I thought I’d scheduled a post for last Friday. Then, just now, it occurred to me: Wait, that shit kinda bombed… Turns out I never scheduled it.

Maybe it’ll bomb anyway :)

MELANOTAN 1

I’ve never been keen on my skin tone.

It started with Aladdin. My first crush. I wanted to marry Aladdin, but he was booed up with Princess Jasmine. Consequently, she became the earliest governing authority on female beauty in my malleable lil’ mind. Here’s the thing: she’s Persian. I lack the confidence of Rachel Dole-rizz-al, so “becoming Persian”—or any sort of Med/Eurasian, wtv—isn’t in the cards for me.

I do my time in the sun, but after a while it starts to feel like a part-time job—excruciatingly boring unless the majestic ocean lies before me. Sometimes I’ll trot my ass over to the spray-tan jawn, where I strip naked for the sweetiepie spraywizards while they wave the glowgun like a wand over my cold, naked body. And yeah, I’ve dabbled a bit in slathering on bronzer.

The issue with self-tanner and spray tans is that they come with a high risk of streaking, and I love wearing white. When I see that unmistakable terracotta sludge on someone’s clothes, I lose respect. Barely a step up from shitting themselves. Disgusting. Oh, you also can’t exfoliate, as it would erode the tan. So not only are these skanks sauntering around with Dorito silt all over they clothes, but they also got nasty strawberry legs. White bitches… 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Enter Les Melanotans.

Scientists hacked the biological mainframe and now you can shoot up to larp as tan. For like $30! And both your dignity and white threads remain pristine.

There’s Melanotan 1 and Melanotan 2. I’ve axed ChatGHB to summarize:

Melanotan 1 is basically a lab-made version of the signal that tells your skin to produce pigment, allowing you to get darker with far less sun. Its pharmaceutical form is FDA-approved to help people with a rare light-sensitivity disorder tolerate sunlight—though not for cosmetic tanning.

Melanotan 2 is the messier cousin: an injectable synthetic tanning signal that makes your skin produce more pigment but also presses unrelated bodily buttons, sometimes causing nausea, appetite loss, and extreme horniness. It isn’t FDA-approved.

I opted for 1 because my research (skimming Reddit threads) turned up too many Melanotan 2-associated cases of nausea. Also, a handful of M2 guys reported being afflicted with all-day, intractable boners. Crazy.

“Melanotan” is a bit of a misleading name. I thought it was hooking up some “u get melanin without the tan” type. Nah—you do need to tan, but barely :) I’ve spent about 20 minutes in the sun a few times a week, and I look like I spent August on La Isla Bonita.

One of the only good things in my life is my enviably svelte figure. This blessing makes it tough to post a pic, as the most probative tan lines tend to be around bobs and vagene. Showcasing them on a platform as venerable as Substack would make too many ppl horny. It just wouldn’t be appropriate :-/

Btw, check out these stunning cloud pix I wabisabi’d while trying to check the time. My phone brightness was too low in the beaming sunlight, I guess I’d opened the camera and with each click of the volume button came these stunners.

“EDIT THIS PHOTO IN THE STYLE OF (X)”

Saw this fucking freak the other day. Seems like he was catching bugs?? Why would you want to catch bugs?????

Had to flick up. Wondered what it’d look like if Juergen Teller had taken the photos, so I asked ChatGHB to show me. Looks cool:

STEAK & CAMPARI SPRITZ

Not sure why mfs get snooty about top sirloin. Wallet-friendly. Tastes great. It’s become my go-to dinner.

Observe how thoroughly I’ve mastered this:

JENI’S “MAPLE SOAKED PANCAKES” FLAVOR

I’ve got a lot in common with Joe Biden—namely, a penchant for Jeni’s ice cream. My favorite flavor is a frozen, creamy incarnation of a universally beloved breakfast dish: Maple Soaked Pancakes.

I had some for breakfast. Yeah, breakfast. Fuck you.

While scranning, I was reminded of a roommate I had when I was 18: a 6’6” Gen X-er named Scott. My age-appropriate friends and I were obsessed with him. We thought he was the baddest mf on earth. In hindsight, it wasn’t starry-eyed youthful mythmaking: Scott was—is—legendary.

Sometimes Scott would play video games and talk shit into the headset, as guys do. Once, while eviscerating what was presumably a teen boy, he said “You have a bedtime. You listen to your mom. You have homework. I fuck hot girls. I do whatever the fuck I want. I eat ice cream for breakfast. You are a BITCH!” (He did pull hot chicks.)

One day, my friends and I heard some particularly dope shit coming from his room. We wandered in on some younger sibling whaaat’s thiiiiis, it’s so cooooool shit to ask about the band: Nitzer Ebb. He showed us the video for “Fun to be Had,” which remains a favorite of mine to this day :))) At some point, I immaturely cracked a joke about a box of Magnum condoms on the desk. Without looking away from the screen, he flatly said, “Yes, Madeline. One day, when you have your own big dick, you’ll understand.”

Scott would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, to his Jersey homeland. The Four Loko ban had left a market vacuum and he was eager to swoop in. I think his dad was a chemist? or some shit? and thus Scott had access to a proper lab and an arsenal of industrial-grade ingredients. He’d return to the city with samples, buzzing about new flavor profiles and the prospect of formulating the next Great American Blackout Beverage.

He also mugged a mugger. Some teen gang hopeful accosted him but Scott flipped the script—pinned the kid flat on his back and barked, “NO! You give me all your money!”

Man. He was the coolest.

Safety ✌️

I cherished the Flag Abundance, more than the soccer even. I’ve always loved flags, globes, maps—artifacts that depicted the vastness of the world around me.

Love a lil’ star motif. Love a lil’ agnès b-looking ass flag.

Los Angeles Apparel was threading up all sorts of last minute flag socks. I found it in poor taste that they’d made pairs for nearly every country except the Congo. Pourquoi pas? C’est un drapeau sympa, non?

Copped both calf and over-the-knee Frenchies as a way to pay homage to my ethnic heritage.

Anyway. For you my friend, I share some of my favorite flags. Thank you.

AMANGELDY IMANOV REVOLUTIONARY FLAG

It’s sooo annoying to kick off with an esoteric flag I knowww but it’s not my fault the mf’s name starts with an “A” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Who the mf? Kazakh revolutionary leader Amangeldy Imanov. Fed up with Russian imperial rule, he and the lads rose up in the 1916 Central Asian revolt.

This is the flag they carried.

BRAZIL

What a feat. Nested geometric forms—angular, orbital. Chromatic contrast and central symmetry. Symbolism both dense and minimal.

It evokes the same quiet warmth as the cover of Brian Eno’s Another Green World.

CALIFORNIA

It doesn’t matter that the literal grass has withered or that the proverbial star has dimmed—this is indisputably the hardest flag of any state in the Union.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

One of my absolute favorites. The deep navy and the red—dark, almost lacquered—is pure class.

If I was Dominican I’d plaster this everywhere, too.

EAST TURKESTAN

In northwestern China lies a region with a deeply contested name. The PRC officially calls it Xinjiang, but natives to the region ain’t w that shit, son. To them, it’s East Turkestan.

