According to TikTok and friends who have friends who’ve done it, “The Winter Arc” is a viral self-improvement regimen one takes on in the lead up to the new year—adopting good new habits, discarding bad ones, implementing fresh fitness routines, all so you hit the ground running come January.
It doesn’t make sense being called that.
To me, The Winter Arc better represents the emotional trajectory of the season: from resignation to the shorter days, crescendoing into, I guess, the Bad Bunny Halftime Show and maybe a ski trip, and then diving back into bleakness through March. Everything you do within the Arc is a way to muddle through the slush. It’s one big yawn you take from January to April—satisfying but ultimately an expression of self preservation.
With that happy outlook, herewith a special (special in that it exists) edition of A Matt-azine to arm you with
What are you telling yourself in order to make the most of—or at least get through—this one and wild year? I like a mantra these days. One place I recommend you source yours: The Testament of Ann Lee.
If you have not yet seen the musical-ish story of Shaker sect founder Ann Lee played by Amanda Seyfried1, directed by Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote The Brutalist and this movie with Brady Corbet, and with music from The Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg, get thee to a theatre. Preferably one screening it in 70mm.
It’s wild and like nothing I’ve ever seen. The music, mostly adaptations of traditional Shaker hymns, is replete with glorious, use-for-anything affirmations. I’ve found myself repeating them as I power through Bulgarian split squats at the gym. (Heated Rivalry Butt Summer is coming after all.)
My Ann Lee Mantras For This Winter:
-“All is constant, all is summer”
-[Primal wails]
-“I’m…clothed by the sun”
-“I hunger and thirst”
-“I am searching, I am led”
-“Today is my own time. Tomorrow can’t be reckoned. And what is past cannot return”
Those Shakers were on to something. Now, is that to say I would I subjugate my sexuality and take a vow of celibacy for the benefit of communal spirituality, precise carpentry and symmetrical architecture? I don’t know. But I have watched enough This Old House to know that when two ends of a dovetail joint perfectly slot together it is downright erotic, holy even. So…
Speaking of celibacy. Stop scrolling and get those two-to-four boys off the international stage. We’ve gone too far. I can’t go to a pilates class without the instructor playing the “All The Things She Said” remix and making weird joke about hockey boys kissing. Ma’am, I’m trying to focus on my left oblique here.
We need a new gay romance TV obsession, and one luckily exists. One that is decidedly chaste—so sexless it boggles the mind2—and like a semester study abroad in reality TV: The Boyfriend. The second season of this Japanese3 “dating” show is on Netflix now.
It follows seven-to-nine bonafide Nice Boys™️ as they sit around a house, and every now and then go work in a coffee truck, in order to sort out if any of them want to pair up.
What happens is…not much. They trudge through the snow of a ski town in pristine-looking The North Face Nuptse jackets and hint that they might like someone else in the house. Their polite, furtive flirtation—a hand grazes a shoulder while boiling pasta; someone suggests they get a matching pair of souvenirs—is a Victorian respite to those Canadian horndogs.
One example: Izaya likes William. Williams likes Izaya. They liked each other BEFORE the show. They don’t kiss until, like, episode 8.
And you don’t even need a side job of scrolling through the internet for DISCOURSE. The Boyfriend has it built in with a panel of relative adults watching the boys alongside us, providing commentary and analyzing their every move. (It’s lowkey V’s favorite part of the show.)
In this edition—and triumphant return—of the world-famous4, merch-having5 Such A Nice Boy™️ column: Pick a Gift Lane
A couple years ago I made it a resolution to try my best to get a birthday gift out to each adult member of my family. I’m old enough and have the money to do something, so why not. Nice Boy™️. (I’ve got a lot of siblings, many who are partnered up, plus parents, so it adds up fast.) But trying to think up a unique gift for nine individuals over the course of the year can be daunting. And then to do it again the following year?
That’s when I decided: Don’t cater the gift to the individual, cater the individual to the gift. In the classic Nice Boy™️ ethos of making you feel good while making me look good—and making both easy—I invoked the notion of the gift category. Pick a gifting lane from which to narrow down your options over the course of the year.
Think variations on a theme. The first time around, I did gift cards to local hot spots around metro Detroit where they all live—inviting them to dinner when I couldn’t be there and to try someplace different and new. This year, books. On the subjects or genres they’d be into.
If I start with the gift category, I can riff and tailor it to each individual rather than rack my brain trying to dream up something unique for them.
I feel like this is something aunts have done for time immemorial, but they tend to just riff on colorways of the same fleece as an out. I’m not saying give everyone the same sweater, or even the same sweater in different colors. If you’re going to give sweaters, maybe your preppy cousin gets a roll neck and your mom gets a cashmere cardigan. Let the lane be a jumping off point. You get to give a gift, make someone happy and let you know you thought of them, without thinking too much.
The Winter Arc can’t only be reality shows and catching up on The Pitt. We do have to get out of the house at some point. Two bits of culture I’m willing to bundle up for:
From Wallace Shawn, the New York intellectual and only other person beside Isaac Mizrahi to log guest spots in both Sex and the City AND Gossip Girl, his new play also stars John Early. Enough for me.
Okay, sure this is technically in spring and like two months away, but it’s bleak out there. As a recent Poog Hag convert and someone mesmerized by her Emmy-nominated special “Get On Your Knees,” I can’t wait to see her new material.
The Winter Arc (Matt’s Version) requires we have an outlet to gripe and vent. If I can just say one thing:
I’d rather tread carefully on a slippery sidewalk than have every surface I encounter be covered in the slimy residue left by the errant and flagrant overuse of chemical ice melt products. The exothermic reaction of sodium-chloride and sodium-magnesium prevents ice from forming down to like -15 degrees. But it also causes water to not fucking evaporate and instead linger in every hallway and on every shoe so that it spreads a slippery, chemical layer everywhere. It’s a scourge. Yes, salt the streets so cars don’t skid. But do the front step of my building need to be coated in a sludgey gel of ice melt because someone was too lazy to shovel? No.
Thank you for listening.
Till next time. We’re nearing the apex of The Winter Arc!
Remember the 2023 Golden Globes? No? Seyfried had won an acting trophy for playing Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout and she wasn’t there to claim the award because, quote, she was “deep in the process of creating a new musical”? Wouldn’t you want it to have been this and not this never-seen Thelma and Louise stage show that she was supposedly part of?
That is, until you have a friend tell your boyfriend that a few of these guys have Only Fans levels of, ahem, content floating around the internet.
I would be remiss if, in the course of talking about watching a Japanese TV show, I did not include this classic Chris Farley drop:
We’ve got readers in The Netherlands and Mexico!
Huge shoutout and thank you to friends of the newsletter Mercedes and Andrew for braving the Union Square Lids store to mint A Matt-azine’s first piece of merch:
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