Hello, friends!
Thoreau called August the waning of life, but what did he know?
He spent all year staring at Walden Pond, blissfully unaware that August is when NYC shines, in all that late summer diffuse golden light and whatnot.
There are 20 Mondays left in 2020.
It’s a new, fresh week — let’s do this.
Where You’ll Find Me
💇🏻♀️ Getting my first quarantine haircut (in 8 months!)
☎️ Checking-in, 5-minutes at a time, an idea from Alisha Ramos of Girls' Night In:
"I've been texting my friends on my afternoon walks, 'Can I call you in five minutes for five minutes' and the response rate has been 100% yes so far. It feels nice to make time to talk about something small too."
🥾 Urban hiking with no agenda:
👩🏻💼 Advising for COHORT:ONE. Applications are now open for Fellowships through midnight EST on August 28:
Watching
🤯 Connected Episode 4: “Digits.” The math of the universe is mind-blowing. 46 mins, Netflix.
💅🏾 The Remix: Hip Hop x Fashion. 66 mins, Netflix.
This whole time, I thought hip-hop artists (or any big musicians really) dressed themselves. Jodeci and those oversized denim suits! Lil’ Kim and her head-to-toe monochrome!
Little did I know the visionary image architects behind the scenes created those edgy, iconic looks that defined 90’s music videos and changed streetwear forever: Misa Hylton, April Walker, Dapper Dan, Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss.
Directed and produced by two women of color, Farah X and Lisa Cortés, the film explores the impact of streetwear — a movement shaped by Black creatives — on cultural trends and fashion at large.
“Hip Hop is the first platform, ever, that we have been able to make real progress globally. Others have always capitalized off our cultural platform. Our music and our fashions, we can create a new culture. This is our time.” -Dapper Dan
Reading
💛 How to Help a Friend Who’s Going Through Some Shit, Mental-Health-Wise by Taylor Trudon for GQ, August 2020.
🔮 TikTok and the Sorting Hat. An intensely intellectual deep take on TikTok and the overall evolution of early aughts interwebs from @eugenewei:
“There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden. They struggle to separate their social functions from their entertainment and utility functions, injecting an aspect of social artifice where it never used to exist.”
Creativity/Productivity Hacks
📹 Camo is an app that turns your iPhone into a high-quality webcam.
📼 Grapevine is a place to share short, recorded video updates from remote team members in different time zones.
Listening
🎧 Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance. (Podcast, 1hr 46 min)
“My conversation with Tolentino was one of my favorites of last year -- and it has become all the more relevant in the midst of a pandemic that has collapsed most human communication into Zoom calls, Twitter feeds, and Instagram stories. This is a conversation about what happens when technology combines with the most powerful forces of human psychology to transform the nature of human interaction itself. It’s about how we construct and express our core sense of self, and what that’s doing to who we really are.”
- Ezra Klein
Dope Stuff for Your Desk
📒 Milko A5 Dot Grid Bullet Journal. This is the bullet style journal you see all over Instagram (6.2 million posts tagged #bulletjournal) — for people who love microscopic organization and fine, small, detailed, ink handwriting. The A5 size feels compact and portable to capture ideas on the fly. $12.99 for a set of 2.
From the Mixtape
💃🏻 Current Mood: Bachata Lovers 💃🏻
New soundtrack for the daily 5-minute dance parties at home.
App of the Week
🎹 Sessions Live. Tune in 24/7 to support livestream music performances from your favorite, yet-to-be-discovered emerging artists. If you’re a musician who wants to make a living from your art, check out their sign up here. Desktop and iOS app.
Take care ‘til next week ✌🏽
—SP
Monday Memo #11: Light in August