Quinn Christopherson, if you don’t remember, is the indigenous Alaskan singer-songwriter who won NPR’s 2019 Tiny Desk concert with “Erase Me,” a song about coming out as trans. Fast forward to now: he’s releasing an album in December, and we get a teaser. “Bubblegum” follows a chronological journey of self-discovery where Quinn lists an age per verse and describes what he’s going though at that time, always coming back to the hook, “I don’t know who I am.” Without any context on the artist, a lot of the narrative could read as cis boy issues, but Christopherson has approached his coming of age more thoughtfully than your standard cis boy. “It should be celebrated to not know who you are,” he said. “So often we’re pressured to nail down and define our identity, as if it’s something finite… Things change and that’s the point.” Listen here.
Anyone else looking to find themselves might consider the newest trend in luxury vacations: pretending to be a survivalist. Per the latest New Yorker, there’s this one travel company (of many, I’m sure) that has you sign up for a mystery excursion where you fly to wherever and ride with a stranger to somewhere super remote. Then you take a quick life-skills tutorial then get left for a few days to see if you can hack it. Of course, someone is secretly trailing you the whole time, and after you don’t die, you get pampered in a fancy hotel before you go home; you’ve paid $10k, after all.
Make all the Covid-era, end-of-times comparisons you want, but this is cryogenics. It’s intermittent fasting. It’s powerlifting. It’s masculinity burnishing itself, no matter who takes it on. Take it from the New Yorker writer, Ed Caesar, who uses language like this:
“Asher, looking me dead in the eye, asked, “What do you want to get out of all this?” I didn’t have a good answer.”
“My shirt was wet with perspiration, and the wind was cool enough to cause me to shiver. I pressed on.”
“I finally spotted some living creatures: small birds with yellow bellies, flitting from bush to bush. I didn’t know what they were called.”
“I longed for a cheap, noisy bar, and the chance to swap stories with strangers.”
A regular Thoreau. Kerouac? Whatever. We all know who stars in this movie: James Franco.
Moving right along from Ed’s Eat-Pray-Love moment, follow me over to Hunk Tok, where everybody’s thirsting over regular old dudes. In the Vox piece circulating on this, the line that keeps coming up is about how unremarkable men just stumble into celebrity while women work their asses off to meet impossible standards. But let’s amplify a quieter detail, which is the use of the (uselessly hetero) term, “girl hot,” or the state of being appealing as a prospect as distinct from meeting the echo-chamber version of the male beauty standard. Edit suggestion: just “hot” will do.
Men have a lot of things women don’t, and high on the list is decent pockets. According to some very informal research, men’s pockets are on average 3″ deeper than women’s, if women get them at all (we’ll address the clothing binary another time). Usually, that means carrying some stupid bag, fumbling with your phone, or showing up unprepared. You know what? No more. Long-time friend of Lorem Julie Sygiel just launched Pockets Project, a line of dresses with deep-ass pockets (8.5 inches minimum) that you can’t perceive at all from the outside. I wore mine to a cocktail party last week and had my phone on me all night, hands free for champagne. We all deserve this freedom. Fuck a purse, rock a pocket; get yours here.
