Vin Diesel’s Cream-Colored Long Johns

Let’s get started with some mini-obseshes and then move on to bigger ones. What can I say except something “something something multitudes”?

BIRDS

Are so gross! No offense to birds but ew.

DRAKE

His new video for Started From The Bottom spends waaaaay too much time at Shoppers Drug Mart, which is like Canadian Duane Reade except with less product options (that might just be “Canada”) and higher prices (also “Canada”) and better candy (also “Canada”). Did you know that? Better candy. Also, “Fuck a fake friend, where your real friends at?” is very “Canada.” (Realized ambition, though: not “Canada.”)

BEYONCÉ DOCUMENTARY

What I like the most about Beyoncé is how she defies the usually inevitable sine waves of celebrity in the same way as, like, Steve Martin. She is a manager of her own capital before she is anything else, I think.

GIRLS CORNER

“I’m going to try something: beg me to stay.” This was the central transformative moment of The Episode (you know the one I mean), and of season two, and second only in the entire series to “YOU are the wound!” Ahhhhhh. “Beg me to stay.” “Make me come.” Get money.

THE ROW AT NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Yes, fashion goblins Mary Kate and Ashley (jay-kays, though: MK and A are beloved by the Haus of Carraway) did up some long johns in their recent autumn/winter 2013 fashion week collex. Well, they did up little suggestive-ish peeks of long johns underneath oversized silky-lineny-furry swaths, but those tight ankle cuffs in black and white are not to be missed.

LEST WE FORGET, THOUGH: They are not the first to capitalize on the quiet sexual appeal and agency of long johns, and of the “waffle” fabric configuration more generally; I mean, by now, even small-minded boys are generally down with the idea that nothing is “new,” in a granular sense, in fashion (Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection or no Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection), but I think it’s important to address the history of long johns as something other than long johns.

Obviously they are a punk staple, whatever-whatever, and to a small subset of a small generation of women, nothing could be more casually erotic than a knee of ripped denim revealing an orb of graying waffle fabric. (Like, a long shiver just passed through my body and into my laptop, can you feel it?) In the movie xXx (hahahahhahahahahahaha), Vin Diesel spends some crucial screen time in cream-colored long johns and if you can forget that it’s Vin Diesel (can you?) as “Vin Diesel” and think of him as “Mark Vincent” who has a twin and a kid and wants to do work that achieves more (you can just tell), maybe the long johns (and shearling jacket!!!) will come to life as sartorial sex-things. (Y? N? M?) Long johns are underwear, technically, and as such are singularly vulnerability-producing, especially on gigantic, hard and hardened men-types or sylph-y women; they cling to the waist and the ankles and hang in between, like antifashion, like jammies, and otherwise move around the body depending on how you play it and what your ass just does. Without a shirt, especially, on girls or boys (long, dirty hair in either case maximizes the effect), and with a cup of coffee, a pair of long johns can accomplish more fashion-as-sex than even jeans, even a perfect white T-shirt, even black heels or lingerie, none of which offers the body up in the same unmediated way. Nothing is or could be more revealing, really, than long johns. Slow clap, The Row.

BROS

Are you guys watching Harry Cheadle’s VICE video series called All Around Losing? Tip to taint, it is my Platonic ideal of what I want my various, if tangential, work-bros to be doing for my own entertainment. Highlight: In the newest edition (in which Harry attempts to learn less awkward body language and then participates in the most embarrassing and least promising exercise of speed dating that I’ve ever seen committed to internet), Harry’s expert-guy (who tells him not to rub his legs to calm down, which I have soooo seen so many guys do as if they’re making wishes come true through their thigh-jeans!?) says of Harry’s more regular dating styles, “The online pool is contaminated.” AAAAAHHHH! I am forced by the vagaries of my own curiosity and compulsions and refusal to write about myself anymore to very frequently think about and then write about other people’s mostly garbage relationships, and I’ve never heard some semiprofessional get harsh about something everybody else is doing like it’s totally fine and normal and appropriate. YES! I’m not squarely against it but can we a little bit, just a lil bit, talk about how the pool is contaminated? Meet someone at the corner store, everyone. Anyway, Harry (and Thomas and Rocco and Wilbert) is doing such good video things that I sometimes just squee like a kindergartener at my desk. I’m freelance so I’m not even in the tank.

OK BYEEEE!

OK Byeeeee!

Previously – Boys Are Dogs and Girls Are Cats

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway