Beach reads recommendations!

If you read nautical disasters and watch stories of corporate corruption on the beach.

Hi there friends. 

Look! A list of recommendations! Like i said in my previous post, I do love a good list of recommendations! Also, all the cool kids are doing it. I want to be a cool kid, too.

Honestly, the mixed bag that is the breakdown of gatekeeping leaves us with just a relentless firehose of input- I don’t know anyone who has managed to skillfully master the art of subtle curation. The options to constrict our media aperture seem to be just that- a constriction of intake, versus the ability to reliably turn to trusted culture farmers- harvesters of the ripe and the fertile, trained to leave the green on the vine.

I track my time on Instagram in an attempt to lessen passive acculturation. To save space for the unexpected and non-homogenized- to take back my taste for the unpolished and unmarketable. I tend to eschew critiques in legacy media like the good little skeptic that I am, but I do turn to my personal board of cultural directors by way of substack, podcasts and newsletters to harvest suggestions for where to sow my attention. Perhaps this makes me part of the breakdown of national institutional trust, perhaps not. Shrugging emoji.

So my first recommendation is to set your phone’s time limit to 20 min for social media intake. Yes, I realize that sounds so school marmmy, but i’ve been pleasantly surprised by how informative this small action can be- there are days when my time limit warning pops up as i’m getting ready to crack open my evening read, and there are days when it pops up before i eat my lunch. The earlier the time limit warning appears, the darker my mood- always. Information. 

That being said, this is not subtle curation. This is a blunt-force tool meant to halt doom-scrolling and general parasitic zombification. I don’t control what media cocktail  I consume in the 20 daily minutes I’m allowing myself. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Eye of Sauron that knows i’m limiting the commodification drip just adjusts the opioid levels in my unfiltered content intake to make sure i feel bad about myself, just like everyone else. 

Onto more inspiring recommendations! 

Our latest foray into really compelling television (wow there are some really bad shows out there, y’all- i’m talking to you, Palm Royale) was the 4 part docuseries on Stax records. I have a feeling this is one of those documentaries that has to gloss over a thousand complexities in order to build a narrative arc that’s capturable in under 4 hours of viewing (i mean i’m sure that’s always true)- but the series felt like a powerful introduction to an American Epic that I’d been largely unfamiliar with. 

I was left with at least a hundred questions, but not in an unsatisfying way- more due to the level of alchemical magic that seemingly transpired at that place, in that time- it just feels mythic in it’s magnitude and i feel certain there’s unmined gold in it’s untold stories.

I recently finished Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea- Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. I am physically unable to resist a nautical disaster epic, especially the ones that take place at a time when there was little to no information about large swaths of the planet. Although I was raised on the coast and strongly encouraged to learn to sail before i weighed enough to successfully right a capsized Laser sailboat, in general I am a tiny baby when it comes to the oceanic; I’m terrified of sea travel and all things sharkey and drowning-adjacent. The thought of setting sail into the vast aquatic unknowns is so entirely foreign to my landlubber sense of security that I devour journals and general discourse on those who normalize something that to me feels impossibly courageous.

I also couldn’t help but read the tale of colonial entitlement through the lens of Jungian individuation. I’m too unskillful in my still-unfolding understanding of this complex process to draw strong conclusions, (i’m beginning to find that strong conclusions might be a thing of my past in general) but i do feel like there is an interesting comparison to be made there, one I’m one hundred percent certain has been mulled on by much wiser minds than mine. If you know of these minds and their words, please pass them along. 

By the way, I’m turning off the monetization of this substack for the time being. As much as I’m persistently driven to find income-streams that are less back-breaking and brain-draining as is the case with most of our work- (which we do love, yes- but sometimes i don’t think it’s well understood how much heavy lifting is involved in both custom design work AND garment manufacturing- they can both feel positively sisyphean and startlingly underpaid compared to most scalable enterprises, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.) but i’ve come to realize that as of right now, while we are in an intensive rebuilding phase of the business, i’m unable to devote the time and energy to this newsletter as I’d like.

So for now, it will be free for all, and thank you so much if you’re one of the few who have been able to help financially chip in on this platform. My grand plan is to re-introduce a paywall once I feel like there is a plan in place to offer more than just random blathering and recommendations. We’d still like to craft some tutorials, and do some more interesting and specific content, but right now there isn’t the space or really the budget to do much of anything besides try to fill the coiffures. 

On that note, we are having a sale over on the website on all our prints- several of which are from the show we had at Prizer that birthed this whole substack escapade! 

Hope you can find some time today to stare into space today and listen to silent messages.