Hedonist Summer

the quintessential end-of-summer to-do list

I have adapted Portra of a Lady on Film, the most popular LOOSEY to date, into a longer-form essay for Maisonneuve. You can read in print where books are sold or online here.

The summer has been a muse of mine for a while. I have written about how the summer can justify your unwise dalliances when no one else will. How the summer can conjure the bizarre combination of coincidence and fate that feels plucked from a past life. How the summer is the perfect season for a ‘guest character’ debut. Sketches of the beach, crashing waves on island sand, humid patios and rooftop fireworks have all emerged as backdrops to the life I live and the life I write about.

I have always said that fall is my favourite season: the satisfying crunch of leaves underneath my sneakers, the steady pulse of new films and, of course, the fashion. But, for some reason, this summer has felt significant. Full of indulgences. A season where I’ve only said “yes” and saw where it took me.  It’s with this in mind that I wonder if the fall is for discernment while the summer is for unbridled pleasure. Perhaps the summer is the long-winded, fun but messy first draft that we later edit and refine in the fall.

We currently have less than a month until autumn and I wish to be intentional about how I spend it. I hope the same for you. With the help of some friends, collaborators and artists I admire, I have curated a list of things you must experience before the summer closes. This decadent summer of hedonism will end sooner than we think so let’s relish the good bits before it’s gone.

Feet pics! For free!

Taking an Outdoor Shower: There is nothing more representative of the languid lush of the summer than an outdoor shower. After a moment at the beach or a sweaty game of cornhole, few things feel more restorative than being outside with nothing to caress your limbs than the salt air, crisp water and convenience store shower gel. Bonus points if you can watch yourself bathe in a mirror. - Brendon

Embracing The Local Kitsch: It’s easy, having fully integrated into a (presumably) sprawling, diverse city, to consider yourself above the garish tourist diversions your home has to offer. After all, locals don’t pay to take pictures with Mickey at Disney, get soaked on the Niagara Falls Hornblower, or scarf down glizzies at Coney Island. 

But, before the summer ends, lean into the passé. Cast off your routines, take a break from gatekeeping the best falafel in town, and join the crowds in experiencing widely advertised local wonders. Summers are about nostalgia, and if you’re like me, something as simple as riding the Cyclone will transport you back to the naive, easily impressed kid you were when you moved in. - Aditya, Finding Our Wild

Eating Pasta at a Restaurant Bar Alone: Would you believe me if I told you that I willingly ate at a restaurant where the chef had been rumoured to murder stray cats? Well, I did and I’d do it again. A week or two ago, I found myself at a buzzy, new restaurant in Hollywood. I was in Los Angeles for work and, after grabbing drinks with a friend, I slid into the dimly lit joint to taste the fabled off-menu rigatoni. I made the reso for two but it was late on a Wednesday and my friend opted to slink off to bed rather than stay out for a bite. 

When I approached the hostess and notified her of the change in the number of guests, she told me I could have my original table or sit the bar. Without hesitation, I took the bar. Dining at the bar is special because you are invisible and on display at the same time. Typically, the bartender takes your order and serves you, meaning you are usually in the presence of a skilled conversationalist should you choose to entertain. The bartender is more likely to give you an honest read of the menu than a regular waiter, more likely to slip you an off-menu treat as you keep them company. You experience the restaurant through the eyes of those who work there without clocking in. As a voyeur, you eavesdrop on the first date to your right, you pick up on the not-so-secret affair between servers. You can chat with the stranger next to you or you can disappear into your own world, earbuds in, magazine in hand. I did a bit of it all that evening.

