Broke behavior vs. "Thrifty Baller" excellence
Broke behavior vs. "Thrifty Baller" excellence
Exclusive Vampire Weekend video SpyLeak, on-foot intel about the buzziest sneaker collaboration in the game, the power of "Depression Grandma" mindset & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
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.
Our newest Home-Goods Guide is here.
— Jonah & Erin
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In today’s Plane we’ve got:
A very cool “choose your fighter”-style new-slapper-sneaker situation… featuring on-foot intel about the most buzzed-about (justifiably!) collaboration in the game…
A handsomely designed, brilliantly useful, humble midcentury-era kitchen tool (?!) that is coppable for the low…
The soul-expanding potential of “Depression Grandma” mindset…
And more
But first —
The Spyfriends in Vampire Weekend are putting out their excellent new album, Only God Was Above Us, tomorrow. One of our favorite songs is the lovely “Mary Boone,” named for the NYC gallerist who helped turn Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Barbara Kruger, among others, into art stars (and, years later, did prison time for tax fraud).
Well get this: The other day the band sent us a mad cool unreleased “Mary Boone” visualizer they put together to accompany the song. It’s a collage of vibey ‘80s and ‘90s NYC / Tri-State-Area news footage, commercials, and visuals — plus some animé and rare “Young VW” footage sprinkled in. We love this song more by the day & think this clip is beautiful:
The band wound up going a non-collage route for the official clip, but this “Underground Alternate Edition” rocks. So we’re psyched to premiere it today in a Worldwide Exclusive Audiovisual-Banger Spyplane Event.
ICYMI, our interview with Ezra Koenig about the new album is here.
Now let’s get to it —
When hot strangers at the very cool parties I attend ask me, “Jonah, what’s Blackbird Spyplane about?” one of the craggy-brained replies I reach for is that we’re a newsletter brought to you by, fascinated with, skeptical of, and inextricably in thrall to modern consumer pathologies. You don’t become “the No. 1 source across all media for anti-consumerist dope-jawns recon” without standing on business amid a vortex of contemporary contradictions — and that is exactly how and where we stand.
For some reason it’s taken us until today to tackle one of the most prevalent and deep-seated (Western) consumer pathologies of all: The wasteful mentality whereby we collectively throw away kilotons of perfectly good s**t daily. Still some toothpaste in the bottom of the tube? I can’t be bothered, time to yeet that baby into the trash. Still some chunks of Living Tree Raw Organic Tahini clinging to sides of the jar? F**k it we ball, time to bung that b*tch into the bin.
We act this way, I believe — despite the hyper-prevalent “eco-consciousness” discourse — in order A) to enjoy a comforting if slightly Jokerfied feeling of profligate American abundance, and relatedly, B) to steer clear of any and all behavior we fear might be mocked as “broke boi” s**t.
This unhealthy mentality is multi-generational, though not pan-generational. It took hold in the ‘50s with the rise of the consumer class, whereas if you were conscious pre-WWII I think you saw things very differently. I remember my dad telling me stories of his mother, who lived through the Great Depression, using paper towels and then — if they were not irrevocably dirty — giving them a rinse and setting them out to dry so that she could reuse them.
As a kid, her psychology struck me as unimaginably alien. But here’s a Spyplane Confession:
In my adulthood, I’ve been known on occasion to do the same thing with paper towels 😳!
That’s an extreme case, but there are many instances where wastefulness makes me feel guilty (in a way that, real talk, might verge on its own pathology). I’ve scissored open a Colgate tube to gain access to like ~5 brushings worth of paste, rather than toss it out. I’ve turned moisturizer bottles upside down when the pump tube no longer picks up anything so that gravity can dislodge the tantalizing weight of mad bergamot-infused cream I still feel in there!! Etc., so on, and so forth. Sometimes I wonder: Is your boy Young Spyplane becoming his own Neo-Depression Grandmother!?
Our ~tWiStEd~ modern culture militates against this degree of “sustainable” behavior. The most socially acceptable way to mollify anxieties we feel around sustainability is of course to simply “consume correctly” — to buy an eco-branded dish-soap (“responsible”), not to squeeze out every drop, then dilute the remainder with water and use that up til the bottle is truly empty (“poor”).
And so, during an event at the newly opened Eames Institute the other day, I was intrigued not only to see mad sick archival chairs up close but also to discover a simple, handsomely designed midcentury tool that is all about communing with “Depression Grandma” mindset with the utmost elegance and panache!
It’s a gem. It costs ~15 smackers and will change your kitchen: