[WORKING TITLE] A MATT-AZINE
Vol. 01, Issue 01... Indulge me!
Welcome to the inaugural edition of [working title] A Matt-azine, a biweekly newsletter of unsolicited columns and features. Like the other inaugural taking place soon, if you wanna throw a million bucks my way in order to stay on my good side, please do!
Gonna try and cover culture, style and food on a regular basis, like a real lifestyle rag, but it’s pretty much by me, for me. For you, this week, maybe it can be a little respite from the horrible shit going down in California.
What I’ve got lined up in this issue:
-Coming out as a thigh guy
-Bottle openers
-Dressing like a third grader
But first….
This Week In Gay Shit
A roundup of what’s popping off in one corner of the culture
-Demi Moore at the Golden Globes.
-This stupid video I’ve played like 20 times this week
-Cooper Koch’s boyfriend. What we know of Cooper Koch: He’s rich. He is, um, very reasonably not shy about doing nudity. What we know of Cooper Koch’s boyfriend: He has a goatee… Answers, please.
-Williamsburg’s ongoing transition to full blown gayborhood with the impending opening of The Oberon by the one gay bartender at the very straight The Craic.
-Out: Equinox Domino | In: Crossfit
[Editor note: I realize and reiterate, this is mostly a newsletter for one. Now, onto the features!]
SUCH A NICE BOY™
The Holiday Party Post-Mortem
Welp, we’re two weeks out of holiday party season. A big thank you to everyone who hosted something this year. There is grace in hospitality, and grace and hospitality are core tenets of being a Nice Boy™.
—Wait. Oh, what’s a Nice Boy™ you ask? I haven’t screamed this pitch at you drunk while you’ve been a guest in my own home? That’s my fault. Forgive me. A quick explainer on my guiding notion of hospitality, AKA my grand idea for a lifestyle service brand, AKA what I would call my TikTok account if I created one like that Babs lady.
Nice Boy™ is about thinking about other people’s comfort before they do without sweating it too much. It’s about moving through the world in a way such that your friend’s moms would say about you, “He’s such a Nice Boy™.”
It’s like chill Martha Stewart for millennial men. The Nice Boy™ creates nuggets of compassion that 1.) make him feel like a champ for doing something nice and 2.) make a given social interaction—be it a party or a work meeting—a little easier. Most of the time, it just means thinking a step or two ahead.
In my mind, a Nice Boy™ act should feel, to both parties, like this photo of Miles Teller.
It is ultimately a selfish endeavor disguised as micro-altruism that disarms people and makes you look good. Added up, it’s about taking a proactive approach to social situations.—
So anyway, holiday parties. I hit the home-hosted holiday party circuit pretty well this year and I’ve got two tips for your next house party. (Tip 0 being have more house parties. Once again, speaking to myself here.)
1. Invite Randos
Because a party with the same people you see on a regular basis is just a get together. You’re throwing a party to try and mix things up, right? Humans who don’t know each other all that well is instant excitement. So, make sure to invite a couple tenuous connections—friends of friends, a coworker you’d wanna hang with, people you’ve soft-seeded to your core group of pals—that you know can show up and talk to people.
I was a rando at a holiday party this year. I’d reconnected with old friends I probably hadn’t seen in seven or eight years and crashed their big group White Elephant exchange. It was great. Met some new folks, smoked a cigarette in a Metro Detroit garage and learned about how sick the pension plan for UofM nurses is. Good for anyone that’s scored that gig, seriously.
And then I met a rando, to me, at an annual holiday party where I usually see the same group of folks year after year. How we got introduced? Searching for something beyond the question of their holiday plans, I was asking one of the usuals if they had any good bits lately when this guy chimed right in. He seemed like a person with bits, he had on a silver cowboy hat. My guy launched into his whole routine as the Jersey pageant mother to a girl named Dominique Dunkindonuts. Fucking hilarious. More randos.
2. More Bottle Openers
Leave a wine opener or two at the bar. Plus a bottle opener by the drink bucket. (You’ve got a drink bucket, right?) Those are givens. But it can’t hurt to leave a couple more out in high-traffic locales. A design-minded one on the coffee table. Another on the kitchen island.
If you’re serving Topo Chicos or the kinds of beers that are fancy enough to require an opener, the openers ought to be as abundantly available and easy to find as the drinks themselves. Oh, and if you’re grabbing a drink for someone, open it before you give it to them. It’s such a blessing.