Next to me, a man in an Aime Leon Dore hat offered his fries, allowing me to snack off his plate. Despite his generosity, I never gave him a bite of my rigatoni. That was for me alone to indulge. - Brendon

Playing With Neighborhood Kids Outside: Whether or not children are outside during the day is a physical marker of when summer ends and school starts. To me, summer is a playful and exploratory time for all ages; take five minutes to hop in a double-dutch session with the kids down the block on your way home. Or even just cheer on the winner in a scooter race down the street! Joining in on simple, summer fun is a must for me. - Addis, Bitter Blush

Reading Emily Cline’s The Guest: As someone who was unmoved by Daddy but enamoured with The Iceman, I was unsure of what to expect when I cracked open Cline’s latest novel, The Guest. Revered as the Play It As It Lays of Gen Z sex work, Uncut Gems for chicks and the “book of the summer,” the novel tells the story of a twenty-two year old named Alex who is ousted by her sugar daddy in the Hamptons and determined to drift her way through the island until Labour Day. A stressful read in which an unreliable protagonist makes nothing but bad decisions, the sentences are clean and the plot grows tense with every page. 

Most piercing, however, is the precision to which Cline illustrates how whiteness and its perceived docility can permeate the gates of wealth and class at ease. Chapter by chapter, constructed episodically so the rising action mirrors the high (and inevitable crash) of a drug, we read as Alex flattens herself to become fluid, to leech, to exploit. Cline's understanding of how these spaces function, and how the right (or white) wallflower can encroach on a territory that is not theirs, undetected, is acute. As a result, Alex's powers of manipulation come not from an aptitude for obscuring her identity. It's quite the opposite. Instead of a disguise, she offers herself - a blank canvas of a girl - and allows her surrounding environment to assume how she might fit in their world. Upon completion, I thought of a new comparison: Parasite amoungst the privileged. - Brendon 

Listening to The Age of Pleasure: Take a bite into this Janelle Monae album, and it instantly tastes like summer. Connect the poolside Sonos, pop your edible of choice, and simply press play. Ride the horns of affirmation, and twerk if ya wanna – all while you dive into this queer, Black celebration record. Because you deserve it. - Trey

Sipping a Vesper Martini: This crushable, citrus-laced concoction that was first popularized in Fleming’s Casino Royale has been a consistent late-night companion of mine. Whether accompanying you on a date with someone whose number you’ll never end up saving or among friends, over a steak dinner, before a night out, the vesper has you marked. Chilled and perilously peaking over its brim, she evokes a sense of sophistication without requiring the sophisticated palette of its stiffer martini siblings. Vodka, gin and Lillet, for the uninformed. Delicious, for those who are. - Brendon

Waking Up in the Jersey Shore: The only feeling better than waking up early to drive, train or even fly to the Jersey Shore is waking up on the shore. Find yourself on a hard, sandy floor, in a bunk bed in a condemnable shack or on a tasteless, unforgiving couch. You won’t care. At the Jersey Shore, you forget about things like your sleep hygiene, your skincare routine, your monastic diet, your dreadful job, your unread text messages. Going down the shore is not so much an act of forgetting as it is the complete and total takeover of simple, joyous Americana. Drink a rum bucket and find yourself overcome with nostalgia for a life and a world that never really existed; treat yourself to an ice cream cone; ride the Gravitron; keep aloe vera in the fridge; lose a game of volleyball as the DJ on the pier mixes Cher over Beyonce like it’s the first, and not the thirtieth, time this summer. Return cleansed. - Ock Sportello, Never Hungover

Kissing Someone You Probably Shouldn’t: I won’t tell if you won’t… - Brendon 

Using Vintage Glass Ashtrays: There is nothing I miss more in the cold, brittle days of winter than the softness and stillness of smoking outside in the summer humidity with a friend. At the end of a long night out, or a short night in, there is something lovely about sitting outside, sweat dripping down your back, while you regale each other with stories from behind a soft glowing amber circle. There's no quicker way to kill that intimate, lovely vibe than by putting out whatever it is you're smoking in a cup. No! The fading days of summer deserve a little opulence as a send-off. Buy a vintage glass ashtray! I bought one a few years ago made of amber glass, and it shines in the sunset. Treat yourself, and your guests to a little beauty while the days are still long! - Kelsey, Normal Gossip

