The Arcades

I have been transfixed by Rushtok—the annual tradition (dating from 2020) of sororities posting group tiktoks that serve as an advertisement to induce young women to join. The phenomenon is mostly Southern and it offers an unreconstructed fantasy of blonde femininity that I find jarring (admittedly, this is because I live in a downtown bubble of women in futch jorts and Mombasa bags).

I’m in Provincetown for what is apparently “Family Week” (the season is organized into semi-official theme weeks—Bear Week, Women’s Week, Leather Week, etc.). The place is awash in gay parents navigating a life transition: the plumped muscle daddy in tactical black workout gear with a Van Cleef bracelet dragging a pink girl’s scooter, the tense PMCs in matching stretch-chino shorts pushing IVF twins in a stroller.

I found myself on the beach yesterday (a Monday), staring into the cloudless sky and wondering if I might benefit from a little more structure in my life. I’m partial to the beach at Fort Tilden, entering the beach at the very last entry point from the concrete access path that runs parallel to the shore, and then trekking to the No Man’s Land as far west as you can go.

I wrote this piece for PIN-UP about the Met’s show of Gothic architectural drawings. Read the piece and check out the show (it closes this week, so see it ASAP). I was discussing books on tape with some friends on Friday and either Harley or Ryan insisted, gently, that I’d be best suited to NPR voice work. I’ve been in process about it because I do have an NPR quality, and I bristled momentarily then relaxed into its plain truth: I am kind of NPR.

I saw Disclosure Day last week: it’s a story about a conspiracy (and counter-conspiracy) to disclose the presence of Roswell-like aliens here on earth. To be clear—it is bad in a variety of ways: it’s predictably moralistic; there are good guys (Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor) and bad guys (Colin Firth, who maybe isn’t bad—despite his attempts at murder, because he’s kind of just going through it). O’Connor plays a boy who is good at math; Blunt is a girl, so she is good at feelings.

I miss working on Maiden Name menswear. That all kind of came about because dudes were wearing the pants anyway, SSENSE saw on IG, and they asked if we would sell them menswear. At the time, we really didn’t design any men’s, but my twink body could wear a funky tank top and an Emily trouser in size 10. That grew into a full men’s offering. It’s been long enough that I feel like I can look at menswear more as a consumer.

I was struck by a comment that Felix Burrichter (PIN-UP EIC) made on Adam Charlap-Hyman and Laura Kugel’s Handle with Care podcast; he said he was not particularly interested in possessing things. I liked that—this idea that possession is one relation of many between you and things, that there’s no necessary reason to pursue that path over others when the beautiful object comes into view. Why not just look? Admire, adore even, but why possess?

I saw a photo yesterday of Lindsey Graham between two shirtless UFC hunks (sadly it’s fake) and it made me sad not to be in Fire Island. It’s the first summer in some time I don’t have a trip to the Pines on the books. Psychosexually it’s a fraught place for me: I was reminded of an ethnographic paper I’d read in grad school about the Dalit (the “untouchables”) in Nepal and why they elected to be “dispossessed insiders” rather than, through conversion to Christianity, free outsiders.

I’ve been reading Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts and I just finished her essay on Ingrid Sischy, written in 1986 while Sischy was EIC of Artforum (she’d been appointed at 27 and, as she confesses to Malcolm, had never actually read the magazine before).

A disconcerting number of you emailed me about the Diane Keaton estate auctions at Bonhams this week. Duncan, my editor at Dwell, thought it could be a good story, but in looking through the catalog I was mostly struck by how ugly all of the furniture was.