…AND A GOOD EATER™, TOO
What Paul Mescal and Chicken Have in Common
[Editor note: One more bit of context. A Good Eater™ is a brother to a Nice Boy™. The other thing you want someone’s mom to say about you, after “He’s such a Nice Boy™” is “and a Good Eater™, too.” Has a friend's mom ever told you that you’re always invited back to their house because of the way you housed her kielbasa and kraut (not a euphemism) while your friend pushed food around his plate? You’re a good eater. Which means this column is for you.]
The holidays this year felt especially gluttonous, with my dad hosting three Christmases between the 23rd an 25th followed by a marathon of eating in Spain with V’s family for New Years. (The sendoff meal, a casual paella.) By January, Sweetgreen salads and Diet Cokes consumed alone and quietly at my desk feels like a merciful respite from all of December’s red meats and gin and tonics.
What I told V before I left Madrid, and say probably at the beginning of every January: We’re only eating chicken this month.
But chicken breast sooooks. The only way to make it good is to filet and flatten and pan fry, like piccata. And while I did get a splatter screen for Christmas, it’s still a lot of work.
That’s where poultry’s, like Paul Mescal’s, best feature comes in: The Thigh. (yess, that headline finally paid off.) Bone-in, skin-on or boneless, skinless, the thigh is the most adaptable and flavorful of all white meats.
I grew up in a chicken breast house. Thighs were reserved for barbecue chicken on the grill and were often the last cut left on the platter. It was V who introduced me to the thigh as an oven champion when we started dating.
He’d throw them on a sheet pan with onion and sometimes drizzle some beer over them, and they were just delicious. That’s basically how I do them now. Season, maybe add some paprika and rub over with a bit of olive oil. Throw it on a tray with some onion, maybe lemon. And let it rip at like 400 for a while. Give it a splash of beer if you’ve got it halfway through cooking. You can roast the shit out of them and they come out all the more tender and delicious.
Two other ways I love the chicken thigh:
For Bone-In, Skin-On
This salsa verde stew from Esquire’s Eat Like a Man cookbook. It’s healthy-ish but hearty. Not gonna lie, it’s the kind of spicy good where you don’t mind your nose dripping into the stew while you’re scarfing. Great over rice.
For Boneless, Skinless
This absolute banger Ali Slagle joint. Hands down a top-five soup for me. Ask Julie. I turned her onto it and she’s a believer now, too.
[Also a working title] Unrecon-Styled
A Column Confronting Fashion in Your Late 30s
[Editor note: This headline is a WIP. IT’S NOT FINAL. I know that it’s bad, okay? But I kind of love-hate it. And I’m working for an audience of one here.]
Now that we’re some years into, and likely on our way out of the Creative Director-cum-Carhartt look, the men-getting-dressed culture (or, again, just myself) is pivoting towards workwear’s true lifestyle corollary: LL Bean-ism. I’ve just got one hangup about it. It makes me feel like a kid.
We—“we” being urban-dwelling, upwardly mobile, Brooklyn-adjacent types—may have overcorrected. We’ve extended ourselves into the direction of costume with our obsession over the laborer look. For those of us not actually working on job sites, no matter how many ball caps and Sambas you pair your Carhartt with, you’re still a skinny guy in a cocktail bar in a big construction-zone jacket. It was with good intentions: we were searching for clothing that works. Functionality leading form and all that. But I’ve come around on the idea that there has long been functional clothing that better suits my reality.
As I get older, I’m more interested in value as an indicator of good style. Not value as in a cheap deal, but value as in paying for and getting significant fashion miles out of clothes that are well-made. I want pieces that tout features and benefits less suited to a winter road management crew and instead lend themselves to the rigors of my actual life, like “won’t shrink in the wash” and “tucks in well” and “won’t look like a loser at the bar but also won’t look obnoxious at the office” and “keeps you warm but won’t overheat on the subway.”
I posit most items in the L.L. Bean catalog exhibit these virtues.
When the Maine company dropped their holiday catalog in early October I found myself dog-earring and circling my favorites, like a kid with the old Sears toy book. I tagged heavy rugbies and chamois flannels. I sent my mom links to thermal henleys in washed turquoise and dark navy commando sweaters. It all looked good enough, booned by the fact that most of their pieces have been bestsellers for 40+ years.