Putting on Usher’s Bad Girl at a party: Jon Caramonica of The New York Times recently reported that due to streaming and a decreased reliance on radio, the concept of Song of The Summer (SOTS) is obsolete. I tend to half agree. While I do not believe that the past few years have yielded worthy SOTS, my theory is that this has more to do with the lack of material than any sort of algorithmic pressure via streaming. As someone who has been incessantly playing Wild Thoughts for the past six summers, we need to bring back HITS. And until then, I will be dipping back into the archives for tracks that make me and my friends want to act out. A favourite, as of late, is Usher’s 2004 Bad Girl, perfect for any barbeque, birthday or bris. By the time Usher hits the “Look at them bad girls moving it / Making faces while they doing it,” you will be well on your way to making some group chat gossip-worthy decisions. - Brendon

Ordering For The Table: Modern life is filled with microdecisions. I’ve especially noticed this fatigue since having my own company, where being the decision-maker is everything I have ever wanted until it’s not. It’s hard to give up control and it’s even harder to ask someone to take it from you, but if you ask around you may be surprised by the number of people who don’t want to deal with a restaurant menu. Be the person everyone trusts enough to order for the table, they will thank you. - Daisy, Dirt

Leaving your phone at home: Earlier this summer, I attended a magazine launch party where I met a filmmaker interested in adapting works of fiction into film. We chatted throughout the night and followed the literary troupe to an after-party at a sepia-washed dive bar in the south of Brooklyn. At the end of the evening, when it was time to call cabs and hop on the train, he turned to me to ask to Google Map his train route home from the bar. It was then that I started to put the pieces together, noticing the red notebook he wrote my number in, how he didn’t call an Uber to the dive bar, I did. It dawned on me that this man did not have a phone. Or, more specifically, he didn’t have a phone on him that evening. He intentionally left it at home.

I was shocked. But then, I felt a kick of embarrassment under the table. An attempt to suppress the shock, gaslighting me as if requiring a phone by your side for twenty-four hours of the day was high maintenance and a sign of self-seriousness. Still, leaving your house without your phone felt reckless. And yet, here he was, allegedly doing it for months, ever-present and somehow finding his way back home safely every time.

Now, I recognize that for some demographics the idea of leaving the house without your phone is an unsafe one so please engage at the level you are most comfortable. But ever since then, in an effort to feel more connected to what is around me, I’ve been micro-dosing with leaving my phone behind: leaving it at home as I go for a walk to the farmer’s market on Saturday, placing it in another room before bedtime, hiding it in the bottom of my suitcase on a vacation for an entire afternoon. Each time I felt free, genuinely forgetting about the device and what lives in it. And besides, if I need anything, the time or the way home, I can easily ask a friendly stranger next to me. - Brendon 

Enjoying a Hurricane Beer: The power is out, the AC down. You're sticky and it's dark and you've got to preserve your phone battery and outside is eerily quiet, a heaviness hanging down from the sky, branches and downed powerlines hemming you in. The contents of your fridge aren't going to make it much longer. You might as well share a hurricane beer in the light of a flashlight beam. You might as well indulge in the final remnants of electricity-induced cold, at least until the power comes back on. If we must endure the existential terror of longer and bigger hurricane seasons these days, at least it means more of us may come to know the what-is-there-to-lose pleasures of a beer in a power outage during a hopefully-inconsequential category 1. - Eleanor, Wicked Tongue

Spraying your face with L'Eauxygénante: Hot girls don’t gatekeep so I’ll let you in on a trade secret. Coco Chanel said that before you leave the house, take one thing off. Well, before I leave the house I spray this one thing on. In the hot summer months, where there is a fine line between appearing dewy and looking sweaty, I turn to L'Eauxygénante. The vitamins lock in the oils of my T zone and keeps the face glistening like I actually drink the recommended amount of water each day. - Brendon

Rocking a white tank with no bra: Rihanna once famously told Vogue: “If I’m wearing a top, I don’t wear a bra” and between the months of June to August, I live by these words. There’s no sexier feeling than walking out of the house on a sticky summer evening, in a white tank, no bra. It’s freeing, it’s chic, it’s French. - Lara

Sharing LOOSEY with a friend: Because the summer is for indulging and this one’s pretty sweet.