Who are these natives? The Uyghurs.

FRANCE

Three noble ideals. The Irrefutable #1.

GADSDEN

You live in fear of projecting even the slightest right-wing sympathies. The political implications of this flag are too loaded, posing too great a risk of social ostracism. Peabrain shit.

This bad boy was mocked up in 1775 to represent America’s unifying mission and message; it symbolized our resistance against British rule. It’s non-partisan. Don’t indulge it as problematic~. In doing so, you’re letting the maaaan tread on you, duuude. Don’t do that!

HONG KONG

Fidget spinner-looking ass flower. I mean that nicely.

ISLE OF MAN

Three armored legs fleeing forever in a frantic circle? Reminds me of me.

You can’t escape fate.

JAPAN

Kanso is the Japanese principle of simplicity: remove what’s unnecessary and allow that which remains to carry the weight.

Keep only what serves a purpose or brings genuine meaning.

And that they did.

KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

Almost as goated as Le Tricolore—it’s the knife-wielding schizophrenic guy of flags. The swaggy type of scary.

LEBANON

It gives Pine Tree flag without any murky political implications.

MEXICO

This is what that bullshit eagle on American passports should look like. Ours sucks—lightly holding wheat(???) in its talons. Tf. It should be violently gripping some spooky shit. And it needs to look pissed off, unhinged, and totally fucking cuckoo crazy.

The Mexican eagle is perfect. Magnificently and violently ripping apart whatever dares enter his grasp. He’s loco. He’s devouring that awful snake. Mere seconds away from grinding its limp, mangled body into the cactus spines.

Commands reverence.

NEPAL

Crushed it. This design is more impressive than climbing Mount Everest, tbh.

OCCITANIA

The cross of Toulouse on this colorway makes it look like the Chinese flag got pissed off. Waving its hands everywhere, yelling and shit. AAAGHHH!!

PANAMA

All that shit I said about France and the DR flags, but this time with stars!

I can hear Diamond Dave just by looking at it.

QUEBEC CITY

The province of Quebec has a nice flag, sure. But I love a maritime motif more than I do a fleur-de-lis.

RWANDA

Cheerful! Not gonna let the past drag u down. Onward and upward! Okay!!

SOUTH KOREA

Like Brazil, an absolute feat. Forgive me, as my mind swells with language from my art school education: remarkable composition—kinetic and gestural while remaining balanced; tense, yet playful. Not for nothing… kinda an egg on Japan’s face.

TEXAS

It’s like a shortbus version of the American flag, which is adorable.

URUGUAY (1828-1830)

Argentina told them fuck off baby blue is our thing. Uruguay was like wtv. They barely switched it up. Gave the current flag sum thicc stripes, made ‘em royal blue, and called it a day.

Speaking of the Argentinian flag: One the all time flags, man. That was my “A” go-to, but Argentina gets plenty of attention at any given moment. Amangeldy Imanov doesn’t. Barely anyone’s talking about Amangeldy Imanov. It’s like people don’t even care. He needs exposure.

VIETNAM

Gonna say it again: this agnès b-looking ass flag.

WYOMING

Bet you thought I’d drop Wales. I rock w the dragon but also like… why he’s kinda tweaking.... :/

Buffalo seem cozy.

XANGRI-LÁ

Xangri-waaaa?

On the south end of the Jersey shore sits a magnificent beach town called Avalon. Aptly named for the legendary idyllic island in Arthurian mythology, Avalon is something of a quiet paradise. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there. I miss it.

Anyway.

On Brazil’s southern coast lies the small municipality of Xangri-lá, a popular beach destination whose name derives from the fictional Himalayan paradise of Shangri-La, adapted to Portuguese spelling.

With its stars, swirly lines, and happy sun, this flag stuns.

YELLOW DRAGON FLAG

One of my favorite historical flags is the Qing dynasty’s Yellow Dragon Flag, used from 1862 to 1912. Its bold yellow background and blue dragon make it one of the most distinctive and memorable flags in Chinese history.

It’s giving Bhutan. But the simple fact of the matter is that Bhutan doesn’t beat Brazil.

ZAMBIA

Bragging about their lush green landscapes. And that cunty eagle omg.

Safety ✌️

No sé. I don’t know. But my money’s on Argentina.

Sports betting is suddenly everywhere: inside every broadcast, podcast, group chat, guy’s phone, girl’s phone, billboard, subway ad, dream, nightmare. What was once a clandestine iykyk-style club is now a $167 billion-a-year national pastime. More than a quarter of Americans maintain an active online betting account.

I’ve noticed quite the uptick of chicks expressing a curiosity to dabble. As a former tomboy and longtime patron to the Art of Sport, I often get asked what moves to make, what opinion to have, what the fuck is going on.

Here’s the thing: I don’t have strategical or technical prowess. I don’t care about stats. I just vibe off Love and intuition and stuff :)

With that being said, here’s a lil’ guide to get u started:

WHAT PLATFORM SHOULD I USE?

Kalshi takes away the need to understand traditional betting odds. It shows everything as a simple percentage and tells you what you’ll pay and potentially win.

Everything else is too complicated, especially for a girl with such a tender, graceful disposition such as yourself 🫶👸🫶

HOW MUCH SHOULD I BET?

Never bet more than you can lose, bitch! That’s ur future failhusband’s job. Just be chill about it.

Choose a number that feels right. Recently, I bet $47 on Norway against Brazil. Why? +47 is the calling code for Norway.

LOW-TO-MID LEVEL DOLLAR AMOUNT INSPIRATION

• $1.23 Jack shit. An amuse-bouche.

• $7.77 cuz 7 is a lucky number

• $23.24 Michael Jordan was #23 and Kobe Bryant was #24.

• $69 Like sex! Lol.

MAKE YOUR BIRTHDAY INTO CAPITAL

For example, a July 19 birthday can be:

• $7.19 if you’re dabbling

• $71.90 if you’re feeling cunty

• $719 if you got it crazy like that

You can also use:

• Jersey numbers

• Area codes

• Bf’s bdays (what I use as my locker code at the gym)

• Lucky numbers

It’s really as you wish.

EMOTIONAL HEDGING

Emotional hedging is essentially betting against your guy/team.

If they lose, you’ll be soooo sad but at least you got some coin.

Conversely, if they win, you lose money. But you deserve that cuz you did something spiritually sick. Your shit attitude had you behaving badly.

WHAT’S + / — MEAN?

Those are symbols used to represent odds. But like I said above, odds aren’t for you 🫶Remember babe? Ur going off vibesss 🐾 💋

PARLAYS / “COMBOS”

A parlay combines several of your bets into one. The catch? Everything’s gotta win. Even one fuckup and the whole thing’s toast.

Kalshi’s version of a parlay is called a “combo.” With a combo, you bundle several predictions into one bet and every single one has to be correct for you to win. Kalshi makes “combos”/parlays much easier than a trad sportsbook by directly showing you the price and potential return rather than requiring you to decipher, calculate, and understand the usual intricate complexity of parlay odds.

