S.W.A.D.D.L.E. Yourself
How to play 4D outfit chess on these haters -- even when one of the haters is YOUR OWN BRAIN
Blackbird Spyplane is earth’s greatest electronic-mail magazine about style, culture, life, love & the jawn sciences, and we are 100% reader-supported 2 boot…
Our interviews w/ Jerry Seinfeld, Tyler, The Creator, Emily Bode, Online Ceramics, Seth Rogen, André 3000, Lorde, John Mayer, Danielle Haim, Daniel Arnold, Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Black, Naomi Fry, Michael Stipe, Hayley Williams, Ezra Koenig, and more are HERE.
Hello & wow, you look fantastic — seems U slept soundly and are drinking lots of water augmented w/ nutritional supplements??
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane, where we’re about to engage in some trademark “profound philosophical life coaching” before breaking U off with some under-the-radar jawns to savor… G-d d*mn we’re good at newsletters!!
Today’s full sletter is a ‘xclusie for our Cla$$ified SpyFriends, whose taste, curiosity and willingness to pay us basically nothing make this modern masterpiece possible … If U R one of these wise souls, thank you & congratulations for rocking with us in the 🌳🌳 Spyplane Inner $anctum 🌳🌳
Longtime readers know that BBSP H.Q. is a beautifully furnished air fortress that floats invisibly (we have cloaking technology) above various cool locales, mostly in the East Bay, which is where I found myself this past Saturday a.m., posted up on exquisite TAN KNOLL BOUCLÉ in the living room, enjoying a restorative weekend ritual we call Beautiful Inward-Gazing Blessed Uninterrupted Closed System (“B.I.G. B.U.C.S.”) Mindset (elaborated on here) …
I’d tossed a copy of the experimental composer Alvin Curran’s 1975 album Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico (Songs and Views of the Magnetic Garden) onto the turntable. It’s an LP I copped after hearing it at the GOAT L.A. hifi bar In Sheep’s Clothing, and hadn’t played for a couple years, so I basically forgot what it sounded like beyond a faded smear of memory.
I was partway through Side A when I felt a mounting urge to get up & turn the s**t the F**K off… the meter was irregular, the synthesizer lines queasy, the timbres metallic and clanging, and the vocals piercingly un-pretty, for a combined effect you could call “challenging.” I’d bought the record during a particularly intense infatuation with soothing & ambient new-age-adjacent compositions, so I’d expected something more soothing & ambient…!
Erin clearly shared my uncertainty because she called out from the kitchen, where she was engaged in some Mach 3+ periodical-reading & coffee sipping: “What … is this?”
“D*mn,” I thought, “these might not be the ideal chunes with which to greet the TOP O’ THE MORNING… wtf!!”
But I told myself, “Easy, king, groove upon these off-putting sounds a little longer…” And lo ‘n’ behold, after a short while the music underwent a BEATIFIC TRANSFORMATION: Right before the end of Side A, soft, harmonizing flugelhorns washed over the d*mn track… and then Side B kicked off with a warm, ill, hypnotically worming synthesizer figure of the type that you might hear on, like, a bonus ballad from the In Rainbows sessions (Radiohead’s best album, real ones know!!) and from that point on the beauty did not relent. Wow.
I realized that — sitting there engaged in B.I.G. B.U.C.S. Mindset — an entirely new mindset had just dropped, in a “telescoping mental architecture of mindsets” schematized here:
Our newest mindset??
S.W.A.D.D.L.E. Mindset!
And as I thought about it profoundly with my big beautiful brain, I realized that S.W.A.D.D.L.E. mindset has swag-increasing implications not only for engaging with art but also for how to dress cool, feel great & avoid becoming FOSSILIZED when it comes to what you wear!!
💎 Here’s how: