This Week: The Scenic Spyway 1 Collection and "Fibonacci Nights"
Imaginary real beautiful souvenirs from imaginary real beautiful places
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Last spring we made “sletter souvenir history” by dropping a limited-edition t-shirt so beautiful and rich with meaning that it sold out in a day … we called it the “Beautiful Music” tee, and it featured a ‘98 iMac shaking hands with a brain via subterranean fungal <~> root pathways while notes of “unbeatable musical intel” wafted aboveground. (You can read our interview with legendary forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, whose pathbreaking work revealed the BLESSED PHENOMENON of natural cooperation & communication known as the “wood wide web.”) The tee was so sick that Vanity Fair published a long smart article that was substantially about its sickness ; )
Today we’ve decided to bring about The End of Sletter Souvenir History — on our “Francis Spykuyama” s**t — by unveiling a cluster of SpyGarments so cataclysmically popping that they will incinerate the old “sletter verities” and necessitate the formulation of cool new paradigms… That may sound intense, even frightening, but don’t worry, cool paradigm-reformulation is the kind of thing we do all the time here at Blackbird Spyplane.
FIRST OFF — THE SEQUEL to “Beautiful Music” …
🌀 … the “Fibonacci Nights” tee 🌀:
O yes! We can’t say too much about this one due to strict codes of silence enforced by certain secret societies, but we can disclose that “Fibonacci Nights” explores the theme of DOPE RUINS THAT STAND THE TEST OF TIME, and what such ruins do and don’t have in common with ANCIENT MYSTICAL GEOMETRIES. We R talking about such man-made triumphs / epochal mysteries as the Giza Pyramids… Illuminati Freemasonry… the Fibonacci sequence (as framed, on this shirt, by a Y2K IBM-ad-style floating surrealist windowpane)… the MS-DOS Terminal screen… and the singular monument to design and engineering brilliance that is the ‘90s-era Toyota Previa…
Our goal with this shirt, as with the “Beautiful Music” tee, was to craft a COOL symbolic artifact of the sort you might stumble on in a thrift store during a road trip and think to yrself, “WHAT KIND OF BLESSED VIBEY PORTAL DID *THIS* EMERGE FROM??”
🐚 The “Fibonacci Nights” tee is screenprinted by hand at a great little shop here in Oakland, CA, on 100% cotton L.A.-made tees (the same blanks that our SpyFriends at Online Ceramics use.)
🐚 There’s only one PERFECT colorway for these: “MS-DOS TERMINAL GREEN on BLACK” !
🐚 The FIBONACCI NIGHTS TEES DROP THURSDAY MORNING 7 A.M. PT/ 10 A.M. ET. We have a bit more stock on these than in previous drops, but FYI the numbers on all pieces are still limited.
🐚 Cla$$ified subscribers will receive an EXCLUSIVE link to cop, and then an hour later that link will go out to the full Spyplane public list.
So join the SPYPLANE INNER $ANCTUM now if you still haven’t !
Spy Nation — we hope U R sitting down, because we’re also stoked to officially unveil “THE SCENIC SPYWAY 1 COLLECTION” in full —
When we teased these on our IG, people FLIPPED OUT and went RESPECTFULLY H.A.M. in our DMs — here’s the deal:
Erin and I have always felt deeply happy & at home out west — ideally in places with nothing but big rocks / big waves / big trees around us — and years before we moved from my native NYC to the Bay, we liked to build vacations around driving different coastal legs of Hwy 1 and the 101, from Malibu all the way up to the Olympic Peninsula…
It’s wild on the 1 — you’ll be hugging a white-knuckle turn and suddenly find yrself flung out high up above a craggy coastline, where cypress-studded bluffs jut out into deep-blue oblivion, while redwoods glow golden from the other side of the road.
Yr breath catches in yr throat, and no matter what vehicle U R in at that moment, it is, in spirit, a “GORPY VEHICLE.”
