🍸 OFF-MENU 004 🍸: Absalom, Absalom!
What I'm loving this week: black lipliner, men's boxers, and some notes on Southern Gothic
Hello, sailor1 — welcome to another installment of OFF-MENU. We’re finally into the autumn doldrums, so I’m baking pistachio cookies and churning through my Fall Vibeotics watchlist (up next: Conte D'automne). It’s hurricane season in North Carolina, and Hélène is expected to make landfall overnight, so don’t be surprised if I’m offline throughout the weekend. For me, hurricane season always feels like a time for soul reorientation — your sympathetic nervous system is fully inflamed. Fight or flight takes over. Time to keep your head above water.
Now, for some of my favorite things…
#1: Old Ralph Lauren advertisements
I possess a meticulously-kept editorial archive and, in the process of reorganizing it this past week, I found this Tumblr blog. I’ve written about my love of Ralph Lauren’s clothing ad nauseam, but his approach to advertisement/marketing/catalog is just as exquisite. So many good gems, here, from this full-page ad about why magazines are important to this Stevie Nicks-y editorial. Highly recommend exploring for peak autumnal inspiration while everyone else is combing through J. Crew catalogs.
#2: “Is sex theatre?”
I’ve been religiously reading Lillian Fishman’s sex and love advice column for The Point. Fishman is one of the most gifted young writers we have, and it’s refreshing to hear thoughts on the sensual world that are humane, philosophic, and cautious about flattery. Reading about sex, like fashion, is always punctuated by an internal I, I, I; it’s hard to divorce our histories, insecurities, and predilections from the material at hand. Fishman gently urges us to forget about ourselves, and I think her column about how sex can give way to subconscious performance is a masterful case study.
“What some of us want to hear is nothing less than this: I want you specifically, and I want you in original ways. This is the rhetoric of love. We can receive this sexually in a non-love context, of course, yet even then it’s so penetrating that it reminds us of the presence and possibility of love. This type of sex, which circulates beyond sexual archetypes and simply ignores received ideas — I want you specifically, and I want you in original ways — is often, famously, less erotic for exactly this reason. What is frequently and obviously “sexual” for us is the game we play with shame: how we perform our subjection to it, how we perform the rejection of it which the heights of our desire demand.”
#3: These Comme Si boxer shorts
I love wearing men’s boxers to bed — I imagine I’ll write a full-length essay about it eventually, maybe a sequel to my essay on lingerie and eroticism. I’ve mentioned Comme Si in the past, for good reason: I take my loungewear very seriously and their silk fabrication is out of this world. Editorial, refined, cool to the touch, and their poplin is so airy and soft. It speaks to something I’ve been trying to do more frequently, which is to consider garments as objects of desire — fashion pieces that I’d like to invest in and take care of for the rest of my life, rather than a $10 T-shirt that’ll last me a year. Consider it a form of slowmaxxing; might as well start with the clothes that carry you to Dreamland. These silk olive boxers are gorgeous.
#4: These off-white crocodile boots
“No white after Labor Day” is a fashion axiom I urge everyone to stop believing. White looks incredible glossed in the coppery, birched tones of fall/winter, and I think any rule invented for the fin-de-siècle leisure class can be done away with by now (it was a way to keep your tennis whites clean as the streets filled with autumn muck). I can’t stop thinking about these Paris Texas boots, made from bone china leather and embossed with crocodile texture. If nobody else buys them, I will.
#5: A healthy dose of Southern Gothic
In college, all of my undergraduate writing, as well as my thesis manuscript, was firmly cemented in the Southern Gothic tradition (it also comprised my entrance packet). It’s how I learned to write — Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Alice Walker, Breece D’J Pancake, William Faulkner. Unlike Donna Tartt, I would probably devour Absalom, Absalom! in a hospital bed. Southern Gothic showed me a prism of the South I recognized from my childhood, and, too, was the first time I witnessed the South taken seriously in art. Who knows if I’ll ever publish those stories, but I like checking in on them from time to time.
As the weather gets bloated with rain and time slows down, you need the Gothic in your life. If I had to create an introductory reading list: Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. Though if you’re well-versed already or just craving something a little off-kilter, might I suggest: Karen Russell’s St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, and the eponymous Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.
#6: Reconsidering black lipliner
Every few years, beauty directors trot this look out for editorials and it never really sticks in the popular imagination (a la colored mascara). As a one-off everyday look, I do find it a little romantic — and when I say “black lipliner,” I do mean just a thin ring of charcoal around an otherwise unadorned mouth (but a nude gloss works, too). Might I suggest this NYX black lipliner that’s actually very pigmented? Or this Lancôme eyeliner-as-lipliner if you want a matte finish?
#7: “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry (1967)
The ultimate Southern Gothic story song with a real-life Southern Gothic varnish — despite her prodigious songwriting skills and warm Nashville embrace, Bobbie Gentry vanished from public life and hasn’t been seen in years. I hope she’s still writing, wherever she is.
See you on Tuesday. ꩜
Is “sailor” what you’d like to be called? I think it’s funny but I also think I sound like a 58-year-old divorcée on a cruise to Martinique.