Spyplane Year One: "D*mn, what a Year"

Plus: What's next!

Close yr eyes and project yrself into a past world so distant it verges on unimaginable … Yes, we are talking about one year ago this week, a pivotal juncture in the history of art and philosophy when Blackbird Spyplane didn’t exist … then all of a sudden it existed — and everything changed.

For ~365 days, this 100% reader-supported newsletter achieved millions of beautiful things… saluted millions of beautiful jawns and the beautiful souls who devise, produce & love them… and blessed millions of beautiful readers’ mindsets along the way.

All while notching a grand total of ZERO wack accomplishments… Wow.

Blackbird Spyplane “blasted off the mf-ing runway” at a moment of profound global uncertainty — politically, ecologically, economically, pandemically. Real talk, that global uncertainty preceded Covid-19 by decades, in lots of ways, and it’s something we are in no way clear of — even if a lot of ppl want you to pretend that we are “back to normal.” (The crises in India and Africa, worsened thanks to the perniciousness of pharmaceutical I.P. profiteers / the Gates F*undation, are one grim illustration.)

Against this tumult, Blackbird Spyplane posed two radical & intertwined questions: Could a fantastic electronic-mail magazine combine Mach 3+ taste while championing values such as human fellowship, interspecies interconnectedness, and democratized control over the wealth that we as workers create with our labor?? And could this sick newsletter help readers get off sublime & idiosyncratic fits while espousing blessed, big-brained tenets such as F**k Amazon and Tuck All Tops ??

You, the Blackbird SpyFriends, answered with a resounding “O YES” on all counts. “So,” you’re understandably asking now, “what comes next?”

Our fail-safe, 100% guaranteed predictions for Spyplane Year Two include …

📅 People everywhere will stop buying GORP — because they are too busy enjoying beautiful nature walks in all the fine GORP they copped during Spyplane Year One!!

📅 A huge autumn for Robby Müller Red.

📅 More ppl making natural-dye clothes!! (These Visvim N.D. price-tags are ruining me!!)

📅 Hats with pins ALL OVER THEM, straight-up gloriously encrusted, like on this swaggy elder spotted at Chinatown Pretty.

📅 A 15th anniversary (!) resurgence of love for J. Dilla’s 2006 landmark Donuts — peep this incredible minute-long YouTube video re-creating his genius 10cc sample flip on the beautiful song “Waves,” which he produced while dying way too young from thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura and lupus:

📅 California garment workers will win their fight to “make L.A. sweatshop free.”

📅 Relatedly: ppl are gonna pressure their senators to sign the PRO Act into law, protecting workers’ right to organize. And work stoppages, walk-outs and wildcat strikes will continue — not only teachers’ strikes for better wages and smaller class sizes but also blessed actions like the NBA players’ strike that Lebron and Chris Paul led last year after the police shooting of Jacob Blake (until a former president wackly talked them out of it, SMDH).

📅 Only like 3 cool people will make a “nature is healing” joke. The rest of the people who make this joke will not be cool, so be careful if you try to make one because the odds are against you.

📅 The fecundity of nature… libidinal abandon… This can only mean that there will be more beautiful jawns, like this Kapital bandana, that depict fruit having sex … 🍌😳

📅 A huge spring & summer for flowy linen jawns a.k.a. Big Tyme Linen Lyfe a.k.a. the perfect garments for transitioning from literal & proverbial “quarantine sweatpants” into (relatively) more structured cut-and-sew fits …

📅 U R gonna see someone whose taste U admire rocking a pair of lightly toasted vintage G-Unit G6 Mids and they’re gonna look GREAT.

📅 Jawns that incorporate Peter Griffin and the Punisher logo will go from “mad uncool” to “somehow cool, d*mn,” thanks to brave and visionary Mach 7+ style gods who will figure out how to freak them… A reminder that swag is protean.

📅 Other fascinating developments that we will reveal in due time.

”But,” you wanna know, “what comes next for Blackbird Spyplane specifically?”

Well, this week:

We compiled the SMARTEST & MOST DELIGHTFUL SPYPLANE ESSAYS we’ve published, ruminating on such subjects as whether or not socialism would kill cool jawns, whether vintage clothes are unethical, and how pants should fit …

We’ve already done this with the Blackbird Spyplane Interview Archive — collecting our conversations with such GOATS as Jerry Seinfeld, André 3000, Phoebe Bridgers, Emily Bode, Online Ceramics, Nathan Fielder, Ezra Koenig, Seth Rogen, Rashida Jones, Taka Kasuga of Arc’teryx Veilance, Naomi Fry, Chris Black, Lorde and Romeo Okwara…

But since we possess heightened mental powers of curiosity and perceptiveness, we wanted to put these masterpiece ruminations all in one place for you to enjoy at your leisure:

Similarly, we went through EVERY SINGLE SLETTER we’ve published, scouring line by line so that we could artisanally hand-compile an EASY-TO-SEARCH JAWN INDEX listing the most fire garments, accessories, home-goods, etc. we’ve ever written about — distilling a full year of “unbeatable recon” into one database.

This comprehensive jawn index will be an exclusive perk for our Cla$$ified Subscribers and it’s dropping Thursday.

The Standard & Strange x Blluemade linen gardening suit in natural flax — full details on Thursday

ALSO?? Our friends at Standard & Strange and Blluemade collaborated on some BEAUTIFUL linen double-knee gardening suits, in indigo and natural undyed versions, made in NYC from world-class Flanders flax — you may have seen me & Erin looking good as h*ll on Instagram stories in the flax joint, posted up among roses, clover and “unbeatable” nasturtiums.

Almost a year ago we wrote about FIRE BOTANIC JAWNS in a gardening-swag special, so this is perfect anniversary timing — in this Thursday’s newsletter we are going to bless our Cla$$ified Subscribers w/ a chance to win both suits behind our “unbeatable paywall” and we are going to bless all our readers with a SpyFriend discount code to cop at a SpyFriendly price.

Beyond that??

We are gonna do more of the same, goddesses!! We aren’t here to “scale”… we aren’t here to “disrupt”… the only people we owe anything are our readers, so our only goal is to keep doing our d*mn thing FOR YOU, such as…

-Finding MORE ingenious fire jawns that you will f**k with heavy.
-Teaming up w/ MORE ppl who make cool s**t.
-Interviewing MORE GOATS about rare possessions they love.
-Ruminating MORE profoundly about morality and pants!!

Thank you for supporting this miraculous newsletter & bearing witness to history as we write it, sletter by sletter, in real time.

—Jonah & Erin