#22: Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
Collected miscellanea this week including intellectual merch, beloved comic strip characters, and opinions
Hi friends! Welcome to another exciting edition of Left On Read!!!! Did you see there’s been more orca-nized crime??? Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge just how many times “looksmaxxing” coverage popped up in my inbox yesterday. Again, over indexing on appearance for appearance’s sake is contributing to our very dire rizz-cession.1
Alternate reading of intellectual merch
The New York Times ran an article earlier this month, “Is the Literary Hat the New Tote Bag?” The subject sparking the debate was a line of baseball caps embroidered with contemporary female authors’ names priced at $27 (without shipping). The caps, designed by self-described “fan project” Minor Canon, mimicked the stylized attribution found on covers of the authors’ most famous works. The merch caused an uproar online, with pessimists of all varieties mocking the profiting and apparent posturing of wearing your favorite writer’s name on your head. People are grouchy!
These hats are not my scene but I can get behind intellectual merch as an opposing force to overpriced fashion brands and logos. Hell, I wore my bright yellow Paris Review cap to filth and I’ve given “Directed By Nora Ephron” ones as gifts. I’m not above some light signaling as a means of connecting with likeminded enthusiasts or, as Mise-En-Scene does, preserving cultural ephemera.2 So many consumers don’t bat an eyelash emerging from the house all logo’ed up, like RHONY fan favorite Jessel sporting both Balenciaga and Alexander Wang loudly on her person, much to the chagrin of castmate Jenna-Fucking-Lyons. Why not give artists some love and airtime instead? Gucci doesn’t need more free advertising. Independent films do!
(Minor Canon has since removed the controversial hats from their site. They’re now selling DEAD AUTHOR HATS instead, conceivably because dead authors can’t write angry defamation emails from beyond the grave.)
Snoop’n and Boop’n and Moomin
I hail from a Snoopy family. Think: Peanuts greeting cards for every occasion, a Christmas tree dominated by Snoopy ornaments, a framed Charles Schulz obituary I wrote at six years old still hanging in my grandparents’ entryway…. Naturally, Nylon’s reporting that Snoopy is trending is simply a delight. Gen Z loves Snoopy and wears their allegiance proudly, from fan edited videos and Instagram pages to travel-everywhere plushies and sold out blood drive tees.
Elsewhere in Beloved Character Land, Claire Marie Healy wrote about the licensing boom of Moomin characters for Dirt. The Scandinavian exports are everywhere, aligning with notable brands such as Adidas and Barnes and Noble. It’s a fun read and—similar to the intellectual merch bit above—touches upon the impossible push and pull of promoting and commercializing art that creator Tove Jansson felt throughout her lifetime.
Moomins and Peanuts debuted as comic strips within five years of each other (1945 and 1950 resp.), both products of a post-war world. Healy writes of the Moomins’ enduring appeal in 2023: they “feel deeply relatable because they are never blandly moralistic—within these tales they act on their desires, get sad, and make adult mistakes.” Peanuts characters function similarly, with Charlie Brown acting as a mouthpiece for author Schulz’s socio-psychological frustrations and musings.
Tangentially related and as reported by Shane O’Neill for the Washington Post Style newsletter, a third character is resurging in the zeitgeist: Betty Boop! While less cerebral than Peanuts or Moomins and debuting decades earlier, Boop represents, according to “BOOP!” musical director Jerry Mitchell, someone “way ahead of her time… an independent, sexy, no apology kind of girl.”
I feel like the popularization of these retro characters says so many things about our current cultural landscape. Namely, I see it as a bid for comfort and a blatant rejection of the Disney industrial complex…
Retail is my cardio
I really adore those felted animal figures you see around the holidays. Little bears in toboggans, dogs eating ice cream in striped sailor shirts. A store nearby sells a wide selection but when I pulled up to purchase late last November (the proper holiday preparation period) they were completely sold out. This year I swept through the shop mid-October, sure to secure an array of ornaments, only to discover the 500 ornament stock (!!!!!) had completely sold out.
McKinsey confirms that holiday shopping started earlier this year and will last longer: “The race to launch ever earlier holiday promotions has created one long, continuous year-end promotional cycle, in hopes of capturing consumers who may be trying to spread their purchases out over a longer period.”
Listen, I used to work retail both big and small. I get the importance of selling through holiday stuff so you’re not strapped with excess merchandise for an entire calendar year OR so you don’t have to heavily discount.3 But I don’t like that consumers are being trained to buy stuff out of season or else lose out. And this isn’t limited to winter holidays! I think all the time about the purchase-motivated customers I had to turn away each year while working in a small gift shop. We lost out on opportunities to win over new audiences because our seasonal inventory was picked over by regulars. I’m sure holiday product launches are happening sooner and sooner because consumption is our medicine during trying times, but ooof. These days shopping is every bit the Olympic sport we joke it is.
(A consolation: beige Christmas décor is OUT.)
All opinions own
Discourse around opinions lately seems to be: individuals are too opinionated online and critics and writers at major publications are too safe in their takes and too sanitized in their verbiage. An interesting role reversal! But one that makes sense since (A) we’re all our own brands now and part of being a brand is curating an image and issuing statements online and (B) advertisers want perpetual good buzz around their offerings and a loosely affiliated, loudmouth writer might jeopardize that image. This dynamic is shifting, though, as media continues to be a messy place. Writers are starting subscription funded publications en masse (Coop owned Flaming Hydra came across my desk via Jason Kottke’s newsletter, for one). Not to mention, you can’t swing a nine iron these days without hitting a very green (hi😇) or very seasoned writer with a personal newsletter.
Good POV from Rusty at
:[I]f I know one fact (and I do) it’s that there will always be people with no other interests or life skills except finding out what’s happening and writing it down…The moneyfolk come and go from media for reasons I will never understand, but when they’re gone—when things look the most bleak—that’s when your true reporter goblins come out to play…. I wondered when we’d reach the Awl inflection point, where the tools to start a subscription-funded blog were cheap enough and the pool of unemployed reporter goblins was deep enough to start generating a new cohort of publications like this. I think I’m ready to say it’s now, and personally I love to see it.
Listening to a SiriusXM DJ (Madison on AltNation, iykyk) trash the ever-loving fuck out of BravoCon this weekend—of which I’m a fan—I was reminded how delightful diametrically opposed diatribes can be when the speaker in question is funny and smart. Madison isn’t beholden to advertisers and we are a better society for it.
Idk, maybe it’s okay for writers to publicly share low-stakes, weird perspectives that wouldn’t necessarily charm the boardroom. It reads as a more enjoyable and trustworthy exchange with audiences, anyway.
Sidewalk Reporting
From the Sidewalk Reporting Archives: my absolute favorite pictures circa 2020-2022. The perfect encapsulation of post-Halloween malaise! I have a whole folder of Sad-O-Lanterns on my phone. And I welcome more, should you spot any on your own sidewalk reporting.
Kindly disregard typos, as they are actually small prayers to the universe that one day my writing will support an editor’s salary
Credit entirely to Friend of Left On Read, Ian
If I spotted someone in a Gwyny Holzer shirt, I’d make a friend for life
My sympathies with buyers who have to make these calculations in an economic climate no one can really agree on