i’m reading Vows that have never been Vowed before

performative life performative wife / also, the Bleecker retail conspiracy, explained

I’m having an ant problem at home (no idea why, she says while biting into breakfast over her keyboard and spraying croissant everywhere). What I’ve learned from researching ant control methods is that you have to go into it with nothing short of a full military strategy. Like you have to set the bait out and watch as the scouts swarm (despite how gross this looks to the naked eye).

You have to let them do this, you cannot interfere, you cannot let the fear in your heart overcome your restraint. Then you wait. You must be patient. Soon, if you played your hand correctly, the queen will be dead. Or so Wirecutter promises.

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Un petit oiseau told me recently that getting your wedding into The New York Times Vows requires, at minimum, a 90-minute interview and a round of fact-checking, which makes this recent Vows wedding announcement even more bizarre to behold. While I’ve also heard that Vows loves a little “hardship element” in one’s love story, the extensive focus on the groom’s Adderall addiction, which apparently derailed the original wedding, is definitely………… a choice.

Is it a brave, vulnerable choice? Perhaps a somewhat punitive one? (One thinks of the typical one-sided Notes App mea culpas posted by many a cheating pro athlete or TikTokker, so often communicated with verbiage suggestive of We And Her Lawyer Agreed I Have To Post This). Personally I can’t imagine the worst period of my life used as a plot twist (at least not for free!!!) for what’s supposed to be a happy announcement, especially when the narrative material of the father’s complicated trip to cross the Iranian border is right there? But me, I’m impossible to please. I’m not out here at night railing Vows on my phone to help me sleep, after all…

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“If I were on the Chris Brown PR payroll, I would suggest he just cop to all of BROWN being AI, because if not, he’s got bigger problems,” writes Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre, and that’s honestly not even in the Top 3 Best Quips in his review of the musician’s never-ending comeback. I liked how this piece gives those of us who’ve checked out on CB for a long time a way to understand this phase of Brown’s career and the narrative machinery at work, especially in the context of all the general superstar biopic chatter that’s been in the air with the famously Jackson family-backed Michael.

I watched the latter recently (in what felt like a fair ethical trade-off) at a friend’s house who was streaming a pirated version of it at home. It wasn’t unentertaining; I found it spooky how compelled I was by both the predictable musical biopic razzle dazzle and also the unsubtle positioning of MJ as a guileless, ever-stunted child. (This is a small spoiler, but the scene of physical abuse depicted early on with the child actor Juliano Valdi as young Michael was honestly one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen on a screen? Did anyone else feel that way?) The play for pathos there felt literally and figuratively violent, and while this Pitchfork review reaffirmed my decision to continue not caring about Brown, it does seem important to try to figure out why things appeal the way they do.

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Curbed writer Anne Kadet (who also writes the charmingly provincial Café Anne newsletter) got to the bottom of why all those trendy internet brand storefronts seem to pop-up in packs — and turns out, it’s not so much due to a kind of grassroots Airspacey effect as it is notably because of one single NY-based “retail platform” called Leap that is responsible for 28 storefronts in four hotspots around the city, including the Bombas, Leset, Alohas, Frankies Bikinis, etc. of it all:

While a shopper wandering down the block might experience it as an eclectic mix of small brands, the boundaries between stores are, in fact, quite porous. Some Leap employees bounce between different brands up and down the street … And by pooling the sales data from all 11 Bleecker storefronts, Leap can help the brands decide what to sell. “We can actually say, ‘We know the Bleecker shopper buys a lot of extra smalls, they buy a lot of black, they buy a lot of athleisure,’” says Levy. The data also suggests new brands that would complement the existing mix. When Leap noticed Frankies Bikinis was doing well on Bleecker, it lured in another upscale swimwear brand, Australia’s Bond-Eye, installing it one door down from Frankies and creating what may be the start of a little swimwear district.

The piece also gets into a commercial broker who’s making the UES feel younger and adequately Reformationed, as well as a good old fashioned real estate company that’s making Williamsburg (complimenary) well, Williamsburgy (derogatory). Talk about that kicker, though.

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Madison Huizinga’s dispatch in her newsletter Cafe Hysteria about leisure as the dream job made me think about the appeal of Dua Lipa and Anthony Bourdain (speaking of biopics) as hyper-influencers in a more cohesive way:

The brand is about abundance - about being a student in life. Dua is the final realization of a European pop star - embodying truly equal parts work and play, eschewing contemporary it girl capitalist side ventures (i.e., a shoddily-made skincare/makeup brand) in favor of promoting cultural and literary fluency, not likely for any large monetary profit. It’s all very cool …

Dua Lipa’s endurance as not necessarily a pop singer, but a pop emblem, reminds me of the resurgence of Anthony Bourdain in mainstream zillennial culture. Whether it’s an image of him smoking a cigarette at a Parisian bistro, slurping noodles on the streets of Hanoi, or diving into the turquoise Med, Bourdain has become a similar symbol of informed, pleasure-forward living.

Something to think about as the ultimate season of leisure performance (normies call it “summer”) crashes down upon us…

(Also related: between performative leisure and performative intelligence, has relevance become synonymous with showmanship?)

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Finally, here’s a particularly fun story I got to help work on at Highsnobiety: we sent photographer Billal Taright and writer Hayley J. Clark into Donald Judd’s Spring Street studio to get an up-close look at the various accoutrement of the artist’s domestic life — and, as an extra touch, had Judd’s son Flavin give us the backstory on some of the objects, which we published as the captions.

To the surprise of no one, the man was exactingly intentional about his taste in furniture and art, but I was tickled to also get insight into what Donald Judd must have been like as a father. A choice sample: “These chairs are an example of what to do when given a design task: You need to buy chairs for your toddlers, but all the available options are made of garish plastic. What do you do? Get 19th century Thonet.” Oh, well of course!