And so I purchased. A red roll-neck knit on sale. I convinced my mom to score me a striped mock-neck rugby for Christmas. I got myself two henleys and a pair of faded black jeans that hit “just below the waist” at their store in Boston’s Seaport District on a trip in October. V got a henley and a fleece, too. We spent more time at that outlet than at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Cut to this January, and I’m layered up in the brand’s thermies, tucked into the mid-rise jeans, and braving the cold in their Classic Mountain Parka. And I have my Bean Boots at the ready should it ever snow.
Looks like I’ve overcorrected again.
Where the workwear moment felt like I was doing manual-labor drag, LL Bean-ism feels weird in a different way. When you rediscover and wear the clothes that have been mostly the same since you were a kid, you begin to feel like you’re, in fact, dressing like a kid again.
Tucked in henleys? Blue-green rugbies? Washed mid-rise denim? I think I wore that to picture day in the third grade. Am I infantilizing myself? Kinda. Is it comfort dressing? Definitely. Should I just get over it? Probably.
There’s a fine line between Kevin McCallister and Chris Evans when you’re wearing a chunky cream fisherman’s cable knit. I think you just have to choose to be Chris Evans.
These pieces have been around forever and worn by every age because they work. They keep you warm in the winter. They look good enough for a casual office. The henleys stay tucked into your jeans. They are the affordable bastions of original prep style, which is to say a large swath of American style.
I’m at a point in life where dressing is no longer about looking cool or keeping up or trying new things. It’s coming from a place of what fucking works. And the foundational texts of casual American sportswear, the stuff I grew up wearing, fucking works.
It’s like the way a chicken tender has always worked. Sure, you can find high-design points of view on Bean-ism, the same way restaurants are all trying to make fancy versions of nostalgic food. (Yes, the cosmic brownie at Juliana is very good.) It’s in the orange mock necks at Loewe or John Elliott’s camo hoodies. But in the end it’s LL Bean all the way down, so why not just go straight to the source. The next catalog drops in February.
Never Had It So Good
A Nostalgia Column
Ghosts of President’s Future and Past Calling
Have I ever mentioned I used to work in magazines? Remember those? It’s a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and I was one of the last people at the party. Though I think everyone who’s done a run through an editorial department between 1999 and, say, 2014, would say they were the last people at the party. It’s like Woody Harrelson says in that SNL apple picking sketch: “Whenever you come, you just missed it.” But I got to experience a few cool things that feel like glory days.
In my first gig, as Assistant to the Editor in Chief at Esquire, I fielded calls from both next next week’s outgoing and incoming presidents.
Yes, the tl;dr of this story is I did my job and answered a phone, but…! I was young and this is a nostalgia column, so whatever!
The first time was on October 3, 2011, my first day as David Granger’s assistant. I had just settled into my desk and was reviewing the manual of the job’s how-tos established by Granger’s first, longtime secretary Fran Kessler—a real Joan from a real bygone era; her typewriter sat under my intern desk until we rolled into the archive closet one day. The manual included things like how to order his lunch from Lenny’s , how to answer the phone when his wife called. The first call of the day came through. It wasn’t his wife.
“David Granger’s office. This is Matt.”
“This is the Vice President’s Office for Mr. Granger.”
“Uhhh. One second please.”
Coming in at the beginning of October meant I was joining right as they were ramping up production on the January “Meaning of Life” issue. The theme that year had been about gleaning wisdom from famous sidekicks, like Art Garfunkel and John Oates. Granger and his executive editor Mark Warren had been working the Vice President’s office for weeks in order to secure an interview. They were calling to confirm. I got up from my desk and tapped at Granger’s door.
“It’s the Vice President’s office?”
He spun around, threw on his headset and waved me out of the office and back to my desk to make the transfer. Which I sweated doing, because, like, what if I accidentally hung up on Joe Biden? It worked out though. The more intense thing that day? Getting Granger’s lunch order right. He liked the Chica-avo sandwich on a spinach wrap, not plain.
The next one was during Trump’s birtherism spin of 2012. The magazine’s site had published some satire basically calling Trump a dumb dumb which came across his desk. So, Hope Hicks (remember her?) emailed me or called me and was like, can we set up a call with our bosses? Granger was on the west coast that week, so we arranged it for Donald to call his cell after I’d logged off for the day.
When I checked my email later that evening, I’d gotten a message from Granger that was essentially a frantic transcription of the call.
I’m paraphrasing, but Granger wrote something like: “This is batshit. He’s going on and on about how hurt he was by the story. Now he just pivoted to my golf game and how he remembered how we’d played golf together once and how I’d needed to correct my swing.”
Ah, feels like much more innocent times.