GREEK ODYSSEY
i'm looking for a man in shipping, greek god, 5'9*
*For the uninitiated, this man is a billionaire. Most Greek billionaires are in shipping, but the only one I care about meeting is Maria Angelicoussis since she vowed not to carry Russian oil.
Today we introduce a new section: WHAT I’M GRATEFUL FOR. I write about Greece, including Athens + Hydra recs behind the paywall, thank you!
WHAT I’M INTO
Press Play: “Ima Read” ft. Njena Reddd Foxxx by Zebra Katz
This song is 12 years old, which feels crazy to say for a song released while I was the bitch in college throwing up Diddy Riese ice cream cookie sandwiches outside Lambda Chi. I'ma write a dissertation to excuse my shit.
This is our Song Of The Week because EAC Shazam’d it at Angie Discotheque in Athens on Friday night. It sounds problematic at first listen, but it was the soundtrack at the Fall Winter 2012/13 Paris Rick Owens show (INCREDIBLE INNNNNCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!) and Azalea Banks sampled it. The song is a nod to Paris is Burning and a testament to how black culture influences mainstream culture, yet is rarely credited. Most of us weren’t using “read” as an insult in 2012.
Borrow from ur public library: Circe by Madeline Miller
I’m not a fantasy-read guy. But I love mythology. This book entered the zeitgeist and I watched it float by until people I trusted started recommending it to me. I decided it would be a good Greece read.
Miller applies a fresh lens to Circe’s story. You know her from The Odyssey. If you’re unfamiliar with Circe’s work, she’s a nymph with pharmaka powers (my GIRL) who famously transformed Odysseus' men into wild pigs (remember the feral hogs?). Impressed by Odysseus’ resilience, she takes him as her lover. In Miller’s version, we take Circe’s POV as she recounts classic Greek myths. It paints a more complete portrait, including that Circe turned the men into wild pigs because one raped her.
In reframing Circe’s story, Miller covers expected themes like misogyny, greed, and power, but I never thought about how lonely she was. It makes sense that she was a people-pleaser seeking external validation. Read this if you couldn’t get through The Odyssey and/or want an easy intro to Greek mythology.
Anti-algorithm news: “The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste” by W. David Marx (The Atlantic)
Yes, The Atlantic published last month, but I just got around to reading it. Do you consider yourself a tastemaker? I don’t, but I assume you’re here because you trust me to curate content fit for your consumption. Marx posits that tastemakers could lose their cultural advantage now that the internet evens the playing field by reducing information asymmetry.
I recommended Marx’s book, “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” in an April letter. I love how he thinks about status and clout as currency. In many ways it is. Where financial arbitrage is a strategy where investors buy assets in cheaper markets to sell them at a profit in more expensive markets, he sees cultural arbitrage as gathering information/style/etc. from places where they are the norm and selling them to the masses. For instance, when Zebra Katz wrote a song about the voguing term “read” and introduced it to both Diplo’s fanbase and the mainstream fashion industry.
WHAT I’M GRATEFUL FOR
WHAT I’M GRATEFUL FOR is where I write about things I’m grateful for (duh). I tried building a morning routine with written gratitude practice, but I’ve decided I can’t do everything I want to do in one morning if I also want to swim at Malmousque before French class. Instead, I practice gratitude verbally throughout the day and moved the written portion to a public forum.
Friends with flats in the Med
Cycladic Art
Revisiting Athens without COVID
WHAT I’M UP TO