SoHo — one of two newly opened shops I hit up, the other being the 📀 Lauren Manoogian store, close by on Broome, the existence of which Blackbird Spyplane broke in an exclusive scoop back in our October 2023 NYC report. Both spots are light-filled, hushed but friendly, spare but calming — much like the clothes.
Of course I popped into 📀 C’H’C’M’ (NYC’s best “multi-brand retail” spot) and of course I also popped into 📀 Colbo (NYC’s best ~ new multi-brand retail spot). I wanted, but sadly did not get a chance, to visit the West Village’s 📀 AndSon, an even newer multi-brand retail spot run by a Spyfriend who stocks some small lines we covered in the sletter before they had stockists, which is tight.
At C’H’C’M’ I was esp. interested to see what was on offer from the big-gas 📀 Japanese label Stein. And wouldn’t you know it, that very same night I witnessed producer, musician and Spyfriend Ariel Rechtshaid rocking a black Stein leather coat (below left) that he copped at C’H’C’M’ in order to look cool while ripping solos on Saturday Night Live, playing with the homies in Vampire Weekend. (Read my interview with Ezra Koenig about Only God Was Above Us here).
This was my first time at an SNL taping, and in an immense stroke of “g-d’s favorite child”-style luck, Maya Rudolph was hosting. She was great, and on some pure “razzle dazzle” s**t, I loved to see the dizzying spectacle of people — the clockwork crew members in particular — coming together to put on a show under preposterously high-pressure conditions. SNL is one of the last surviving original-DNA links to television’s earliest days, and it’s kind of wild that it still exists, especially in our torched & nebulous streaming-cataclysm present. It was especially wild to see Lorne Michaels pacing the studio floor at 12:55 a.m., inspecting sets and biting his fingernails. We should all be so lucky to find something we care about that intensely for that long a chunk of our lives. Also, none other than Reigning Auteur of American Empire Steven Spielberg was posted up watching from off to one side.
In the VW dressing room afterwards I linked with the band, Spyfriend Rashida Jones, the film-producing and cool-Mephisto-rocking homie Eli Bush of Elara Pictures, and the deeply charismatic rapper, nightlife don and also cool-Mephisto-rocker Despot, who was about to soft-relaunch his Chinatown restaurant Time, which originally opened as a sushi spot, as a bar — now called 📀 Time Again.
The SNL afterparty was fun, too. I’ll keep its details off the record except to note I got to chop it up with Spyfriend and gifted photographer Sinna Nasseri, who was in town to shoot behind the scenes at the Westminster Dog Show for the third year running, for Vogue. When I asked Sinna what he wanted to do differently this year, he said, “I want to shoot the dogs’ faces extremely close up.” And so he did, among other approaches (two of his pics are above.)
Speaking of NYC institutions, I only had one lunch (the macro plate of course) at 📀 Souen, a spot I’m even happier still exists than SNL. I had a fantastic dinner for one at the bar at 📀 Odeon one night. The place is legendary for a reason: The room was buzzing pleasantly, my grilled branzino on spring peas was yanking, and the dirty vodka martini was perfect. I ate dinner at 📀 Estela, too, which was very good, as was a lunch at 📀 Lodi, but I bummerishly did not eat at 📀 Altro Paradiso, which remains far and away my No. 1 Ignacio Mattos spot.
Sticking to matters of food & bev, I had a sunset Red Stripe with Spyfriends Lawrence Schlossman and Marisa Meltzer at 📀 Clandestino — the unf**kwithably comfortable dive bar at the heart of Dimes Square.
Dimes Square is a place that people who live in NYC like to roll their eyes about and people who wish they lived in NYC like to roll their eyes about, both for a muddle of good and bad reasons. Whereas if you’re me (born and raised in NYC, but you don’t wish you lived there anymore because Oakland is better) you recognize it for what it is: An objectively great little neighborhood with an abbondanza of cool s**t around — 📀 Dimes, 📀 Cervo’s, 📀 Scarr’s, 📀 Casetta, 📀 Leisure Centre, 📀 Lara Koleji, 📀 169 Bar, 📀 Wu’s Wonton King, and 📀 Regina’s Grocery, to name a few. There’s great people watching, no cars, and, if you’re willing to pony up, there’s my favorite hotel in Manhattan, 📀 Nine Orchard, a majestic former bank where the café was painted by Happy Menocal, the bench near check-in was made by Green River Projects with Bode upholstery, and the rooms include OJAS sound systems and ceramics by 📀 Shane Gabier — among other Mach 3+ fancy-boi touches. I got coffee one afternoon in the hotel’s soaring-ceilinged Swan Room (below top right) with Spyfriend Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s busy turning his recent 📀 blockbuster New Yorker article about a kid’s mysterious death in London into his next book.
After the Red Stripes were done, Lawrence and I moseyed over to a 📀 Byline Magazine launch party. I chopped it up with all manner of kindvibed media-adjacent youngsters who love Blackbird Spyplane, including the writer Delia Cai, who was wackly laid off as part of the ongoing Condé bloodbath the very next day. She’s rededicating herself to her newsletter 📀 Deez Links, and if the attention generated by her recent “Hate Reads” series is any indication, she’ll be OK!
