There are no cheat codes for taste!!
Plus how to get off fits in the heat, great ceramics and more "unbeatable recon."
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane, friend…
Our roundup of the Best Pants Out is here.
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
What’s up! In today’s sletter we’ve got:
A bevy of chill unisex Belgian-linen clothes, made in NYC and perfect for getting off fits as the temperatures climb.
Artisan knits we discovered on a recent spin through L.A. — summer-weight scarves, color-flecked socks that pair perfectly with sandals, and other beautiful things for the body and home.
Cool ceramics, made, glazed and fired by hand, from a small maker in the Hudson Valley.
And more !
But first —
Is putting people on to fire s**t an endangered art? It’s an interesting proposition to consider here at Blackbird Spyplane, where we’re in the business of putting people on to fire s**t extremely artfully — and where we have never felt more alive!! So I (Jonah) was curious to read an essay published at The Atlantic the other day by Japan-based author and Spyfriend W. David Marx, about the devaluation of what he calls “cultural arbitrage”: the process by which tastemakers & trendspotters leverage their awareness of cool / rarefied / obscure cultural phenomena, bringing them to broader attention in exchange for cash and clout.
David identifies this as a dynamic that thrived pre-internet, before we all had so much knowledge at our fingertips. “In a time of scarcity, information had more value, which provided a natural motivation for curious individuals to learn more about what was happening at the margins of society,” he writes. Whereas today, “the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable — curbing the social value of sharing new things.” The headline is “The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste.”
It’s a smart, fun essay, and I was especially intrigued by David’s ultimate suggestion that cultural “arbitrageurs,” by helping to “accelerate the diffusion of information from the underground into the mainstream,” play a vital role in a healthy cultural ecosystem, much the way bees play a vital role in a healthy literal ecosystem. His argument is that these arbitrageurs don’t just provide “sophisticated consumers with an exciting stream of unfamiliar ideas, but also breathe new life into mass culture” as agents of “cultural hybridization.”
There are, of course, some big counterexamples, e.g., Beyoncé and Drake, who are known for taking songs, sounds and artists that are bubbling in the underground and bringing them into their own pop airspace. But the main idea I’d bounce off David if I were discussing this with him over martinis at Blackbird Spyplane’s No. 1 favorite bar in Tokyo — a bar whose existence is technically widely knowable thanks to the internet, but whose dopeness remains actually known by a relatively small slice of lucky / cool people — is that just because we no longer live in a time of “information scarcity” doesn’t mean that the services of “dope-s**t discoverers” who surface slept-on heat are no longer wanted en masse.
Quite the contrary, if information is everywhere, that’s functionally identical to information being nowhere. Possibly it’s worse, because it’s so crazy-making: My hunch is that more people than ever want someone to help them find some signal amid today’s unprecedented levels of noise.
This is why everyone is so thirsty for “recs” and “IDs on the pants” that cool people wear on IG!! Search for “best t-shirts” on G*ogle or The W*recutter and tell me 99.9% of the results aren’t garbaggio!!
Against a backdrop of information bloat, doesn’t the metaphor just shift? The tastemaker who once spelunked her way through hard-to-access caves, digging up rare gems, has become the tastemaker who truffle-pigs her way through the digital kilotons of s**t we’re all drowning in, digging up the shrooms.
The anecdote that David uses to kick off his piece is that when he was a kid his family moved, he knew a Nintendo cheat code unknown by other kids in his new town, and this knowledge made him popular. But knowledge of a cheat code is, of course, not the same thing as taste (which in this scenario would look more like knowledge of a fire deep-cut TurboGrafx16 game or something?) Which is appropriate, because there will never be “cheat codes” when it comes to taste, baby!
Wow —
One question we hear a lot from Spy Nation — especially as summer approacheth — is how to get off fits in the heat. My answer to this question invariably involves the magic word ‘LINEN.’
When I was in Italy during a 90°F+ heatwave two summers ago, I brought along mad linen pieces, including a loose-fitting, lightweight ecru-linen chore jacket that did not fail me. As it happens, that jacket was made by some NYC-based linen whisperers who recently dropped their SS24 collection of unisex linen jackets, shirts, caps, double-pleat pants and — yes — linen tees: