A MATT-AZINE: The Brrr-thday Spectacular

Aaaaand we’re back! Welcome to issue 2 of [Is it even a working title anymore or should I just admit that this is the name?] A Matt-azine, a biweekly newsletter of unsolicited columns and features.

Everyone keeping warm? Trying to get some sunlight? Good. To keep things on the up amongst bad news, tax season and SAD, we’re tenuously covering birthdays this week—namely, my own.

On the lineup:

-A disco playlist

-Burgers

-Footnotes!

But first…

-Demi Moore, Academy Award Nominee1

-ARIANA GRANDE, ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE2

-A special birthday shout to MOTHERDISCO, having their third-year celebration Saturday. I’m not going, because it's sold out, but that gathering remains my bid for the best party on the scene because 1.) they only play good, old disco and 2.) it, mercifully, ends at 10pm. Bless.

-Charli XCX resale tix are expensive! Though, I think we can expect a dip beforehand, because…

-...gays cooler than me are into the new FKA Twigs. As in...

-Out: brat summer | In: Eusexua spring

Now, onto the features!…

[Editor note: As a reminder, Nice Boy™ is my guiding notion of hospitality. It’s about creating conditions and moving through the world in a way such that your friend’s mom would say about you, “He’s such a Nice Boy™.”]

(Acknowledging the above is technically a Thanksgiving toast, but imagine it was a birthday dinner for the sake of this column.)

Here’s how a birthday dinner usually goes down:

Everyone arrives and greets and hugs the birthday person and says “Happy Birthday.”

Then people split off and chat with who they’re seated next to or across from. They talk about work and what they’re streaming.

Then the drinks come and everyone does a big, collective birthday cheers!

Then people go back to telling some story about who they hate at work or what restaurant they thought was overrated.

And then the food comes, and the birthday person becomes just another person at a group dinner.

Focus gets pulled.

A birthday dinner needs an officiant. Someone to remind the dearly beloved why we’re gathered here today. A birthday dinner needs a Nice Boy™ to redirect the diffuse conversation of the table into a spotlight on the guest of honor.

One way to do it: Induce some cozy nostalgia. Play the “Favorite moment of the year. Go.” game.

Either late-midmeal or just as plates are getting cleared, but before the waiter brings out a piece of coconut cake with a candle in the ice cream, elect yourself the Nice Boy™ and ask the person across from you, loud enough to get the whole table’s attention:

“Danny, favorite Matt moment of the year. Go.” Then have everyone go around and share a favorite memory of the birthday boy/girl from the past year. Maybe it’s the time you caught them making out with a rando on a night out in February. Or the cabin trip you took in October where they turned out a baller meal for everyone.

[Editor note: Sharing the inspiration from which this comes below because it’s so stupid.]

It’s kind of silly and seems like a bit (because it is) but it turns the last moments of the night into a celebratory game that sends everyone out the door, especially the birthday boy/girl, in a state of gratitude.

Each guest gets a chance to share some personal, fun moment with the group. It keeps the birthday boy/girl at the center. And you get some good anecdotes, gossip even, from friends you might not be as connected with. It’s a win-win-win, which is what being a Nice Boy™ is all about.

Is a good burger and a manhattan.

That’s kind of it.

As you’ll read further down in “[Still Working Title] Unrecon-styled”, I’ve got a hard time treating myself, but one thing I know how to do: Enjoy the hell out of a burger and manhattan come January 26.

A burger and a manhattan are both just indulgent enough and just pedestrian enough that they feel special without being over the top. Exactly what you want an adult birthday to be.

I’ve done the birthday burger and manhattan in a large group setting. I’ve done it with just V & I. I’ve done it alone at the bar. Every time has been absolutely lovely.

But it can’t be any old burger on a birthday. It’s all about prioritizing an exceptional burger. In New York that means going to burger institutions, preferably old school and dark.

My Top Spots for a Birthday Burger and Manhattan, in no particular order:

1. JG Melon

2. P.J. Clarke’s (Third Ave. or Lincoln Square. NOT Brookfield)

3. Allswell (My neighborhood stalwart)

4. Julius’ (I’ll caveat that I have not actually done a birthday burger and manhattan here, but a Friday-night burger and martini and logged it for a future birthday spot. The bar is dark and old, and their burger is great. Like Miller’s in Dearborn, you also leave the place smelling like a burger.)

5. Minetta Tavern (V and I went here last year for my birthday dinner. We’re doing it again this year. I’d be very happy if this became, like, a 30-year tradition.)

3What’s the right way to treat yourself?

In my 20s, when I was the assistant to the editor-in-chief of a men’s magazine, I got exposure to a whole raft of free shit. A lot of it luxury fashion. At the holidays especially, Granger’s desk would be inundated with the likes of Cartier leather briefcases, Ferragamo leather briefcases and Armani leather messenger bags. (Apparently, the Luxury PR gifting apparatus of the mid-2010s favored mid-size leather goods for the EICs. That’s all to say nothing of the Tom Cruise cake we’d get delivered from “Tom, Katie and Suri.”) It was all so thrilling.

He once opened a pair of Gucci loafers in front of my desk, turned to me and was like, “I don’t want these, do you want them?” I did. I also took home a Smythson dopp kit that V has since claimed as his own. A friend of a friend who worked at Zegna scored me a sick fucking suit for $100 bucks at her employee sample sale. I’ve worn that to about eight weddings. I wrote 100 words on the launch of Shinola, and they sent me and my brother watches.

Even if I didn’t take something home, I could wander in the fashion closet and handle the threads of an Hermès sweater or try on a belted Belfast leather jacket.

The thrill of luxury fashion for me will forever be associated with: This costs nothing. Cut to: me having to pay for it.

I now work for a luxury fashion retailer. The shit isn’t free anymore, but it is heavily, wonderfully discounted. And, yet, every time I feel like I’m ready to throw down for “something nice” for myself, I can’t do it.

I’ve twice bought and returned the Loewe Flow Runner. Same for the McQueen platform sneaker. The addition to and removal from my cart of the Gucci pool slide has been a monthly ritual since I took my job five and a half years ago.

Being on the other side of the luxury game, I can see the sheer volume by which these unique, special, expensive “it” items move. At first glance, the above shoes are immediately appealing. I think the Flow Runner is genuinely cool looking! I love what Jonathan Anderson does. But then when I add to cart, I’m just a sucker paying too much—albeit less than most people!—for a shoe.

And what am I gonna do with the shoe if I do finally, truly cop it? Wear it with that old Carhartt jacket [Editor note: See photo in Good Eater™ above]?

Collecting one-off, hype-ish items, does not a personal-style make. I think it’s hard to seriously covet luxury fashion items as a pushing-40 year old dude. But it got me thinking, what indulgences do I actually, willingly spend too much on? Fragrances. Paper towel—I use a lot of it, shamelessly. Sunglasses, including the most obnoxious pair of Prada Linea Rossa shield shades. Renting a car when I’m in Detroit. To me, these are luxuries.

This is all functioning as a reminder to myself going into my 38th year: Your indulgences are your own. Don’t follow the hype. Believe in yourself. Take the Flow Runner off the wishlist.

My Astrologer: Detroit’s Alt-Weeklies

Being born in late January makes me an Aquarius. Which, I think, means I’m independent and an aloof lover—heyyyy💅. But for real, the zodiac is all mostly, kind of bullshit, except! (except!) for the celestial insights of one particular astrologer.

If you were a teen in Metro Detroit in the 2000s trying to affect cool, you’d hang at Dearborn Music and flip through the alternative rock stacks4. On your way out the shop, you’d probably pick up a copy of Real Detroit Weekly from the rack by the door. Real Detroit Weekly was a free print alt-weekly newspaper chronicling the music listings around the city.

Real Detroit and its sister alt-publication Detroit Metro Times were a window into the artsy, indie music scene bubbling around Detroit. The cool kids probably participated in it. The non-cool kids were too obscured by high school nonsense to really see it.

What we all—cool kids and non-cool kids alike—knew, though, was that the best, most prescient, cut-to-your core horoscopes you’d ever read in your life were in the pages of Real Detroit Weekly. Written by someone named Cal Garrison—who I imagined as a male NPR host—these horoscopes would give us chills as we read them aloud from the backseat of someone’s car driving around on a Friday night.

When Real Detroit got absorbed by the Metro Times in 2015, Cal’s column followed. When Cal left the Metro Times, I followed her to her personal page—turns out she’s a leathery, hippy lady based out of Arizona, which all, you know, tracks. Every Friday she still puts out a fresh set of, as she calls them, ‘scopes.

Cal basically called it that I’d be going to New York. She pinpointed the panic that impelled me to pivot from magazines to barber school.

Now she’s now naming this fucked-up moment we’re in. She says we’re halfway through the eye of the needle. That we’re kind of going through hell right now because we’re getting set up for something greater:

[A]t the moment we are bearing witness to events that give more credence to the idea that the entire house is burning down than any thought that we might be ascending to the Higher Realms…

…[W]hatever we are going through right now, I am clear that the entire process is being overseen by otherworldly forces who are here to help. After all: the Kogi Mamos told us a long time ago:

'The only way to see the Light is in total Darkness'

Times like these you gotta find some affirming hope somewhere. For me—get ready for this kicker—it happens to be in an astrology column I discovered in:

LOCAL PRINT MEDIA.

AMEN.

Alright, I went long again. Sorry. (Still looking for an editor!)

Catch you in two weeks for the Love and Football Issue, where we’ll be discussing why this is the ideal relationship. PEACE.