Parlays are:

• Fun

• Dramatic

• Great for “the bit”

RULE: The more little legs you add, the more likely you’re getting fucked. Maybe you like that, though ;-)

Two selections? Cute. Nine selections? Lol dumbass.

KNOW WHEN TO LEAVE THE PARTY

You generally have two choices:

💰 HOLD 🙅

To hold is to keep your bet untouched until the game is over. No tinkering. It’s more romantic to remain loyal to your original vision 🔮 🧘

👋 SELL EARLY ✌️💸

Maybe u wanna cash yo shit out while the game/match is still going. It’s p*ssy behavior but hey—sometimes it be like that.

Kalshi will offer you the choice to automatically sell after your position reaches a certain profitable price, the term you want is usually “take profit / auto-sell.”

For example: You buy something at 50¢ and tell the app to sell it automatically if it reaches 75¢. You lock in the gain instead of remaining in the mix, refreshing, stressed.

However, a stop-loss does the opposite: it sells after the price falls to a level you selected as ur gtfo price, thus limiting how much more you’d lose.

“IDGI……”

• Take-profit: Bounce once u got what you came for

• Stop-loss: Split before u embarrass/degrade urself

• Limit sell: “I’m not gonna dip til someone pays me (x) amount”

• Market sell: “I hate it here get me the FUCK out idgaf what it costs”

  ---

🏃🏻‍♀️‍➡️ 💸 DO NOT CHASE 🏃🏻‍♀️📉

If you keep losing, yet you continue to dive in again and again, then you’re technically addicted to losing. Which means you’re addicted to being a loser.

On this blog, we hate losers (freaks, too.) If you suck at sports betting, then hey—you suck at sports betting. And that’s okay. There’s probably some other bullshit you’re good at.

In Abel Ferrara’s 1992 classic, Bad Lieutenant, the titular character drives through the city, crossfaded as fuhh, as he listens to the radio broadcast of a Mets game that he’s gone way too deep on. When his wager gets fuxxxxxd, he explodes into a cacophony of rage, shrieking “COCKSUCKER!” like a banshee as he yanks out his POLICE-ISSUED gun and proceeds to shoot the car radio. Type of thing that’s gotta feel amazing when you’re all pissed off, absolutely coked to the gills. G-ddamn.

Anyway, he then turns on his siren and starts ripping through traffic, toward nothing really. While it’s a great film, I don’t really see this as a viable lifestyle for you, babe:

🪏 SCALPING 🎰

You didn’t listen to me? You kept chasing? Oops! Try scalping.

Scalping is basically making quick profits off small price differences. In stocks and crypto, scalping is rapidly buying and selling for tiny gains.

In sports betting, it generally means placing opposing bets at different odds to lock in a small profit. But since you fucked it up so bad, you needn’t worry about scalping in that realm.

It ain’t sports but what you could do is make bets on the hourly price-of-Bitcoin, conveniently available on Kalshi. It’s practically dipshit proof. Make little $1-5 bets ‘til you get your money up. It’s gonna take awhile, so be patient.

Keep trading fees in mind, bc repeatedly entering and exiting positions can eat away at the tiny crumbs you’re collecting. 10 cents here, 30 cents there.

And sis, if you can’t do that… you’re NGMI.

🤠 AND IT KEEPS COMING…. 🤠

I could wax poetic fer fuckin’ days about the endless beauty of sports. I have! Part of their magic is the constant motion: somewhere, a game is always going, a crowd is always rising and another galvanizing moment is waiting to unfold.

In roughly a month, the US Open will take center stage. Five weeks later, as basketball and hockey season begin, baseball will come to a close with the World Series. All of the sudden it’s Super Bowl Sunday. In between all that, there’s some UFC MMA W/E fights with brutes beating the freaking crap out of each other. And before we’ve had time to catch our breath, it’ll be the NBA playoffs all over again—LGK!!!!!

My point is that there’s always an 💖 opportunity 💖 to GAMBLE!!!! Isn’t that exciting!!!?

Safety ✌️

The sixteen European teams that qualified for the World Cup are a parade of nations with wildly incompatible histories, aesthetics, and self-mythologies. United only by a shared vision of America as a crude dystopia, they expected to enter a hellscape of gun-toting fatasses plagued by political psychosis. Instead, they’ve stepped into an oasis of friendly faces: welcoming, warm, and eager to host. They marvel with excitement over our prosperity, our kindness, and the general spectacle.

It’s impossible to escape the buzz about how great World Cup tourism has been for “American PR.” Reputable news outlets and social media are flooded with examples of foreigners marveling at suburban sprawl, Slurpees, and shooting ranges. Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops have become destinations. Ranch dressing has remixed taste palettes and free refills have made a mockery of European discipline. Like children, they are entranced by soda, scale, and sauce.

What nobody explicitly points out is that the unifying thread of this enthusiasm is not “authenticity” or Americana: It’s trashiness. The joys of trashy America that have always been a private pleasure to hicklibs and coastal elites have captured the hearts of our similarly snobby European friends. It’s easy to see why low-impulse-control nations—the philandering French and blotto-drunk Britons—would quickly surrender to slop, but the most intriguing embrace comes from a country culturally engineered against vulgarity: Norway.

JEG ER IKKE NORSK

Like many Americans, I grew up living an ancestral lie.

I always understood myself to be a quarter Norwegian. I could explain why I thought that—and who was actually what percentage—but rambling accounts of one’s ethnic fractions are almost always boring. Mine is no exception. (On a similar note: I think more people should stop mentioning distant aristocratic ancestry cuz nobody gaf and it makes you sound like a broke loser.)

Imagine my surprise when 23andMe hit me with this shit:

I wish 23andMe had tea analysis. Less “genetic marker: FCKMY69ASSFK68”, more “How many generations ago was your most recent lying-ass hoe ancestor?” I don’t care about genetic markers cuz bitch I ain’t no nerd. I wanna know who chote, who got chote on, the lies, the scandal, shit like that. Unfortunately, that kind of data is largely irretrievable and/or subjective—but still, I yearn.

Anyway. Ikke norsk. Not Norwegian. But I’ve been to Norway a handful of times. I’ve seen the deep south and the great north—chances are you don’t know anyone who’s been farther north than I have. I’ve been so fucking far north, it’s unbelievable.

I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to norskfolx—I’ve even befriended some—and there’s something sweet albeit strange about seeing them en masse, happy as clams, being loud, showy and expressive. We’re talking about a place where the Gen Z Stare is the norm.

EXTROVERT TOURISM

Scandinavians are born with a psychic leash of emotional minimalism, tethered to a house of law and order. They love rules so much, in fact, that Janteloven—a satirical set of fictional commandments—became a kind of Scandinavian bushido.

Janteloven, or the Law of Jante, comes from a 1933 novel by Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose. The following laws represent the longstanding “stay humble and keep your head down” attitude prevalent in Scandinavian culture:

1. You’re not to think you are anything special.

2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.

3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.

4. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.

5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.

6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.

7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.

8. You’re not to laugh at us.

9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.

10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.

They have a collective suspicion of those who are too proud, too ambitious, too expressive, too theatrical, too thirsty, just doing toooooooo much. An omnipresent consciousness that becoming famous is mad embarrassing, unless it accidentally happens through raw talent.

Norwegians don’t feel as if they’re apart of the world stage. And they’re okay with that. But there is the natural human instinct to be recognized in some capacity, and that sneaks out. For example, they’ll tell you they’re better than Swedes.

In America, our doctrine is delusion.

We live the inverse of Janteloven. We’re made to believe that everyone is special and anyone can become famous. This social malady isn’t unique to the overconfident kids spawned through snowflake parenting. Maybe your parents were sensible people who raised you to have manners and be chill. Or maybe your parents told you, “you ain’t shit.” Maybe you don’t even have parents! It doesn’t matter!

The messaging of American Individuality is pervasive, and it starts early. It seeps through in the motivational posters, participation trophies, gold stars, school assemblies, Pixar cartoons, blah blah blah. Affirmation is inescapable. It hangs on soft fabric banners behind unremarkable children “starring” in dogshit productions of The Three Little Pigs:

“Everybody is Somebody.”

My generous interpretation is that it’s harmless—intended simply to convey a general sense of support and warmth, and perhaps also to offer reassurance to downtrodden children. Either way, the intended message was: U matter. Ur special. Ur not like ANYONE else! Except everyone else is also not like everyone else, which creates a logistical problem nobody fuckin’ cared to solve.

What makes this insidious is its lack of balance. America weaponizes encouragement. There is a profound difference between telling a kid they have dignity and telling them they’re exceptional.

Without balance, praise becomes atmospheric—so constant, so unquestioned, that it begins to feel like fact. Encouragement becomes prophecy which becomes expectation which becomes entitlement and before you know it, you have a nation of growns clinging to the mantra of I am owed this. It’s a nasty conviction, believing one is owed recognition, riches, comfort—not because it was earned, but because merely wanting something means it should be theirs.

But to a Norwegian, there must be something almost narcotic about entering a culture that tells you the exact opposite: u the shit and u run this bitch! Sloppy American delusion can look like liberation when you’ve spent your life being told to keep your head down.

THE DANCE OF LIFE

It’s interesting to me: the type of foreigner who comes to America and, once presented with “freedom”—American style—doesn’t gravitate toward the elevated parts of our culture, but rather for the things we’re ashamed to love: trashy shit that we’d never openly embrace, even though it’s imbued with the very freedom we both claim to cherish and pretend to have outgrown.

Surely these virtuous Scandinavians—a people untouched by excess and conspicuous consumption—would be above such lowbrow shenanigans. These good social democrats are the apotheosis of an enlightened European citizen. To the eggheads on the Upper West Side and Park Slope, they’re the pinnacle of refinement: tasteful, egalitarian, even-keeled. They recycle! They compost! (I first “composted” in Norway btw) They trust their public institutions!

But nah. Turn them loose in the United States and a mischievous appetite for rascal antics quickly develops. They’re not just dabbling in things they wouldn’t be “allowed” to do at home— they like doing this stuff. The spirit of Latarian Milton flows through them as they realize to themselves, perhaps in other words: I wanna do hoodrat stuff with my friends.

Take, for example, pretending that they’re Vikings. “Viking Row”—a mass pantomime of fans sat in a longship, rowing the air, and chanting—is easily what put this Norwegian fanbase on the board. A video of the dazzling ritual unfolding on a Boston escalator went viral, and it’s been all eyes on the Norskis ever since.

When folx back home caught wind that their countrymen dared to goof off, they called a symposium to discuss The V.Q.: The Viking Question. Was it too macho? Too nationalistic? Was it fash-coded? Lowkey, was it giving Nazi?

Mímir Kristjánsson, a left-wing MP, went on center-left podcaster Adam Friedland’s World Cup pod to offer some perspective on the sitch and wave off the implications. He said something to the effect of, “the Norse past does not belong to Nazis, and we needn’t shy away from what is ours.” The way I heard it was, “We shouldn’t have to treat our mythology like some radioactive shit just cuz of Stormfront or wtv.”

With each thrilling win, Viking Row continues to be a delightful fixture. They got so freaky with it that they sat their white asses down on the floor of the fuckin’ train to figuratively splash around. Up in those piss tunnels like a damn fjord smh. Yuck!

My absolute favorite took place at Citi Field. The Mets were on their typical bullshit (sucking bad) when Dansby Swanson of the Chicago Cubs hit a three-run jack straight into the bleachers. Not a great look for the hometown team. In almost no situation would that be met with local cheer. And yet, there sat the Norwegians: unbothered, moisturized, happy, in their lane, and rowing away.

Later on, Swanson hit a grand slam. Utter devastation to the Mets. All smiles from the Norskis. I’m unsure how to say this, but their blissful ignorance and free-spirited vibing kept making me think of this classic piece of media.

SINKING, SOAKING

Although the Norwegian idea of “acting up” is usually constrained, they can pop off.

Since alcohol is prohibitively expensive in Norway, they’re avid pre-gamers. The whole thing feels distinctly reminiscent of suburban American youth: I remember walking to clubs and feeling like we weren’t in a city at all—down grassy hills or along tree-lined roads, houses barely visible, as though we were coming or going from a high school party in Westchester.

The only truly obnoxious thing I ever witnessed there was “sinking.” It began as a Swedish nightlife trend and is essentially just buying two bottles of champagne and paying the bartender to pour one directly down the sink. I’ve heard it dismissed as fake news, the way Mormon soaking is often waved away as an urban legend. But it’s real. I saw it at Sollihagen!

THE SAGA CONTINUES…

There’s a chance the party will end tomorrow, as Norway are set to take on England. I hope they massacre them, for old times’ sake.

But if the Lions tear through the longship and send the Norskis packing, may they return home with a spring in their step, feeling a lil’ funkier than when they arrived.

Whatever happens, it’s been nice watching them live out some of Lana Del Rey’s wisest words: be young, be dope, be proud—like an American.

Safety ✌️

GATE 51

Amongst the neon churn of Las Vegas, in plain view of an airport full of people flying to and from bachelor weekends and trade shows, sits a small fleet of nondescript white Boeing 737s. Adorned only with a simple red stripe, these planes make roughly twenty departures a day into the Nevada desert’s most fevered corners of the Infowars imagination.

Welcome to the world of Janet Airlines. Area 51 Air. The Black-Budget Jitney. Officially, it is a “classified Department of the Air Force passenger fleet moving military personnel, civilian employees, and contractors to Special Access Program facilities,” which is a federal way of saying: we’re doing weird shit in the desert, and yes, it requires a shuttle service.

The fleet includes Boeing 737-600s bought from Air China, which is its own dumb geopolitical footnote: used jets from the state-owned airline of America’s greatest economic rival, reborn as classified desert buses for private defense contractors.

Janet operates out of an underground hangar, allegedly accessed through a trap door in the nearby Luxor Hotel. It’s reminiscent of that wall on the train platform in Harry Potter — the one tha ganggg casually sprints through cuz it’s the portal to their School of Magical Fuckery.

