October Signals
Hello my friends, welcome back for the latest installment of Signals. Signals is our bi-monthly round-up of anything that has caught my eye recently. It really doesn’t have to relate to menswear or fashion or anything — it’s a true grab-bag in that sense.
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Notes From Italy
If you follow my Instagram closely, you’ll know that I just got back from Italy. I should start by saying that I think travel is way over-emphasized in our current culture - yeah it’s nice to see different things and experience different cultures, but being a “lover of travel“ has reached near-death-cult levels of cultural penetration among upwardly-mobile Americans.
That said, Italy lives up to the hype.
It was my first time in the country, and I left so much more impressed that I thought I would’ve. The Beauty-Per-Square-Inch of cities like Florence and Siena are so alien to my American mind that they took on an almost surreal, dreamlike quality as we explored around.
I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the beauty (I’ll throw up some of my favorite scans at the end of this section), but would like to make a few observations from my time there:
Rome kicks ass - I don’t know who came up with the idea that you can do Rome in two days. That’s such an obvious falsehood and it makes me question the travel styles of people who say that. You’d have to speedrun every notable landmark in the city to try and cram that all into just two days, and I imagine you wouldn’t enjoy your time there if you tried to do that.
The Sistine Chapel kind of sucks - the Vatican is really cool and the museum is really great, but they put you in a literal cattle chute that meanders through a bunch of (comparatively) lame, uninteresting artifacts before you’re allowed to get a glimpse of the chapel itself. The place is packed to the gills and it takes about an hour and a half of shuffling through ancient Egypt (???) exhibits with about an inch of space between yourself and the next person, before you actually get to the chapel, where you’re then packed into the room like sardines.
Sweaty, gross, full of body odor. I would honestly consider skipping unless you’re making some sort of religious pilgrimage.
Italian cigarettes smell different
The food is more satiating - there is lots of discourse and even more circumstantial evidence that Americans, when spending an extended amount of time in Europe, will lose a bunch of weight. This is often met with a “yeah no shit, you fat idiot Americans are actually off your asses and walking around for once in your obesoid lives“.
As someone with a very high activity level, I don’t find this answer satisfactory. If anything, my overall activity decreased compared to a normal day here in Boston. Additionally, there is plenty of data out there that shows that the average European is nearly as sedentary as the average American at this point. I also ate like shit and consumed coma-inducing levels of gelato while over there. Still, I weighed about half a pound less than when I arrived. So why is that?
If I had to make an educated guess, it’s that America has experienced soil depletion at a way higher rate than Europe - our food here is literally less nutritionally dense, all else being held constant. So, while the macronutrients (calories/proteins/fats/carbs) would be roughly the same, the micronutrients are wildly different (below).
It is likely that our food quality (even organic foods) is poor enough that we have to consume significantly higher quantities to satisfy our micronutrient requirements, which would keep us hungrier throughout the day. I felt relatively full up until my next meal in Italy for comparison. Apologies for the dissertation, just something I personally find interesting. At any rate, try to buy from high-quality, local sources!
Rome and Florence have the most gluten free options of any cities I’ve visited - having celiac disease, traveling to a country where I don’t speak the language is pretty stressful. Thankfully, there are tons and tons of options, and even more thankfully, they actually take it very seriously there (there’s nothing more humiliating and frustrating that eating out at a restaurant and realizing that the waitstaff thinks “gluten free“ is some fake yuppie thing).
Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk - enjoy some of my favorite pictures from the trip:
This is so cool. Need to hunt this down and buy one. I was tracking this for a couple weeks before it was released, only to completely forget about it and have it sell out. Tale as old as time.
Head of the Charles Regatta
The HOCR was this past weekend up here in Boston - probably one of the preppiest events in the entire country (for the spectators, at least).
I was able to attend on Saturday and was greeted with an absolutely miserable scene - a borderline-torrential downpour, coupled with a gigantic mud pit stretching almost the entirety of the course.
I wasn’t able to get too many shots because of the rain, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people came out to attend. As a rower myself, it’s nice to see the sport entering a mini-renaissance in the age of short-form video. It’s such a beautiful and intense sport, and that is finally able to be seen by others.
This post is a video btw (check it out!!).
One of the craziest things to happen this week was Irish olympic gold medalist Paul O’Donovan entering in the championship single sculls event, only to come in 15th (!!!) place. One of the best rowers in the entire world can’t even finish top half in the event. Goes to show how technically difficult and special the Charles race course is.
Anyway, a weekend of good fun and great racing, topped off with my boathouse purchasing a $12,000 Biorower rowing machine:
This thing is supposed to be almost exactly like rowing on the water, including some dynamic instability. Can also swap the sculls out for a single sweep arm. I’m really excited to try this thing out.
Barbour x Palace
I don’t know much about Palace beyond them being a skating company that caters toward hypebeasts (sort of like Supreme, but less dead), but Barbour continues its recent hot streak of partnering with just about anyone willing to give them a boost in clout.
That said, the collection is small and has some cool pieces:
Sidenote: Apparently borzois are a hella tough dog breed
Cyberpunk 2077
The main reason this edition of Signals is 3 weeks late is that I’ve been playing this game.
Seriously have you guys played this? It fucking rules. Probably one of the best games I’ve played honestly, which surprised me since I’m more of a Skyrim guy.
The game was originally released in 2020 and was completely botched and buggy as hell. Allegedly an attempt at a money grab to get the game out before the new Xbox and PS5 came out, so they could double-dip on the previous- and next-gen consoles.
It was met with horrible reviews and the game completely bombed, which was really rare coming from the same company that makes the Witcher franchise (one of the most successful and high-quality game franchises out there if you’re not familiar).
Apparently the release was so embarrassing that the company spent over $120 million trying to rework the game so that it was actually fun. I guess it worked out, because I downloaded it with the DLC that they just launched (a neo-noir spy thriller) and it was incredible. I put something like 60 hours into it in just a few weeks.
I think the biggest drawback for this franchise is that the game’s star is Keanu Reeves. I find it strange and off-putting to have movie stars in video games (they doubled down on this by putting Idris Elba in the DLC). Feels wrong on a lot of levels.
To expand, I think that there is still a functional barrier between the internet and Real Life (at least for us elder gen Zers — I don’t have much faith in this regard for the really young kids (gen alpha?)). Video games are part of the internet domain and should stay there.
In other words, it’s like when you see someone using tiktok slang in the real world and it feels extremely cringey and forced (it’s giving autism 💅🏻). Like there’s this unacknowledged rule to not cross the internet-meatspace barrier, and this person, for whatever reason, isn’t socially capable of understanding that. It just feels off. At any rate, digitizing stars and putting them in your video game is weird and you shouldn’t do it.
Buck Mason West Coast Ivy
Firstly, shoutout to Eric Twardzik for bringing this one to my attention in his latest article on The Search Continues (I highly recommend subscribing btw).
Buck Mason recently released an editorial featuring a less stuffy, West Coast version of ivy style. It’s filled to the brim with some excellent outfit inspiration.
Alright guys, that’s it for this edition of Signals. That’s everything I’ve been up to or have otherwise been thinking about recently.
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Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Great stuff. Some reflections:
1. The "lover of travel" moniker is overused. I just read in the Washington Post that luxury travel is at an all-time high, while credit card debt is also at an all-time high with Travel and entertainment being the #1 category making up that debt. Without a doubt in my mind, social media plays a large role in this with its "keeping up with the Joneses" influence on the masses.
2. On losing weight in Europe. It's an anomaly, and I think you are close to the root cause. I go to Greece frequently, and there I drink a lot of beer, eat a lot of fried foods, and have a good ol' time...but I come back lighter. I read once that Mediterranean grains, like semolina/wheat, are so many more gut-friendly bacteria than ours in America. It also reminds me of a Nat Geo article I read about how the maize (corn) that the indigenous cultures in South America ate was a "superfood" as they were super-packed with micronutrients as compared to the modern-day North American variety of corn.
Btw - those photos from an iPhone? They look great.
are we fucking with buck mason? For some reason I equate them with lame startup fashion brands that advertise on podcasts. But I agree the west coast ivy editorial was awesome and the website has a some stuff that has piqued my interest.