So we decided to whip up “imaginary souvenirs” in tribute to a few classic California spots (with killer iconography) along Hwy 1, in Big Sur and Sonoma…
All three of these places are, strictly speaking, real and visit-able and objectively beautiful. But they’re also sort of imaginary, too, impossible to ever really set foot in, in the sense that they were conceived, marketed and/or made iconic amid ‘60s-era utopian-Californian fever dreams, remnants of which still cling to them today…
Those dreams combined ambitious postwar optimism — “we can engineer a better society based on simple, resilient principles of natural harmony, communitarian fellowship, and FIRE design” — with crass postwar profiteering — “yooo the middle class is flush with cash right now, let’s sell them vacation homes, resorts & retreats as a ‘remedy’ for the soul-draining consumer culture that’s made them naggingly unhappy…” The strange result is that these places, pointing off toward some horizon of unrealized utopian possibility, have never fully existed.
But mamma mia, they are special and they are beautiful, so you could kind of say that the “Scenic Spyway 1” jawns we whipped up in tribute to them are something like imaginary real beautiful souvenirs from imaginary real beautiful places.
Both of the Big Sur spots we’re saluting have POPPING CRUNCHY logos that we have loved as long as we’ve known them: Peep that mini shampoo bottle (above), which we’ve held on to for like 15 years now!
That’s true too of the other coastal gem we wanted to salute: A quasi-utopian IYKYK planned community ~2.5 hrs north of the Bay, known for its sheep-grazed communal meadows encircled by beautiful modernist cribbos …
We try to go there as much as we can: It’s a place to get off these stunning hikes, watch these stunning whales, glimpse the outlines of a kindvibed alternate society, and think about ideals of affordable inclusive communal living, realities of astronomical property values and, as hard winds pummel you at the edge of the earth, the stark inevitability of death…
Over the pandemic, prices there went $upernova — does that represent the obscene death of a beautiful dream, or does it reflect a contradiction that was embedded into the dream from the start? Barbara Stauffacher-Solomon, the graphic-design visionary behind the logo, has talked about how, way back in the ‘60s, “when things turned from the idealism to the sales pitch, I got very depressed.”
That’s the kind of POIGNANT TENSION we thrill to, and which helps a jawn transcend the physical realm and resonate with metaphysical significance, if U ask us!!
The Spyway 1 Collection consists of:
🐋 3 limited-edition CREAMY HIGH-QUALITY 100% cotton tees — screenprinted here in Oakland on L.A.-made blanks (the same ones our SpyFriends at Online Ceramics use, as with the Fibonacci Nights tee…)
🐋 2 STURDY HIGH-QUALITY brushed-cotton baseball caps, union-made in the U.S.A. and custom-embroidered for us here in the East Bay… One is black with off-white embroidery; the other is white with royal-blue embroidery…
🐏 ALL 5 of the “Scenic Spyway 1” jawns drop this THURSDAY MORNING AT 7 A.M. PT / 10 A.M. ET.
🐏 Our Cla$$ified subscribers will receive an EXCLUSIVE link to cop, and then an hour later that link will go out to the full Spyplane public list.
The ~10,000th reason to join the SPYPLANE INNER $ANCTUM if you haven’t yet.
BTW — you may have noticed that Stauffacher-Solomon’s brilliant logo evokes not ONLY a ram’s head AND a whale’s tail AND a cresting wave BUT ALSO two nautilus shells and, by extension, FIBONACCI SPIRALS — this s**t is all connected, lovers!!
P 🐏 E 🐋 A 🌊 C 🐚 E 🌀 and see you Thursday
— Jonah & Erin
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Our “Master Jawn Index” — a running guide to earth’s greatest under-the-radar pieces and designers — is here. Our full interview archive is here and U can also peep our 🐏 SpyTalk Chat Room, 🐏 Thought-Provoking Profound Essay Collection, 🐏 Spyplane Interview Archive, and gem-stuffed 🐏 Blackbird SpyMall…
The geometric sheep and sheep horns are so 🔥🔥🔥
What sort of program/pen tip/tool(?) did y'all use to get that scraggly pen drawing look for the Fibonacci Nights graphic?