Just kidding. It’s based out of a terminal on the airport’s west side, with unsexy amenities like a secure-access parking lot and windowless waiting areas. From there, our casually dressed, clearance-clad friends from Raytheon and Northrop jet outta Fabulous Las Vegas on over to the office, where I assume they love the alien and set off bombs all day. Funky shit.

A few years ago, I saw a Janet flight attendant job listing. Naturally, it required active Top Secret clearance, which isn’t the type of thing flight attendants usually have. Not sure how the whole thing panned out, but it’s not my problem.

Anyway. If you ever find yourself at Harry Reid International, peering through the looking glass and you catch a glimpse of the spooky metal—stay vigilant. You may immediately begin to feel like a Targeted Individual. That’s because you are. You need to start doing your own research. Now. They’re lying to you, dude. You saw what you saw.

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New York isn’t just watching basketball; it’s consecrating it. Cheer has evolved into worship, and the fervor has become so contagious it’s almost proselytizing. This has, understandably, produced a minor schism within The Church between two kinds of OG heads— the “I liked them before they were on a major label FUK U!!!!” purists, who regard the bandwagon goons as spiritual contaminants, and the “fuck it, we recruit” evangelists, whose mission is stated in said attitude.

Personally, I take provincial allegiance extremely seriously. I can’t even bring myself to wear a pair of red socks. One doesn’t need to have watched every regular season game to understand the religious charge of a city entering a finals trance, or the ancient drama of choosing a side and losing yourself on its behalf. A championship run is civic romance in its purest form— loud, tribal, sentimental, chaotic, embarrassing, and beautiful. And not for nothing… kinda erotic.

There’s a reason they call Madison Square Garden “the Mecca.” Many of us have made our Umrah— that is to say, gone to regular-season or early playoff games— but the Finals???? The Finals are Hajj-coded, baby.

Sadly, not everyone can afford the obscene Stubhub-priced pilgrimage to Mecca, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from worshipping. Bars, secret spaces, and games projected on the sides of buildings have become annexes of the same church. The Garden may be the altar, but the faith has spilled into the streets.

If my cross-religious references are making you think I’m a total dipshit, hear me out: One of the most mesmerizing things about a championship run is that it briefly dissolves the palpable antagonism and petty boundaries people may otherwise feel toward one another. Political, socioeconomic, racial, generational, religious differences— all of these soften in the glow of a shared local treasure. For a few delirious weeks, the core tenets become unity, harmony, devotion, and a shared dream. Which, btw, is spiritually female behavior.

My go-to game fit is a cashmere Prada sweater. I believe it’s from F/W ‘19. Anyway, I became convinced I needed it “for Knicks games.” I was fixated, and finally one night, with the courage of Ambien, I was able to smash buy. And Allahu Akbar for that!

It skews more indigo than royal blue but the orange ribbed neck, cuffs, and hem make my loyalty unmistakable. Since regular season games run from fall through early spring, cashmere is usually suitable. But in this heat? In this humidity? I’ve just been color coordinating with socks, ribbons, shit like that. I’ve got a couple rags shot from the t-shirt gun, but the cuts on those ain’t cute…

I asked Grok to generate a Dominican flag-themed KAT jersey and the result made me gasp. If it existed, that’s what I’d be rocking. I’ll pay any price.

What happened during Game 4 on Wednesday was special — not just because the Knicks won, but because they won in the most spiritually manipulative way possible. They were fuckin’ dead. Down 29, at home, for the second game in a row. And then, somehow, possession by possession, clawed their way back in— just as they had in Game 1 against the Cavs.

OG Anunoby turned into a defensive angel, an instrument of G-d, with 1.2 seconds left, tipping Jalen Brunson’s miss in. And as the Garden erupted in something of rapture, Stephon Castle sealed the win with the most fuckass fumble I’ve ever seen.

Within my extended social circle, many of the newgoons are chicks from California, so I’m not sure why anyone expected them to pull up with firm principles. There was one in particular I saw the other night: fit so crisp and off-the-rack, so freshly baptized she didn’t even recognize Bloomberg. Not even that young, either. Anyway, her dad has DNC fundraisers at their $75M Beverly Hills mansion. This alone would make her a mark but honestly? Who gives a shit. She’s a nice girl. It’s funny. She’s having fun. We love all our recruits, folx.

I’m interested in the emotional architecture of fandom: how a jersey, a city, an athlete, or a team can become a costume that allows one to borrow another kind of energy. Sports, at their best, are a form of woo-woo. They’ve got ritual, devotion, talismans, grudges, destiny, and the belief that if you put on the right thing, watch the right person, or give yourself to the right run, some of its greatness might briefly pass through you.

This Finals run has encouraged leaning into romance and mass hysteria to a place that otherwise pretends to be too cool and smart for allat. It’s turned the city into a choir, our Knicks into mythic vessels, and put us ordinary schmucks under a civic spell— we’re all just borrowing power from the same dream ~*~

Safety ✌️

AGE GAP

BONDAGE

CHEATING

DOMINATION

EAGER

FREAKY

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I’ve been watching the French Open. Aside from the whole being from Tyrol thing, Jannik Sinner got me thinking about Italianx excellence.

Btw, HBO (Max? HBO Max??) is covering the tournament. If u even care. If you don’t, there’s probably something going on with you. Are you stressed? You gotta relax. You probably just need to optimize the background ambiance of your day-to-day. Tennis sounds are soothing. Use your ex’s parents’ HBO login. Just put on the fucking French Open, man! Feels good.

“AUSTRALIA” MANGO

If you’re unfamiliar with Mango, he was Peter Gabriel for Italians.

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Sans-serif brands tend to blur together, banal and forgettable. Spirit avoided this trap through the art of scandal. Like American Apparel and Glossier, it was able to transcend from mere brand into genre. Part of the collective fascination was that Spirit knew exactly what it was. It stood firm in its own informal mission statement: “You’ll get there, probably. In the meantime, fuck you.” It was, frankly, punk rock.

I loved the shenanigans. I was something of a fan.

Full disclosure: I’ve never flown Spirit. For most of my life, I’ve flown Delta Air Lines almost exclusively. The times I haven’t were typically due to a lack of direct routes, or because I was on a partner airline.

My nearest and dearest can personally attest to my enthusiasm. I have experienced every Medallion. I have made a million memories through a million miles. My loyalty was always honored and rewarded. It never felt transactional, anonymous, or unpleasant. I wasn’t a cog in the wheel; I was one of the wives.

But in typical marital fashion, the passion has dwindled. This might come as a surprise to those who knew us as a couple—Delta and me—but I’ve felt it quietly for years. By now, my love has been ground down to nearly nothing.

Spirit’s demise has helped me come to terms with the loss I’ve really been mourning: the spirit of Delta.

I want to squash any potential speculation that I’m an autist with an airplane fixation.

I come from a family of aviators and I love flying business class. That’s it. My interest is not in equipment, mechanics, “Mach” whatever, or really anything technical at all. I could not credibly explain how most of it works.

