Daisy Alioto introduces our October issue.

Hello, and welcome to Dirt’s second monthly issue, an experiment in consolidating your attention. We have four stories, one in each category: Entertainment, Technology, Culture and Collecting.

More about Dirt Media here 👁️‍🗨️

If you’re looking for quick hits from Dirt Media, Clone is an hourly glance at our open tabs, with an audio integration that lets you listen to our affiliated podcasts. Later this month we’ll launch Creative Complaint, hosted by Dani Loftus. It’s a podcast about taste informed by distaste.

Two of the pieces in this issue were commissioned and edited in collaboration with Are.na, a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge. Are.na is a place to save content, create collections over time and connect ideas. Privately or with other people.

In this issue, Are.na’s cofounder and CEO Charles Broskoski (aka Cab) draws on the film You’ve Got Mail to talk about why business is personal after all. “A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic,” he writes.

“Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so,” he continues. Like Cab, I am not very money motivated. It seems to me that the best reason to accumulate cultural power is to redistribute opportunities to people with talent. Money can’t buy you taste, but it is often the price of survival.

I thought about this delicate negotiation as I read Ruby Justice Thelot’s tribute to the Hedi (Slimane) Boy. “On cooler evenings, I layered a distressed wool cardigan and a midnight blue scarf. I was, in my mind, the sexiest man alive.” I thought about this negotiation as I wrote about two wonderful new novels on marriage and infidelity. From Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory:  "He wanted to divorce her so they could meet by chance ten years from now and do everything they'd ever done a second time."

Taste and money. Money and taste. Where would we be without them? Perhaps back in the era of Factory Pomo, a short-lived, but influential, aesthetic of the Information Age. Design nerds will love reading Evan Collins’ deep dive into this design history, which rounds out this October issue.

Enjoy!!!

TECHNOLOGY

Personal Business

Charles Broskoski on building a company that doesn’t fake sincerity.

The last time I watched You’ve Got Mail, I shed a tear. Not for the love story (definitely not), but for the large portion of the movie dedicated to the respective businesses of Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (played by Tom Hanks).

If you haven’t seen You’ve Got Mail, I’m really very happy to outline it for you.

Kathleen Kelly runs a small independent bookstore she inherited from her mother called The Shop Around the Corner (a reference to a 1940 movie of the same name, which You’ve Got Mail is based on). The Shop Around the Corner is a children’s bookstore with large windows, good lighting, and at least four employees. It has an enthusiastic customer base and a strong community, where everyone knows each other’s name. Kathleen Kelly sees books—and, by extension, her shop—as a vehicle to help people discover who they really are. 

Joe Fox runs a different variety of book store called Fox Books, which is more like a combination of Barnes & Noble and Walmart, in so far as it’s a big corporation controlled by a single family. The word “discount” is thrown around a lot, but they also talk about cappuccinos and big comfy chairs. There’s a scene where Kathleen Kelly, in an effort to see what the competition is like, enters the store and witnesses a customer inconvenience an employee with a fuzzy query about a book. As the employee struggles to answer, she steps in with expert guidance. Joe Fox, in contrast to Kathleen Kelly, seems to not really care about books in particular. For the Fox family, books are just a vehicle for profit. Their goal is not just to become the biggest bookstore, it’s to become the only bookstore.

COLLECTING

Hedi Boys

Ruby Justice Thelot on growing in and out of Slimane.

In the summer of 2018, I set out to be the sexiest man alive. Every day, I ventured into the streets of Toronto to observe the vagations of a wide range of men discovering or, in some instances, affirming their own sex appeal. I developed a taxonomy of male sexiness across four axes.

Outside of the chart was the abyss, or a complete lack: the hunched shoulders, the ill-fitting clothes, eyes angled towards the pavement, the definition of “Not It”. Then, there was cocaine-core: think Tony Montana, white suit, shirt unbuttoned, collar worn boldly over the jacket’s lapel. There was Sopranos-core: picture a velvet tracksuit worn in New Jersey’s best suburbs, a middle-aged confidence, dabbed with opulent jewelry, the floral-laden Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt. There was also Kramer-core: imagine a man in a luxurious shearling jacket layered atop a quirky lobster shirt, an irreverent self-assuredness, the gait of a “hipster doofus” (in the words of Elaine).

ENTERTAINMENT

The Reconciliation Plot

Daisy Alioto on two new novels in which marriage survives an affair.

I remember sitting by the lake when my friend told me his father had left their family, placing his wedding band on the kitchen counter. When his father came back, he denied ever doing that. To me this story represented the mystery of adults—it still does.

We are at the tail end of a series of divorce novels, the most memorable of which are thinly veiled autofiction. Nested inside the divorce novel is the open marriage plot or perhaps the affair plot, like a house inside another house (a friend’s version of the secret room dream). 

Some of these books even speak to each other. In Liars by Sarah Manguso, the narrator throws bricks at the concrete wall in her yard to cope after her husband leaves her for a family friend. This affair is preceded by years of what the narrator comes to admit to herself was mistreatment (hence, Liars). 

“Before I could write, before I could even speak…I threw bricks. And so I wrote on that wall the first document of my rage.” In the non-fiction half of The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (which also begins with an act of betrayal) we get this brick-throwing ritual from another angle when Lacey goes to visit Manguso: “We took turns throwing them that morning, then she watched me, newer to the wreckage, commenting on my form, handing me brick after brick.” 

Now, a new slate of books has entered the literary fray, ones with affairs that don’t end in divorces. Most notably, Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian and The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers. They fall in to what I am calling the Reconciliation Plot. A category of novel that asks: What if the affair was, to the continuous marriage, simply, a house inside another house?

CULTURE

The Brief Reign of Factory Pomo

Evan Collins on forging an aesthetic of the Information Age.

In the early 1990s, the now-defunct technology distribution company Access Graphics released a brochure promoting their “Ultimedia Tools Series,” a media and digital design software package. For a cutting edge product in an emerging field, the brochure’s graphic design was surprisingly retro: On the cover, a burly factory worker “forges” CDs, letters, film strips, and music notes as if he’s metalworking. The style is reminiscent of Depression-era WPA posters and Diego Rivera murals, and the typeface follows suit—the tall, closely-spaced lettering with heavy slab serifs look almost like metal signage on a factory’s exterior. 

Inside the brochure, CDs merge with gears while technical arrows and jagged, sharp forms are overlaid onto simple figures similar to those seen in commercial illustration of the time. As a piece of design, this brochure is pure “Factory Pomo,” a short-lived aesthetic in the 1980s and 1990s associated with the transition into the Information Age and the integration of personal computing into our everyday lives.

Personal Business and Factory POMO were edited by Meg Miller. Hedi Boys was edited by Ross Scarano.