Housekeeping:
Lightly overwhelmed by all the HEAVIES love over these past two weeks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The reception has been beyond my wildest dreams. I said this in a Note—I never realized that the Substack backend was basically Twitter from 10 years ago—but between the love from Snake, Feed Me, Hung Up, and Deez Links I feel like I hit a sort of personal Substack Mount Rushmore. Now I just need a lightly problematic fave in the mix to really spice things up.
On Thursday I was at Grand Nature getting by shoulder fascia annihilated by Charlie—I felt like I was gonna cough up a piece of rib cartilage by the end of it—when a guy called to book a massage. Charlie picks up and I can overhear the whole thing: “Can I book an appointment for Monday with, uh… Chris?” Charlie: “Ah there’s no Chris who works here.” “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant… *reading*… Charlie.” It was a surreal little moment that briefly had me feeling like I was being pranked.
I’ve spent the week setting up a cool interview series with interesting creatives and thinkers about how they work out, and more importantly, how they design a routine that accommodates their fitness needs. It’ll kick off next week. I’m excited for you guys (non-gendered term) to read it. They’ll be free at first but eventually will be archived behind a paywall, so if you feel it in your fingers and feel it in your toes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for the monthly cost of a small cold brew.
Onto the post:
1.
Earlier this week I got coffee (at Dimes lol) with the homie Tony Wang, original big-brained fashion genius and director of strategy for places like SSENSE and 032c who now runs the Office of Applied Strategy, to talk about some exciting upcoming projects and, more pertinent to this newsletter, POWER LIFTING. (More in a bit 😈.)
He put me onto something he learned from his personal trainer called the hip shift, which has been really helping him with his hip mobility. (I’m 90 percent certain we set a new Dimes record for time spent discussing hip abduction and axes of rotation.)
I’ve been using a modified version of the hip shift involving a 12kg kettlebell for the past few days and let me tell you… it’s nice. Quick and effective. I think the hip shift is elbowing its way into becoming a permanent fixture in my pre-workout stretching routine. The best part is you can use anything you have lying around: a kettlebell, a dumbbell, a cat, or nothing at all.
2.
I try to always have two books going at any given time, one non-fiction and one fiction (my good friend Kevin Nguyen has insisted that this is how he gets through a book a week). This was one of those rare two-week stretches where I managed to finish two excellent books in sequence: Judith Thurman’s essay collection A Left-Handed Woman and Outline by Rachel Cusk, which I LOVED, in no small part, because the novel situates a sense of self in how we’re refracted through other people. So good. Consider me Cusk pilled.
Thurman, on the other hand, is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, whose precision lifts her sentences to an aspiring level of elegance, especially when she covers fashion. Her profile of Rei Kawakubo in the New Yorker has done more to shape my own twisted sensibilities than maybe anything else, to the extent that I kept a printout of it in my “favorite stories” folder (like, an actual physical folder) at GQ. (I also emailed her once to see if she’d be interested in writing a Demna profile should it materialize, and I received the funniest, most thoughtful no I’ve ever received as an editor.)
So when I finished Outline in bed this week and immediately Googled interviews with the author—as one does—it was more than a little kismet that the 2017 New Yorker profile of Rachel Cusk was assigned to… Judith Thurman. Here’s the paragraph I took a screenshot of:
The actual composition of a book, as opposed to the long period in which Cusk thinks about it, makes notes, and works out the structure, is relatively brief. “I don’t want to live a writer’s life,” she said, by which she meant one shackled to a computer, “so I’m unemployed most of the time. My process is very uncomfortable. The hardest stage is to overcome the fakery, and I can’t associate with people while I’m doing that. But the writing part is pure technique. It’s a performance, like getting on a stage, and before I start I have to have rehearsed everything I want to say, and to know what’s in my sentences.” In Cusk’s recent novels, it isn’t the drama of the events but their specificity that keeps you riveted. Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension. Where the action meanders, language takes up the slack. Her sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.
Not too many links to share this week as I’m on deadline for a few projects. New post early next week.
Charlie! Destroys me but he’s the best of the best
gonna steal ur read two books simultaneously method