You might interpret the world of commercial aviation like something directed by David Fincher— a journey of contemptuous characters and unending misery— but I don’t. My love of flight is cerebral and sentimental. It evokes, for me, the same existentialism of a Terence Malick film: romantically melancholic, wistful, dreamy.

Between the callous disregard for our dignity and arbitrarily priced fares (transpacific flights in Delta One have regularly been going for $9-12k lately), Delta has been faltering in popularity with its Day Ones for awhile.

But I don’t really wanna talk about SkyMiles, or MQD witchcraft, or how the AmEx partnership has been ruinous for Sky Clubs, even as the renovations themselves have looked good. It bores me at this point, and those more logistically qualified to report on it already have.

I wanna get sentimental. It’s hard to resist the sunken cost fallacy when I think about Delta. The times we’ve had. The rituals. The respect. I’ve made mileage runs to protect status and for the last few years I’ve even been bullied into meeting the new spend minimums. It seemed worth it, especially for international and partner-airline travel. European airports relish in a lack of urgency. Lines (“queues” for my friends in the Commonwealth) run at too leisurely of pace, so I always felt calm knowing that my jaunt through security was one of priority. Access to partner lounges, such as the Virgin Clubhouse at LHR, kept me safely coddled in the reality distortion field.

While I still get upgrades, the oversaturation of SkyMiles members has made them increasingly rare. It’s vulgar to be sidelined for loreless newjacks. It’s unfair Delta won’t even carve out a small mercy quota for we old heads to stay (bene)fitted.

The Johnny-come-latelys are POSERS. All they did was get an AmEx Platinum and make a bunch of money at their stupid bootlicking jobs!!!! Is it soooo unreasonable to expect some reward for unwavering loyalty to a horseshit brand without having to spend FIVE FIGURES in exchange for LOW-TIER status????

Pipe dream. Fat chance. Harsh realm.

Pre-flight in tha club is its own little sacrament. Getting drunk. Goofing off. Scope the scene, loop around. Book a shower to freshen up and take ass pics in the mirror. If you’re lucky, the bathroom attendants might have that “I’m on pills” look in their eye and u can sneak ur bf/gf in to get on a more lascivious tip ;)

I love being at an airport and/or on an airplane with people I know. Friends and fam are a given but it’s also fun when fellow souls on board are people you may know casually, professionally, or simply just because they’re famous. There’s a special unity, a temporary oneness felt by both shared altitude and destination. The cabin becomes a commune. Get in bitch, we’re going to the same place.

A few years ago, Jim Jarmusch and I were on the same flight. We were alone in the jet bridge with a gate agent for a couple minutes. It felt like forever and I thought of 20 different ways I could blurt out that we share a birthday. Nevertheless, I stayed mum.

After boarding, I clocked Sydney Sweeney up in the cabin too. She had ‘em covered up though :(

A LETTER TO MYSELF

Breaking up is hard to do. You are a slave to Delta— especially Delta One— but I need to tell you something difficult and liberating: you do not have to die in this relationship. You can leave. There is hope. There is light. There are other suitors and their names are United Polaris and JetBlue Mint.

Will you love them as much? Probably not. They haven’t built the vast emotional and literal architecture Delta built for you: the regular lounges, the One lounges, the illusion of safety, the romance of being recognized by your favorite corporate entity. But new memories can be built. New rituals can harden into tradition. New aircraft layout can become familiar. New lie-flat seats can hold you in the dark and kiss u.

Maybe you don’t even have to break up with Delta. Maybe u can just cheat sometimes.

Think of Erika Jayne, forced to confront the devastating reality that Tom Girardi’s Pasadena mansion was no longer her home. She’d had it all: the chapel, the pool, the glam room, the rich old man with a liver-spotted dick. She tolerated his ill-tempered little moods because, for a long time, the arrangement had been good to her. But then, because of airplanes, it became real bad.

It’s going to be fine. Different, but fine.

Safety ✌️

Tucker Carlson has long been candid about his absent mother, Lisa McNear Lombardi. After his parents divorced in 1976, his father, Richard, was granted full custody of Tucker and his younger brother, Buckley. Part of Richard’s custody argument was that Lombardi’s drinking and drug use made her an unfit mother. This was probably true: People who knew Lombardi described her as bohemian, withdrawn, and unhappy. Joan Quinn, then the West Coast editor of Interview, put it bluntly: “I couldn’t imagine her ever being a mother.”

After splitting off from the boys, Tucker’s Mom took a splash straight into the seductive world of the 1970s and ’80s Los Angeles art scene. David Hockney’s longtime assistant, Mo McDermott, brought her into the mix and shortly after the ingratiation, the two began Presenting as Married (though records of a marriage proved elusive.) They shared studios, homes, and a life of “collaborative sculpture.”

Here’s the thing: I’m something of a Hockneyhead. I’ve seen the 1973 Hockney documentary, A Bigger Splash, and had always assumed that Mo was a friend of both David and Dorothy. When I learned of his marriage to Tucker’s Mom, I thought about all the flamboyant straight guys I know— being that I have a great sense of personal accountability, I immediately considered that I was wrong.

But then I saw these photos of his mother:

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BEACH-STARVED

CURIOUS

DIONYSIAN

EMBRACED

FRAGILE

GIDDY

HOEISH

IMPULSIVE

JONESIN’

KINETIC

LOOPY

MISCHIEVOUS

NOSTALGIC

OVERSTIMULATED

PENSIVE

QUIXOTIC

RECKLESS

SENSUAL

TENDER

UNMOORED

VULNERABLE

WACKY

X-RATED

YEARNING

ZONKED

Safety ✌️

THE ROXY CINEMA now carries Tip Top beverages. Those of us who remember the days before Delta fell off are well acquainted with Tip Top and their tasty, squat product.

You should catch a film at the Roxy regardless of Tip Top, though. It has some of the best programming of any rep theater in the city. In the country, even. Always a good time.

“HALO” THE CURE

Melodic and upbeat, yet still slow and dreamy enough to melt into. It has the optimism of a new crush but also the sentimental force to remind you how in love you are with your preexisting shawty.

Btw, it’s a B-side to 1992’s “Friday I’m in Love” if u even care.

ASTROLOGICAL PLATES AS BIRTHDAY GIFTS

Trays and dishes are the chicest solution to the unending problem of splayed-out table crap. Lip balm, sunglasses, matches, pens— you can make a bunch of bullshit look very intentional once corralled.

I have several scattered throughout the house, but I’m particularly fond of these two: a circular drinks tray with mid-century illustrations of classic cocktails and their recipes, and then a small dish decorated with little Aquarius-related tidbits. Being that it’s from France, it’s written in French.

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BANTER

CHAOS

DINNER

EXTRAVAGANCE

FLIRTING

GLOBES

HOTELS

INEBRIATION

JESTERMAXXING

KODAK EKTACHROME FILM

LIMINAL SPACES

MOON

NAUGHTINESS

OCEAN

PEPSI

QUINN :))

RELAXING

SWIMMING

TAXIS

UNIFORMS

VEGAS

WALRUSES

XEROX MACHINES

YANKEES

ZANY BITCHES

Safety ✌️

“BIN LADEN’S FUCKIN’ DEAAAAAAD!”