The next day was the main event of the trip — my mother’s birthday.
I copped an 📀 Eileen’s Special Cheesecake (strawberry, bagged up above bottom right) to celebrate, and it was a smash hit. Peace to Nick Williams and Phil Ayers of 📀 Small Talk Studios for the recommendation. I’d visited their stu in the garment district a couple nights previous, saw some fantastic pieces from their SS24 and FW24 collections, and then we went to the 📀 GOATED but slept-on garment-district pizza spot Lazarra’s (virtually the only street-level indication it exists is the sign above bottom left).
We split a couple pies and a bottle of Chianti, and when it came time to order dessert we discovered we’re all cheesecake enthusiasts. We agreed that the putatively legendary cheesecake at Junior’s is disappointing, and we were happy to discover that Lazarra’s cheesecake is great. Lazarra’s is the kind of unselfconscious NYC treasure I’d have no trouble imagining going supernova if it weren’t kind of out of the way (not that that’s hurt the recent 📀 Keens love though!?) It rocks.
Mama Spyplane loved the Eileen’s cheesecake and had a great day. Papa Spyplane did, too, and it also emerged that he holds onto 🧠 decades-old calendars so he can reuse old ones when the math is right and the days line up. Turns out you can use a 1996 calendar for 2024 — which pops illustrated with an incredible 📀 ‘95-‘96 Life in Hell joint (below top right.)
On the subject of Spyplane relatives with great taste: My uncle (below left) is in his early ‘90s and was one of the most effortlessly fitted people I saw on the trip. Hiking boots with a slightly mismatched suit, fraying pants hems, and earthtone check button-up is an unbeatable combo…
Speaking of swag, I wasn’t the only young Bay-based king visiting NYC. Spyfriend Evan Kinori came in from SF and threw an opening party for his exhibition at 📀 JDJ Gallery on lower Broadway, which runs from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. daily until May 26th.
There’s salvaged-elm furniture that Evan made in collaboration with kindvibed Marin County woodworker Sam Buchanan, fantastic upstate NY cider, and beautiful clothes. The 📀 gifted weaver Marina Contro is there with her loom, creating fabric in real time from deadstock ‘90s-era yarn cones that Evan convinced the deep-cut apparel-industry legend Sally Fox to sell him.
If you’re unfamiliar, Fox developed an organic cotton that grows in various colors naturally, i.e. requires no dyes. Her clients once included Armani and Levi’s, but in the ‘90s NAFTA f**ked that all up, and she’s been building her operation back ever since… Fox will come through for a talk at the gallery this Thursday evening.
If you have a spare $1850 lying around (and while the yarn lasts) you can order a striped Kinori shirt (above right) cut and sewn from fabric made from the deadstock Fox cones, loomed on the premises by Contro. There are other, relatively less costly Sally Fox garments on hand, too (above bottom left), including some tobacco-brown 2-pleat Japan-milled cotton-canvas pants that I copped along with an ecru cotton-muslin button-up, on some neo-Simplicity-Man s**t. (I’m wearing both in the opening art up top today.)
While you’re in the neighborhood: The Spyfriends at 📀 Broadway Gallery are right across the street from JDJ, and I also popped into the nearby 📀 Nino Meier Gallery to see a cool show by L.A. painter and ceramist Roger Herman, recommended by Shane Gabier. Shane tipped me off when I bumped into him at the excellent 📀 Karma art bookshop, sibling to several cool gallery spaces in the East Village.
At the Kinori party I saw a gang of Spyfriends including Andrew Kuo, Chris Black, Noah Johnson, Pascal Spengemann, Steff Yotka, Sam Hine, Allen Danze, and Kathleen Sorbara, who runs the fantastic Brooklyn vintage shop 📀 Chickee’s. I unfortunately did not make it there this visit, nor 📀 Stella Dallas, nor 📀 Front General Store’s newly opened designer-vintage-focused annex, 📀 FSG Outpost — one of my biggest regrets of the trip, because I’ve heard it’s great.
I wasn’t in Brooklyn enough. Next time. I did make it to Greenpoint for a great dinner at the buzzy 📀 Bernie’s Restaurant, enjoying way too much beautifully executed bar & grill type food with Spyfriend Nick Dierl. We started with mozzarella sticks and a Caesar salad and ended with a Key Lime Pie-style lemon icebox pie. They were great, as were the many artery-clogging delicacies in between.
And that brings us full circle, because come Friday night, I hit the Mk.gee show with Nick and his cooked-Lowa-hiking-boot-rocking young colleague Bradley Bledsoe. In addition to OPN, notable New Yorkers Nicholas Braun and Josh Safdie were also in attendance. Now you can now scroll up to the start of today’s sletter and read it again, on a loop, like as if you were suspended for eternity in 7 repeating days of “Recon Valhalla.” 😉
Peace till next time.
— Jonah & Erin
Papa SP rocks https://www.whencanireusethiscalendar.com/ At the risk of blowing up one of my favorite ebay activities, you can search for old linen towel kitchen calendars (my favorite are Vera Neumann) The one I have hanging up this year is also 1996 🥲
FSG Annex is cool! Quite a contrast to the downstairs space