Pods & Ends
Curl up with some good things
Dames Nation, I ask you to buckle in and prepare yourself to receive perhaps my hottest take of all time: it’s nice to celebrate when good things happen. To wit, THIS:
Last week, in the fulfillment of a years-long dream, I was the featured guest on Who Cares About The Rock Hall?, a podcast for enthusiastically nerdy music obsessives. Co-hosts and walking delight machines Joe Kwaczala and Kristen Studard invited me to chat about and make a case for inducting The Bangles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and it was such a treat. I wrote about the show a couple of years ago and surprise! I still agree with everything I said about it way back in 2019, including and especially “I love the way the show incorporates genuine, earnest enthusiasm for music and addresses the very worthwhile question of who gets to be part of the canon, while also relentlessly taking the piss out of the Rock Hall itself and insisting that it become a better version of itself.” If you like to hear witty nerds talk at length about canonicity and how silly it is that third-tier bands of white dudes keep getting inducted while first-tier woman-led acts wait and wait and waaaaaaaait for the collegial recognition they deserve, give it a listen!
In other listening news, our beloved Reply-All team has released the first in a four-part series of episodes about Bon Appetit (both the magazine & their wildly popular Test Kitchen) cataclysm of 2020, and all that happened before and after. Lead reporter and series host Sruthi Pinnamaneni has interviewed dozens of staffers, and rightly puts the experiences of BIPOC freelancers and staffers at the center of the story. Her careful laying out of the facts, circumstances, and editorial choices that ensured that the magazine upheld and further entrenched white supremacy at every point in the last ten years is chilling, and offers -- without sensationalizing them at all -- many of the details we’ve been wondering about for months. It’s juicy, and that accounts for a great deal of why I smashed that play button the second I had a free hour on Thursday. It’s also journalism of extraordinary thoroughness and sensitivity, and is essential listening.
I’ve gone down a little rabbit hole of Instagram stylists lately, and though I normally shy away from 30-day challenges because they remind me too much of the book clubs I always think I want to join but then never read the book for, I’m having fun with two concurrently. One is Dressing Dawn’s #mindfulnessoutfit challenge, the other is Shop Your Wardrobe, I think. I can’t recall the name, hashtag, or the person who issued the challenge, due to my brain continuing its steady transformation into mush, so if this rings a bell for you & you know who issued the challenge, please do let me know so I can shout them out in a revision!
The gist is: pick 5-15 items you haven’t worn in a year or more from your closet/drawers/storage boxes and work them into your outfits for the month. Speaking as someone who went through her laundry hamper for delicates this morning and said aloud more than once “oh, I’d forgotten you even existed!” to several sweaters, it’s past time for me to do an honest assessment of what I already own and remove items that just aren’t working for me so they can work for someone else.
Along similar lines, Erin at @stylethieffashion talked in her Stories recently about her impulse buy-curbing habit of creating a visual wishlist of clothes & accessories she’s interested in. The wishlist is a placeholder/reminder, and a way to build in a cooling-off period while in the occasionally fevered state of acquisition-driven shopping. I over-rely on the soothing hit of dopamine I get from shopping, and it turns out that the good feeling of browsing is very nearly as effective as hitting PURCHASE. I’m definitely better off adding to a wishlist and revisiting it once in a while to look for patterns of interest, repeat items, and to weed out things I like but don’t love before they wind up languishing, neglected & unworn, in my closet.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Vulture’s perfect, idiosyncratic, weird as hell column on Matt Berry, who is himself perfect, idiosyncratic, and weird as hell
My continuing borderline-lustful embrace of colorful outerwear (currently contemplating & price drop-watching burgundy velvet & sequins on the one hand, forest green Muppety elegance on the other)
My new favorite newsletter, Your Barrie Godmother, by once & future guest editor Barrie Hardymon! I look forward to taming my itchiest sweater using the conditioner soak method in the latest issue.
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