The villain of the American century had got got. Murked. Killed. Popped. Nice.

A good friend of mine recalled seeing Osama bin Laden’s face everywhere in the wake of 9/11. She was eight at the time, blonde, a nice Catholic girl, and even though she knew this guy was a real piece of shit, she simply couldn’t pretend he was ugly. Maybe I like the wrong kind of guys, she thought.

Weeks later, as Osama continued to blow up the airwaves, her older sister remarked, “He’s kind of hot.” Their mother, a classic Upper East Side archetype— the kind who casually uses words like “ravishing” and “splendid”— nodded in agreement. “Oh yes. All this aside, he’s really quite handsome. Tall, too.”

What Osama bin Laden did to our stunning skyline was sick, twisted, and frankly mean-spirited, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome. Moral clarity does not require us to pretend he was boring. You would be lying to yourself or performing some strenuous civic piety to deny that he led a remarkable and deeply intriguing life.

I’m kinda over him at this point though. You know whose life I recently learned was equally fascinating? His older half-brother, Salem.

Introducing…

A segment for small bits of trivia: things without much of a larger story that have been rattling around in my mind and feel worth knowing.

SALEM BIN LADEN was, by all accounts, deeply Americanized: a rich Saudi heir with a boyish obsession for flying and adventure. After the death of their father, he became the family patriarch. And he decided the future was Florida.

Salem loved Florida. Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens places him in Panama City and Bay Point circles, where he reportedly brought Saudi royalty—Fahd, then crown prince—into his strange panhandle orbit.

He preferred Orlando to Palm Beach because it was trashier. And he just wanted to be around trashy people who liked to fly planes.

There is an alluring, exotic quality to trashiness. Lana gets it.

Palm Beach is rich in the correct way: polished, geriatric, lacquered, quietly sinister. Orlando is rich in the wrong way, which is to say the more interesting way. It has theme parks, shitty restaurants, bald heads adorned with wraparound Oakleys, guys who own planes and drink Miller High Life. It’s a place where cheese pizza and grape soda is just dinner. It’s wrapped tightly in the spirit of a very specific America: unbothered, weirdly sincere, a tax-free paradise.

Salem never lived to see the atrocities his brother would commit because he died doing what he loved— piloting an experimental ultralight aircraft. On May 29th, 1988, Salem struck high-voltage power lines on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas and was killed. Authorities described it as a “freak accident.”

One can’t help but draw parallels between Salem bin Laden and John F. Kennedy Jr.: aviation enthusiasts from legacy families who perished in a similar manner.

JFK Jr.’s father, President John F. Kennedy, was born on May 29th, 1917.

After Salem’s passing, much of the clan continued to live in Florida through September 2001. Then all that stuff happened, so fearing retribution, over a dozen BL’s sought to evacuate the country. The White House kindly helped them, approving a private charter that your boomer parents’ tax dollars probably paid for.

But who cares, that was a long time ago. Anyway, here’s one of the abandoned mansions:

If I may, I’d like to pivot back to Pakistan… I’ve become quite intrigued by the QUAID-E-AZAM RESIDENCY.

This Bottega Veneta x Luigi’s Mansion looking-ass house is where Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, spent many of his final days.

Jokes aside, what a dignified space. Such a striking pattern of balustrades, a veranda that evokes both rhythm and repose, and that covered balcony? That’s the type of place u find God/Allah. The architecture feels both commanding and welcoming. It’s got a real sense of ceremony. Really magnificent.

Btw I studied Industrial Design if u even care.

I’ve always found the Pakistani intelligence service, aptly named the INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE (ISI), to have one of the spookiest logos.

It’s said to be a markhor—Pakistan’s national animal—adorned with exaggerated twisting horns and a snake for added flair.

Idk if it’s meant to give Baphomet but it’s doing too much. ISI ur scaring the hoes.

Safety ✌️

Dessert is the postgame. It carries that ceremonial, locker-room-adjacent feeling of triumph, even if said triumph is merely getting plastered between bites of steak frites alongside people you love and hate.

Once, after some phenomenal win, my friend Stephen and I perused the Odeon dessert menu with that imbibed rascal energy you only see in star athletes. We cultivated the confidence to forgo killer ordering instincts, moving forward with neither discipline nor a commitment to excellence. Hold the refined-palette digestifs and the crème brûlée because we’re cracking, but not like that. We want the sugariest, shittiest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now. Thanks. And we’ll take the banana trifle. Thanks again.

I turned to our friend Mike and asked casually, expecting an affirmative: “Mike, you like bananas?”

“FUCK. NO.”

Mike’s disdain was so palpable, so resonant, and so firmly anchored in disgust that I felt guilty for having evoked this type of revulsion in his otherwise Certified Chill ✌️demeanor.

It was in that moment I understood that bananas are divisive. You’d think such a cheerful fruit was broadly beloved. I know I did. But the banana, like so many seemingly neutral objects, contains a hidden violence. People don’t merely dislike them. They recoil. They gag. They litigate texture, smell, ripeness, bruising, trauma, strings, mush, the entire Chiquita enterprise.

AN EX-BOYFRIEND’S MOTHER had a passionate disdain for bananas.

He and I had our own place but we essentially lived at his parents’ apartment because it was 5,000 square feet overlooking Central Park and vibrantly social in that specific New York way where someone was always coming in, heading out, or lingering in the kitchen. By the end, I spent more time hanging out with his mom than with him.

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What I didn’t mention was the nosedive my inbox took shortly thereafter:

It seemed too crazy. We’d just lost Bowie, and now Prince? These were my close personal friends. It couldn’t be true, but if the not-yet-failing New York Times was reporting it, it probably was.

INIMITABLE, ILLUSTRIOUS

A decade later, Prince still inspires a particular kind of awe: the kind reserved for those whose gifts were so blatant and so fully realized that they almost strain belief.

Close enough to feel immediate, yet strange enough to remain unknowable. An enigmatic chamber of a man: frilled, sequined, and private. Faintly celestial, guided by a logic known only to himself.

Without further ado, here are some of his greatest moments, artifacts, and oddities.

LIVE IN SYRACUSE, 1985

Shot at the peak of Purple Rain hysteria, it captures him in full fucking superfreak carnival mode as he puts on one of of the greatest live performances of all time.

Absolutely sublime. Undeniably ethereal.

During “I Would Die 4 U,” he twists and twerks, dropping into a stage-humping split. Moments later, he gallops across stage and swings from the truss like monkey bars.

The encore ends with a 16-minute rendition of “Purple Rain.” At around the 14-minute mark, an intangible force seems to guide him, like a planchette on a Ouija board, as he ascends a staircase while flawlessly shredding.

For you my friend, I distill moment of video here:

CONCEALING HIS KILLER HOOP GAME

Prince had a curious tendency to remain cryptic about talents others might flaunt— namely, basketball.

Who could forget* the Chappelle’s Show bit where Charlie Murphy recalls Prince dogwalking him in a pickup basketball game.

KG corroborates this, noting that Prince was “on some Mighty Mouse shit”:

* If you forgot this then you’re a real sicko. Purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

2004 ROCK N’ ROLL HALL OF FAME PERFORMANCE

At the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Prince, Tom Petty, and some other guys whose names I kinda recognize as a former reader of Guitar World performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in tribute to George Harrison.

It starts as a fairly reverent all-star rendition—cohesive, tasteful—but once Prince takes his solo, it becomes a reminder that he ran the shit. The performance is remembered almost entirely as his. And he didn’t even show up for rehearsal.

Adding to the mythology is the mystery of the disappearing guitar. At the end, he tosses the not-a-Telecaster into the air, never to be seen again. When asked about the vanishing act, Tom Petty said, “Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage and I wonder where it went, too.”

BOOTING KIM KARDASHIAN OFF THE STAGE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

The famously dance-averse Kim froze when pulled onstage to boogie during the 2011 “Welcome 2 America” tour. And Prince wasn’t fucking with that at all.

CURFEW-DEFYING COACHELLA 2008

We’re fresh off another Coachella weekend, with legacy acts taking victory laps, Sabrina and Madonna twirling around in intergenerational pageantry, and just a general air of “you’re doing amazing, sweetie.”

None, however, had the moxie to crack the Top 3 canon, which is almost doctrinal at this point: Daft Punk, Beyoncé, and of course:

Not to be a bitch, but I was there. It was remarkable. He kept telling us we were in the coolest place on earth. And when “Creep” crept up? FUCK. Sucks that he and Thom Yorke never shared the stage. That vertical visual would be quite the treat ;-)

Anyway.

No anecdote has circulated more widely than that of the curfew. Frenzied festival staff wigged out as 1 a.m. came and went with no end in sight, prompting him to defiantly declare, “They’re telling me to stop… BUT I CAN’T… FROM NOW ON, THIS IS PRINCE’S HOUSE!”

He told us he loved us, too.

PRINCE INTERACTIVE

In 1994, he released the CD-ROM game Prince Interactive, in which players buzz around a pixelated Paisley Park and “solve puzzles to collect the five pieces of Prince’s symbol.”

It’s eerie and bears similarities to the Great Northern in Twin Peaks. It even has its own version of Room 315— the one with the humming door that serves as a portal to the Black Lodge. And like the Black Lodge, it’s got a monochrome enclave where some weird bitch hits you with esoteric babble.

Paisley Peaks.

“WE CAN FUCK”

This funky lil track on the Purple Rain deluxe album is a sultry, unhurried piece of erotic persuasion where Prince’s lustful croon softens into self-effacing murmurs of seduction.

Though the song itself isn’t a personal favorite, I do enjoy its lyrical silliness. I like to imagine it subconsciously inspired Axl Rose’s lecherous overdub on “Rocket Queen” a few years later.

Some fun lines:

MIA THE YORKIE

Prince and his (eventually ex) wife, Mayte Garcia, had a Yorkie named Mia.

All that’s ever really been publicly noted about Mia is that she was a source of comfort after the devastating loss of the couple’s one-week-old son, Amiir. I’ve tried to dig up some happier lore on the lil bitch, but alas.

Note: The collaborator in me feels compelled to acknowledge that I haven’t properly recognized The Revolution, or the many other talented people who helped shape the brilliance mentioned above. So here I am, doing that now. S/o y’all

Safety ✌️

I settled into a chair across from The Artwork and noticed another pattern: several of these industry names had been embroiled in scandal—some at the time, others long before. I’d recently become obsessed with the burgeoning “woke” vernacular that seemed to permeate every corner of modern media, so I opened my laptop and fired this off to Delta brass and their assistants:

Dear Delta,

Recently I was in the Delta SkyClub at LAX. I had planned to simply relax before my flight, but when I finally found a place to settle into (it was very busy and seating was limited) I was met by a piece of “art” that was so offensive and impossible to ignore because it spanned the entire wall. This photograph, which I have attached, is a symphony of horrors— It is a photograph of several books and many of the titles are on subjects that are universally emotionally triggering.

For clarity, I have circled the most outrageously offensive titles in aqua blue. Titles which are troubling (but not glaringly triggering) are circled in yellow.

• WOODY ALLEN Where do I begin with this monster. Woody has spent the past decade in the limelight on the basis of repeated sexual abuse accusations. One book would be offensive enough, but there’s an entire section of his work.

• LENI RIEFENSTAHL Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi. The term “Nazi” has come to be used liberally, often to describe people being harsh or dictoritative about something, but Leni Riefenstahl was a literal Nazi. She was a film director in the actual Third Reich and a close friend of Adolf Hitler. It’s offensive enough to display the work of a Nazi, but even more offensive that the only woman director featured in this photograph is a Nazi. What does that say about women? I know that Delta is not anti-woman, so it’s very perplexing.

• KIRK DOUGLAS Kirk Douglas is the Black Dahlia Murderer. There is no doubt by the LAPD, the FBI, or anyone even remotely familiar with the case that Kirk Douglas is the perp. Douglas was only acquitted as a suspect due to lack of DNA testing in 1947, when the brutal murder occurred.

• ROMAN POLANSKI Roman Polanski was charged with pedophiliac rape and has been banned from entering the United States as a result. It’s revolting to have to see his face on a book bearing his name, for the same reasons as Woody Allen.

• CLINT EASTWOOD Racist with a penchant for womanizing. Frequently mentioned for his horrible antics on Hollywood insider news site, crazydaysandnights.net

• PEDRO ALDOMOVAR All over the papers for tax evasion. Bad person.

• SIMON PEGG I was shocked to see not just one, but three copies of a biography on Simon Pegg. If Delta is so insistent on representing the cabal of “Mission Impossible”, why not showcase Amy Nicholson’s critically acclaimed biography on Tom Cruise (”Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor”) Not only is Amy Nicholson a woman, but she’s also a great writer.

• PIERRE PASOLINI He was brutally murdered.

• CHARLIE CHAPLIN Nazi and communist sympathizer. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#Controversies_and_fading_popularity_.281939.E2.80.931952.29

I’m not asking for a refund, I’m not asking for some sort of mileage compensation: All I am asking is that you please take this down. This photograph is triggering and outdated and much of its scathing content is only underscored by the massive scale of the photograph. It could easily be replaced with tasteful photographs with film icons such as Ava DuVernay, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Lukas Haas.

Please do not be on the wrong side of history.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

I received a response from CEO Ed Bastian’s assistant, who essentially said “Nobody’s ever mentioned this, hope to see you on a Delta flight soon.”

As of this writing, The Artwork still stands, though it’s now housed in the dazzling “new” (2022) LAX Sky Club.

Safety ✌️

By the way, I like the Mayor. The way he handled that second snowstorm? Phenomenal. I’ve lived in this town well over half my life and that was an unprecedented turbomelt.

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But why? Gloom Rules should read like a trip into my mind. Buoyant yet anchored, freewheeling yet orderly. Diffuse. A journey that takes you everywhere and nowhere at once, and does it quickly.

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